I like this sort of problem but it does bother me a bit when a teacher can assign his students "Give away your intellectual property" as an exercise. Writing articles, yes, using Wikipedia yes. Good skills. But even if stuff is done for a class (which you're typically paying to attend, directly or indirectly) I don't see why the school should own stuff you produce or be able to determine what you do with it, beyond requiring you to give them reasonable access so they can mark it. It's a bit different for research students since at least they might be getting some funding / support (although often less than you'd think).
Ditto where teachers have taken their classes out to do stuff of OpenStreetMap. I think in both cases it's good experience and it's nice that students are encouraged to do something for The Greater Good but I think it's fairest if there's a line between what you have to do *for your class* and giving access to that information to the wider world. Seems to me that the academic / learning side does not require Free licensing to be satisfied, so whether to contribute to a public project should be an individual choice.
Maybe they're hoping to demonstrate what the authorities are willing to go to. OTOH maybe they're trying to forestall some possible harassment by making an early (even a surprise announcement) that something's happening so that eyes will be on the authorities in advance.
I understand part of this has useful implications of budgeting. Specifically, space agency stuff will have a different budget pot to some of the other scientic work, which (given we like to put lots of money in to get the return investment from ESA) is useful as it protects the funding of other sciences a bit more. AIUI from someone in non-space programme science.
No idea why they're not using the BNSC but the stories I'd seen on the UKSA do claim that it's just a co-ordinating umbrella for existing space stuff, so it's not going to stop the UK collaborating with ESA. Maybe it's due to some complicated science politics.
No surprise they're considering this given the current social and political climate, maybe. And perhaps the healthcare bill looks like an expedient motivator for it. I can't see the argument that the heathcare bill is responsible for ID cards, though. The UK has had a functional National Health Service for ages (the bill originally came into force in 1948) and hasn't needed ID cards to facilitate it. I understand that the new US healthcare proposals are substantially different but even so, surely private medical insurance has successfully been managed without ID cards for years - you still need to know who you're treating, why can't similar techniques work? I'm skeptical of the link here...
It's a DS, so there are two screens anyway. If you hold it really close to your face (maybe just use a rubber band to attach it) then you can see a different screen with each eye - problem solved!
Maybe Google *had* most to lose. But maybe they lost that when they weren't able to bring greater freedom of information quietly to China. Or maybe they lost it when they couldn't progress their Chinese business in the way they wanted. Or maybe they lost it when they burned their bridges by issuing an ultimatum to the government of an enormous nation (not that I necessarily disapprove of that). By this point it's not clear to me to what extent Google actually do have that much to lose *anymore*, even though they seemed to have a lot at stake before things started souring.
If you take democracy to mean something along the lines of "majority rule" then, no, open source isn't that. It's something that's more flexible, made possible by the almost total lack of resource scarcity in the production and copying of computer software. It's basically anarchist, in a positive sense. Everyone can be completely independent if they want, or they can work together according to shared goals or ideals - but it's all self-organized without top-down control except for where it accepted by consent as being expedient. The "raw materials" - software and ideas - can flow freely because it's practically free to produce and copy them. There doesn't need to be a democratic decision over where to commit resources because for practical purposes there's no limit on resources and no way of centrally controlling them anyhow. Readers of Iain M Bank's Culture books will see similarities with that civilisation, made possible by near-infinite resources.
Also, all the issue at hand really seems to demonstrate is that Ubuntu isn't a democracy. It can be run as a completely top-down regime but as long as the components are basically open source people have the freedom to come and go as they please according to whether that regime serves their needs, so it's up to Ubuntu to decide whether that approach is reasonable. That said, if they're sensible, they should realise that they're fortunate to have a large community of users and that it's worth responding to their needs. But that doesn't mean they are wrong have someone make tough or unpopular judgement calls if they believe that's the best approach overall.
I'm not sure our tax system needs to be as baroque and unintelligible as it is in order to deliver results. Most of the things the Inland Revenue do seem downright pointless to anyone with an engineering mindset although I expect many of them had some sane motivation originally.
The bonus of your strategy is that it would also cut down on overheads for individuals, sole traders, small businesses, etc across the country by reducing the amount of admin needed! So it ought to be quite attractive. I doubt any of the consultants the government hires to advise them on this stuff are going to recommend something difficult like reforming the tax system when they could got a lucrative IT contract, though. To a management / IT consultancy with a favourite hammer government problems have good reason to look like nails.
I'm reminded of a comment in Asimov's Prelude to Foundation where Hari Seldon remarks on the characteristics of tax systems. Roughly, part of the point was that a simple tax system is easier for the populace to deal with (good) but that it tends to be / seem less fair, whereas you can have more nuances in a more complex system and find people are unhappy because they don't understand it.
Well, this doesn't sound so great to me. I'm a tech savvy UK citizen and I do lots of things online. But certain aspects of our nation require specialist advice to navigate. If you're job seeking it is probably worth having someone who can give you sensible advice on the law etc without you having to trawl through pages and pages of documentation to (possibly) find the information you're interested in. Ditto the tax system - the guys at the local tax office will see people without an appointment and can quickly explain what needs doing in a given circumstance. I'm happy "wasting" some of my taxes on maintaining these places even if they could be replaced by an online gateway because they provide "someone who knows" without every citizen who ever has a question having to work themselves up to being a minor domain expert before they can do a relatively simple task. Even with a good UI and a lot of online help I doubt I could sort out problems as effectively myself online as by just asking an expert with access to the right information and the knowledge to use it well.
Essentially, the author as recognised the need for games with zombies in. He has produced a game with zombies in for one dollar, which he hopes people will pay. The game features zombies shambling in from the sides, which you had better shoot lest you die.
Practically the difference is pretty small, as you say. I'd argue that the business model of "We have this stuff ready for release but will keep it and sell it to you later" is not what people are used to and the fact that this *is* the business model is most apparent and explicit when the content was already on the disk.
When it's really downloaded content at least people can imagine the content hadn't gone gold when the software was shipped. If the content shipped on the disk then there's no question of that being the case, therefore people see the business model they dislike more clearly and make more noise about it.
Even though it's phrased trollishly, you've summed up some differences pretty well. In practice, people drive a heck of a lot in Europe too but the roads here are perhaps harder work to do long distances on. But the thing about planes being the fastest way to get around long distance points to another difference. In Europe in particular countries are closer together, as is the perception of a "long" trip. The time cost of travel to airport, waiting around for the plane, collecting bags at the other end, etc starts to dominate the journey pretty quickly and even for international trips it can quickly get to be more hassle than just hopping on a train. Plane travel between European countries is super cheap, though, so it's still often worth doing.
So, just considering intelligence / national security information for the moment... I like that Wikileaks is putting more "intelligence"-style information into the hands of the citizenry, so long as they're sensible about it and don't publish really critical operational stuff for no morally justifiable reason. However, regardless of questions of restraint, lets just consider the risk of Wikileaks: It lets people leak national security data anonymously and makes it public.
Lets consider the problems to national security here: stuff is leaked anonymously so you can't stop them. And it gets published. Compare this to the traditional model which is either: a) stuff is leaked anonymously to a newspaper - and gets published, very embarassing at the least. This happens already. b) stuff is leaked to a foriegn intelligence agency. In this case it gives a specific power an "edge" and happens secretly so you don't know it's gone on at all. At least with Wikileaks the data is public and so you know which of your data has been published there! Moreover, since Wikileaks is just a website with anonymous contributors there's less of a risk that your leaker will be doing it purely for personal gain as they might be when dealing direct with a foreign power.
I'm not saying that leaking any old stuff or abolishing secrecy would be appropriate. But I'm not convinced that Wikileaks makes the security situation worse. And there's a strong argument that it makes life better for people in general.
Situations like this irritate people because they're one of the most extreme embodiments so far of the true intent of DLC (and DRM, for that matter). People don't like being asked to pay money to buy incremental updates on something they paid a fairly decent amount for. And they don't like it when the incremental updates were available at release time but held back. When the updates that were held back were on the same disk it feels worse but it is still highlighting an eagerness to nickel-and-dime that the customers would object to anyhow, if it were sufficiently obvious.
The reason it seems so irksome in this case whereas people are OK with the Windows situation is that you know upfront that you're buying one version of windows that has a certain number of features, from a list the company offered you. When the company drip feeds extra features to you at extra charge it interferes with the normal way people judge value, so they feel swindled, hence a general dislike of DLC. But DLC isn't as bad as it could be - at least you're getting extra content that wasn't available before. When it turns out that the "new" content isn't actually new development work, it feels like you're being exploited.
I think you have a bunch of good points. It's worth noting though that whistleblowers are typically protected in a number of circumstances? So there's recognition that they can serve a useful purpose in exposing corruption but they are awkward. And if the whistleblower is actually revealing undemocratic behaviour I don't think it's undemocratic for them to take a personal stand on that issue.
The reason I kinda like the ability to leak stuff anonymously is that it keeps the balance. The moral choice is fine when it's a personal choice you can take the consequences for yourself. But when you have a family to support maybe you feel the need to keep your mouth shut for their sake, even though it's not in the interests of the nation - even a highly moral and selfless person might then not be willing to do the right thing for their country if it compromises his family's welfare.
I'd argue that people can leak stuff anonymously (or even with promise of protection and reward) to any intelligence agency in the world already, if they have useful information. So the situation where information can be exposed already exists to a certain extent. Given the choice, at least leaking it to Wikileaks keeps the citizenry informed of what everyone's up to and "levels the playing field" by letting all foreign agencies see all the info at once.
All good points. The trouble is, in a way, that once the secrecy becomes widespread and is not just for highly exceptional cases it is going to be really tempting to overclassify stuff for spurious reasons. It doesn't even need to be with the motivation of "pulling one over on the little people", it can just be extreme risk-averseness e.g. "why release this stuff that's probably OK when not releasing it means we don't have to make that call". And if people start finding legitimate-sounding justifications to cover up mistakes that should be public, it's a dangerous situation.
To a certain extent I'm of the opinion that the secrecy is a somewhat self-perpetuating thing - once you get involved in activities that have to be secret you find that you need to keep up the secret activity, hiding information, etc lest your skeletons jump out of their cupboards. That's why it's good to limit it as much as possible, even though in international politics it is a necessity.
I don't generally friend people on Facebook who I don't know. People who I knew a long time ago and had unpleasant experiences with are slightly below them in my priority order - the known data suggests I don't want to friend them! So it seems fair enough to me. Also, "doing life wrong" isn't very fair in this context. Bearing a grudge to the extent that you seek out people and try to revenge yourself on them, that would not be the best choice. Having bad memories of people from a formative part of your life - par for the course, I'd say. Part of being human, although the ability to forgive / forget / let go can also be important.
"Some may say that the majority of applications can't truly take advantage of the resources afforded by a six-core chip capable of processing up to 12 threads."
Well, before switching to Click-to-Flash mode I would quite happily have used 11 of those threads for Flash banner adverts spinning in a CPU-hogging mode and 1 thread for my useful applications. So I expect it will make things go faster even on the desktop! But that's not a good reason for wanting / needing more hardware threads!
NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated
" what I meant was "argued by NetApp". I've not looked through the patents so I haven't got a position on whether ZFS violates them, or whether they're sane, or whether they're invalidated by prior art. I understand that NetApp's copy-on-write WAFL filesystem does predate ZFS, so it wouldn't be entirely surprising if NetApp did hold related patents.
I've found that the lecturers can do that, laptops or no. In my experience, not that I ever used laptops in lectures, what really turned me into a "witless stenographer" was when lecturers supplied sufficiently inadequate notes that I had to concentrate on writing down *everything they said* rather than understand the lecture. If I'd instead concentrated on understanding the lecture and failed to grasp a concept I would have been left without a proper reference. This is particularly the case when lecturers are not following a particular textbook closely (although - having paid for the tuition and exams why should I have to buy a book if it's prerequisite for those?) or when they choose to define "the syllabus" as "what I say in lectures is examinable" so there's no well-defined written guide to what's going to be in the tests you'll sit.
It's interesting what Schwartz has to say about how things work "on the inside". Companies bluffing and calling each other's bluff. Showing up and going "I'm watching you". His description makes it sound a bit like Jobs & Gates hadn't really thought their cunning plan all the way through, which I would think is unlikely. I'd have guessed they were just testing Sun's resolve, finding out how Sun evaluated their own patent portfolio, investigating whether these projects (Looking Glass and OpenOffice) were just a tech demo or were something that Sun wanted to stand by and protect. What his blog post didn't mention was on how many occasions Sun did the same thing to another company, big or small. It would be laudable if they refused to do that but it would also mean they were deliberately pulling their punches, so it would be a bit surprising from a large corporation.
Who knows where the truth lies over the ZFS case but it does open the prospect that Sun wasn't sitting passively by and getting threatened by other companies. On the other hand, there could be more to this story than meets the eye (e.g. the kind of high level meetings Schwartz refers to, preceeding the legal letters) in which case it might not be anything like so simple. We've not generally seen Sun visibly holding back (or trying to) the marketplace using patents as much as, say, MS or Apple might have done. But it doesn't mean that given their investment in patents they didn't try to use them.
That sounds familiar to me too. Quite a lot of companies seem to be asking for specific experience in a particular language or a particular kind of development. This does strike me as pretty bizarre sometimes, since often that doesn't sound like the truly hard part of the problem they're recruiting someone to solve! Obviously everyone who prides themselves on their abilities probably regards their personal expertise as being the hardest / most advanced thing out there but it's a bit worrying if that's taken to an extreme of excluding skilled programmers...
One of the reasons I like Python is that it is actually quite good at accessing unwrappered OS functionality - the standard libraries provide the ability to pack structs, etc, so if you want you can access ioctls without having to write native code (the inability to do that was one of the pain points I found in Java when I last programmed it - but that was 7 years ago, so I daresay things will have moved on!). When you do have to write "native" code, some combination of C (the native module API is fairly nice) or Pyrex / Cython makes it quite easy to do.
Python is certainly slow but I often find that doesn't matter too much. A combination of well-chosen native modules and / or existing libraries and / or careful algorithmic design can take Python's speed off the critical path. The Mercurial (hg) revision control system is written mostly in Python with some (now optional) native modules and it is one of the fastest version control systems out there.
All that being said, I think C is a pretty good language to teach people. It's not necessarily the language you want them to program (or even think) in, which is why my own lecturers didn't want to teach it to us. But without understanding a decent number of the concepts C makes explicit it's not that easy to appreciate what's really going on in the system and it's not that easy to appreciate the advanced features in other languages. We were lectured ML (a very nice functional programming language) and Java in my first year degree course. Occasionally we'd get told stuff like "ML is garbage collected" - it's pretty hard to understand what that means if you've only ever used garbage collected languages and don't know about explicit storage allocation! Ditto for pointers vs Java's references, etc.
In my work I've generally found C and Python to be complimentary - Python excels at interaction stuff, string processing, control plane logic. C excels at low-level things and stuff that needs to be high performance. They're easy to join up when necessary, so it works pretty well.
I've never really bothered to block web content until recently. But I've now started using rekonq's Click-To-Flash mode having seen (far too many times) pointless Flash applets consuming 100% CPU when I just leave them. I'm currently using nspluginwrapper so at least I can hunt down the misbehaving Flash and kill it directly (a la Google Chrome), which is better than the old days where I had to guess which Firefox tab might contain an applet that's hammering performance. Unfortunately this means I don't see all the ads - I've never been that bothered by ads appearing, just one of those things that you get because people need to pay the bills. Occasionally ads are even amusing (e.g. the Plants vs Zombies parodies of the maddening Evony psuedo-porn adverts).
I don't block adverts specifically, though. Non-Flash ads are free to take up screen space and my attention and very rarely they're even interesting. Google's text-based ads are also fine, although some sites make it difficult to distinguish those from the actual articles. But these days it's a pretty hard sell to ask people to run resource-hungry software just to get adverts. Maybe Flash behaves better on other platforms - but OTOH, advertisers are going to lose revenue on iPad and iPhone customers if they don't move away from Flash at some point. For lots of these adverts I'd be tempted to say that an HTML5 video might even be more appropriate (!).
Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net/) which is by far my favourite "serious" geek news site (mainly because of their kernel page) has a nice model involving some adverts + subscription. They do have some adverts. They also delay some of their best content by a week if you're not a paying subscriber. Subscribers can categorise themselves according to an "honour system" to choose how much they pay if they want to subscribe. Apparently it works OK for them. I suspect this only really works for them because they produce extremely high-quality, specialist articles - you plain can't get some of this stuff elsewhere, so it's worth supporting them. A general-consumption geek news site is going to find that sort of thing a lot harder.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this sort of problem but it does bother me a bit when a teacher can assign his students "Give away your intellectual property" as an exercise. Writing articles, yes, using Wikipedia yes. Good skills. But even if stuff is done for a class (which you're typically paying to attend, directly or indirectly) I don't see why the school should own stuff you produce or be able to determine what you do with it, beyond requiring you to give them reasonable access so they can mark it. It's a bit different for research students since at least they might be getting some funding / support (although often less than you'd think).
Ditto where teachers have taken their classes out to do stuff of OpenStreetMap. I think in both cases it's good experience and it's nice that students are encouraged to do something for The Greater Good but I think it's fairest if there's a line between what you have to do *for your class* and giving access to that information to the wider world. Seems to me that the academic / learning side does not require Free licensing to be satisfied, so whether to contribute to a public project should be an individual choice.
Maybe they're hoping to demonstrate what the authorities are willing to go to. OTOH maybe they're trying to forestall some possible harassment by making an early (even a surprise announcement) that something's happening so that eyes will be on the authorities in advance.
I understand part of this has useful implications of budgeting. Specifically, space agency stuff will have a different budget pot to some of the other scientic work, which (given we like to put lots of money in to get the return investment from ESA) is useful as it protects the funding of other sciences a bit more. AIUI from someone in non-space programme science.
No idea why they're not using the BNSC but the stories I'd seen on the UKSA do claim that it's just a co-ordinating umbrella for existing space stuff, so it's not going to stop the UK collaborating with ESA. Maybe it's due to some complicated science politics.
No surprise they're considering this given the current social and political climate, maybe. And perhaps the healthcare bill looks like an expedient motivator for it. I can't see the argument that the heathcare bill is responsible for ID cards, though. The UK has had a functional National Health Service for ages (the bill originally came into force in 1948) and hasn't needed ID cards to facilitate it. I understand that the new US healthcare proposals are substantially different but even so, surely private medical insurance has successfully been managed without ID cards for years - you still need to know who you're treating, why can't similar techniques work? I'm skeptical of the link here ...
It's a DS, so there are two screens anyway. If you hold it really close to your face (maybe just use a rubber band to attach it) then you can see a different screen with each eye - problem solved!
Maybe Google *had* most to lose. But maybe they lost that when they weren't able to bring greater freedom of information quietly to China. Or maybe they lost it when they couldn't progress their Chinese business in the way they wanted. Or maybe they lost it when they burned their bridges by issuing an ultimatum to the government of an enormous nation (not that I necessarily disapprove of that). By this point it's not clear to me to what extent Google actually do have that much to lose *anymore*, even though they seemed to have a lot at stake before things started souring.
If you take democracy to mean something along the lines of "majority rule" then, no, open source isn't that. It's something that's more flexible, made possible by the almost total lack of resource scarcity in the production and copying of computer software. It's basically anarchist, in a positive sense. Everyone can be completely independent if they want, or they can work together according to shared goals or ideals - but it's all self-organized without top-down control except for where it accepted by consent as being expedient. The "raw materials" - software and ideas - can flow freely because it's practically free to produce and copy them. There doesn't need to be a democratic decision over where to commit resources because for practical purposes there's no limit on resources and no way of centrally controlling them anyhow. Readers of Iain M Bank's Culture books will see similarities with that civilisation, made possible by near-infinite resources.
Also, all the issue at hand really seems to demonstrate is that Ubuntu isn't a democracy. It can be run as a completely top-down regime but as long as the components are basically open source people have the freedom to come and go as they please according to whether that regime serves their needs, so it's up to Ubuntu to decide whether that approach is reasonable. That said, if they're sensible, they should realise that they're fortunate to have a large community of users and that it's worth responding to their needs. But that doesn't mean they are wrong have someone make tough or unpopular judgement calls if they believe that's the best approach overall.
I'm not sure our tax system needs to be as baroque and unintelligible as it is in order to deliver results. Most of the things the Inland Revenue do seem downright pointless to anyone with an engineering mindset although I expect many of them had some sane motivation originally.
The bonus of your strategy is that it would also cut down on overheads for individuals, sole traders, small businesses, etc across the country by reducing the amount of admin needed! So it ought to be quite attractive. I doubt any of the consultants the government hires to advise them on this stuff are going to recommend something difficult like reforming the tax system when they could got a lucrative IT contract, though. To a management / IT consultancy with a favourite hammer government problems have good reason to look like nails.
I'm reminded of a comment in Asimov's Prelude to Foundation where Hari Seldon remarks on the characteristics of tax systems. Roughly, part of the point was that a simple tax system is easier for the populace to deal with (good) but that it tends to be / seem less fair, whereas you can have more nuances in a more complex system and find people are unhappy because they don't understand it.
Well, this doesn't sound so great to me. I'm a tech savvy UK citizen and I do lots of things online. But certain aspects of our nation require specialist advice to navigate. If you're job seeking it is probably worth having someone who can give you sensible advice on the law etc without you having to trawl through pages and pages of documentation to (possibly) find the information you're interested in. Ditto the tax system - the guys at the local tax office will see people without an appointment and can quickly explain what needs doing in a given circumstance. I'm happy "wasting" some of my taxes on maintaining these places even if they could be replaced by an online gateway because they provide "someone who knows" without every citizen who ever has a question having to work themselves up to being a minor domain expert before they can do a relatively simple task. Even with a good UI and a lot of online help I doubt I could sort out problems as effectively myself online as by just asking an expert with access to the right information and the knowledge to use it well.
Essentially, the author as recognised the need for games with zombies in. He has produced a game with zombies in for one dollar, which he hopes people will pay. The game features zombies shambling in from the sides, which you had better shoot lest you die.
Practically the difference is pretty small, as you say. I'd argue that the business model of "We have this stuff ready for release but will keep it and sell it to you later" is not what people are used to and the fact that this *is* the business model is most apparent and explicit when the content was already on the disk.
When it's really downloaded content at least people can imagine the content hadn't gone gold when the software was shipped. If the content shipped on the disk then there's no question of that being the case, therefore people see the business model they dislike more clearly and make more noise about it.
Even though it's phrased trollishly, you've summed up some differences pretty well. In practice, people drive a heck of a lot in Europe too but the roads here are perhaps harder work to do long distances on. But the thing about planes being the fastest way to get around long distance points to another difference. In Europe in particular countries are closer together, as is the perception of a "long" trip. The time cost of travel to airport, waiting around for the plane, collecting bags at the other end, etc starts to dominate the journey pretty quickly and even for international trips it can quickly get to be more hassle than just hopping on a train. Plane travel between European countries is super cheap, though, so it's still often worth doing.
So, just considering intelligence / national security information for the moment... I like that Wikileaks is putting more "intelligence"-style information into the hands of the citizenry, so long as they're sensible about it and don't publish really critical operational stuff for no morally justifiable reason. However, regardless of questions of restraint, lets just consider the risk of Wikileaks: It lets people leak national security data anonymously and makes it public.
Lets consider the problems to national security here: stuff is leaked anonymously so you can't stop them. And it gets published. Compare this to the traditional model which is either: a) stuff is leaked anonymously to a newspaper - and gets published, very embarassing at the least. This happens already. b) stuff is leaked to a foriegn intelligence agency. In this case it gives a specific power an "edge" and happens secretly so you don't know it's gone on at all. At least with Wikileaks the data is public and so you know which of your data has been published there! Moreover, since Wikileaks is just a website with anonymous contributors there's less of a risk that your leaker will be doing it purely for personal gain as they might be when dealing direct with a foreign power.
I'm not saying that leaking any old stuff or abolishing secrecy would be appropriate. But I'm not convinced that Wikileaks makes the security situation worse. And there's a strong argument that it makes life better for people in general.
Situations like this irritate people because they're one of the most extreme embodiments so far of the true intent of DLC (and DRM, for that matter). People don't like being asked to pay money to buy incremental updates on something they paid a fairly decent amount for. And they don't like it when the incremental updates were available at release time but held back. When the updates that were held back were on the same disk it feels worse but it is still highlighting an eagerness to nickel-and-dime that the customers would object to anyhow, if it were sufficiently obvious.
The reason it seems so irksome in this case whereas people are OK with the Windows situation is that you know upfront that you're buying one version of windows that has a certain number of features, from a list the company offered you. When the company drip feeds extra features to you at extra charge it interferes with the normal way people judge value, so they feel swindled, hence a general dislike of DLC. But DLC isn't as bad as it could be - at least you're getting extra content that wasn't available before. When it turns out that the "new" content isn't actually new development work, it feels like you're being exploited.
I think you have a bunch of good points. It's worth noting though that whistleblowers are typically protected in a number of circumstances? So there's recognition that they can serve a useful purpose in exposing corruption but they are awkward. And if the whistleblower is actually revealing undemocratic behaviour I don't think it's undemocratic for them to take a personal stand on that issue.
The reason I kinda like the ability to leak stuff anonymously is that it keeps the balance. The moral choice is fine when it's a personal choice you can take the consequences for yourself. But when you have a family to support maybe you feel the need to keep your mouth shut for their sake, even though it's not in the interests of the nation - even a highly moral and selfless person might then not be willing to do the right thing for their country if it compromises his family's welfare.
I'd argue that people can leak stuff anonymously (or even with promise of protection and reward) to any intelligence agency in the world already, if they have useful information. So the situation where information can be exposed already exists to a certain extent. Given the choice, at least leaking it to Wikileaks keeps the citizenry informed of what everyone's up to and "levels the playing field" by letting all foreign agencies see all the info at once.
All good points. The trouble is, in a way, that once the secrecy becomes widespread and is not just for highly exceptional cases it is going to be really tempting to overclassify stuff for spurious reasons. It doesn't even need to be with the motivation of "pulling one over on the little people", it can just be extreme risk-averseness e.g. "why release this stuff that's probably OK when not releasing it means we don't have to make that call". And if people start finding legitimate-sounding justifications to cover up mistakes that should be public, it's a dangerous situation.
To a certain extent I'm of the opinion that the secrecy is a somewhat self-perpetuating thing - once you get involved in activities that have to be secret you find that you need to keep up the secret activity, hiding information, etc lest your skeletons jump out of their cupboards. That's why it's good to limit it as much as possible, even though in international politics it is a necessity.
I don't generally friend people on Facebook who I don't know. People who I knew a long time ago and had unpleasant experiences with are slightly below them in my priority order - the known data suggests I don't want to friend them! So it seems fair enough to me. Also, "doing life wrong" isn't very fair in this context. Bearing a grudge to the extent that you seek out people and try to revenge yourself on them, that would not be the best choice. Having bad memories of people from a formative part of your life - par for the course, I'd say. Part of being human, although the ability to forgive / forget / let go can also be important.
"Some may say that the majority of applications can't truly take advantage of the resources afforded by a six-core chip capable of processing up to 12 threads."
Well, before switching to Click-to-Flash mode I would quite happily have used 11 of those threads for Flash banner adverts spinning in a CPU-hogging mode and 1 thread for my useful applications. So I expect it will make things go faster even on the desktop! But that's not a good reason for wanting / needing more hardware threads!
I'd like to clarify that when I said "
NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated
" what I meant was "argued by NetApp". I've not looked through the patents so I haven't got a position on whether ZFS violates them, or whether they're sane, or whether they're invalidated by prior art. I understand that NetApp's copy-on-write WAFL filesystem does predate ZFS, so it wouldn't be entirely surprising if NetApp did hold related patents.
I've found that the lecturers can do that, laptops or no. In my experience, not that I ever used laptops in lectures, what really turned me into a "witless stenographer" was when lecturers supplied sufficiently inadequate notes that I had to concentrate on writing down *everything they said* rather than understand the lecture. If I'd instead concentrated on understanding the lecture and failed to grasp a concept I would have been left without a proper reference. This is particularly the case when lecturers are not following a particular textbook closely (although - having paid for the tuition and exams why should I have to buy a book if it's prerequisite for those?) or when they choose to define "the syllabus" as "what I say in lectures is examinable" so there's no well-defined written guide to what's going to be in the tests you'll sit.
It's interesting what Schwartz has to say about how things work "on the inside". Companies bluffing and calling each other's bluff. Showing up and going "I'm watching you". His description makes it sound a bit like Jobs & Gates hadn't really thought their cunning plan all the way through, which I would think is unlikely. I'd have guessed they were just testing Sun's resolve, finding out how Sun evaluated their own patent portfolio, investigating whether these projects (Looking Glass and OpenOffice) were just a tech demo or were something that Sun wanted to stand by and protect. What his blog post didn't mention was on how many occasions Sun did the same thing to another company, big or small. It would be laudable if they refused to do that but it would also mean they were deliberately pulling their punches, so it would be a bit surprising from a large corporation.
NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/. But NetApp alleged that Sun had first demanded patent royalties from NetApp and that they were acting in response to that: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/sun-patent-team.html
Who knows where the truth lies over the ZFS case but it does open the prospect that Sun wasn't sitting passively by and getting threatened by other companies. On the other hand, there could be more to this story than meets the eye (e.g. the kind of high level meetings Schwartz refers to, preceeding the legal letters) in which case it might not be anything like so simple. We've not generally seen Sun visibly holding back (or trying to) the marketplace using patents as much as, say, MS or Apple might have done. But it doesn't mean that given their investment in patents they didn't try to use them.
That sounds familiar to me too. Quite a lot of companies seem to be asking for specific experience in a particular language or a particular kind of development. This does strike me as pretty bizarre sometimes, since often that doesn't sound like the truly hard part of the problem they're recruiting someone to solve! Obviously everyone who prides themselves on their abilities probably regards their personal expertise as being the hardest / most advanced thing out there but it's a bit worrying if that's taken to an extreme of excluding skilled programmers ...
One of the reasons I like Python is that it is actually quite good at accessing unwrappered OS functionality - the standard libraries provide the ability to pack structs, etc, so if you want you can access ioctls without having to write native code (the inability to do that was one of the pain points I found in Java when I last programmed it - but that was 7 years ago, so I daresay things will have moved on!). When you do have to write "native" code, some combination of C (the native module API is fairly nice) or Pyrex / Cython makes it quite easy to do.
Python is certainly slow but I often find that doesn't matter too much. A combination of well-chosen native modules and / or existing libraries and / or careful algorithmic design can take Python's speed off the critical path. The Mercurial (hg) revision control system is written mostly in Python with some (now optional) native modules and it is one of the fastest version control systems out there.
All that being said, I think C is a pretty good language to teach people. It's not necessarily the language you want them to program (or even think) in, which is why my own lecturers didn't want to teach it to us. But without understanding a decent number of the concepts C makes explicit it's not that easy to appreciate what's really going on in the system and it's not that easy to appreciate the advanced features in other languages. We were lectured ML (a very nice functional programming language) and Java in my first year degree course. Occasionally we'd get told stuff like "ML is garbage collected" - it's pretty hard to understand what that means if you've only ever used garbage collected languages and don't know about explicit storage allocation! Ditto for pointers vs Java's references, etc.
In my work I've generally found C and Python to be complimentary - Python excels at interaction stuff, string processing, control plane logic. C excels at low-level things and stuff that needs to be high performance. They're easy to join up when necessary, so it works pretty well.
I've never really bothered to block web content until recently. But I've now started using rekonq's Click-To-Flash mode having seen (far too many times) pointless Flash applets consuming 100% CPU when I just leave them. I'm currently using nspluginwrapper so at least I can hunt down the misbehaving Flash and kill it directly (a la Google Chrome), which is better than the old days where I had to guess which Firefox tab might contain an applet that's hammering performance. Unfortunately this means I don't see all the ads - I've never been that bothered by ads appearing, just one of those things that you get because people need to pay the bills. Occasionally ads are even amusing (e.g. the Plants vs Zombies parodies of the maddening Evony psuedo-porn adverts).
I don't block adverts specifically, though. Non-Flash ads are free to take up screen space and my attention and very rarely they're even interesting. Google's text-based ads are also fine, although some sites make it difficult to distinguish those from the actual articles. But these days it's a pretty hard sell to ask people to run resource-hungry software just to get adverts. Maybe Flash behaves better on other platforms - but OTOH, advertisers are going to lose revenue on iPad and iPhone customers if they don't move away from Flash at some point. For lots of these adverts I'd be tempted to say that an HTML5 video might even be more appropriate (!).
Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net/) which is by far my favourite "serious" geek news site (mainly because of their kernel page) has a nice model involving some adverts + subscription. They do have some adverts. They also delay some of their best content by a week if you're not a paying subscriber. Subscribers can categorise themselves according to an "honour system" to choose how much they pay if they want to subscribe. Apparently it works OK for them. I suspect this only really works for them because they produce extremely high-quality, specialist articles - you plain can't get some of this stuff elsewhere, so it's worth supporting them. A general-consumption geek news site is going to find that sort of thing a lot harder.