Mr. Brin lived in the Soviet Union until he was nearly 6 years old, and he said the experience of living under a totalitarian system that censored political speech influenced his thinking — and Google’s policy.
"Political speech" didn't directly influence him aged six, but the country, culture and attitude a lack of it created apparently did. Moreover, nothing in his comment claims he understood it was influencing him at the time... but it's perfectly reasonable that as a grown man with a clearer understanding of both politics and civil liberties, he would think back to his childhood experiences, combine that with what he now knows of the political situation at the time, and come to conclusions regarding the reasons for his childhood experiences.
I'm of two minds on this whole issue...carte blanche for the Conservatives will take us down a Republican party path that the US has followed and I don't want that; on the other hand I'm tired of the apologist, relativist Liberal party policies where they put politics ahead of good government.
I'm not an expert on Canadian politics (just the UK and USA takes up more than enough of my time), but I was under the impression that you were not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, hadn't suffered a serious terrorist attack in years, and haven't had much trouble from al Qaeda ever since they first rose to prominence after 9/11.
You're also retiring your over-the-top anti-terror legislation in favour of more sensible, well-thought-out laws, and seem well on track to putting the entire present world problems behind you.
Given even the UK is in Iraq and Afghanistan, has suffered al Qaeda-linked terrorist incidents and has a prime minister who right at this very moment is trying to do to us what the Republicans did the the USA, and the USA is more fucked militarily, politically, economically, strategically and in terms of international reputation than it's been in a long time, how isn't it better in Canada?
"I am a VB6/VB.NET programmer. I have learned C/C++ and Java, but they are largely forgotten now as there was no reason to do the exact same thing at half the development speed."
This is kind of my point - while C/C++/Vicual C++/Java/whatever are slower to develop in than VB, they allow you to do much more complex things much more reliably. They also allow you to develop much larger applications more efficiently, because they generally encourage you do things The Right Way (rather than The Quick Way, which VB tends to favour).
If someone doesn't see any difference between languages (heck, even C# has some lovely features missing from VB.NET) it's often because they simply haven't learned those other languages well enough. To quote Paul Graham: "If you only eat at McDonalds, the food will seem the same in every country".;-)
VB has its place, without a shadow of a doubt; that place is for small rapid application development jobs by an already disciplined, skilled programmer. Unfortunately what it mostly gets used for is knocking up applications (of any size right up to "enormous") by people who haven't already learned the discipline and mental agility needed to avoid VBs many "convenient but bad" features or shortcuts.
This being Slashdot, let's have a car analogy.;-)
VB is a scooter - it's brilliant for getting going quickly, and if you only take the scooter everywhere you see nothing wrong with it.
Brackets-and-braces languages tend to be more like cars - it takes a while to get going (open door, sit down, put seat-belt on, check mirrors, turn ignition, clutch down, into gear, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc) but it'll take you further quicker in the long run.
If you're used to taking a scooter everywhere, cars are nasty - they're loud, obnoxious and intimidating to share the road with, and you wonder why anyone would want to drive one every day. The first few times you try to drive a car it's a positively weird experience - although it's not as scary inside as it is outside, it never seems to behave like you expect - you find yourself annoyed that it makes you jump through so many hoops to use it.
However, if you learn to drive a car than the speed and power it gives you means you never, ever want to go back to relying on a scooter ever again.
Make sense?
If anything, the VB.NET compiler for Mono will be a great thing. There are plenty of competent VB programmers out there that just don't know c/C++ well enough and don't have the time and resources to switch to a more platform-independent language. Now there is a great possibility for apps that were written for Windows will be easily ported to Linux. Reliance on proprietary applications is one of the largest blocks to widespread adoption of Linux. Hopefully, this will be a good thing.
Fair point - I was half-joking in my original agreement with Savance's statement. VB on Linux is a Good Thing, but it does present the spectre of hordes of crappy VB-only bedroom shareware programmers unleashing wave after wave of apps of... varying... competence and reliability on what was a platform generally populated by better-written programs. It was more a joking "elitist snobby aesthetic" objection than one grounded in sensible business cases and real-world requirements.;-)
Not to impugn your abilities as a programmer, but this kind of reinforces my point - VB doesn't make bad programmers, but learning VB as a first/main language does make programmers who find it harder to learn to think in any language other than VB.
The disparity in syntax/design/philosophy/culture/whatever between VB and the brackets-and-braces languages like C/C++/Java/Javascript/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc means people who learned VB as a first/main language tend not to learn the other languages easily, so they tend to spend most of their time working in VB, which of course reinforces their way of thinking and making all other languages even harder to learn.
To be fair it's not nearly as easy to knock up GUI apps in Ruby or Python when you're coming from a Microsoft-centric background in VB, this is true. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as easy because it demands a very different approach to the one you're used to.
The clinching evidence (for me personally) is that, while I know a lot of people who learned VB, learned Visual C++/Java/Perl/Python/Ruby/whatever to the same standard and now prefer to work in their "second" language, I don't know one person who first learned a brackets-and-braces language and then VB, and prefers to work in VB.
Of course YMMV, but it seemed pretty telling to me.
You know... this could be said to be more a statement about the relative abilities of VB and non-VB programmers than about the relative merits of C#.
Like, perhaps... most of the good programmers use C# and other languages, whereas the people who learned on VB only know... VB.
Or the majority of good programmers took one look at.NET and jumped ship to other platforms, leaving a majority of VB-only weenies[1] to make up the numbers.
[1] Not to say you can't write good code in VB, merely that of all the people I know, those who learned VB first tended to stop there, whereas those who learned C/C++/Java/Perl/PHP/Javascript(!)/etc tended to go on and learn other languages, broadening their horizons and becoming better programmers as a result.
Hopefully VB.NET's semantic near-equivalence to C# and other.NET languages will encourage them to diversify, but TBH it seems to be more a problem with the general culture associated with VB than with the language per se.
Which is, of course, the reason hundreds of thousands flocked to it when it was created... I've seen environmentalists view a heavily-trafficked road and declare that building it was completely unnecessary.
Convenience != Necessity.
Something isn't necessary unless you need it.
People will use something once it exists merely because they want to - for example, because it's more convenient.
If you've got the kind of work environment that disgruntles and demotivates your employees, it's vastly more likely that one of them will be pissed off enough to steal from the company.
I'd never do something as unprofessional as sabotage, but I've worked for companies before that made me "disgruntled" and "paranoid". Praise invariably passing up the chain and blame dripping downwards will do that to an organisation. Given this it's hardly surprising that demotivated people will "generally show up late" and "generally perform poorly". And if you're trying to do your best but your company culture mandates inefficiency and second-best alternatives, damn straight any professional worth his salt is going to "argue with colleagues" who dictate it should be done the way it's always been done rather than the way it should be done.
But, of course, these warning signs are clearly the telltale signs of impending sabotage which warrants clamping down harder on the unhappy employee... and not... say... signs your management style and company culture is so fucked that you'd better sort it out soon or everyone's going to need watching.
Kind of reminds me about how poor parenting, easy access to weapons and a terrible high-school culture lead to Columbine, but it was the trenchcoats and Metallica t-shirts which bore the brunt of the outrage and paranoia afterwards.
So how do you stop people just instantly registering a new e-mail address with hotmail, GMail, Yahoo mail, 10-Minute Mail, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc?
See the problem yet?
And for usernames, how many times have you tried to sign up to a site to be met with: "Username 'm0le5ter69' already in use, please choose another"? So what chance is there of having a register with "their" username on it? Even if the paedophile plays along and reports every online account he sets up, they could well wind up with hundreds of usernames associated with each person. That's a lot of overhead when searching or cross-referencing and a lot of false positives when looking for those usernames on the net.
The only way this could work even in theory would be for there to be some kind of mandatory, permanent, unchangeable net-identity infrastructure which could be tagged to forum postings, e-mails and social networking sites. But there isn't. And if there were, how are you going to possibly enforce it and what makes you think that it's worth losing the anonymity of the net for something so infrequent and unlikely as a kid getting abducted?
And with all due respect to your children, I'm not (and I suspect everyone else isn't) giving up my cherished net anonymity on the merest off-chance that it might reduce the chance of a child being groomed for abuse on-line because their parents haven't done a good enough job of teaching them proper, safe online behaviour.
I don't think anyone's against the idea of making paedophiles easier to track or bar from sites frequented by minors, and everyone wants kids to be able to play safely. But if the only way to do it is to make every human being on the net trackable in the same way, you can fuck right off.
Not aimed at you personally, but in general:
Your "right" to leave your kids unsupervised and have nothing bad happen to them does not trump my right to privacy.
Or, more generally:
Don't infringe my rights because you can't be bothered to perform your duties.
Indeed. And according to my most recent Wikipedia reading, this is entirely due to Congress being taken over by Elephants in the midterms (apparently comprehensively beating out the Martians who'd held the majority for the last sixteen quintillion years).
"It is as more like saying generally, the more you can find out the more likely you are to make the wrong decision based on misrepresentations and someone else's agenda. I essence, it would be a vote in the same manor of the uninformed person."
I think I see. My position is that people are inherently reasonable - even if they believe the wrong things, if they see enough counter-evidence and little enough evidence in favour of their position (this includes other people telling them their opinions), eventually their opinion will weaken or change to the correct one.
Hence, literacy is a good thing because it increases the amount of evidence you can get.
There are two assumptions there: 1. People are "reasonable". I think this is safe, because even if they aren't rational enough to consider the evidence on an emotional level, eventually enough people telling them the correct interpretation will have an emotive, brainwashing effect anyway.
2. The majority of information available on a given topic is generally pushing the correct interpretation. Hence, more literature => more correctness. If this assumption doesn't hold true (eg, with the internet giving every fuckwit under the sun their own little soapbox to shout from, and anyone with a non-mainstream agenda tending to scream louder than the restrained, correct majority), then more literature => more horseshit.
Luckily, minority-agenda-driven fuckwits tend to shout at each other as much as at each other, so the majority interpretation (though quiet) tends to drown it out. The only real problem is well-organised groups of fuckwits, who work together to make their interpretations seem like the most prominent ones (Neocons, Fundamentalists, etc).
"Some people only beleive the campaign literature distributed by one party oposed to all that availible. Some will only trust the headlines in the newspaper which often present something out of context for shock value. Some will only believe it if they heard it on thier favorite tv/radio show and look only for evidence to support their view. Some will continue to beleive whatever is told to them by anyone who seems the most informative."
Indeed. But the key thing here is that if a large enough majority of people keep telling them they're wrong, eventually they will begin to doubt their position. It might not be easy, but to do otherwise is a pretty good indication of insanity.
"I remember getting into an argument with a someone when I saw their kid being taught by a public school and they were making the claim that there was only 26 ammendmentd to the constitution... But they beleived the wrong position because of the implied autority the teacher has."
Actually, this is trivially solvable, by going on the net or going down to your library and getting a copy of the constitution. This doesn't demonstrate that greater access to information is bad because one guy read the wrong thing, it demonstrates how you still needed even greater access. Namely, the ability to compare your knowledge with "everyone's" knowledge without having to go to the library (eg, by using a laptop and Google).
"Another Case in point, I know a guy who swore up and down that Clinton was going to turn control of America over to the UN when his time was up and they were going to make him the overseer of america in return. I know another who thinks Bush is going to declare martial law and not have another election. Of course he would make this claim going into each election since the war on terror strarted. These people are not alone either. And they firmly belive that what they do at the polls are the right thing to do. Voter literacy doesn't mean much of anything different then what we have now."
Right. But in any sensible debate these people are quickly laughed out of the conversation. Just because you can still point to isolated cranks and loonies doesn't mean that the vast majority aren't ge
Dwarfs: Arsey short people with beards. Sometimes they use magic, sometimes not.
Fantasy-based MMORPGS: Run, run, stab, slash, grab loot, run, run, get quest, run, run, slash, stab, grab loot/materials, run, run, hand in quest, gain XP, level up.
If you know a pair of identical twins really, really well you can argue that they're both different because one's got a small mole on his cheek and and one's got slightly thicker eyebrows, but you know what? They look the same to everyone else.
And if everyone on earth looked like they did, it'd be a fucking boring world.
I know dwarfs in Tolkien and dwarfs in WoW are different to you, but that's just because you've got your head jammed so far... into the genre that you've lost the ability to imagine anything else.
You can compare the very, very insignificant non-gameplay-mechanics, having-no-impact-on-how-you-play-the-game backstories of various otherwise-identical races between two almost-identical MMORPGs, or you can compare WoW to Katamari Damacy.
Now tell me fantasy-based MMORPGs aren't all pretty much variations on a theme.
"You have to take these all seriously, because who knows if they're threats or not?"
Do you wear an earthed metal hat whenever you go out and the weather's a bit dodgy? Have you plastered your children and housepets in flexible Faraday cages?
Go look up the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack, and then the chances of being hit by lightning.
If you always wear lightning-proof headgear and earthed metal underwear in the rain, then rant away.
If not, your response is fact-free, emotion-not-intelligence-prompted horseshit caused by media over-reporting and sensationalising that has no place in a serious debate.
Seriously - what the fuck makes idiots assume that just because three people got killed by terrorists in Buttfuck, Arkensas that suddenly now everyone has to have chips in their heads and hand in their genitals for safe keeping by the government?
Look up the statistics - you're more likely to be hit by lightning than killed in a terrorist attack. So if you don't spend the same amount of time worrying about lightning as you spend worring about "t3h T3rr0R1sTs!!11!1!" you're being a nervous jumpy fuckwit.
> No, that's wrong. ActiveX controls are signed the same way SSL certificates are signed. > Additionally, the browser restricts what operations it may be perform based on security zone.
Fair point, but telling the user to "click here to run WhizzySpankyGreatActiveXControl-NotAPornDiallerHon est.ocx" is hardly security - leaving anything up to the user that requires the naive user to themselves distinguish between trustworthy authors and untrustworthy authors is basically just a way of shifting the blame from Microsoft to the end-user when/if their machines get rooted, not a way to secure the machine.
Kind of like how I could write a really perfect firewall that worked by showing you the raw dump of every incoming packet and asked you whether or not to allow it in for processing. After all, if anything bad happens then it's the user's fault, right?
Users think in terms of buttons, not processes - "Oh, the ActiveX box comes up, so now I hit [Ok]", not "The ActiveX warning box has come up, so now I ned to read the whole thing, extract the company name, do some background-checking in another window to make sure the certificate's legit, then grant access for this control this one time only".
> No, that's wrong. It is just a DLL that runs in the current IE process, which has whatever > privilege the user has. True, users often run as admin, but ActiveX doesn't "rely" on that as > you say.
Sorry - should have been clearer. Default in Windows is to run as admin. There is no sandboxing of ActiveX content, the way there is with Java/Javascript/whatever else. Therefore most ActiveX controls are written with the assumption they'll be running as admin. True, this is more the fault of the control developers than the architecture per se, but then if there was a sensible safety sandbox there by default the developers wouldn't be able to blithely assume root access, would they?
> Anyway, what's the big f'n deal to create additional browser plugins for other browsers, to > support the security protocol the govt chose?
Shouldn't be any deal at all. I agree this should be a no-brainer.
Indeed. And look where it got them - massive costs to update their entire online commerce infrastructure overnight, or be effectively locked out of the entire future of the single overwhelmingly dominant computing platform.
And if they make the same mistake again and just retool for Vista/IE7 instead of migrating to open standards, another huge up-front cost when those proprietary formats and "standards" go the way proprietary formats always do.
It's kind of like taking massive amounts of coke - sure, your mate might be happier and more lively and more fun to be around, but in five years' time he's likely to be a paranoid, abusive down-and-out without even a septum to his name.
Personnely I doubt that Vista will break these Korean ActiveX modules indefinetely, as MS can release a patch after the OS is releashed and selling, at their leisure. MS would never create a situation where an entire country is put off their flagship product, especially a country with 99.9% MS Windows usage, as stated in the article.
I think you'll find the problem is that it's the very fundamental design decisions in ActiveX that are the problem.
ActiveX was originally designed with almost no thought to security - it relied on having pretty much unrestricted root access to your machine, and running arbitrary code directly on your operating system.
No sandboxing, no privilege-escalation warnings, nothing. And root access.
Now with Vista Microsoft have finally sorted out some of their most egregious security mistakes. Unfortunately, "unrestricted access for random binaries on any web page in the world" and "secure systems that a concussed ten-year-old couldn't crack" are pretty much mutually exclusive.
Short answer: It's pretty much impossible to "patch" ActiveX, because ActiveX was the problem.
To be fair, ActiveX has got better since it was introduced, but it's still fundamentally flawed, and with some extremely dangerous and/or stupid design assumptions.
The PR company's position doesn't have to make sense - all they have to do is decide on an equation, then start a campaign to ram it down people's throats. People hear far more in a day than they can possibly think about, disassemble and critically examine. If you tell people things for long enough, eventually they'll assume it must be right and will start to believe it even though they never subjected it to critical thought.
For example, it came be proven that by any sane definition of the terms, "movie piracy == theft" is complete horseshit. However, that doesn't mean a lot of people and organisations don't believe it, and it doesn't mean that the grossly-excessive punishments for copyright infringement in criminal and civil cases aren't informed by the opinion.
The only way to guard against these kind of bullshit memes is by critically evaluating them and realising they lack even internal consistency - then you're immune to them. However, rational critical evaluation is work, and it's a lot of work for some people, so most people just don't bother.
Heh, fair play. Apologies for the perjorative tone in my GC reply(?) - it's sometimes hard to divine motivation in comments like that, and I think we're both agreed that there are far too many #3s out there.;-)
Yeah - who needs a bunch of uptight, repressive, humourless foreigners in charge of a monolithic "big government", run by a single party, who until recently exercised total control over their entire country's political system, using that unrivalled power to crush opposition, shit on civil liberties, eliminate free speech while telling their citizens they were the envy of the world, and to fuck up the environment, pass ridiculous "laws" seeking to regulate the internet and flout both international law and international opinion?
"Why do people always recite this "the USA isn't a democracy, it's a republic" nonsense, as if the two are mutually exclusive"
1. Because they don't understand exactly what "democracy" (a system of decision-making) and "republic" (a particular type of government) mean, but they're bright enough to know there is a difference between the two.
2. Because it's easier to paper over this uncertainty with false certainty, thereby making you look as if you're the one who's out of his depth instead of the person drawing the incorrect comparison.
3. Often, because it seems, to the person drawing the distinction, to offer an excuse for America to do whatever undemocratic things it likes, but still bang on about "Freedom!!!1!!1!one!11!".
"USA! USA! American freedom! USA!"
"But, isn't the USA the country currently violating every democratic guideline going - ignoring the geneva convention, detaining people indefinitely without charge, conducting wars of aggression to deliberately destabilise non-threatening other countries, restricting freedom of speech, movement and association, and warrantlessly surveilling its own citizens?"
"DUH!!1!! America isn't a democracy, it's a republic, Idiot!!! Freedom! Freedom!"
There is no conflict between a "republic" and a "democracy" - a republic is just a type of democracy.
Anyone telling you different is either mistaken, or deliberately blurring the lines to paper over holes in their arguments.
FWIW, I think the GP was a number 1, but number 3s are everywhere, these days.
"couldn't someone claim that they have every right to pressure MS to fix ActiveX in this case?"
Oh god no.
No no no no, no.
Let the nasty, binary, proprietary, security-abortion die a fucking death already.
1. MS didn't push squat on anyone. They offered it as a solution, and Korea, stupidly, went for it like a bunch of lemmings off a cliff[1].
2. MS didn't "break" ActiveX in Vista. They fixed some massive security holes in the new OS, and it just so happens that those security holes were ActiveX. Frankly I think you've got a better shot at suing MS for leaving ActiveX enabled all this time.
3. ActiveX didn't take well because it was a steaming pile of horseshit from the day it was released. If I offer to sell you horseshit for $500 a bag and you're stupid enough to buy it, I don't think you can sue me when the bag turns out to contain... horseshit. People all over the world were screaming how insecure it was from the very second ActiveX was released - if the Koreans were stupid enough to base their infrastructure on it, tough luck - they should have ignored the marketing spin and shill-authored white papers and listened to the techies.
[1] Except without even Disney rounding up thousands of them and forcing them to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Political speech" didn't directly influence him aged six, but the country, culture and attitude a lack of it created apparently did. Moreover, nothing in his comment claims he understood it was influencing him at the time... but it's perfectly reasonable that as a grown man with a clearer understanding of both politics and civil liberties, he would think back to his childhood experiences, combine that with what he now knows of the political situation at the time, and come to conclusions regarding the reasons for his childhood experiences.
I'm not an expert on Canadian politics (just the UK and USA takes up more than enough of my time), but I was under the impression that you were not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, hadn't suffered a serious terrorist attack in years, and haven't had much trouble from al Qaeda ever since they first rose to prominence after 9/11.
You're also retiring your over-the-top anti-terror legislation in favour of more sensible, well-thought-out laws, and seem well on track to putting the entire present world problems behind you.
Given even the UK is in Iraq and Afghanistan, has suffered al Qaeda-linked terrorist incidents and has a prime minister who right at this very moment is trying to do to us what the Republicans did the the USA, and the USA is more fucked militarily, politically, economically, strategically and in terms of international reputation than it's been in a long time, how isn't it better in Canada?
If someone doesn't see any difference between languages (heck, even C# has some lovely features missing from VB.NET) it's often because they simply haven't learned those other languages well enough. To quote Paul Graham: "If you only eat at McDonalds, the food will seem the same in every country".
VB has its place, without a shadow of a doubt; that place is for small rapid application development jobs by an already disciplined, skilled programmer. Unfortunately what it mostly gets used for is knocking up applications (of any size right up to "enormous") by people who haven't already learned the discipline and mental agility needed to avoid VBs many "convenient but bad" features or shortcuts.
This being Slashdot, let's have a car analogy.
VB is a scooter - it's brilliant for getting going quickly, and if you only take the scooter everywhere you see nothing wrong with it.
Brackets-and-braces languages tend to be more like cars - it takes a while to get going (open door, sit down, put seat-belt on, check mirrors, turn ignition, clutch down, into gear, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc) but it'll take you further quicker in the long run.
If you're used to taking a scooter everywhere, cars are nasty - they're loud, obnoxious and intimidating to share the road with, and you wonder why anyone would want to drive one every day. The first few times you try to drive a car it's a positively weird experience - although it's not as scary inside as it is outside, it never seems to behave like you expect - you find yourself annoyed that it makes you jump through so many hoops to use it.
However, if you learn to drive a car than the speed and power it gives you means you never, ever want to go back to relying on a scooter ever again.
Make sense?
Fair point - I was half-joking in my original agreement with Savance's statement. VB on Linux is a Good Thing, but it does present the spectre of hordes of crappy VB-only bedroom shareware programmers unleashing wave after wave of apps of... varying... competence and reliability on what was a platform generally populated by better-written programs. It was more a joking "elitist snobby aesthetic" objection than one grounded in sensible business cases and real-world requirements.
Not to impugn your abilities as a programmer, but this kind of reinforces my point - VB doesn't make bad programmers, but learning VB as a first/main language does make programmers who find it harder to learn to think in any language other than VB.
The disparity in syntax/design/philosophy/culture/whatever between VB and the brackets-and-braces languages like C/C++/Java/Javascript/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc means people who learned VB as a first/main language tend not to learn the other languages easily, so they tend to spend most of their time working in VB, which of course reinforces their way of thinking and making all other languages even harder to learn.
To be fair it's not nearly as easy to knock up GUI apps in Ruby or Python when you're coming from a Microsoft-centric background in VB, this is true. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as easy because it demands a very different approach to the one you're used to.
The clinching evidence (for me personally) is that, while I know a lot of people who learned VB, learned Visual C++/Java/Perl/Python/Ruby/whatever to the same standard and now prefer to work in their "second" language, I don't know one person who first learned a brackets-and-braces language and then VB, and prefers to work in VB.
Of course YMMV, but it seemed pretty telling to me.
You know... this could be said to be more a statement about the relative abilities of VB and non-VB programmers than about the relative merits of C#.
.NET and jumped ship to other platforms, leaving a majority of VB-only weenies[1] to make up the numbers.
.NET languages will encourage them to diversify, but TBH it seems to be more a problem with the general culture associated with VB than with the language per se.
Like, perhaps... most of the good programmers use C# and other languages, whereas the people who learned on VB only know... VB.
Or the majority of good programmers took one look at
[1] Not to say you can't write good code in VB, merely that of all the people I know, those who learned VB first tended to stop there, whereas those who learned C/C++/Java/Perl/PHP/Javascript(!)/etc tended to go on and learn other languages, broadening their horizons and becoming better programmers as a result.
Hopefully VB.NET's semantic near-equivalence to C# and other
Something isn't necessary unless you need it.
People will use something once it exists merely because they want to - for example, because it's more convenient.
Want != Need.
And what about cause and effect?
If you've got the kind of work environment that disgruntles and demotivates your employees, it's vastly more likely that one of them will be pissed off enough to steal from the company.
I'd never do something as unprofessional as sabotage, but I've worked for companies before that made me "disgruntled" and "paranoid". Praise invariably passing up the chain and blame dripping downwards will do that to an organisation. Given this it's hardly surprising that demotivated people will "generally show up late" and "generally perform poorly". And if you're trying to do your best but your company culture mandates inefficiency and second-best alternatives, damn straight any professional worth his salt is going to "argue with colleagues" who dictate it should be done the way it's always been done rather than the way it should be done.
But, of course, these warning signs are clearly the telltale signs of impending sabotage which warrants clamping down harder on the unhappy employee... and not... say... signs your management style and company culture is so fucked that you'd better sort it out soon or everyone's going to need watching.
Kind of reminds me about how poor parenting, easy access to weapons and a terrible high-school culture lead to Columbine, but it was the trenchcoats and Metallica t-shirts which bore the brunt of the outrage and paranoia afterwards.
Hmmm.
Man, I've got to start going to your church... ;-)
Which one was it again?
So how do you stop people just instantly registering a new e-mail address with hotmail, GMail, Yahoo mail, 10-Minute Mail, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc?
See the problem yet?
And for usernames, how many times have you tried to sign up to a site to be met with: "Username 'm0le5ter69' already in use, please choose another"? So what chance is there of having a register with "their" username on it? Even if the paedophile plays along and reports every online account he sets up, they could well wind up with hundreds of usernames associated with each person. That's a lot of overhead when searching or cross-referencing and a lot of false positives when looking for those usernames on the net.
The only way this could work even in theory would be for there to be some kind of mandatory, permanent, unchangeable net-identity infrastructure which could be tagged to forum postings, e-mails and social networking sites. But there isn't. And if there were, how are you going to possibly enforce it and what makes you think that it's worth losing the anonymity of the net for something so infrequent and unlikely as a kid getting abducted?
And with all due respect to your children, I'm not (and I suspect everyone else isn't) giving up my cherished net anonymity on the merest off-chance that it might reduce the chance of a child being groomed for abuse on-line because their parents haven't done a good enough job of teaching them proper, safe online behaviour.
I don't think anyone's against the idea of making paedophiles easier to track or bar from sites frequented by minors, and everyone wants kids to be able to play safely. But if the only way to do it is to make every human being on the net trackable in the same way, you can fuck right off.
Not aimed at you personally, but in general:
Your "right" to leave your kids unsupervised and have nothing bad happen to them does not trump my right to privacy.
Or, more generally:
Don't infringe my rights because you can't be bothered to perform your duties.
End of argument.
"if you know the answer to that, you can generate the wealth necessary to trivially solve all of the others."
Remind me again, how does having a lot of money prove P = NP?
Indeed. And according to my most recent Wikipedia reading, this is entirely due to Congress being taken over by Elephants in the midterms (apparently comprehensively beating out the Martians who'd held the majority for the last sixteen quintillion years).
"It is as more like saying generally, the more you can find out the more likely you are to make the wrong decision based on misrepresentations and someone else's agenda. I essence, it would be a vote in the same manor of the uninformed person."
I think I see. My position is that people are inherently reasonable - even if they believe the wrong things, if they see enough counter-evidence and little enough evidence in favour of their position (this includes other people telling them their opinions), eventually their opinion will weaken or change to the correct one.
Hence, literacy is a good thing because it increases the amount of evidence you can get.
There are two assumptions there:
1. People are "reasonable". I think this is safe, because even if they aren't rational enough to consider the evidence on an emotional level, eventually enough people telling them the correct interpretation will have an emotive, brainwashing effect anyway.
2. The majority of information available on a given topic is generally pushing the correct interpretation. Hence, more literature => more correctness. If this assumption doesn't hold true (eg, with the internet giving every fuckwit under the sun their own little soapbox to shout from, and anyone with a non-mainstream agenda tending to scream louder than the restrained, correct majority), then more literature => more horseshit.
Luckily, minority-agenda-driven fuckwits tend to shout at each other as much as at each other, so the majority interpretation (though quiet) tends to drown it out. The only real problem is well-organised groups of fuckwits, who work together to make their interpretations seem like the most prominent ones (Neocons, Fundamentalists, etc).
"Some people only beleive the campaign literature distributed by one party oposed to all that availible. Some will only trust the headlines in the newspaper which often present something out of context for shock value. Some will only believe it if they heard it on thier favorite tv/radio show and look only for evidence to support their view. Some will continue to beleive whatever is told to them by anyone who seems the most informative."
Indeed. But the key thing here is that if a large enough majority of people keep telling them they're wrong, eventually they will begin to doubt their position. It might not be easy, but to do otherwise is a pretty good indication of insanity.
"I remember getting into an argument with a someone when I saw their kid being taught by a public school and they were making the claim that there was only 26 ammendmentd to the constitution... But they beleived the wrong position because of the implied autority the teacher has."
Actually, this is trivially solvable, by going on the net or going down to your library and getting a copy of the constitution. This doesn't demonstrate that greater access to information is bad because one guy read the wrong thing, it demonstrates how you still needed even greater access. Namely, the ability to compare your knowledge with "everyone's" knowledge without having to go to the library (eg, by using a laptop and Google).
"Another Case in point, I know a guy who swore up and down that Clinton was going to turn control of America over to the UN when his time was up and they were going to make him the overseer of america in return. I know another who thinks Bush is going to declare martial law and not have another election. Of course he would make this claim going into each election since the war on terror strarted. These people are not alone either. And they firmly belive that what they do at the polls are the right thing to do. Voter literacy doesn't mean much of anything different then what we have now."
Right. But in any sensible debate these people are quickly laughed out of the conversation. Just because you can still point to isolated cranks and loonies doesn't mean that the vast majority aren't ge
Dwarfs: Arsey short people with beards. Sometimes they use magic, sometimes not.
Fantasy-based MMORPGS: Run, run, stab, slash, grab loot, run, run, get quest, run, run, slash, stab, grab loot/materials, run, run, hand in quest, gain XP, level up.
If you know a pair of identical twins really, really well you can argue that they're both different because one's got a small mole on his cheek and and one's got slightly thicker eyebrows, but you know what? They look the same to everyone else.
And if everyone on earth looked like they did, it'd be a fucking boring world.
I know dwarfs in Tolkien and dwarfs in WoW are different to you, but that's just because you've got your head jammed so far... into the genre that you've lost the ability to imagine anything else.
You can compare the very, very insignificant non-gameplay-mechanics, having-no-impact-on-how-you-play-the-game backstories of various otherwise-identical races between two almost-identical MMORPGs, or you can compare WoW to Katamari Damacy.
Now tell me fantasy-based MMORPGs aren't all pretty much variations on a theme.
"You have to take these all seriously, because who knows if they're threats or not?"
Do you wear an earthed metal hat whenever you go out and the weather's a bit dodgy? Have you plastered your children and housepets in flexible Faraday cages?
Go look up the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack, and then the chances of being hit by lightning.
If you always wear lightning-proof headgear and earthed metal underwear in the rain, then rant away.
If not, your response is fact-free, emotion-not-intelligence-prompted horseshit caused by media over-reporting and sensationalising that has no place in a serious debate.
Seriously - what the fuck makes idiots assume that just because three people got killed by terrorists in Buttfuck, Arkensas that suddenly now everyone has to have chips in their heads and hand in their genitals for safe keeping by the government?
Look up the statistics - you're more likely to be hit by lightning than killed in a terrorist attack. So if you don't spend the same amount of time worrying about lightning as you spend worring about "t3h T3rr0R1sTs!!11!1!" you're being a nervous jumpy fuckwit.
If you read, the worst that can happen is that books can lie to you.
If you can't read, both books and the guy explaining what's going on because you can't find out for yourself may lie to you.
Illiteracy = 1 unnecessary extra point of failure.
Hence, a literate population will, on average, be better informed and more correct in their judgements and decisions.
It's like saying "generally, the more you can find out the more likely you are to make the right decision.
This is so basic and self-evident I'm surprised you're even trying to argue it.
> No, that's wrong. ActiveX controls are signed the same way SSL certificates are signed.
n est.ocx" is hardly security - leaving anything up to the user that requires the naive user to themselves distinguish between trustworthy authors and untrustworthy authors is basically just a way of shifting the blame from Microsoft to the end-user when/if their machines get rooted, not a way to secure the machine.
> Additionally, the browser restricts what operations it may be perform based on security zone.
Fair point, but telling the user to "click here to run WhizzySpankyGreatActiveXControl-NotAPornDiallerHo
Kind of like how I could write a really perfect firewall that worked by showing you the raw dump of every incoming packet and asked you whether or not to allow it in for processing. After all, if anything bad happens then it's the user's fault, right?
Users think in terms of buttons, not processes - "Oh, the ActiveX box comes up, so now I hit [Ok]", not "The ActiveX warning box has come up, so now I ned to read the whole thing, extract the company name, do some background-checking in another window to make sure the certificate's legit, then grant access for this control this one time only".
> No, that's wrong. It is just a DLL that runs in the current IE process, which has whatever
> privilege the user has. True, users often run as admin, but ActiveX doesn't "rely" on that as
> you say.
Sorry - should have been clearer. Default in Windows is to run as admin. There is no sandboxing of ActiveX content, the way there is with Java/Javascript/whatever else. Therefore most ActiveX controls are written with the assumption they'll be running as admin. True, this is more the fault of the control developers than the architecture per se, but then if there was a sensible safety sandbox there by default the developers wouldn't be able to blithely assume root access, would they?
> Anyway, what's the big f'n deal to create additional browser plugins for other browsers, to
> support the security protocol the govt chose?
Shouldn't be any deal at all. I agree this should be a no-brainer.
Indeed. And look where it got them - massive costs to update their entire online commerce infrastructure overnight, or be effectively locked out of the entire future of the single overwhelmingly dominant computing platform.
And if they make the same mistake again and just retool for Vista/IE7 instead of migrating to open standards, another huge up-front cost when those proprietary formats and "standards" go the way proprietary formats always do.
It's kind of like taking massive amounts of coke - sure, your mate might be happier and more lively and more fun to be around, but in five years' time he's likely to be a paranoid, abusive down-and-out without even a septum to his name.
What benefits, eh?
ActiveX was originally designed with almost no thought to security - it relied on having pretty much unrestricted root access to your machine, and running arbitrary code directly on your operating system.
No sandboxing, no privilege-escalation warnings, nothing. And root access.
Now with Vista Microsoft have finally sorted out some of their most egregious security mistakes. Unfortunately, "unrestricted access for random binaries on any web page in the world" and "secure systems that a concussed ten-year-old couldn't crack" are pretty much mutually exclusive.
Short answer: It's pretty much impossible to "patch" ActiveX, because ActiveX was the problem.
To be fair, ActiveX has got better since it was introduced, but it's still fundamentally flawed, and with some extremely dangerous and/or stupid design assumptions.
In Korea only old people use non-IE browsers.
See, you're parsing it - that's the problem.
The PR company's position doesn't have to make sense - all they have to do is decide on an equation, then start a campaign to ram it down people's throats. People hear far more in a day than they can possibly think about, disassemble and critically examine. If you tell people things for long enough, eventually they'll assume it must be right and will start to believe it even though they never subjected it to critical thought.
For example, it came be proven that by any sane definition of the terms, "movie piracy == theft" is complete horseshit. However, that doesn't mean a lot of people and organisations don't believe it, and it doesn't mean that the grossly-excessive punishments for copyright infringement in criminal and civil cases aren't informed by the opinion.
The only way to guard against these kind of bullshit memes is by critically evaluating them and realising they lack even internal consistency - then you're immune to them. However, rational critical evaluation is work, and it's a lot of work for some people, so most people just don't bother.
Heh, fair play. Apologies for the perjorative tone in my GC reply(?) - it's sometimes hard to divine motivation in comments like that, and I think we're both agreed that there are far too many #3s out there. ;-)
Yeah - who needs a bunch of uptight, repressive, humourless foreigners in charge of a monolithic "big government", run by a single party, who until recently exercised total control over their entire country's political system, using that unrivalled power to crush opposition, shit on civil liberties, eliminate free speech while telling their citizens they were the envy of the world, and to fuck up the environment, pass ridiculous "laws" seeking to regulate the internet and flout both international law and international opinion?
;-p
Oh, sorry - were we talking about China?
1. Because they don't understand exactly what "democracy" (a system of decision-making) and "republic" (a particular type of government) mean, but they're bright enough to know there is a difference between the two.
2. Because it's easier to paper over this uncertainty with false certainty, thereby making you look as if you're the one who's out of his depth instead of the person drawing the incorrect comparison.
3. Often, because it seems, to the person drawing the distinction, to offer an excuse for America to do whatever undemocratic things it likes, but still bang on about "Freedom!!!1!!1!one!11!".
There is no conflict between a "republic" and a "democracy" - a republic is just a type of democracy.
Anyone telling you different is either mistaken, or deliberately blurring the lines to paper over holes in their arguments.
FWIW, I think the GP was a number 1, but number 3s are everywhere, these days.
"couldn't someone claim that they have every right to pressure MS to fix ActiveX in this case?"
Oh god no.
No no no no, no.
Let the nasty, binary, proprietary, security-abortion die a fucking death already.
1. MS didn't push squat on anyone. They offered it as a solution, and Korea, stupidly, went for it like a bunch of lemmings off a cliff[1].
2. MS didn't "break" ActiveX in Vista. They fixed some massive security holes in the new OS, and it just so happens that those security holes were ActiveX. Frankly I think you've got a better shot at suing MS for leaving ActiveX enabled all this time.
3. ActiveX didn't take well because it was a steaming pile of horseshit from the day it was released. If I offer to sell you horseshit for $500 a bag and you're stupid enough to buy it, I don't think you can sue me when the bag turns out to contain... horseshit. People all over the world were screaming how insecure it was from the very second ActiveX was released - if the Koreans were stupid enough to base their infrastructure on it, tough luck - they should have ignored the marketing spin and shill-authored white papers and listened to the techies.
[1] Except without even Disney rounding up thousands of them and forcing them to do it.