Reporting news is a serious issue and the facts should have been checked first, which clearly wasn't done.
Excuse me, China, this is the Washington Post here... I just wanted to call to confirm that you did indeed shut down that blog, yes, its address is something.blogspot.cn. Oh? Ok, just calling to confirm. Thanks! Oh wait, one more thing, I am writing a piece on Tiananmen Square and...
</example>
How exactly do you intend fact checking to occur in such scenarios? Humans make mistakes; it is inevitable that errors will occur, especially in situations where the true facts are not clear (like this one). The important thing is that we eventually get it correct.
The notion of 'eventual correctness' has occasionally been used to produce useful things before.
Barring such an understanding, what is it you want? It's not okay for people to make mistakes; everyone must get everything right the first time, or else?
An important point to note here, is that most programmers nowadays don't need to be aware of this. At least not to the extent they used to.
I wouldn't be so sure of this. One of my first tasks in my first job out of college was to optimize some incredibly slow code. The code was creating large XML text documents to send to other components. I share the mentality "start with C", or at least "fully learn C", but it was obvious the guy whose code I was fixing did not.
Needless to say, the C# code I was working on looked something like this:
I changed the code to use "StringBuilder" (which grows a buffer rather than allocating a new string every time) and sped up the code by something like %10,000. My manager was quite pleased.
But yes, I think knowing "what's going on under the hood" will always be important...
Mod parent down -- FUD! VB doesn't have anything to do with "wizards" more than does C# or C++ (as presented in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 IDE) or Java does (in Eclipse, or IntelliJ).
Sure, when you first create a project, a wizard comes up asking (for C++) "Do you want a GUI or Console? MFC, ATL? Precompiled headers?". But that's not doing any *programming* for you; that's just setting the project up. As a professional developer, I consider such things a time saver.
In Visual Basic, just like in every other language, you do the programming yourself. All that happens for you is project set up and the insertion of hooks, such as:
User: *double click*
IDE: here you go, this empty delegate will be called when a user presses that button
It's pretty hard to many any sort of "real" application all the while only relying on what's generated for you.
This has been google's strategy from the beginning, the more info they have about you, the users - the better they can market to you, the users.
If you take the pessimistic stance that marketing will always happen, regardless, then at least in this scenario you receive marketing that might actually interest you instead of, oh, I don't know, notification about a new brand of tampon (the sorts of adverts that I always see on TV for some reason).
For example, Google would know that by reading Slashdot, you must be male, and automatically exclude you from receiving such misdirected advertisements. Likewise, if Google were in control of all the advertising, the Slashdot crowd would never get another v14gr4 ad again! (since they have no use for it):-)
The real problem is that tests like this are garbage in the first place.
In fact, Bruce Schneier (a respected cryptographer, responsible for Blowfish) addressed the topic thoroughly almost 8 years ago in his column Crypto-Gram. Here's a relevant snippet:
You see them all the time: "Company X offers $1,000,000 to anyone who can break through their firewall/crack their algorithm/make a fraudulent transaction using their protocol/do whatever." These are cracking contests, and they're supposed to show how strong and secure the target of the contests are. The logic goes something like this: We offered a prize to break the target, and no one did. This means that the target is secure.
It doesn't.
Contests are a terrible way to demonstrate security. A product/system/protocol/algorithm that has survived a contest unbroken is not obviously more trustworthy than one that has not been the subject of a contest. The best products/systems/protocols/algorithms available today have not been the subjects of any contests, and probably never will be. Contests generally don't produce useful data. There are three basic reasons why this is so.
You're right, I didn't really refute your point. However, I still disagree.
There have been some pretty elaborate attacks on software. For example, the vulnerability that some colleagues of mine at Rice University found in Google Desktop. They spent a good month analyzing the security of and trying different things on Google Desktop. In the process, they wrote plenty of their own software. Indeed, it would not have been possible to find this flaw had they not been clever engineers themselves.
There are plenty of other attacks out there, such as cache hit timing attacks, that are very, very complicated -- the idea itself behind that timing attack is insane to me, much less the implementation. (For those attacks, cache hit information was used to extract secret/private keys from inside other applications without having any special privileges!).
I don't think the situation is simple enough to say that breaking into things is always easier than making them in the first place, even as a generalization. Especially if you include the amount of time looking for vulnerabilities as part of the "circumvention" of one specific flaw, vulnerabilities are quite expensive to find.
For the most part, it always requires less skill to break something than to get something working.
Your car analogy would be good if we were talking about computer code -- it takes a lot more skill to write some good code than to mess it up (in textual form). But that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about circumvention of security, often known as "breaking" it; but that break (to circumvent protection) is a very conceptually different break than your car example (to render nonfunctional).
Finding exploits like this takes time, intelligence, and often understanding of the software in question. Especially in a well-crafted system, you have to know how the system works in order to circumvent it.
It actually should be able to make a device that "runs on" zero-point energy. However, it depends on your definition of "runs on". Usually, when we say that, we talk about the last important power source. Cars run on gasoline, which (probably) came from plants, which came from the sun, soil, etc.
It is entirely possible to 'extract' energy from the vacuum (the zero-point energy) by making use of the Unruh effect. Specifically, whenever you are accelerating, you appear to perceive light coming from the vacuum. If you ran some device off this energy, it would run on zero-point energy much like a car runs on gasoline. Gasoline and the zero-point energy in this example did not "just exist" though, the energy for the device ultimately came from somewhere else.
I suspect this is not what you were referring to, though, but I thought I'd point it out because it is interesting nonetheless:)
What you really meant is that zero-point energy can't be harvested in such a way that it's "free" to us. But really, any energy becomes free to us when its actual source is sufficiently far away that we don't care. Solar energy is "free" -- we just have to put up solar cells and collect it from the sun.
Perhaps we may find that zero-point energy is extractable from the vacuum -- and we might never really figure out where it's coming from. (Who knows, black holes send us the energy from other universes?)
But anyway, it is important to pin down the notion of "free" energy. Free energy is any energy that comes from outside your local thermodynamic system.
Um, no..NET itself (the platform, SDK, etc.) is entirely free, just like Java. The only thing Microsoft has control over is the development tools. Microsoft's Visual Studio is not open source, but so what? In the grandparent post to this I pointed out several open-source.NET projects and one IDE. And there are plenty of popular non-open-source Java IDEs out there too. No one has problems with them.
Oh, and I should also point out that C# and.NET are actually much more "free" technologies than Java is.
Java is, and always has been, a proprietary technology completely specified by Sun. Sun owns the specs and decides what language features to add. Period.
The.NET platform and C# language are fully-specified and are on their way into acceptance as international standards by the ISO. Quote:
In July 2005, Ecma submitted [the C# and.NET] TRs to ISO/IEC JTC 1 via the latter's Fast-Track process. This process usually takes 6-9 months.
So, there is nothing at all "closed" or "proprietary" about C# or.NET, especially compared to Java. The only thing you might find is people using Visual Studio for development; but there are many alternatives:
SharpDevelop is an open-source IDE very similar to Visual Studio, it can do C# and VB.NET
DotGNU is a GNU-sponsored project to implement the.NET platform.
The Mono Project, started by Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame, is another implementation of.NET
So, let's say you were right and Microsoft did somehow convert Pastry to C# from Java. How is this closed or proprietary at all? If anything, it's *more* open.
Sun, the company, itself owns all aspects of Java. No one owns C# or.NET -- they're on their way to becoming international standards. As much as Slashdot seems to hate FUD, the attitude people give Microsoft really seems hypocritial sometimes. And yes, I did see your correction post; but that's not what I'm addressing here. C# and.NET are Open systems in every sense of the word.
I'm not entirely sure what happened at Rice w.r.t. Pastry. What I was told by Dr. Wong that Rice had a Pastry version, MS adopted it and converted it to C#, then allowed us to use it freely. All of this was part of an elective class called COMP 410 that students take. Basically, a team of 10-20 people act like a software company, self-organize, meet with a "client" (professor acting like one) and build a huge system.
And yes, we use entirely Microsoft software. But I think it's a good thing. When I took it, Microsoft gave us copies of Visual Studio 2003, SQL Server, and funding for some tablet PCs to use as part of the project. I thought it was a *superb* experience to work with so much real-world technology.
Yes, I suppose one could say that MS is stifling open-source competition... but seriously, we were building an application that used a distributed cluster of SQL Server databases, transactionally changed by Enterprise Services features with Event Queueing; all of this also used a distributed file and processing system based on Pastry (C#). Getting all that to work together with open-source in a single semester would be quite a challenge. What database would we even use? MySQL is definitely not capable of that. And Oracle isn't free.
So, in this case at least, I think Microsoft's support of us has been positive for students. We are not just a Microsoft shop -- there is even a research group at Rice called the Programming Languages Team, which focuses almost exclusively on Java for research projects. I'm currently involved in improving the open-source, student-oriented Java IDE called Dr Java, which is under the purview of PLT.
*Pant*
Well, I'm sorry this turned into a rant. I guess my point of this: Microsoft has not caused Rice to give up open-source software or anything like that. In reality, their funding has exposed us to more software and more systems than we would have otherwise. I think that is a Good Thing.
It is neither a good thing for students to be exposed solely to OSS, nor solely closed-source industry software. A university should educate well-rounded people, and much like liberal-arts universities require students to take many subjects, Rice exposes CS students to different technologies and environments in its computer science program. Otherwise, how can I ever decide which is best for a task?
[Note: I am heavily, personally in favor of Microsoft software and have accepted an internship with them in the C# Compiler group next summer. But this doesn't mean I dislike Java or OSS; I don't see why there has to be a conflict at all. Use whatever tool suits you best.
But that's just me. I'm going to do *my* best to make C#.NET the best language it can be. If you like Java, fine! We can learn from another:]
Hmmm, really? I didn't know. Sorry for saying you built it. I talked to Mathias Ricken about it today (a doctoral student under Corky in the PLT group) and he told me you were largely responsible for it.
Dr. Wong also said, during my time in COMP 410, that Rice U. was entirely responsible for Pastry before MS took it.
So what's the real story? Did we make it or not? X_x
Congratulations on the/.ing, btw. Where's your office? I'll come by sometime and say hi.:) I'm an undergraduate junior from Brown.
Sorry not to mention it in the first place, but I did study directly under Dr. Wallach (a security/distributed systems researcher at Rice) who is a project member listed at freepastry.org. I did not build these things in question, but I have studied their properties and used them (Pastry, specifically) to build other things.
I have worked under Dr. Wong for a couple of years at Rice, working on Pastry-related and other distributed systems. No, those people are not me, but I have worked with them, and am familiar with their research and the relevant systems, and am happy to finally see these advances make their way into the mainstream.
Why is everyone so ready to bash me for praising them? I thought freely identifying myself as being (very loosely) related to the projects and disclosing my bias was something honest people do.
I have plenty of my own projects that I hope will be worthy of praise some day, and others that have already been praised. Getting some by proximity isn't my goal here. My real goal, actually, was to talk up Rice:)
LOL, that was not my intention, though I guess I see how it could have come off that way. I take pride in my university, the people I have worked with, and applaud them for the things they produce.
I don't even know Dan personally, though I have researched under Drs. Wong and Wallach before. I'm just trying to point out where credit is due.
Is it wrong to want your fellow students to be praised for their hard work?
As a Rice Computer Science student I would like to point out that Pastry actually originated at Rice, under Dan Sandler. The first framework was in Java. You can see from his web page that he's responsible for FeedTree, too.
Microsoft Research became interested in the product and ported it to C#, effectively turning it into the form it is now. Many classes at Rice have now "backported" it, I guess you could say, and it's used for many of our classes that involve distributed networks, such as the current COMP 410 class which has previously turned out distributed file and process system codename Voltron.
Here's a link to the paper co-authored by Sandler and others at Rice.
But you yourself is stating that google is either responsible or not for censorship. Why should google not apply to local laws in china when it does apply to USA laws even thougth many people here don't love them.
USA's laws, while not perfect, are a lot less fucked up and repressive than those in China. At least with the DMCA, there is some smidgen of a notion that it was created for correct reasons. The idea behind it was good (to help get rid of the massive piracy), but it was implemented poorly (and hurts all kinds of fair use).
China is actively censoring its people from hearing about a political past it wishes to forget. And more. That's a lot worse.
I'm not calling any of this right, mind you -- the ban on China or whatever. I think Google's responsible and is doing a bad thing. But, it's also probably the lesser of two evils.
Tell me, where were your shoes made? Your shirt? Computer monitor?
Did you just say, "China"?
If one has a problem with people doing business with China, one should start nosing in other businesses that contribute much more to the problems located there: sweatshops, poverty, hunger, etc. That the elite few who can afford computers are censored in this way is not at the top of the list.
Exactly. That argument is a complete false dilemma. The argument falsely implies that either Google or China is responsible for doing wrong -- fact is that they are both responsible.
China, for setting the policies. Google, for choosing to adopt them.
At which point all the original developers reform the original company, grab the original source (the last release is still out there with its OSS license!), and start releasing the same product. Only now they're a lot richer with Oracle's money in their pockets.
No, I don't think Oracle will be firing them any time soon.
According to linear calculations of what it takes to get relativistic, it will take about 2 years under 1 G acceleration to reach the speed of light.
However, this is actually an underestimate since relativistic effects make it harder to get that close to the speed of light, the closer you get. If you could achieve a constant 1G, that is how long it would take, but this is physically impossible since effective mass increases with velocity.
I calculated it on Google calculator with the following formula (just type into search):
(386 000 (miles per second)) / (10 ((meters per second) per second)) = 1.96852756 years
His argument is not tied to him at all. You thinking of it that way is simply forgetting the distinction between one's actions and one's argument. They are not related. As another said:
Being a hypocrite does not affect the merit of his argument. Claiming it does is a kind of logical fallacy in the ad hominem class, specifically the tu quoque ("you too") ad hominem.
For example, say I kill somebody. I later say that murder is immoral. Does that make me a hypocrite? Yes. Does my hypocrisy invalidate my claim that murder is immoral? No. Hence the fallacy.
You can make unpleasant claims about Gates' character if you want, but in the context of this thread they'd fall into another class of logical fallacies: non sequitur, or changing the subject. We're ostensibly talking about whether Gates stole IP, his character is irrelevant. (Past guilt doesn't indicate or even suggest future guilt... but I suspect you're getting tired of me bringing up logical fallacies.)
Your argument is based on a logical fallacy known as ad hominem. Some examples of other such arguments (from Wikipedia that I linked):
"You claim that this man is innocent, but you cannot be trusted since you are a criminal as well."
"You feel that abortion should be legal, but I disagree because you are uneducated and poor."
"He's physically addicted to nicotine. Of course he defends smoking!"
"Tobacco company representatives are wrong when they say smoking doesn't seriously affect your health, because they're just defending their own multi-million-dollar financial interests."
In short, there's no reason for you to point out that Bill Gates also stole. It doesn't make his argument less convincing or less applicable. The person making the argument is a completely irrelevant aspect of the argument itself. An argument is true or false no matter who says it, no matter their character or past actions.
The fact that you're attacking his past actions instead of the argument he made is telling. I think he has a point. Would you like to reply to his actual argument instead of just attacking the man?
If you want to discuss all the other, horrible things that Bill Gates may have done... then that's fine. But it also is completely offtopic and should be moderated as such.
Aryans advocate violence against others based on skin tone or religious affiliation
I'm Aryan, you insensitive clod! We don't advocate hurting anyone.
It's a sad state when the mere celebration of one's race, if not a minority, is automatically interpreted by others as racism. People who play the race card so frequently, I think, are the true racists.
"White pride" doesn't have to mean "down with blacks" any more than "Muslim pride" means "bomb America". Please don't generalize like this. It perpetuates the racism you might aim to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
Reporting news is a serious issue and the facts should have been checked first, which clearly wasn't done.
Excuse me, China, this is the Washington Post here... I just wanted to call to confirm that you did indeed shut down that blog, yes, its address is something.blogspot.cn. Oh? Ok, just calling to confirm. Thanks! Oh wait, one more thing, I am writing a piece on Tiananmen Square and...
</example>
How exactly do you intend fact checking to occur in such scenarios? Humans make mistakes; it is inevitable that errors will occur, especially in situations where the true facts are not clear (like this one). The important thing is that we eventually get it correct.
The notion of 'eventual correctness' has occasionally been used to produce useful things before.
Barring such an understanding, what is it you want? It's not okay for people to make mistakes; everyone must get everything right the first time, or else?
I wouldn't be so sure of this. One of my first tasks in my first job out of college was to optimize some incredibly slow code. The code was creating large XML text documents to send to other components. I share the mentality "start with C", or at least "fully learn C", but it was obvious the guy whose code I was fixing did not.
Needless to say, the C# code I was working on looked something like this:
I changed the code to use "StringBuilder" (which grows a buffer rather than allocating a new string every time) and sped up the code by something like %10,000. My manager was quite pleased.
But yes, I think knowing "what's going on under the hood" will always be important...
Mod parent down -- FUD! VB doesn't have anything to do with "wizards" more than does C# or C++ (as presented in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 IDE) or Java does (in Eclipse, or IntelliJ).
Sure, when you first create a project, a wizard comes up asking (for C++) "Do you want a GUI or Console? MFC, ATL? Precompiled headers?". But that's not doing any *programming* for you; that's just setting the project up. As a professional developer, I consider such things a time saver.
In Visual Basic, just like in every other language, you do the programming yourself. All that happens for you is project set up and the insertion of hooks, such as:
User: *double click*
IDE: here you go, this empty delegate will be called when a user presses that button
It's pretty hard to many any sort of "real" application all the while only relying on what's generated for you.
This has been google's strategy from the beginning, the more info they have about you, the users - the better they can market to you, the users.
:-)
If you take the pessimistic stance that marketing will always happen, regardless, then at least in this scenario you receive marketing that might actually interest you instead of, oh, I don't know, notification about a new brand of tampon (the sorts of adverts that I always see on TV for some reason).
For example, Google would know that by reading Slashdot, you must be male, and automatically exclude you from receiving such misdirected advertisements. Likewise, if Google were in control of all the advertising, the Slashdot crowd would never get another v14gr4 ad again! (since they have no use for it)
The real problem is that tests like this are garbage in the first place.
In fact, Bruce Schneier (a respected cryptographer, responsible for Blowfish) addressed the topic thoroughly almost 8 years ago in his column Crypto-Gram. Here's a relevant snippet:
You see them all the time: "Company X offers $1,000,000 to anyone who can break through their firewall/crack their algorithm/make a fraudulent transaction using their protocol/do whatever." These are cracking contests, and they're supposed to show how strong and secure the target of the contests are. The logic goes something like this: We offered a prize to break the target, and no one did. This means that the target is secure.
It doesn't.
Contests are a terrible way to demonstrate security. A product/system/protocol/algorithm that has survived a contest unbroken is not obviously more trustworthy than one that has not been the subject of a contest. The best products/systems/protocols/algorithms available today have not been the subjects of any contests, and probably never will be. Contests generally don't produce useful data. There are three basic reasons why this is so.
You can read the original here.
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/ 03/1543256
You're right, I didn't really refute your point. However, I still disagree.
There have been some pretty elaborate attacks on software. For example, the vulnerability that some colleagues of mine at Rice University found in Google Desktop. They spent a good month analyzing the security of and trying different things on Google Desktop. In the process, they wrote plenty of their own software. Indeed, it would not have been possible to find this flaw had they not been clever engineers themselves.
There are plenty of other attacks out there, such as cache hit timing attacks, that are very, very complicated -- the idea itself behind that timing attack is insane to me, much less the implementation. (For those attacks, cache hit information was used to extract secret/private keys from inside other applications without having any special privileges!).
I don't think the situation is simple enough to say that breaking into things is always easier than making them in the first place, even as a generalization. Especially if you include the amount of time looking for vulnerabilities as part of the "circumvention" of one specific flaw, vulnerabilities are quite expensive to find.
For the most part, it always requires less skill to break something than to get something working.
Your car analogy would be good if we were talking about computer code -- it takes a lot more skill to write some good code than to mess it up (in textual form). But that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about circumvention of security, often known as "breaking" it; but that break (to circumvent protection) is a very conceptually different break than your car example (to render nonfunctional).
Finding exploits like this takes time, intelligence, and often understanding of the software in question. Especially in a well-crafted system, you have to know how the system works in order to circumvent it.
It actually should be able to make a device that "runs on" zero-point energy. However, it depends on your definition of "runs on". Usually, when we say that, we talk about the last important power source. Cars run on gasoline, which (probably) came from plants, which came from the sun, soil, etc.
:)
It is entirely possible to 'extract' energy from the vacuum (the zero-point energy) by making use of the Unruh effect. Specifically, whenever you are accelerating, you appear to perceive light coming from the vacuum. If you ran some device off this energy, it would run on zero-point energy much like a car runs on gasoline. Gasoline and the zero-point energy in this example did not "just exist" though, the energy for the device ultimately came from somewhere else.
I suspect this is not what you were referring to, though, but I thought I'd point it out because it is interesting nonetheless
What you really meant is that zero-point energy can't be harvested in such a way that it's "free" to us. But really, any energy becomes free to us when its actual source is sufficiently far away that we don't care. Solar energy is "free" -- we just have to put up solar cells and collect it from the sun.
Perhaps we may find that zero-point energy is extractable from the vacuum -- and we might never really figure out where it's coming from. (Who knows, black holes send us the energy from other universes?)
But anyway, it is important to pin down the notion of "free" energy. Free energy is any energy that comes from outside your local thermodynamic system.
Um, no.
Sorry, but that's just ignorant.
Quote: The original comes from the Mono Project FAQ entry on patents. Please, stop the FUD.
Java is, and always has been, a proprietary technology completely specified by Sun. Sun owns the specs and decides what language features to add. Period.
The
So, there is nothing at all "closed" or "proprietary" about C# or
So, let's say you were right and Microsoft did somehow convert Pastry to C# from Java. How is this closed or proprietary at all? If anything, it's *more* open.
Sun, the company, itself owns all aspects of Java. No one owns C# or
I'm not entirely sure what happened at Rice w.r.t. Pastry. What I was told by Dr. Wong that Rice had a Pastry version, MS adopted it and converted it to C#, then allowed us to use it freely. All of this was part of an elective class called COMP 410 that students take. Basically, a team of 10-20 people act like a software company, self-organize, meet with a "client" (professor acting like one) and build a huge system.
:]
And yes, we use entirely Microsoft software. But I think it's a good thing. When I took it, Microsoft gave us copies of Visual Studio 2003, SQL Server, and funding for some tablet PCs to use as part of the project. I thought it was a *superb* experience to work with so much real-world technology.
Yes, I suppose one could say that MS is stifling open-source competition... but seriously, we were building an application that used a distributed cluster of SQL Server databases, transactionally changed by Enterprise Services features with Event Queueing; all of this also used a distributed file and processing system based on Pastry (C#). Getting all that to work together with open-source in a single semester would be quite a challenge. What database would we even use? MySQL is definitely not capable of that. And Oracle isn't free.
So, in this case at least, I think Microsoft's support of us has been positive for students. We are not just a Microsoft shop -- there is even a research group at Rice called the Programming Languages Team, which focuses almost exclusively on Java for research projects. I'm currently involved in improving the open-source, student-oriented Java IDE called Dr Java, which is under the purview of PLT.
*Pant*
Well, I'm sorry this turned into a rant. I guess my point of this: Microsoft has not caused Rice to give up open-source software or anything like that. In reality, their funding has exposed us to more software and more systems than we would have otherwise. I think that is a Good Thing.
It is neither a good thing for students to be exposed solely to OSS, nor solely closed-source industry software. A university should educate well-rounded people, and much like liberal-arts universities require students to take many subjects, Rice exposes CS students to different technologies and environments in its computer science program. Otherwise, how can I ever decide which is best for a task?
[Note: I am heavily, personally in favor of Microsoft software and have accepted an internship with them in the C# Compiler group next summer. But this doesn't mean I dislike Java or OSS; I don't see why there has to be a conflict at all. Use whatever tool suits you best.
But that's just me. I'm going to do *my* best to make C#.NET the best language it can be. If you like Java, fine! We can learn from another
Hmmm, really? I didn't know. Sorry for saying you built it. I talked to Mathias Ricken about it today (a doctoral student under Corky in the PLT group) and he told me you were largely responsible for it.
/.ing, btw. Where's your office? I'll come by sometime and say hi. :) I'm an undergraduate junior from Brown.
Dr. Wong also said, during my time in COMP 410, that Rice U. was entirely responsible for Pastry before MS took it.
So what's the real story? Did we make it or not? X_x
Congratulations on the
Sorry not to mention it in the first place, but I did study directly under Dr. Wallach (a security/distributed systems researcher at Rice) who is a project member listed at freepastry.org. I did not build these things in question, but I have studied their properties and used them (Pastry, specifically) to build other things.
:)
I have worked under Dr. Wong for a couple of years at Rice, working on Pastry-related and other distributed systems. No, those people are not me, but I have worked with them, and am familiar with their research and the relevant systems, and am happy to finally see these advances make their way into the mainstream.
Why is everyone so ready to bash me for praising them? I thought freely identifying myself as being (very loosely) related to the projects and disclosing my bias was something honest people do.
I have plenty of my own projects that I hope will be worthy of praise some day, and others that have already been praised. Getting some by proximity isn't my goal here. My real goal, actually, was to talk up Rice
LOL, that was not my intention, though I guess I see how it could have come off that way. I take pride in my university, the people I have worked with, and applaud them for the things they produce.
I don't even know Dan personally, though I have researched under Drs. Wong and Wallach before. I'm just trying to point out where credit is due.
Is it wrong to want your fellow students to be praised for their hard work?
As a Rice Computer Science student I would like to point out that Pastry actually originated at Rice, under Dan Sandler. The first framework was in Java. You can see from his web page that he's responsible for FeedTree, too.
Microsoft Research became interested in the product and ported it to C#, effectively turning it into the form it is now. Many classes at Rice have now "backported" it, I guess you could say, and it's used for many of our classes that involve distributed networks, such as the current COMP 410 class which has previously turned out distributed file and process system codename Voltron.
Here's a link to the paper co-authored by Sandler and others at Rice.
But you yourself is stating that google is either responsible or not for censorship. Why should google not apply to local laws in china when it does apply to USA laws even thougth many people here don't love them.
USA's laws, while not perfect, are a lot less fucked up and repressive than those in China. At least with the DMCA, there is some smidgen of a notion that it was created for correct reasons. The idea behind it was good (to help get rid of the massive piracy), but it was implemented poorly (and hurts all kinds of fair use).
China is actively censoring its people from hearing about a political past it wishes to forget. And more. That's a lot worse.
I'm not calling any of this right, mind you -- the ban on China or whatever. I think Google's responsible and is doing a bad thing. But, it's also probably the lesser of two evils.
Tell me, where were your shoes made? Your shirt? Computer monitor?
Did you just say, "China"?
If one has a problem with people doing business with China, one should start nosing in other businesses that contribute much more to the problems located there: sweatshops, poverty, hunger, etc. That the elite few who can afford computers are censored in this way is not at the top of the list.
Don't blame Google, blame China.
Exactly. That argument is a complete false dilemma. The argument falsely implies that either Google or China is responsible for doing wrong -- fact is that they are both responsible.
China, for setting the policies. Google, for choosing to adopt them.
#2 they can just lay off all the developers.
At which point all the original developers reform the original company, grab the original source (the last release is still out there with its OSS license!), and start releasing the same product. Only now they're a lot richer with Oracle's money in their pockets.
No, I don't think Oracle will be firing them any time soon.
However, this is actually an underestimate since relativistic effects make it harder to get that close to the speed of light, the closer you get. If you could achieve a constant 1G, that is how long it would take, but this is physically impossible since effective mass increases with velocity.
I calculated it on Google calculator with the following formula (just type into search):
Maybe have editors who know the field...
That's a good one! Hahahaha....
The TIME CUBE!!!
Sorry, I had to.
His argument is not tied to him at all. You thinking of it that way is simply forgetting the distinction between one's actions and one's argument. They are not related. As another said:
Being a hypocrite does not affect the merit of his argument. Claiming it does is a kind of logical fallacy in the ad hominem class, specifically the tu quoque ("you too") ad hominem.
For example, say I kill somebody. I later say that murder is immoral. Does that make me a hypocrite? Yes. Does my hypocrisy invalidate my claim that murder is immoral? No. Hence the fallacy.
You can make unpleasant claims about Gates' character if you want, but in the context of this thread they'd fall into another class of logical fallacies: non sequitur, or changing the subject. We're ostensibly talking about whether Gates stole IP, his character is irrelevant. (Past guilt doesn't indicate or even suggest future guilt... but I suspect you're getting tired of me bringing up logical fallacies.)
In short, there's no reason for you to point out that Bill Gates also stole. It doesn't make his argument less convincing or less applicable. The person making the argument is a completely irrelevant aspect of the argument itself. An argument is true or false no matter who says it, no matter their character or past actions.
The fact that you're attacking his past actions instead of the argument he made is telling. I think he has a point. Would you like to reply to his actual argument instead of just attacking the man?
If you want to discuss all the other, horrible things that Bill Gates may have done
Aryans advocate violence against others based on skin tone or religious affiliation
I'm Aryan, you insensitive clod! We don't advocate hurting anyone.
It's a sad state when the mere celebration of one's race, if not a minority, is automatically interpreted by others as racism. People who play the race card so frequently, I think, are the true racists.
"White pride" doesn't have to mean "down with blacks" any more than "Muslim pride" means "bomb America". Please don't generalize like this. It perpetuates the racism you might aim to solve.