"I don't like the idea either, but I disagree here... that's not the only reason. Another reason is that you can't tell which protestors and supporters will remain peaceful during something that was obviously motivating enough to get them off their ass is the first place. Add in a little mob mentality, ala riots when a team wins something... and you're got a recipe for a real mess. One that's been seen before."
That's not terrorism. As such, no powers granted to law enforcement to counteract terrorism should be used.
No terrorist I've ever even heard of has launched their attack from the cover of a bunch of peaceful protesters in the middle of NYC (or wherever). Aeroplanes? Sure. Driving a truck full of fertilizer/sugar up to a government building? Sure. But in the middle of a pre-arranged, planned demonstration you've got some of the tightest security anywhere, even when they aren't violating your basic rights.
Terrorism strikes where we aren't looking, not where we're tooled up and waiting for it.
In addition, the right to peacefully protest is a staple part of western civilisation. I'm sorry, but removing the only way to effectively voice your peaceful dissent because someone's worried about something that they have absolutely no reason or precedent to worry about is pretty weak as an excuse.
It's merely that public demonstrations serve to encourage other people to voice their dissent, whereas if nobody's seen to be dissenting most people will just keep their heads down. Force the demonstration to take place in a quiet, obscure area well away from the media and the main event, and it might as well not happen at all. No publicity = no benefit from protesting.
The thing is, in any functional democracy our representatives should be listening to our dissent, not seeking underhand ways to prevent us from dissenting.
And especially not by waving the bullshit bogeyman of "terrorism" as an excuse.
"Yes, I'm aware of the "free speech zones" at debates and conventions in recent elections, and I think they're a horrible idea, but at least in those cases it's motivated by the inability of police to guarantee the safety of the people both inside and outside the building when a terror target is that high-profile."
In other words, the threat of terrorism (which, if you look up the statistics is on par with your chances of being struck by lightning) means we have to restrict free speech?
So why don't we have laws restricting people from congregating out in the open when the weather's looking a bit sketchy?
And why should people be allowed into rallies or photo-ops if they look like supporters, but herded into free speech zones if they look like protesters? If anyone was going to bomb the Republican Party Convention do you really think they'd be stupid enough to wander up wearing a "Fuck Bush" T-shirt over their homemade dynamite vest?
This entire rationale is so pathetically flimsy it's completely see-through. There is only one reason to herd peaceful protesters into designated (almost always well-hidden) areas but still allow supporters through, and that's because you don't want people to see the protest.
Unfortunately that's rather the whole point of your right to free assembly, so they have to come up with a pathetic pretext to allow them to needlessly violate your basic rights.
"On the other hand, those events are infrequent compared with the hindrances on free speech rights that take place at our public educational institutions every day, this time motivated by left-leaning political correctness advocates rather than by right-leaning Patriot Act advocates."
I read the article. A religious group thinks it should continue to receive funding from a state school, but should be allowed to only admit individuals who share that faith. The state school thinks that this violates Separation of Church and State, which sounds pretty correct to me.
The school has offered to either stop funding all the religious groups in the school, or continue to fund the Knights of Columbus if it admits non-believers. The group has refused this.
Nobody's denying anyone free speech, and it's shockingly intellectually dishonest to claim they are.
All the school is saying is that if the group's going to exclude people on religious lines, then they (as a state entity) shouldn't be paying them to do it.
As (presumably) a religious person, how would you feel about your kid's school funding a science club that refused to allow membership to Christians?
"Note that in each of those cases, we're talking about the highest levels of federal government taking overt acts to revoke our First Amendment rights. Compare that with this particular case of some local TSA moron doing something stupid."
So top-down all-in-one didn't work, as it was too much too soon for people to accept, and sure enough, those laws ended up being explicitly repealed or popularly ignored.
Bottom-up creeping totalitarianism is more dangerous than the obvious top-down approach. It's not to obvious, and requires you treat it as the beginning of a trend, rather than giving you something big and juicy to point to to get people good and riled up.
To steal a meaphor from elsewhere in the comments: people notice when you switch off an electric light, because the change is obvious. People don't as readily notice the sunset - it takes a long time and it's very slow. However, by the time the sun's finally set it's often too late to do anything about it.
Plus, with the slow, creeping approach there are always legions of people like yourself to claim nothing's wrong and everything's Just Fine, citing even more egregious examples from the past.
Do you believe that an item's price should be based on the production/distribution cost, consumer demand and the pre-agreed "fair price" of similar items, or is it solely dependant on consumer demand?
If you take the hardline ultra-capitalist approach and think it's ok for the price to be based purely on demand, presumably you also have no problems with "cornering the market", price-fixing cartels and gouging people (eg, selling inflatable rubber dinghies for $1000 each during Hurricane Katrina) - after all, whatever people will pay, eh?
If you think price should contain some element of "fairness", then these prices are way over the odds - the price is broadly equivalent to a brand-new hardback book, but consumer demand for e-books isn't exactly battering the door down, production is less than for paper books, distribution is essentially free and you have to shell out something like $300 minimum on hardware before you can even use the thing you just bought.
If you agree that it's perfectly acceptable for companies to charge you a premium merely because people will pay it, then fine. However, given most people believe that ticket touting, price-fixing and the like are wrong, I think most people would agree that "fairness" should also be an important consideration.
And incidentally, in the UK books are considered an essential/educational item, not a luxury - this is why you don't have to pay VAT on them.
"Yeah, because governments never did that type of stuff until the inception of the US and no other governments have done that stuff or do that stuff now."
Oh well then, that's ok then. That completely absolves you of guilt for it.
While you're at it, why not start executing dissidents, throwing peaceful protesters in prison, holding prisoners without trial, executing children, rigging elections, torturing suspects, dismantling due process and eating babies? I mean, there have been societies at one point of another that have done all those things at one time or another, so surely it's alright to do all of them now, right?
(FWIW, I started writing that list as an example of some of the worst things any society has ever done... distressingly the modern USA is actually doing a number of them right now - I swear that was an accident, but it just goes to show...)
Or maybe the fact that you're the worlds only superpower means you should make an effort to be a good role-model - be the adult in the playground, instead of the kid with a pituitary disorder who's four times the size of the other kids but refuses to understand why he's not allowed to have "harmless" playground fights.
Or maybe you should carry on doing what you're doing, but should shut up about how you're the "light of the free world" and the "shining example of democracy" to everyone else. Be selfish, careless and violent. Just don't be a hypocrite with it.
Or maybe you should carry on doing and saying whatever you like, but should ensure that your behaviour at least doesn't adversely affect other nations, especially when it's merely for your convenience.
"If you're going to be anti-US, at least have the good sense to slam us for the things we do that every other government on earth doesn't do. Thank you."
Microsoft is getting investigated right now for doing what other companies already (and still) do. The thing is, Microsoft is a monopoly, so the rules are different.
Adults in playgrounds can't have a fight with the other kids. Microsoft can't bundle software and lock out other vendors. The USA can't act like a tooled-up banana republic, while simultaneously screaming what nice guys they are, and decide to squish anyone who looks at them funny.
Well, they all can, but that doesn't make them nice people, and it's perfectly understandable when people have a problem with it.
And finally, FWIW, most other countries did abuse their power, and that was wrong. I personally feel deeply ashamed of my country's actions (UK) from the end of the 18th century right up to the end of WWII.
However, holding up something from 50-100 years ago as proof that it's ok to do it now is pretty far down the list, as reasonable justifications go.
Hell, in the period above the USA was busy stealing ancestral homelands from the native Americans, you'd only just stopped viewing black people as possessions and women weren't allowed to vote. Does that mean that's all "ok" for the rest of us to do now, too?
"Terrorists do not attack and kill 3000 people simply because they don't like the people's attitude... A group of people who have the resolve to carry out a terrorist attack would not be expending so much effort, energy, and money simply based on the attitude of their intended victims. The cause of hatred is far more deep-rooted than just an attitude."
Sigh.
Your attitude is made manifest in the people you elect, your foreign policy, your aggressive non-interest in the welfare of anyone outside your borders when that conflicts even minimally with your own level of comfort.
When people say "terrorists attack you because of your attitude" they don't mean that someone was once rude to a muslim in a Quick-E-Mart and that's why the WTC was destroyed.
"Attitude" in this case is a shorthand for "arrogance, lack of empathy, viewing other cultures/nations/people as expendable commodities, political interference, corruption and all the other actual actions that arise from holding said attitude".
The rest of the world is quite capable of making this distinction - why are so many US citizens apparently not?
Do you really think anyone would travel to the US, infiltrate the country, set up a terrorist cell, learn to fly passenger planes, try to hijack half a dozen planes then fly them into buildings, killing themselves as well as the passengers... merely because they disapproved of how you live your life?
Here is a Cluesflash: Muslims don't give a rat's ass about how Americans live their lives. You could eat babies while fornicating with your own sister (as I hear they do in Arkensas) and the world of Islam wouldn't care. However, where "your attitudes" start to affect "their lives", that's where people get mad enough to blow themselves up as a symbol of their anger.
Oh, and the world of Islam tends to get upset when images of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH and all of that) are taken in vain, but less the deliberate stirring up by middle-eastern governments (who saw a useful distraction from their own domestic problems) and bussed-in pre-arranged "riots", even that's not a big deal.
"Whoever modded the comment insightful needs a reality check (or a better understanding of terrorists)."
Terrorists are not maniacs, irrational or mad - they're just very, very firm in their beliefs.
They don't blow up buildings because the little yellow pixies told them to, because it's Wednesday or because somone from that country once flipped them off.
They do it because they're so angry that they feel the need to strike back in any way they can.
Sensible, insightful people would be wondering what got them so mad in the first place, and if it's really worth doing.
But I guess idiots just find it easier to demonise them (neatly absolving themselves of guilt) and assume that even if you changed your actions they'd just be doing it anyway, right?
"But what being ticked off at someone's attitude does is make you happy when the other party is attacked by terrorists. It doesn't make you actually commit a terrorist act."
So you're saying that people would blow themselves up because they (in a wonderfully nebulous way) "disapprove" of our "freedoms", and not because, for example, the botched invasion of Iraq directly lead to their kid brother being shot, and the ensuing collapse of the economy lead to their parents starving or dying of TB?
Oh that's easy: recently the more sophisticated global warming deniers have moved on from claiming "there's no heating going on" to admitting that there may be heating going on, but that it's probably all part of a natural cycle, "because look - at some point in the past the average global temperature was the same as it is now, even without human intervention!!!11!!1one!".
Of course, this ignores the mountain of evidence that the heating is happening almost instantly (geologically speaking), and the fact that earth was once a seething mass of rock at well above the boiling point of water.
Still, you can't convince someone who'll shift rationales to protect their conclusion. To them, the most important thing is defending their pre-selected conclusion, not ensuring their decision-making process leads them to the correct ones in the first place.
Indeed. Then the lander will be two pixels wide, instead of one!
Twice the resolution. Are dumbasses going to care? Remember, we're talking roughly about the difference between "." and, well, something half that size.
Well done and all on getting a "super-high" resolution camera over Mars, but it's pathetic hyperbole to present it how they have. Whereis the cutoff point between a normal high resolution camera and a "super-high" one, anyway?
So... what part of "a movie costs many times more than a book to produce" were you disagreeing with?
If you can show that even an international bestseller book costs several hundred million dollars to write then I'll believe you.
However, I think you'll have a hard time proving:
1. There are more people involved in the production of a book than a movie. 2. Book production requires more equipment. 3. Book production (of necessity) takes noticeably longer than films.
If this isn't the case, then someone, somewhere along the line is ripping people off.
As someone (yes I live in backward Oklahoma, however Norman is somewhat educated) who was constantly in trouble for being different and difficult due to my overwhelming boredom with the monotonous teaching techniques used.
Perhaps you should try hard to pay attention, as that is a sentence fragment.
If you are the grammar police, consider me Internal Affairs. You are correct, that is a fragment. Good work, officer. However, he was speaking in the past tense, and you suggest that he should 'try hard to pay attention'. Pay attention to what? I believe you meant to say, "Perhaps you should have tried harder to pay attention [in English class]".
You are suspended for three weeks, with pay.
Greetings. High Commissioner of Pedantry here.
Your correction implies that the Grammar Police officer was advising the original poster that he should have paid attention in the past, when he was learning the rules of grammar.
He could, however, have been advising the OP to pay attention now - at the point in time when he was actually making the "mistake", not at the point in time when he should have been learning to avoid such mistakes in the first place.
Given this reading of his intentions, his comment was entirely accurate. Furthermore, it suggests the OP still hasn't learned the lesson (to concentrate), rather than his lack of concentration being a one-off error on his part.
Patents are temporary monopolies, which inherently restrict people's freedom. Even the people who originally set up the patent law in the USA understood and agreed with this.
Given patents are restrictions, patents are only allowed to exist where necessary, and solely for the "greater good" of society.
Without patents there would be no protection for inventors' inventions, so the theory says they wouldn't invent anything, and society would suffer.
Large businesses already have large cash reserves and an infrastructure to quickly begin production of any new product or invention, so the people who patents are mostly designed to protect are independant inventors and small companies.
If inventions occurred without patent protection then there would be no need for patents.
The computer industry (specifically, the software industry) has, for the last thirty or forty years, self-evidently been the single most successful and fast-developing industry we've ever seen. Innovation and inventions have come on a regular (and ever-increasing) basis, for long before patents were issued on software. In fact, there are reams and reams of documented cases where innovation has been halted by the existence of patents, and not one where a patent has been proven to have helped innovation.
Unlike most physical devices, software is not generally a discrete invention. If even basic software algorithms are allowed to be patented it will be impossible to write software, since software is basically a collection of basic algorithms re-arranged into a novel order.
Because software is hard for patent examiners to understand they habitually issue overly-broad patents to basic algorithms. Because the only way to challenge patents is in court (with all the associated fees), software patents primarily benefit large companies who can afford to cross-licence or defend their patents.
So, patents are a necessary evil, and by design and intention may be used only where necessary.
Patents are required to stimulate innovation. Except in the software industry. Patents reward novel and non-obvious innovation. Except in the software industry. Patents protect the small inventor. Except in the software industry.
Have I made my point yet?
You can blather on all day about the philosophy of what should and shouldn't be patentable[1], but it's irrelevent - software shouldn't be patentable because there's no need.
Patents shouldn't be issued unless there's a good reason to do so, not merely because you can't see a reason not to.
[1] FWIW I agree that algorithms are ideas/math, and that ideas/math shouldn't be patentable. If you disagree, and believe ideas or math should be patentable you might as well ask why someone can't patent a colour, or why Isaac Newton couldn't patent gravity.
Software is a few very, very basic ideas (algorithms). Software merely consists of re-arranging them in a novel order, not "inventing" anything new.
Source code is an expression of ideas, and is (rightly) copyrightable. "Software" is just ideas, and ideas simply aren't patentable.
I think that's more of a function of the corporate information systems (IS) environment more than the language... That would also be why you're seeing the same thing with Java; it's really big for internal IS work.
Ah, but is that cause or effect?
It's a fine distinction, but you end up wondering where you draw the distinction between "the languages that get used mostly in those kind of corporate cultures" and "the culture of the language".
Cultures are made by the people in them - you may suggest Java and VB only have those kind of cultures because they're mostly used in those kind of companies, but then "the culture of X" is mostly made up by the people who use X, in this case corporate drones.
I honestly don't know whether the Java/VB cultures are caused by some kind of brain-damage caused directly by the languages (and that's what makes them attractive to the corporate mentality), or whether the culture is caused by the languages mostly appealing to the kinds of people with that mindset anyway.
Either way, given the languages we use are the tools we use to think, I'd say causation or correlation are both good reasons to keep well away from them...;-)
Here's a great idea - instead of chucking god-knows-what else into the atmosphere, because some of us think it might possibly help, why don't we... y'know... just stop belching out so much CO2[1] in the first place?
I mean, lovely thought experiment and all, but exactly how retarded do we have to be to try to re-establish balance by effecting yet more change to the atmosphere? If everything works perfectly, then wonderful. But if one thing goes wrong we could be fucking our environment even more.
Just bite the bullet and wean ourselves off fossil fuels, FFS.
For an extreme case, look at all the public-key cryptography apps out there. They all interoperate, and yet offer great security.
I'm going to take a punt and guess that either you didn't think that through, or you're not really a developer with any experience of the kind of things you use Javascript for.
There's nothing wrong with the Javascript language.
Various implementations of it have been buggy, but this is the fault of the browser-writers.
And IIRC, some of the worst security problems for Javascript have been a direct result of Microsoft extending it into JScript, giving it access to the filesystem and OS and trying to turn what was a nice, safe harmless web-scripting language into a full-permissions do-what-the-hell-you-want desktop scripting language, without (surprise!) paying enough attention to security.
XSS is the only thing that really stands out as a "javascript" problem, but technically that's caused more by whoever wrote the server-side code responsible, in whatever language they wrote it.
What, you mean rewrite it totally and break backwards-compatibility until it's essentially semantically equivalent to any of the brackets-and-braces languages like C#, C++ or Java?
1. RFID-enabled players check RFID tag before playing (otherwise-normal) DVD
This is so stupid it's unlikely even the MPAA would release it. Trivially "hackable" by playing the DVD in a normal (non-RFID) player. As a wonderful side-effect, also completely kills the market for RFID players.
2. Key held on DVD (data) that must match key held on RFID
Less stupid, but all your have to do is remove the (data) key when copying the disc. Player thinks it's a normal disc and plays it without querying RFID chip at all. DVD data is software, basically making it trivial to hack and even easier to distribute tools to do it automatically.
3. DVD data encrypted with key held in RFID chip.
3a. Same key used for all movies Trivially hackable. See DeCSS.
3b. Different key for each movie This is the most difficult option, and hence the most likely one they'll go for. Requires a hardware hack to get the key on a per-movie basis. However, happily, your DVD player has to be able to get the key too, so extracting the key from the RFID chip should be either unprotected, or protected by a password that's common across all brands, or at least all players of that brand. Once you have that password, you can grab the key from the RFID chip and use it to decrypt the DVD data.
Of these options, the only worrying one is 3b - this requires a hardware (rather than software) hack to get the unencrypted DVD stream, and while it sems pretty easy from that point of view, hardware hacks themselves aren't automatable, are less distributable and require more skillz to get working.
Of course, the whole thing's moot anyway because who's going to be stupid enough now to buy-in to another physical medium for their, uh, media?
More to the point, how is embedding an RFID chip in the disc going to prevent people playing region-encoded discs outside of their regions?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't region-encoded discs already... well... region-encoded?
Either people buy legit US/Japanese/whatever players (which you can't guard against with RFID chips), or they get their existing player chipped to bypass the whole region-protection mechanism - is there any reason to think this isn't going to work with the new RFID players, too?
Of course, if the DVD players refuse to play unRFIDed discs then they'll be a bit useless for all the existing DVDs out there (nothing like breaking backwards-compatability to hurt a new product). If the RFIDed DVDs have some kind of (data) flag on the disc to turn RFID-checking it on it's liable to be trivial to reverse-engineer or omit the flag when copying the disc, too.
Even if it does somehow "eliminate optical disc piracy in the entertainment and IT sectors", does anyone else think it's wonderful how they've finally managed to do it just about the time that broadband and bittorrent have made "optical disc" piracy obsolete, even in the mainstream?
"Err... yes. Only by understanding the underlying system can you appreciate the reasons why a good architecture is a good architecture. Understanding what you're doing at a low level is a key part of building the aesthetic sense that guides us through high-level design decisions."
I'm not saying it can't help you understand it, only asking whether it's necessary to learn that part first (or even "early") on your career as a larval-stage programmer.
Paul Graham has famously indicated the connections between painting and hacking, but that doesn't mean I should have to learn painting before I can touch a computer.
Surely I'd be better learning the skills I need immediately, and picking up painting as I go. If I'm building a house, I'd view it as being more like "plumbing" than "foundations".
Sure, if I've go no idea about plumbing then learning as I go might occasionally necessitate redesigning a bit (or a lot) of a house. This will hurt the first time, but I'll be damn sure I know what I'm doing from then on. I'll also be able to build several really great garden sheds and really get interested in building before I encounter the boring world of plumbing.
I think this is a better way of learning than forcing everyone to learn plumbing before they're allowed to touch a brick - while you might get a few really nice houses built, you'll lose a generation of talented builders because they don't see why they should sit through a year of plumbing to pick up their first trowel...
"Most of those abstractions are substantially easier to understand if you can appreciate why they work... The point is: the abstractions have been designed to be efficiently implementable at a low level. This means that understanding the low level helps you understand them."
Actually, the best abstractions have been designed for their use as abstractions - thinking tools. Look at Lisp compared to FORTRAN. FORTRAN was designed to be close to the hardware, and was very efficient. Back in the day everyone used FORTRAN for everything.
Lisp was designed to be expressive. When it was first written it was slow to run, but now Lisp programs run acceptably fast, which language is widely regarded with nit-picking disgust, and which language is undergoing a revival amongst the very best and brightest hackers?
(FWIW, I don't know FORTRAN or Lisp, so I have no axe to grind on this. But I'd say the usage-patterns are very, very clear).
Regarding your assertion that abstractions are chosen because they map well to the hardware: How do "linked lists" help you understand processor design? "Binary", granted, is useful at the low level, as are pointers (but does any modern language have true pointers, or references?). Arrays are useful, but they're less "abstract" than things like hashtables or linked lists, and how does OOP map neatly onto tranditional assembler programming?
Most of the "best" abstractions (inheritance, linked lists, OOP, APIs) are more about giving you useful tools to think with rather than just "mapping to the hardware". When you think about it, an abstraction that's designed to map to the hardware isn't really that much of an abstraction at all, is it?
"[Coding efficienctly is] sometimes necessary... Coding to that edge will always be necessary. Embedded systems usually only have *just enough* power to do the task they're designed for. Squeezing an extra few transactions per second from a machine could save a big web site thousands in additional hardware. People still want their video encodes to finish quicker. And faster cryptography means we can use better cryptography with bigger keys, which will always be desirable."
I don't believe I ever stated anywhere that it was never important. In fact, on several posts on the topic I've specifically mentioned embedded programming as one example of a place where a low-level appreciation (even "using assembly") was more or less essential.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't like the idea either, but I disagree here... that's not the only reason.
Another reason is that you can't tell which protestors and supporters will remain peaceful during something that was obviously motivating enough to get them off their ass is the first place.
Add in a little mob mentality, ala riots when a team wins something... and you're got a recipe for a real mess. One that's been seen before."
That's not terrorism. As such, no powers granted to law enforcement to counteract terrorism should be used.
No terrorist I've ever even heard of has launched their attack from the cover of a bunch of peaceful protesters in the middle of NYC (or wherever). Aeroplanes? Sure. Driving a truck full of fertilizer/sugar up to a government building? Sure. But in the middle of a pre-arranged, planned demonstration you've got some of the tightest security anywhere, even when they aren't violating your basic rights.
Terrorism strikes where we aren't looking, not where we're tooled up and waiting for it.
In addition, the right to peacefully protest is a staple part of western civilisation. I'm sorry, but removing the only way to effectively voice your peaceful dissent because someone's worried about something that they have absolutely no reason or precedent to worry about is pretty weak as an excuse.
It's merely that public demonstrations serve to encourage other people to voice their dissent, whereas if nobody's seen to be dissenting most people will just keep their heads down. Force the demonstration to take place in a quiet, obscure area well away from the media and the main event, and it might as well not happen at all. No publicity = no benefit from protesting.
The thing is, in any functional democracy our representatives should be listening to our dissent, not seeking underhand ways to prevent us from dissenting.
And especially not by waving the bullshit bogeyman of "terrorism" as an excuse.
Damn, forgot to add:
"Yes, I'm aware of the "free speech zones" at debates and conventions in recent elections, and I think they're a horrible idea, but at least in those cases it's motivated by the inability of police to guarantee the safety of the people both inside and outside the building when a terror target is that high-profile."
In other words, the threat of terrorism (which, if you look up the statistics is on par with your chances of being struck by lightning) means we have to restrict free speech?
So why don't we have laws restricting people from congregating out in the open when the weather's looking a bit sketchy?
And why should people be allowed into rallies or photo-ops if they look like supporters, but herded into free speech zones if they look like protesters? If anyone was going to bomb the Republican Party Convention do you really think they'd be stupid enough to wander up wearing a "Fuck Bush" T-shirt over their homemade dynamite vest?
This entire rationale is so pathetically flimsy it's completely see-through. There is only one reason to herd peaceful protesters into designated (almost always well-hidden) areas but still allow supporters through, and that's because you don't want people to see the protest.
Unfortunately that's rather the whole point of your right to free assembly, so they have to come up with a pathetic pretext to allow them to needlessly violate your basic rights.
"On the other hand, those events are infrequent compared with the hindrances on free speech rights that take place at our public educational institutions every day, this time motivated by left-leaning political correctness advocates rather than by right-leaning Patriot Act advocates."
I read the article. A religious group thinks it should continue to receive funding from a state school, but should be allowed to only admit individuals who share that faith. The state school thinks that this violates Separation of Church and State, which sounds pretty correct to me.
The school has offered to either stop funding all the religious groups in the school, or continue to fund the Knights of Columbus if it admits non-believers. The group has refused this.
Nobody's denying anyone free speech, and it's shockingly intellectually dishonest to claim they are.
All the school is saying is that if the group's going to exclude people on religious lines, then they (as a state entity) shouldn't be paying them to do it.
As (presumably) a religious person, how would you feel about your kid's school funding a science club that refused to allow membership to Christians?
"Note that in each of those cases, we're talking about the highest levels of federal government taking overt acts to revoke our First Amendment rights. Compare that with this particular case of some local TSA moron doing something stupid."
So top-down all-in-one didn't work, as it was too much too soon for people to accept, and sure enough, those laws ended up being explicitly repealed or popularly ignored.
Bottom-up creeping totalitarianism is more dangerous than the obvious top-down approach. It's not to obvious, and requires you treat it as the beginning of a trend, rather than giving you something big and juicy to point to to get people good and riled up.
To steal a meaphor from elsewhere in the comments: people notice when you switch off an electric light, because the change is obvious. People don't as readily notice the sunset - it takes a long time and it's very slow. However, by the time the sun's finally set it's often too late to do anything about it.
Plus, with the slow, creeping approach there are always legions of people like yourself to claim nothing's wrong and everything's Just Fine, citing even more egregious examples from the past.
First link in a Google search:p roves_t.html
http://www.robertsilvey.com/notes/2004/12/bush_ap
Really... in this day and age you have absolutely no excuse for throwing out stupid questions like this. Google Is Your Friend.
Do you believe that an item's price should be based on the production/distribution cost, consumer demand and the pre-agreed "fair price" of similar items, or is it solely dependant on consumer demand?
If you take the hardline ultra-capitalist approach and think it's ok for the price to be based purely on demand, presumably you also have no problems with "cornering the market", price-fixing cartels and gouging people (eg, selling inflatable rubber dinghies for $1000 each during Hurricane Katrina) - after all, whatever people will pay, eh?
If you think price should contain some element of "fairness", then these prices are way over the odds - the price is broadly equivalent to a brand-new hardback book, but consumer demand for e-books isn't exactly battering the door down, production is less than for paper books, distribution is essentially free and you have to shell out something like $300 minimum on hardware before you can even use the thing you just bought.
If you agree that it's perfectly acceptable for companies to charge you a premium merely because people will pay it, then fine. However, given most people believe that ticket touting, price-fixing and the like are wrong, I think most people would agree that "fairness" should also be an important consideration.
And incidentally, in the UK books are considered an essential/educational item, not a luxury - this is why you don't have to pay VAT on them.
"Yeah, because governments never did that type of stuff until the inception of the US and no other governments have done that stuff or do that stuff now."
Oh well then, that's ok then. That completely absolves you of guilt for it.
While you're at it, why not start executing dissidents, throwing peaceful protesters in prison, holding prisoners without trial, executing children, rigging elections, torturing suspects, dismantling due process and eating babies? I mean, there have been societies at one point of another that have done all those things at one time or another, so surely it's alright to do all of them now, right?
(FWIW, I started writing that list as an example of some of the worst things any society has ever done... distressingly the modern USA is actually doing a number of them right now - I swear that was an accident, but it just goes to show...)
Or maybe the fact that you're the worlds only superpower means you should make an effort to be a good role-model - be the adult in the playground, instead of the kid with a pituitary disorder who's four times the size of the other kids but refuses to understand why he's not allowed to have "harmless" playground fights.
Or maybe you should carry on doing what you're doing, but should shut up about how you're the "light of the free world" and the "shining example of democracy" to everyone else. Be selfish, careless and violent. Just don't be a hypocrite with it.
Or maybe you should carry on doing and saying whatever you like, but should ensure that your behaviour at least doesn't adversely affect other nations, especially when it's merely for your convenience.
"If you're going to be anti-US, at least have the good sense to slam us for the things we do that every other government on earth doesn't do. Thank you."
Microsoft is getting investigated right now for doing what other companies already (and still) do. The thing is, Microsoft is a monopoly, so the rules are different.
Adults in playgrounds can't have a fight with the other kids.
Microsoft can't bundle software and lock out other vendors.
The USA can't act like a tooled-up banana republic, while simultaneously screaming what nice guys they are, and decide to squish anyone who looks at them funny.
Well, they all can, but that doesn't make them nice people, and it's perfectly understandable when people have a problem with it.
And finally, FWIW, most other countries did abuse their power, and that was wrong. I personally feel deeply ashamed of my country's actions (UK) from the end of the 18th century right up to the end of WWII.
However, holding up something from 50-100 years ago as proof that it's ok to do it now is pretty far down the list, as reasonable justifications go.
Hell, in the period above the USA was busy stealing ancestral homelands from the native Americans, you'd only just stopped viewing black people as possessions and women weren't allowed to vote. Does that mean that's all "ok" for the rest of us to do now, too?
"Terrorists do not attack and kill 3000 people simply because they don't like the people's attitude... A group of people who have the resolve to carry out a terrorist attack would not be expending so much effort, energy, and money simply based on the attitude of their intended victims. The cause of hatred is far more deep-rooted than just an attitude."
Sigh.
Your attitude is made manifest in the people you elect, your foreign policy, your aggressive non-interest in the welfare of anyone outside your borders when that conflicts even minimally with your own level of comfort.
When people say "terrorists attack you because of your attitude" they don't mean that someone was once rude to a muslim in a Quick-E-Mart and that's why the WTC was destroyed.
"Attitude" in this case is a shorthand for "arrogance, lack of empathy, viewing other cultures/nations/people as expendable commodities, political interference, corruption and all the other actual actions that arise from holding said attitude".
The rest of the world is quite capable of making this distinction - why are so many US citizens apparently not?
Do you really think anyone would travel to the US, infiltrate the country, set up a terrorist cell, learn to fly passenger planes, try to hijack half a dozen planes then fly them into buildings, killing themselves as well as the passengers... merely because they disapproved of how you live your life?
Here is a Cluesflash: Muslims don't give a rat's ass about how Americans live their lives. You could eat babies while fornicating with your own sister (as I hear they do in Arkensas) and the world of Islam wouldn't care. However, where "your attitudes" start to affect "their lives", that's where people get mad enough to blow themselves up as a symbol of their anger.
Oh, and the world of Islam tends to get upset when images of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH and all of that) are taken in vain, but less the deliberate stirring up by middle-eastern governments (who saw a useful distraction from their own domestic problems) and bussed-in pre-arranged "riots", even that's not a big deal.
"Whoever modded the comment insightful needs a reality check (or a better understanding of terrorists)."
Terrorists are not maniacs, irrational or mad - they're just very, very firm in their beliefs.
They don't blow up buildings because the little yellow pixies told them to, because it's Wednesday or because somone from that country once flipped them off.
They do it because they're so angry that they feel the need to strike back in any way they can.
Sensible, insightful people would be wondering what got them so mad in the first place, and if it's really worth doing.
But I guess idiots just find it easier to demonise them (neatly absolving themselves of guilt) and assume that even if you changed your actions they'd just be doing it anyway, right?
"But what being ticked off at someone's attitude does is make you happy when the other party is attacked by terrorists. It doesn't make you actually commit a terrorist act."
So you're saying that people would blow themselves up because they (in a wonderfully nebulous way) "disapprove" of our "freedoms", and not because, for example, the botched invasion of Iraq directly lead to their kid brother being shot, and the ensuing collapse of the economy lead to their parents starving or dying of TB?
Oh that's easy: recently the more sophisticated global warming deniers have moved on from claiming "there's no heating going on" to admitting that there may be heating going on, but that it's probably all part of a natural cycle, "because look - at some point in the past the average global temperature was the same as it is now, even without human intervention!!!11!!1one!".
Of course, this ignores the mountain of evidence that the heating is happening almost instantly (geologically speaking), and the fact that earth was once a seething mass of rock at well above the boiling point of water.
Still, you can't convince someone who'll shift rationales to protect their conclusion. To them, the most important thing is defending their pre-selected conclusion, not ensuring their decision-making process leads them to the correct ones in the first place.
Indeed. Then the lander will be two pixels wide, instead of one!
Twice the resolution. Are dumbasses going to care? Remember, we're talking roughly about the difference between "." and, well, something half that size.
Well done and all on getting a "super-high" resolution camera over Mars, but it's pathetic hyperbole to present it how they have. Whereis the cutoff point between a normal high resolution camera and a "super-high" one, anyway?
So... what part of "a movie costs many times more than a book to produce" were you disagreeing with?
If you can show that even an international bestseller book costs several hundred million dollars to write then I'll believe you.
However, I think you'll have a hard time proving:
1. There are more people involved in the production of a book than a movie.
2. Book production requires more equipment.
3. Book production (of necessity) takes noticeably longer than films.
If this isn't the case, then someone, somewhere along the line is ripping people off.
Clearly, they'll be queuing up to get into Silicon Heaven.
Greetings. High Commissioner of Pedantry here.
Your correction implies that the Grammar Police officer was advising the original poster that he should have paid attention in the past, when he was learning the rules of grammar.
He could, however, have been advising the OP to pay attention now - at the point in time when he was actually making the "mistake", not at the point in time when he should have been learning to avoid such mistakes in the first place.
Given this reading of his intentions, his comment was entirely accurate. Furthermore, it suggests the OP still hasn't learned the lesson (to concentrate), rather than his lack of concentration being a one-off error on his part.
Patents are temporary monopolies, which inherently restrict people's freedom. Even the people who originally set up the patent law in the USA understood and agreed with this.
Given patents are restrictions, patents are only allowed to exist where necessary, and solely for the "greater good" of society.
Without patents there would be no protection for inventors' inventions, so the theory says they wouldn't invent anything, and society would suffer.
Large businesses already have large cash reserves and an infrastructure to quickly begin production of any new product or invention, so the people who patents are mostly designed to protect are independant inventors and small companies.
If inventions occurred without patent protection then there would be no need for patents.
The computer industry (specifically, the software industry) has, for the last thirty or forty years, self-evidently been the single most successful and fast-developing industry we've ever seen. Innovation and inventions have come on a regular (and ever-increasing) basis, for long before patents were issued on software. In fact, there are reams and reams of documented cases where innovation has been halted by the existence of patents, and not one where a patent has been proven to have helped innovation.
Unlike most physical devices, software is not generally a discrete invention. If even basic software algorithms are allowed to be patented it will be impossible to write software, since software is basically a collection of basic algorithms re-arranged into a novel order.
Because software is hard for patent examiners to understand they habitually issue overly-broad patents to basic algorithms. Because the only way to challenge patents is in court (with all the associated fees), software patents primarily benefit large companies who can afford to cross-licence or defend their patents.
So, patents are a necessary evil, and by design and intention may be used only where necessary.
Patents are required to stimulate innovation. Except in the software industry.
Patents reward novel and non-obvious innovation. Except in the software industry.
Patents protect the small inventor. Except in the software industry.
Have I made my point yet?
You can blather on all day about the philosophy of what should and shouldn't be patentable[1], but it's irrelevent - software shouldn't be patentable because there's no need.
Patents shouldn't be issued unless there's a good reason to do so, not merely because you can't see a reason not to.
[1] FWIW I agree that algorithms are ideas/math, and that ideas/math shouldn't be patentable. If you disagree, and believe ideas or math should be patentable you might as well ask why someone can't patent a colour, or why Isaac Newton couldn't patent gravity.
Software is a few very, very basic ideas (algorithms). Software merely consists of re-arranging them in a novel order, not "inventing" anything new.
Source code is an expression of ideas, and is (rightly) copyrightable. "Software" is just ideas, and ideas simply aren't patentable.
Oh my Cod that was awful. I would never bream of lowering myself to punning, but it's about what I'd expect in this plaice
I think that's more of a function of the corporate information systems (IS) environment more than the language... That would also be why you're seeing the same thing with Java; it's really big for internal IS work.
;-)
Ah, but is that cause or effect?
It's a fine distinction, but you end up wondering where you draw the distinction between "the languages that get used mostly in those kind of corporate cultures" and "the culture of the language".
Cultures are made by the people in them - you may suggest Java and VB only have those kind of cultures because they're mostly used in those kind of companies, but then "the culture of X" is mostly made up by the people who use X, in this case corporate drones.
I honestly don't know whether the Java/VB cultures are caused by some kind of brain-damage caused directly by the languages (and that's what makes them attractive to the corporate mentality), or whether the culture is caused by the languages mostly appealing to the kinds of people with that mindset anyway.
Either way, given the languages we use are the tools we use to think, I'd say causation or correlation are both good reasons to keep well away from them...
<scribbles>
Eh? What? Oh, nothing...
Exactly.
Here's a great idea - instead of chucking god-knows-what else into the atmosphere, because some of us think it might possibly help, why don't we... y'know... just stop belching out so much CO2[1] in the first place?
I mean, lovely thought experiment and all, but exactly how retarded do we have to be to try to re-establish balance by effecting yet more change to the atmosphere? If everything works perfectly, then wonderful. But if one thing goes wrong we could be fucking our environment even more.
Just bite the bullet and wean ourselves off fossil fuels, FFS.
[1] and CO, low-level ozone, etc, etc, etc.
Security != interoperability.
For an extreme case, look at all the public-key cryptography apps out there. They all interoperate, and yet offer great security.
I'm going to take a punt and guess that either you didn't think that through, or you're not really a developer with any experience of the kind of things you use Javascript for.
There's nothing wrong with the Javascript language.
Various implementations of it have been buggy, but this is the fault of the browser-writers.
And IIRC, some of the worst security problems for Javascript have been a direct result of Microsoft extending it into JScript, giving it access to the filesystem and OS and trying to turn what was a nice, safe harmless web-scripting language into a full-permissions do-what-the-hell-you-want desktop scripting language, without (surprise!) paying enough attention to security.
XSS is the only thing that really stands out as a "javascript" problem, but technically that's caused more by whoever wrote the server-side code responsible, in whatever language they wrote it.
What, you mean rewrite it totally and break backwards-compatibility until it's essentially semantically equivalent to any of the brackets-and-braces languages like C#, C++ or Java?
Oh, wait-
Indeed. Why let a little thing like reality get in the way of a really good business initiative?
There are three cases I can see:
1. RFID-enabled players check RFID tag before playing (otherwise-normal) DVD
This is so stupid it's unlikely even the MPAA would release it. Trivially "hackable" by playing the DVD in a normal (non-RFID) player. As a wonderful side-effect, also completely kills the market for RFID players.
2. Key held on DVD (data) that must match key held on RFID
Less stupid, but all your have to do is remove the (data) key when copying the disc. Player thinks it's a normal disc and plays it without querying RFID chip at all. DVD data is software, basically making it trivial to hack and even easier to distribute tools to do it automatically.
3. DVD data encrypted with key held in RFID chip.
3a. Same key used for all movies
Trivially hackable. See DeCSS.
3b. Different key for each movie
This is the most difficult option, and hence the most likely one they'll go for. Requires a hardware hack to get the key on a per-movie basis. However, happily, your DVD player has to be able to get the key too, so extracting the key from the RFID chip should be either unprotected, or protected by a password that's common across all brands, or at least all players of that brand. Once you have that password, you can grab the key from the RFID chip and use it to decrypt the DVD data.
Of these options, the only worrying one is 3b - this requires a hardware (rather than software) hack to get the unencrypted DVD stream, and while it sems pretty easy from that point of view, hardware hacks themselves aren't automatable, are less distributable and require more skillz to get working.
Of course, the whole thing's moot anyway because who's going to be stupid enough now to buy-in to another physical medium for their, uh, media?
Reasons to Hate Electronics that Phone Home #278: Being mistaken for a Morrissey fan.
Thanks - I'll add it to the list.
More to the point, how is embedding an RFID chip in the disc going to prevent people playing region-encoded discs outside of their regions?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't region-encoded discs already... well... region-encoded?
Either people buy legit US/Japanese/whatever players (which you can't guard against with RFID chips), or they get their existing player chipped to bypass the whole region-protection mechanism - is there any reason to think this isn't going to work with the new RFID players, too?
Of course, if the DVD players refuse to play unRFIDed discs then they'll be a bit useless for all the existing DVDs out there (nothing like breaking backwards-compatability to hurt a new product). If the RFIDed DVDs have some kind of (data) flag on the disc to turn RFID-checking it on it's liable to be trivial to reverse-engineer or omit the flag when copying the disc, too.
Even if it does somehow "eliminate optical disc piracy in the entertainment and IT sectors", does anyone else think it's wonderful how they've finally managed to do it just about the time that broadband and bittorrent have made "optical disc" piracy obsolete, even in the mainstream?
"Err... yes. Only by understanding the underlying system can you appreciate the reasons why a good architecture is a good architecture. Understanding what you're doing at a low level is a key part of building the aesthetic sense that guides us through high-level design decisions."
I'm not saying it can't help you understand it, only asking whether it's necessary to learn that part first (or even "early") on your career as a larval-stage programmer.
Paul Graham has famously indicated the connections between painting and hacking, but that doesn't mean I should have to learn painting before I can touch a computer.
Surely I'd be better learning the skills I need immediately, and picking up painting as I go. If I'm building a house, I'd view it as being more like "plumbing" than "foundations".
Sure, if I've go no idea about plumbing then learning as I go might occasionally necessitate redesigning a bit (or a lot) of a house. This will hurt the first time, but I'll be damn sure I know what I'm doing from then on. I'll also be able to build several really great garden sheds and really get interested in building before I encounter the boring world of plumbing.
I think this is a better way of learning than forcing everyone to learn plumbing before they're allowed to touch a brick - while you might get a few really nice houses built, you'll lose a generation of talented builders because they don't see why they should sit through a year of plumbing to pick up their first trowel...
"Most of those abstractions are substantially easier to understand if you can appreciate why they work... The point is: the abstractions have been designed to be efficiently implementable at a low level. This means that understanding the low level helps you understand them."
Actually, the best abstractions have been designed for their use as abstractions - thinking tools. Look at Lisp compared to FORTRAN. FORTRAN was designed to be close to the hardware, and was very efficient. Back in the day everyone used FORTRAN for everything.
Lisp was designed to be expressive. When it was first written it was slow to run, but now Lisp programs run acceptably fast, which language is widely regarded with nit-picking disgust, and which language is undergoing a revival amongst the very best and brightest hackers?
(FWIW, I don't know FORTRAN or Lisp, so I have no axe to grind on this. But I'd say the usage-patterns are very, very clear).
Regarding your assertion that abstractions are chosen because they map well to the hardware: How do "linked lists" help you understand processor design? "Binary", granted, is useful at the low level, as are pointers (but does any modern language have true pointers, or references?). Arrays are useful, but they're less "abstract" than things like hashtables or linked lists, and how does OOP map neatly onto tranditional assembler programming?
Most of the "best" abstractions (inheritance, linked lists, OOP, APIs) are more about giving you useful tools to think with rather than just "mapping to the hardware". When you think about it, an abstraction that's designed to map to the hardware isn't really that much of an abstraction at all, is it?
"[Coding efficienctly is] sometimes necessary... Coding to that edge will always be necessary. Embedded systems usually only have *just enough* power to do the task they're designed for. Squeezing an extra few transactions per second from a machine could save a big web site thousands in additional hardware. People still want their video encodes to finish quicker. And faster cryptography means we can use better cryptography with bigger keys, which will always be desirable."
I don't believe I ever stated anywhere that it was never important. In fact, on several posts on the topic I've specifically mentioned embedded programming as one example of a place where a low-level appreciation (even "using assembly") was more or less essential.