Why does this useless f'n game pays so f'n much. It would be much much easier if
A: I didn't care
B: The customer wasn't so bloody stupid and aware of when they were being sold a magic bullet!
Yeah, that's kinda a problem with the complexity of the subject. People just buy what's best presented ("ooh, that's shiny!") because they're often completely incapable of purchasing things on the merits of the presented systems. This is something I've encountered a lot myself, and I've only actually been in this industry for a little over a year.
Well, yes, XML is a data interchange format more than anything. On the other hand, it can be a useful representation of (simple) logical structures, which could be considered almost "progamming in XML". But no, in general, that's neither what it's for nor something it is useful for.
I think you've essentially hit the nail on the head there. XML is excellent at what it does. However what it does is not "everything", and the "silver bullet" marketing (Java + XML = "Enterprise"!) surrounding it causes people to get upset, because that's not what it is.
Marketing is, in general, really good at turning people against perfectly good technologies, because those in the know will always see through the lies, exaggerations and half-truths, but will then have a hard time conveying these to superiors or other colleagues who have had a little less experience and a glossy leaflet to gaze on.
It's just a matter of priorities, really. There's a balance to be struck between having the newest stuff and having a stable distribution. The stable branch of Debian just balances its priorities very strongly towards stability. It's up to the user to decide whether that's what they want from their operating system. If not, there is other branches of Debian, and other distributions entirely, which can be used. Allowing wild variation in philosophy like this is one of the redeeming features of the "distro soup" that exists.
Theoretically if one is rigorous enough, and keeps type-safety verified at every level, one could verify that the file protections could not be broken. As you point out, though, this does rely on the language implementation not having flaws allowing semantics to be broken. It's just a help, nothing more.
You can prove more about what is possible with a language within an environment when it is typesafe. If you can verify the typesafety of a program before you run it, you know that these properties hold. If you use these properties to prove that no process can alter the code of the kernel or the drivers, rootkits have been stopped.
Of course, at this point, one gets into the practicality issues of having a system where one cannot alter the filesystem drivers.;)
It's possible to write a system, using the features of a typesafe language, which would make rootkits impossible. It's not an automatic benefit that one gets from a typesafe language though, no.
I always liked that Singularity project for "off the wall" thinking things like that. Not going to be more than a research project for some time, though, although I think that some of the concepts (Isolates in particular) have been adopted, at least in part, by the JNode project.
As an OSS developer you have some distro call you "unstable" and makes a default policy to ignore you.
If the distro's main aim was stability, as a developer I'd have to consider them extremely unwise to do otherwise. Debian doesn't "participate on the bleeding edge" because their goals are stability over "bleeding edge" features. The fact that Gentoo works the other way around doesn't mean in any way that Debian's attitude is "worse", it's just different.
The fact that there is more than one distribution in the world allows us to have distributions with different perspectives on important features. You treat it as if it's a matter of right and wrong as opposed to a matter of differing priorities.
I think we have differing viewpoints which lead to the same overall conclusion, which is pretty encouraging. I'm not sure how else to reply to that post.:)
In short, I was hoping to avoid the harshness of that with the "thereabouts" comment. There's another replier to my post who had an in-depth conversation on these issues with me already, I hate to refer you to it but I don't really have time to craft a full reply to you right now.
The ``extension'' should simply be "no-action", except on systems that blur the distinction between what the file contains and what you want to do with it, this breaks down completely.
I don't think there's a serious distinction here to blur, just more and more specific information about a file. The fact that something is marked as text just gives you a broader definition of "what you can do with it".
MIME types don't tell you what to do with a file. They tell you what kind of data it contains. Essentially what you can do with a file. Data can be categorised further than just "text", and there is no particular reason to stop right there.
What you want, rather, what everyone wants, is a system where extensions describe _what_to_do_ with the file, and not _what_it_contains_.
No, I reckon it's more accurate to say that we want an accurate categorisation of what is in a file, and then the system (or by association the user) decides how to handle that data. I'm not convinced extensions are the answer to this problem, but MIME-types certainly seem more valid than magic numbers.
I'm well aware of the fixed costs of producing a CD. I think I just ended up going on about something different to what you're talking about in general. In particular, in the case of lower-circulation artists the slice of the pie is considerably larger. But yes, when talking about major labels, they could easily price down. It doesn't serve what they percieve to be their interests though.
Wouldn't the editor/viewer be something that handles "ASCII English text"?
Sure, an editor that handles ASCII English text would be able to do it, but what if one wants to discriminate? Use of MIME-types (as one solution) gives us the ability to select a viewer for everything "text" as a simple editor, but define an editor seperately for C, Java, and Grandmother's increasingly-delayed letter, without loss. I'm not convinced file extensions are the full solution, but they're certainly no worse than magic numbers. With magic numbers you get the category, but not the specific type. With extensions it's the opposite. Neither is ideal.
Apologies if I'm a little brief here, I accidentally refreshed the page and lost my half-finished reply (gah!) so a lot of this is retyped from memory.
When it comes out of the womb and takes its first breath, or when it reaches the point that it could be born, even prematurely? And when does it become morally wrong to have an elective abortion?
I don't know. As with most morals, nobody knows authoritively. I would personally err towards the end of "when it reaches the point that it could be born, even prematurely", but my opinion here is not the be-all and end-all. I like to think that my support of abortion is more because the repercussions of making it illegal would be far worse than those of leaving it legal. I think that in moral matters sometimes all we can do in terms of legislation is try to coldly choose the less-harmful course. But even evaluating them is hard.
Heart failure can and does lead to death, otherwise there would be no such thing as heart failure as a cause of death.
Of course. My point was just that heart failure is not all there is to death, and a working heart is not all there is to "life".
I say that a child is "alive" at the moment of conception as it is a living, growing, organism (or entity, if you will).
I'd agree that it was "alive", but I wouldn't refer to it as a "child". In moral cases like these the subtleties of what we say can mean a lot more than we intend, and I just don't see it as the same. I don't disagree with you though; I respect your opinion. It's just not the same as my own opinion. I don't think either of us can claim our view is "right", just that it's what we believe. Discussion of these matters is always welcome and beneficial if carried out as adults, though.
I'm guessing you're not female and you don't have children of your own, or I would suspect some of your views to be different...
Spot on. Although I do know females with children with similar views. But you are correct in your assertion there.
Ask any woman who has miscarried how she feels and I can pretty much guarantee that she'll tell you that it's like having a piece of her soul ripped out of her. And miscarriages are more likely to happen before the heart starts beating and it's still a mass of cells, yet it hurts at least as much as losing a child at any other stage of life. Why would that be if it's just a mass of cells and there is no real life yet?
She feels as though she has suffered loss, and she has. She has lost something that was hers, a life that would have existed had it continued further. As heartless as it sounds though, this proves nothing at all. She loved that mass of cells for what it would become. When she lost the mass of cells, she lost that hope, that eventuality, too. It doesn't mean a human died. The potential for a human died. It feels horrible to have to draw a distinction, but there is one, in my mind.
Worth noting that any girl I was to get pregnant would have to work very hard to get me to accept abortion as a course of action. It's not something I think I could bring myself to do. This doesn't mean that I would stop others from doing it, though, and it certainly doesn't mean that I equate the act with murder.
I'm probably further influenced by the fact that I know someone who has had an abortion by the "wire coathanger" method, and quite frankly if keeping it legal and less of a tabboo subject avoids one other person avoid that, it'd be a moral victory in my mind.
I favor legalizing abortions for safety reasons that others have already stated...
The same safety reasons I was largely citing, I would think, although I'm pretty bad at "clear talking".
1. You said that "human life begins at birth (or thereabouts)"...what's the "thereabouts"? Are you saying that the child of a woman who is within the time frame of delivering, even if it's a premature delivery (let's say, for argument's sake, 7 1/2 months) is considered "alive"? Or is it not until after the child is born, named, and registered with the country's system (ie - given a social security number and has a signed birth certificate, perhaps) that the child is "alive"?
This is what I meant by "thereabouts". I don't draw a direct distinction. I figured I better say that in case someone came to me with a list of "fringe cases", and didn't realise that saying it would provoke the same reaction!
2. Oftentimes, a person is dead when the heart stops beating. So why is the unborn child not considered "alive" when the heatbeat can first be heard (generally at about 10 weeks into the pregnancy)?
Sometimes a human is not dead when their heart stops beating. Why would an unborn child be considered "alive" at that point? This definition is what makes this issue so tricky. My belief is exactly that; a belief. I'm not going to claim that it's fact. It's what I believe to be most likely and compassionate in context. And I think there is a distinction between when something "becomes alive" and "when human life begins", as subtle as the semantic differences there seem.
3. What about partial birth abortions? The child is carried into the last trimester, but is aborted before birth. At that point, the child is fully developed and pretty much ready to be born.
My understanding is that these are only ever carried out in order to save the life of the mother. I don't think they're defensible as a means of elective abortion.
Hmm. I suppose that I'm treating the collection of work of the original work and the adverts as another distinct copyright entity. That's probably just innaccurate. My poor brain.
Isn't this roughly equivalent to the service provided by TiVo when stripping out adverts, though, except overseen by a human and with less checks for copyright ownership?
I suppose that it's fair point that they are distributing these works, whereas an automated system like TiVo just makes them without a seperate distribution stage being necessary.
I don't think the parent post is exactly a troll, and it seems unfair to criticise him for it. The points are valid.
This lawsuit did succeed for exactly the reason that a lot of "worse" things happen. Copyright law gives complete dominion over derivative works. It baffles me that there is such support for this ruling when there's such opposition to the very same measures in other areas of life.
Freedom of speech is freedom to lie. Freedom of content is freedom to release censored versions. Mandating censored versions is clearly wrong, but making them available I find it hard to find any argument against. There's a demand for it. It's not a serious problem for anyone else since they can still get the unedited versions.
Whether content should be free to be modified by others is another matter. But bear in mind that when you protect creator's rights you're also protecting the limitation of availability of other derivative works. I'm in two minds about this myself, but it is worth checking that one is not being too contradictory (and saying that is probably going to come back to haunt me...) before shooting off an opinion.
So, my answer is, of course you should be able to 'marry' any consenting adult, but you should not be able to force me to recognise your relationship as marriage.
You've answered this from a largely (or purely) libertarian perspective, and I think your response is valid. Of course this logically implies that marriage should not be a legal entity at all, which is the main problem here.
So this argument reduces to when does human life begin?
That's the problem with the abortion argument, it all just boils down to that one belief most of the time. I personally believe the most pragmatic solution is to have abortion legalised, because if it is not legal it will still go on and more people will end up hurt from poor practices. That said, I'm one of those that believes that "human life" begins at birth (or thereabouts) so I'm predisposed towards legalised abortions in the first place.
Provided you're doing it in private, it doesn't affect me at all. Doing it in front of my children is another matter...
I don't know what your implication with this one is, but we already have laws about public indecency, and for additional protection I feel it's right that the responsibility lies with the parent.
Agreed, and this should stop. Similarly, all forms of state coercion should stop.
Obviously they're not going to. I think a lot of non-religious people get exasperated specifically because Christian laws seem so arbitrary to them, though, which I think is why there's so much complaint about these things in general.
Given that marriage is an artificial construct created by society, why should society provide such advantages to behavior which it finds to be detrimental to it?
Because it's not detrimental to it. It's not even detrimental to the species, even if you do regard them as having something wrong with them, since they would not be reproducing anyway, married or not. However, stable units living together are beneficial to society, regardless of whether they are producing children, and if that's your sole criteria for deciding whether to give them benefits I'd say they should definately have those benefits. If producing children is the reason, give the benefits to people with children.
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Yeah, that's kinda a problem with the complexity of the subject. People just buy what's best presented ("ooh, that's shiny!") because they're often completely incapable of purchasing things on the merits of the presented systems. This is something I've encountered a lot myself, and I've only actually been in this industry for a little over a year.
Well, yes, XML is a data interchange format more than anything. On the other hand, it can be a useful representation of (simple) logical structures, which could be considered almost "progamming in XML". But no, in general, that's neither what it's for nor something it is useful for.
I think you've essentially hit the nail on the head there. XML is excellent at what it does. However what it does is not "everything", and the "silver bullet" marketing (Java + XML = "Enterprise"!) surrounding it causes people to get upset, because that's not what it is.
Marketing is, in general, really good at turning people against perfectly good technologies, because those in the know will always see through the lies, exaggerations and half-truths, but will then have a hard time conveying these to superiors or other colleagues who have had a little less experience and a glossy leaflet to gaze on.
It's just a matter of priorities, really. There's a balance to be struck between having the newest stuff and having a stable distribution. The stable branch of Debian just balances its priorities very strongly towards stability. It's up to the user to decide whether that's what they want from their operating system. If not, there is other branches of Debian, and other distributions entirely, which can be used. Allowing wild variation in philosophy like this is one of the redeeming features of the "distro soup" that exists.
Theoretically if one is rigorous enough, and keeps type-safety verified at every level, one could verify that the file protections could not be broken. As you point out, though, this does rely on the language implementation not having flaws allowing semantics to be broken. It's just a help, nothing more.
Why? One only needs to prove that no instruction of the system can overwrite the important parts of the system?
You can prove more about what is possible with a language within an environment when it is typesafe. If you can verify the typesafety of a program before you run it, you know that these properties hold. If you use these properties to prove that no process can alter the code of the kernel or the drivers, rootkits have been stopped.
Of course, at this point, one gets into the practicality issues of having a system where one cannot alter the filesystem drivers. ;)
It's possible to write a system, using the features of a typesafe language, which would make rootkits impossible. It's not an automatic benefit that one gets from a typesafe language though, no.
I always liked that Singularity project for "off the wall" thinking things like that. Not going to be more than a research project for some time, though, although I think that some of the concepts (Isolates in particular) have been adopted, at least in part, by the JNode project.
Also interesting (I think): Could this have an effect (positive or negative) on the efficiency and/or effectiveness of pair programming?
If the distro's main aim was stability, as a developer I'd have to consider them extremely unwise to do otherwise. Debian doesn't "participate on the bleeding edge" because their goals are stability over "bleeding edge" features. The fact that Gentoo works the other way around doesn't mean in any way that Debian's attitude is "worse", it's just different.
The fact that there is more than one distribution in the world allows us to have distributions with different perspectives on important features. You treat it as if it's a matter of right and wrong as opposed to a matter of differing priorities.
That does seem to be the logical course of action. However it's will not be backed in large numbers any time soon.
I think we have differing viewpoints which lead to the same overall conclusion, which is pretty encouraging. I'm not sure how else to reply to that post. :)
In short, I was hoping to avoid the harshness of that with the "thereabouts" comment. There's another replier to my post who had an in-depth conversation on these issues with me already, I hate to refer you to it but I don't really have time to craft a full reply to you right now.
I don't think there's a serious distinction here to blur, just more and more specific information about a file. The fact that something is marked as text just gives you a broader definition of "what you can do with it".
MIME types don't tell you what to do with a file. They tell you what kind of data it contains. Essentially what you can do with a file. Data can be categorised further than just "text", and there is no particular reason to stop right there.
No, I reckon it's more accurate to say that we want an accurate categorisation of what is in a file, and then the system (or by association the user) decides how to handle that data. I'm not convinced extensions are the answer to this problem, but MIME-types certainly seem more valid than magic numbers.
I'm well aware of the fixed costs of producing a CD. I think I just ended up going on about something different to what you're talking about in general. In particular, in the case of lower-circulation artists the slice of the pie is considerably larger. But yes, when talking about major labels, they could easily price down. It doesn't serve what they percieve to be their interests though.
Possible, yeah. It's probably a specific allowance of the "way" in which the copyright work can be redistributed by the broadcaster.
Sure, an editor that handles ASCII English text would be able to do it, but what if one wants to discriminate? Use of MIME-types (as one solution) gives us the ability to select a viewer for everything "text" as a simple editor, but define an editor seperately for C, Java, and Grandmother's increasingly-delayed letter, without loss. I'm not convinced file extensions are the full solution, but they're certainly no worse than magic numbers. With magic numbers you get the category, but not the specific type. With extensions it's the opposite. Neither is ideal.
Windows can be case sensitive too, I guess it's worth noting. It's just not by default. It is also case preserving in general.
Another message implied that OSX is case sensitive in certain circumstances, which is believable too. If only these things were simple.
Apologies if I'm a little brief here, I accidentally refreshed the page and lost my half-finished reply (gah!) so a lot of this is retyped from memory.
I don't know. As with most morals, nobody knows authoritively. I would personally err towards the end of "when it reaches the point that it could be born, even prematurely", but my opinion here is not the be-all and end-all. I like to think that my support of abortion is more because the repercussions of making it illegal would be far worse than those of leaving it legal. I think that in moral matters sometimes all we can do in terms of legislation is try to coldly choose the less-harmful course. But even evaluating them is hard.
Of course. My point was just that heart failure is not all there is to death, and a working heart is not all there is to "life".
I'd agree that it was "alive", but I wouldn't refer to it as a "child". In moral cases like these the subtleties of what we say can mean a lot more than we intend, and I just don't see it as the same. I don't disagree with you though; I respect your opinion. It's just not the same as my own opinion. I don't think either of us can claim our view is "right", just that it's what we believe. Discussion of these matters is always welcome and beneficial if carried out as adults, though.
Spot on. Although I do know females with children with similar views. But you are correct in your assertion there.
She feels as though she has suffered loss, and she has. She has lost something that was hers, a life that would have existed had it continued further. As heartless as it sounds though, this proves nothing at all. She loved that mass of cells for what it would become. When she lost the mass of cells, she lost that hope, that eventuality, too. It doesn't mean a human died. The potential for a human died. It feels horrible to have to draw a distinction, but there is one, in my mind.
Worth noting that any girl I was to get pregnant would have to work very hard to get me to accept abortion as a course of action. It's not something I think I could bring myself to do. This doesn't mean that I would stop others from doing it, though, and it certainly doesn't mean that I equate the act with murder.
I'm probably further influenced by the fact that I know someone who has had an abortion by the "wire coathanger" method, and quite frankly if keeping it legal and less of a tabboo subject avoids one other person avoid that, it'd be a moral victory in my mind.
The same safety reasons I was largely citing, I would think, although I'm pretty bad at "clear talking".
This is what I meant by "thereabouts". I don't draw a direct distinction. I figured I better say that in case someone came to me with a list of "fringe cases", and didn't realise that saying it would provoke the same reaction!
Sometimes a human is not dead when their heart stops beating. Why would an unborn child be considered "alive" at that point? This definition is what makes this issue so tricky. My belief is exactly that; a belief. I'm not going to claim that it's fact. It's what I believe to be most likely and compassionate in context. And I think there is a distinction between when something "becomes alive" and "when human life begins", as subtle as the semantic differences there seem.
My understanding is that these are only ever carried out in order to save the life of the mother. I don't think they're defensible as a means of elective abortion.
Hmm. I suppose that I'm treating the collection of work of the original work and the adverts as another distinct copyright entity. That's probably just innaccurate. My poor brain.
Isn't this roughly equivalent to the service provided by TiVo when stripping out adverts, though, except overseen by a human and with less checks for copyright ownership?
I suppose that it's fair point that they are distributing these works, whereas an automated system like TiVo just makes them without a seperate distribution stage being necessary.
I don't think the parent post is exactly a troll, and it seems unfair to criticise him for it. The points are valid.
This lawsuit did succeed for exactly the reason that a lot of "worse" things happen. Copyright law gives complete dominion over derivative works. It baffles me that there is such support for this ruling when there's such opposition to the very same measures in other areas of life.
Freedom of speech is freedom to lie. Freedom of content is freedom to release censored versions. Mandating censored versions is clearly wrong, but making them available I find it hard to find any argument against. There's a demand for it. It's not a serious problem for anyone else since they can still get the unedited versions.
Whether content should be free to be modified by others is another matter. But bear in mind that when you protect creator's rights you're also protecting the limitation of availability of other derivative works. I'm in two minds about this myself, but it is worth checking that one is not being too contradictory (and saying that is probably going to come back to haunt me...) before shooting off an opinion.
You've answered this from a largely (or purely) libertarian perspective, and I think your response is valid. Of course this logically implies that marriage should not be a legal entity at all, which is the main problem here.
That's the problem with the abortion argument, it all just boils down to that one belief most of the time. I personally believe the most pragmatic solution is to have abortion legalised, because if it is not legal it will still go on and more people will end up hurt from poor practices. That said, I'm one of those that believes that "human life" begins at birth (or thereabouts) so I'm predisposed towards legalised abortions in the first place.
I don't know what your implication with this one is, but we already have laws about public indecency, and for additional protection I feel it's right that the responsibility lies with the parent.
Obviously they're not going to. I think a lot of non-religious people get exasperated specifically because Christian laws seem so arbitrary to them, though, which I think is why there's so much complaint about these things in general.
Because it's not detrimental to it. It's not even detrimental to the species, even if you do regard them as having something wrong with them, since they would not be reproducing anyway, married or not. However, stable units living together are beneficial to society, regardless of whether they are producing children, and if that's your sole criteria for deciding whether to give them benefits I'd say they should definately have those benefits. If producing children is the reason, give the benefits to people with children.