Al-Qaeda does not have a "right" to own any fucking websites.
No, they clearly don't. In fact, that has nothing to do with terrorism: Al Quaeda is neither a natural person nor a corporation, so they can't own anything at all.
But individuals have the right to have web sites. Membership in a terrorist organization may cause them to lose that right (among other things), but that determination should be up to a court of law in a democracy, not secret government organizations.
What you are advocating is that bureaucrats and spooks in the British secret service can determine, without any judicial or public review, what speech is acceptable, and enforce whatever restrictions on speech they want through secret means. That is unacceptable in a democracy.
It is very simple.
Yes, to people like you, everything is always "very simple". Someone in the government applies a convenient label to a group of people, and you let the government do whatever it likes. The label that you prefer to dehumanize others is "terrorist", but it might just as well be "Jew", "homosexual", "enemy of the people", "imperialist pig", or "infidel". It's people to whom things are always so "very simple" that are keeping terrorism, war, and hatred alive on all sides.
Why are these left wing 'libertarians' SO much more interested in protecting the rights of terrorists
These left wing libertarians are concerned with protecting the rights of free speech and self determination, rights that even potential terrorists have until they actually commit a crime.
Don't these libertarians realise that if the terrorists had their way, they would be one of he the firsts groups to have their lives extinguished?
Well, that sums up the problem: you accept doing the wrong thing (dismantling democracy, killing civilians) because you are scared, while we prefer doing the right thing (maintaining democracy, helping nations in need) even though it may be risky and unprofitable in the short term.
It's short-sighted thinking like yours that has created the mess we are in in the first place.
So... it is a-okay to bomb a terrorist camp and kill everyone in it... but suddenly their 'rights' are violated if someone knocks out their websites?
Yes, quite right. Terrorist camps kill people, web sites don't.
The reason why this is being done is the exact same reason why Britian didn't let the USSR set up a Soviet Army recruiting station in London
It's also the exact same reason why the British Empire repressed freedoms: repressing speech works--for a while--until people get sufficiently pissed off. Eventually, repression backfires. That's why we are seeing terrorism in the first place.
Second, it is a propaganda war.
You are quite right that it is a propaganda war. And if we want to be perceived as the side standing for freedom and democracy, we can't afford being seen repressing speech we don't like.
So you condone inciting violence because (according to you) we do it too? Don't tell me it's OK for them because we do it, tell me it's not OK for us OR them.
I think it is acceptable for anybody to talk about violence, including suggesting that violence is a solution to a particular political problem. That's part of the political process. If people can't express that opinion in public, I can't disagree with them in public and try to convince them that they are wrong.
Untill hardware is supportted (And by no means is the *nix developers fault), it'll fail to get a foot hold.
I don't see the problem: if you buy supported hardware, then Linux runs on it. If you buy it preinstalled, you don't even have to install it.
On the other hand, if you install Windows on unsupported hardware, you will run into problems, too. In fact, you'll run into problems with Windows even on supported hardware, since many drivers are highly Windows version specific.
How do you know what those sites actually were about? I certainly don't.
Furthermore, "encouraging" violence is part of everyday political opinions: US politicians do it just about every day.
So, do you have a specific argument for how shutting down those sites is going to make us all safer? Because, a priori, restricting free speech and political discussion would seem to only strengthen the arguments of the terrorists.
Your rationalization states some very obvious points,
What do you think I'm "rationalizing"?
You, cahiha, seem to have been able to handle your exposure to porn.
There is nothing to "handle"--I just don't buy the stuff.
The poster presumably posted as an AC because of typical reactions such as yours. Too bad you couldn't allow their statement of personal responsibility to represent the courage the person faced in dealing with their own problems and/or symptoms.
Oh, bullshit. The grandparent poster wasn't accepting responsibility, he was blaming the world for his problems, but then pulled back because he realized that didn't work. Face it: there are many things in this world that can hurt you if you make stupid choices. Porn just isn't very high on that list.
The greatest hope for children
"Hope" implies that there is some bad situation now that we can improve if we make an effort. There is not. There are good parents and there are bad parents, and that's not going to change.
a healthy parental figure who is able to coach, guide, and protect children from being over-exposed to things in life before they are ready
Well, if that's what you believe and if that's the way you want to raise your kids, that's your choice; you control what your kids can see. But don't try to impose your choices on everybody else. What you may consider an "over-exposure", I may consider ridiculously prudish behavior that does more harm than good.
It's not even worth commenting on all the biased and misleading statements in that article. But the Lisa was certainly not the first commercial computer with a GUI. And Smalltalk had overlapping windows.
What makes a pattern important is that it is widely recognized - it allows not only for reusable code, but more importantly, reusable thinking.
Yes, patterns are important, and it is important that they are widely recognized. That's why many languages have them built in. Hence, the ancestral comment that most of those patterns aren't needed in Lisp. But instead of telling you to use the correct tools for the job, the GoF book amounts to "structured programming in Fortran 77" or "object oriented programming in assembly language".
Similarly, I think it is progress to have GoF broadly understood. This is usually best accomplished by writing a book that people can read about the subject, and GoF did us that courtesy.
I think it is merely symptomatic that the GoF book even had to be written: it shows that the industry is based on the wrong kinds of programmers, the wrong approaches, and the wrong tools. The book may well help improve software development slightly in the short term, but it doesn't represent progress towards solving the fundamental problems with software development.
What is currently cutting edge becomes mundane in 50 years. Calculus was at one time very advanced, and only the most educated understood it
My prediction is that, unlike calculus, design patterns and OOP will not stand the test of time. After an initial blossoming of creativity in the middle of the last century, we are in the dark ages of software engineering right now, complete with the inquisition, crusades, and black death. A century from now, people will look back on OOP and design patterns and think of them as being as ridiculous as Ptolemy's epicycles.
Awesome plan. While we're at it, let's get rid of all the books too. Documentation is a crutch as well, so let's delete all that. And burn down the universities - no-one ever gained anything from them that they couldn't have figured out in their own lifetime.
That's not what I said. What I said is that this specific concept is so simple that if it wasn't obvious to a working programmer, they have no business being in the business.
Also, no-one should be allowed to pass on advice, because everyone should be able to work this shit out for themselves.
Generally, it is good for people to work things out for themselves. Often, in education, we have to short circuit that in the interest of time. But there are many things that, if you couldn't have worked them out for yourselves, you shouldn't be in the business at all.
The trouble with people like you and Maguire is that you think that it all comes down to education, documentation, and discipline. But those educational tools only let you produce the programming equivalent of short order cooks, which is why software sucks so badly.
As someone who was once addicted to porn, I can tell you that it can seriously screw up your notions about the realities of sex. Easy access to pornography on the internet during my single years definitely caused me some problems
Hundreds of millions of people have "easy access to pornography" and no relationship problems. Obviously, your utilization of on-line pornography was a symptom, not a cause, of your problems.
If you don't want to have easy access to pornography on-line, you have many ways of putting yourself in a position that you don't: get rid of your home Internet connection, connect through a filter, or join a monastery.
Is it depressing, as you say? I don't think so...it is par for the course.
Software development was governed by design patterns long before the GoF wrote their book. What is depressing is that (1) people like you think these people actually invented patterns, (2) you didn't figure it out for yourself before picking up the book, (3) most of the actual patterns in that book are workarounds for limitations of current OOLs, and (4) people like you think that all of that is really just fine. It's the blind (GoF) leading the blind (people like you).
I think if more software designers understood design patterns, the world would be better place, at least with repect to the state of the art in computer programming.
Perhaps a better approach would be to simply fire people who need books to figure this stuff out.
Design patterns are largely cookbook workaround for poorly designed languages and libraries. It's pretty depressing that this is the best that software engineering and programming languages have to offer in 2005.
But when people cast aspersions based on nothing but roadside rumour, I feel it's important to correct the record.
My "aspersions" are based on using Perl since Perl 3 days--roughly 15 years. Perl has numerous severe problems that make testing and debugging in it unnecessarily hard. People like me picked up Perl back then because it was a slight improvement over sh/awk/sed scripting, but fortunately, lots of better open source scripting languages have come along since then.
I'm not one to disparage other languages. There are plenty of desirable features in each.
Sorry, no go. One can debate the relative merits of Ruby, Python, REXX, PHP, and VB, but Perl clearly is inferior to all of those. For small projects, Perl's libraries still may tip the balance, but for any kind of large project, the severe deficiencies of the Perl language make it a poor choice.
Perl6 perhaps may re-enter the race, but it is effectively a different language from the Perl we all know and despise, and Perl6 doesn't seem to be happening.
And that's about as "scalable" as I can make it - not very. All I'm doing is duplicating hardware for speed and reliability
That's mostly all anybody can do.
True scalability allows the operation the machine was doing when it died to complete successfully, and PHP ain't there (yet).
Are you willing to pay the price for that? An order of magnitude more hardware, much larger risk of software faults, much higher training costs? How much more reliable would your "non-scalable" system become if you through all those resources at it?
In the end, you probably scale better with the platform that is "less scalable" than with the platform that is.
his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java
That must be the same sense in which a good meal is a predecessor to a turd.
Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."
Apple already fired Kay, and they pretty much closed their research labs. These days, Apple is mostly software development, engineering, design, and marketing.
Those kinds of scenarios don't work. The GPL is quite clear: either people can use the code freely, or they can't use it at all.
So, if Microsoft asserts patent claims, then those will have to be tested in court. If they hold up, then RedHat can't ship until its code has been modified so it doesn't infringe anymore. Microsoft can't "indemnify" people for their own patents.
If, on the other hand, Microsoft buys RedHat, then they automatically give everybody they distribute Linux to a transferable license to all applicable patents.
As for Microsoft improving RedHat interoperability with Windows, great! Please do.
big company took an open source product, kinda created their own fork
True.
gives a bit back to the community and the geeks embrace it.
Care to list some Apple contributions to the open source community that are actually widely used on platforms other than Macintosh? I can't think of any. I'm pretty sure none of my Linux machines have any significant Apple-sponsored open source software on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Al-Qaeda does not have a "right" to own any fucking websites.
No, they clearly don't. In fact, that has nothing to do with terrorism: Al Quaeda is neither a natural person nor a corporation, so they can't own anything at all.
But individuals have the right to have web sites. Membership in a terrorist organization may cause them to lose that right (among other things), but that determination should be up to a court of law in a democracy, not secret government organizations.
What you are advocating is that bureaucrats and spooks in the British secret service can determine, without any judicial or public review, what speech is acceptable, and enforce whatever restrictions on speech they want through secret means. That is unacceptable in a democracy.
It is very simple.
Yes, to people like you, everything is always "very simple". Someone in the government applies a convenient label to a group of people, and you let the government do whatever it likes. The label that you prefer to dehumanize others is "terrorist", but it might just as well be "Jew", "homosexual", "enemy of the people", "imperialist pig", or "infidel". It's people to whom things are always so "very simple" that are keeping terrorism, war, and hatred alive on all sides.
Why are these left wing 'libertarians' SO much more interested in protecting the rights of terrorists
These left wing libertarians are concerned with protecting the rights of free speech and self determination, rights that even potential terrorists have until they actually commit a crime.
Don't these libertarians realise that if the terrorists had their way, they would be one of he the firsts groups to have their lives extinguished?
Well, that sums up the problem: you accept doing the wrong thing (dismantling democracy, killing civilians) because you are scared, while we prefer doing the right thing (maintaining democracy, helping nations in need) even though it may be risky and unprofitable in the short term.
It's short-sighted thinking like yours that has created the mess we are in in the first place.
So... it is a-okay to bomb a terrorist camp and kill everyone in it... but suddenly their 'rights' are violated if someone knocks out their websites?
Yes, quite right. Terrorist camps kill people, web sites don't.
The reason why this is being done is the exact same reason why Britian didn't let the USSR set up a Soviet Army recruiting station in London
It's also the exact same reason why the British Empire repressed freedoms: repressing speech works--for a while--until people get sufficiently pissed off. Eventually, repression backfires. That's why we are seeing terrorism in the first place.
Second, it is a propaganda war.
You are quite right that it is a propaganda war. And if we want to be perceived as the side standing for freedom and democracy, we can't afford being seen repressing speech we don't like.
So you condone inciting violence because (according to you) we do it too? Don't tell me it's OK for them because we do it, tell me it's not OK for us OR them .
I think it is acceptable for anybody to talk about violence, including suggesting that violence is a solution to a particular political problem. That's part of the political process. If people can't express that opinion in public, I can't disagree with them in public and try to convince them that they are wrong.
Untill hardware is supportted (And by no means is the *nix developers fault), it'll fail to get a foot hold.
I don't see the problem: if you buy supported hardware, then Linux runs on it. If you buy it preinstalled, you don't even have to install it.
On the other hand, if you install Windows on unsupported hardware, you will run into problems, too. In fact, you'll run into problems with Windows even on supported hardware, since many drivers are highly Windows version specific.
Basically the bloke was engaged in Wardriving, and deliberately hooked into the wireless network.
Yes, and what's wrong with that? If the network isn't secured with a key, it's obviously intended to be used by anybody.
The court made a major error with its decision.
Didn't you know? Apple invented DRM, just like they invented the GUI. It's an Apple innovation. They're going to try and sue everybody else over it.
How do you know what those sites actually were about? I certainly don't.
Furthermore, "encouraging" violence is part of everyday political opinions: US politicians do it just about every day.
So, do you have a specific argument for how shutting down those sites is going to make us all safer? Because, a priori, restricting free speech and political discussion would seem to only strengthen the arguments of the terrorists.
Your rationalization states some very obvious points,
What do you think I'm "rationalizing"?
You, cahiha, seem to have been able to handle your exposure to porn.
There is nothing to "handle"--I just don't buy the stuff.
The poster presumably posted as an AC because of typical reactions such as yours. Too bad you couldn't allow their statement of personal responsibility to represent the courage the person faced in dealing with their own problems and/or symptoms.
Oh, bullshit. The grandparent poster wasn't accepting responsibility, he was blaming the world for his problems, but then pulled back because he realized that didn't work. Face it: there are many things in this world that can hurt you if you make stupid choices. Porn just isn't very high on that list.
The greatest hope for children
"Hope" implies that there is some bad situation now that we can improve if we make an effort. There is not. There are good parents and there are bad parents, and that's not going to change.
a healthy parental figure who is able to coach, guide, and protect children from being over-exposed to things in life before they are ready
Well, if that's what you believe and if that's the way you want to raise your kids, that's your choice; you control what your kids can see. But don't try to impose your choices on everybody else. What you may consider an "over-exposure", I may consider ridiculously prudish behavior that does more harm than good.
It's not even worth commenting on all the biased and misleading statements in that article. But the Lisa was certainly not the first commercial computer with a GUI. And Smalltalk had overlapping windows.
It's too bad we can't reify patents so that they could really be stacked like cannonballs.
Microsoft can and Microsoft does. Yes, people do stack those patent awards.
What makes a pattern important is that it is widely recognized - it allows not only for reusable code, but more importantly, reusable thinking.
Yes, patterns are important, and it is important that they are widely recognized. That's why many languages have them built in. Hence, the ancestral comment that most of those patterns aren't needed in Lisp. But instead of telling you to use the correct tools for the job, the GoF book amounts to "structured programming in Fortran 77" or "object oriented programming in assembly language".
Similarly, I think it is progress to have GoF broadly understood. This is usually best accomplished by writing a book that people can read about the subject, and GoF did us that courtesy.
I think it is merely symptomatic that the GoF book even had to be written: it shows that the industry is based on the wrong kinds of programmers, the wrong approaches, and the wrong tools. The book may well help improve software development slightly in the short term, but it doesn't represent progress towards solving the fundamental problems with software development.
What is currently cutting edge becomes mundane in 50 years. Calculus was at one time very advanced, and only the most educated understood it
My prediction is that, unlike calculus, design patterns and OOP will not stand the test of time. After an initial blossoming of creativity in the middle of the last century, we are in the dark ages of software engineering right now, complete with the inquisition, crusades, and black death. A century from now, people will look back on OOP and design patterns and think of them as being as ridiculous as Ptolemy's epicycles.
Awesome plan. While we're at it, let's get rid of all the books too. Documentation is a crutch as well, so let's delete all that. And burn down the universities - no-one ever gained anything from them that they couldn't have figured out in their own lifetime.
That's not what I said. What I said is that this specific concept is so simple that if it wasn't obvious to a working programmer, they have no business being in the business.
Also, no-one should be allowed to pass on advice, because everyone should be able to work this shit out for themselves.
Generally, it is good for people to work things out for themselves. Often, in education, we have to short circuit that in the interest of time. But there are many things that, if you couldn't have worked them out for yourselves, you shouldn't be in the business at all.
The trouble with people like you and Maguire is that you think that it all comes down to education, documentation, and discipline. But those educational tools only let you produce the programming equivalent of short order cooks, which is why software sucks so badly.
As someone who was once addicted to porn, I can tell you that it can seriously screw up your notions about the realities of sex. Easy access to pornography on the internet during my single years definitely caused me some problems
Hundreds of millions of people have "easy access to pornography" and no relationship problems. Obviously, your utilization of on-line pornography was a symptom, not a cause, of your problems.
If you don't want to have easy access to pornography on-line, you have many ways of putting yourself in a position that you don't: get rid of your home Internet connection, connect through a filter, or join a monastery.
Is it depressing, as you say? I don't think so...it is par for the course.
Software development was governed by design patterns long before the GoF wrote their book. What is depressing is that (1) people like you think these people actually invented patterns, (2) you didn't figure it out for yourself before picking up the book, (3) most of the actual patterns in that book are workarounds for limitations of current OOLs, and (4) people like you think that all of that is really just fine. It's the blind (GoF) leading the blind (people like you).
I think if more software designers understood design patterns, the world would be better place, at least with repect to the state of the art in computer programming.
Perhaps a better approach would be to simply fire people who need books to figure this stuff out.
Design patterns are largely cookbook workaround for poorly designed languages and libraries. It's pretty depressing that this is the best that software engineering and programming languages have to offer in 2005.
But when people cast aspersions based on nothing but roadside rumour, I feel it's important to correct the record.
My "aspersions" are based on using Perl since Perl 3 days--roughly 15 years. Perl has numerous severe problems that make testing and debugging in it unnecessarily hard. People like me picked up Perl back then because it was a slight improvement over sh/awk/sed scripting, but fortunately, lots of better open source scripting languages have come along since then.
I'm not one to disparage other languages. There are plenty of desirable features in each.
Sorry, no go. One can debate the relative merits of Ruby, Python, REXX, PHP, and VB, but Perl clearly is inferior to all of those. For small projects, Perl's libraries still may tip the balance, but for any kind of large project, the severe deficiencies of the Perl language make it a poor choice.
Perl6 perhaps may re-enter the race, but it is effectively a different language from the Perl we all know and despise, and Perl6 doesn't seem to be happening.
And that's about as "scalable" as I can make it - not very. All I'm doing is duplicating hardware for speed and reliability
That's mostly all anybody can do.
True scalability allows the operation the machine was doing when it died to complete successfully, and PHP ain't there (yet).
Are you willing to pay the price for that? An order of magnitude more hardware, much larger risk of software faults, much higher training costs? How much more reliable would your "non-scalable" system become if you through all those resources at it?
In the end, you probably scale better with the platform that is "less scalable" than with the platform that is.
It does it all, and it values the most expensive component of software (for all but the biggest Web apps): programmer time.
Programmers also have to debug and maintain that software, and that makes Perl one of the most wasteful languages in terms of programmer time.
is somewhat naive. For example, none of the luminaries were involved directly in Mac, which has made money.
Yes, and Windows has made even more money. Obviously, Windows must be even better than Mac, right?
his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java
That must be the same sense in which a good meal is a predecessor to a turd.
Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."
Apple already fired Kay, and they pretty much closed their research labs. These days, Apple is mostly software development, engineering, design, and marketing.
Apple has good pull to get people, but even better management.
Apple has good developers, excellent management, and excellent marketing, but they aren't innovators.
It's about a culture that permits creativity and innovation.
True, and there are few companies that still do. Google is one of the few.
apple recently opened up their cvs repository of webcore (khtml), which the khtml developers used to merge in many of apples changes.
Ah, yes: khtml is an excellent example of Apple's attitudes towards open source--and why they are not to be trusted.
Those kinds of scenarios don't work. The GPL is quite clear: either people can use the code freely, or they can't use it at all.
So, if Microsoft asserts patent claims, then those will have to be tested in court. If they hold up, then RedHat can't ship until its code has been modified so it doesn't infringe anymore. Microsoft can't "indemnify" people for their own patents.
If, on the other hand, Microsoft buys RedHat, then they automatically give everybody they distribute Linux to a transferable license to all applicable patents.
As for Microsoft improving RedHat interoperability with Windows, great! Please do.
big company took an open source product, kinda created their own fork
True.
gives a bit back to the community and the geeks embrace it.
Care to list some Apple contributions to the open source community that are actually widely used on platforms other than Macintosh? I can't think of any. I'm pretty sure none of my Linux machines have any significant Apple-sponsored open source software on them.