No. I called the EU undemocratic because the people who make the descisions are not elected by citizens of the EU. I think that's a pretty good definition of "undemocratic".
That's not how democracies work. Supreme court justices, foreign ministers, FDA commissioners, immigration officials, housing authority officials, and city planners, people who make decisions that can make or break your life, are all unelected by the citizens. Most decision makers in a democracy are not elected by the citizens, they are appointed by people with a (usually indirect) mandate to do so. Appointment of representatives of the UK government to the EU is no different.
Furthermore, you are placing blame in the wrong place. The only people who decide who is going to represent the UK at the EU is the UK government. If you think that the selection is "undemocratic", then that's a problem internal to the UK, not a problem with the EU.
Finally, the EU does have a body of directly elected decision makers and power is being transferred to them gradually. The reason that transfer of power isn't happening more quickly is because the representatives of the governments of the member nations don't want it to (probably a good thing).
I think you are really just using complaints about a lack of democracy in the EU as a smokescreen. What really bothers you is the fact that democratically elected representatives from France, Germany, Poland, or Italy can make majority decisions that overrule decisions that your national government makes. You just don't like further European integration.
"And I think you haven't come to terms with the crimes that your nation committed against the rest of the world over the last several centuries, or with the new status of the UK in the world." Forgive me if I ignore the transparent flamebait.
Which part should I forgive? The part where you choose to ignore the actions of Britain as a colonial power? Or the part where you choose ignore the fact that in the 21st century, the UK is not a world power anymore?
That's just silly. What are you then - a citizen of cyberspace?
Now you are asking a different question. I've moved back and forth between several European nations and the US many times and hold dual citizenship if you must know. At this point, I feel more at home in the US, although I think Europe probably has a brighter future, at least if people like you can overcome their lingering nationalism.
I set forth the benefits of democracy, you tell me that democracy doesn't work in practice.
You called the EU "undemocratic" because it has problems. I was just pointing out that all democratic institutions have problems. The EU can justifiably be called a democratic institution, just like the British government or the US government.
The EEC which predated the EU might have had a claim to that effect.
It's the same organization, only the name changed over time to express its growth and tighter integration among its members.
That means all of us greedy genocidal colonial powers managed to get our act together all by ourselves.
No; the immediate changes after WWII were simply due to loss of power. It took sustained efforts by the EEC and EU (plus a good deal of political pressure from the US) to shape European nations into less aggressive and more cooperative players.
Wow, were we all that bad? I think your adjectives are breeding out of control.
And I think you haven't come to terms with the crimes that your nation committed against the rest of the world over the last several centuries, or with the new status of the UK in the world.
I notice you didn't want to say where you came from.
Because there is no meaningful answer to that question.
I suggest you actually bother to read the GPL, which was created and extensively reviewed by lawyers: it explains very clearly what your obligations are with respect to patents under the GPL.
What does it do? All those Amazon links people put on their web pages still work, and you can still use Amazon product search. But it will give you a price comparison right in the browser (a little floating window on top of the Amazon page), together with links to order from other on-line book sellers.
There are other Greasemonkey user scripts that look up the book in your local library and do all sorts of other nice price comparison things for you.
The only virtue of democracy is that it implements the will of the electorate. Democracy is not an end in and of itself. A poor, malfunctional democracy is no democracy at all.
You assume that there are democracies that work really well; there are not. Democracy is a messy business, fraught with compromises, corruption, inequalities, and problems. But, as Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
What is it you think the EU does so well?
It has managed to transform a war-torn, feuding continent of greedy, genocidal colonial powers under a variety of fascist regimes, communist regimes, dictatorships, and monarchies into a prosperous alliance of nations with free movement of individuals, free enterprise, free elections, and sound human rights guarantees. It has led to the longest stretch of peace among its members in recorded history.
I hail from the UK and I very much disagree.
I think you are misinterpreting the loss of cultural identity and political self-determination that unavoidably goes along with integrating into the EU with a lack of democracy. That's not surprising: the UK is used to being in control and it is not used to being told by a another authority how to run its affairs. But the British Empire is history and the UK today is just another European nation on the fringes of the European continent.
No nation is being forced to join the EU. If the UK doesn't want to be a member, that's fine. As Norway and Switzerland show, there is life outside the EU even within Europe. But perhaps it is time for the UK to make up its mind one way or another.
Try to obfuscate that as much as you like by claiming that there's some magical difference in that code based on where it comes from, but at the end of the day you are using JNI, and you do have explicit reference to that fact in the Java code.
No, you don't have to have an explicit reference in the Java code. You start with a.class file containing a class definition with JNI methods, and a corresponding.so file. You convert both into Java strings or byte arrays, and that's what gets put into the actual Java code. The Java code writes them both in the right place for them to be picked up by the loader. Then you call a method in the class you defined. The class gets loaded, the.so gets called, and the unsafe operation takes place. All your Java source code ever contains is a bunch of harmless file I/O operations and constant data.
And there are plenty of other ways of wreaking havoc. You can just open/proc/self/mem and change any location you like through read/write operations. You can just spawn a debugger process on your own process and use it to change arbitrary memory locations. All of those can be done with standard Java, with either just java.io, or at most the Process class (of course, they are not cross platform but, then, neither is JNI).
Java cannot prevent any of those unsafe operations; the mechanisms that can prevent Java from doing such things are careful code reviews and the use of operating system security features. The only thing that Java's lack of a built-in "unsafe" construct achieves is that it makes error prone, inefficient, and unportable things that ought to be simple and portable.
"They used the spectral information from the DISR device (think of it as a single pixel of full very accurate color) and then used it to interpolate color for a whole image"
That's what they did, but color doesn't work like that. What they are showing you is what you would get with a camera with a bad white-balance setting.
Chances are that if you actually looked at the scene, you'd see something fairly neutral, closer to the b/w image, or even with blue and green hues.
i.e. when the US acts without the backing of the UN, we're the big, evil bully. However, when the US DOESN'T act when the UN is disinterested, we're the big, evil, unfeeling nation who could care less about the plight of the rest of the world. Right?
You are absolutely right: both of these behaviors are unacceptable.
What the US should do is participate in the UN and support the UN. That means not acting when the UN votes not to act, but to lobby and participate within the UN to get it to do what we think is the right thing to do.
And this is a problem how? This is an honest question.
It's the US government that has hyped up cyberwarfare. If you believe their hype, then keeping control of the root DNS servers gives the US the equivalent of full first-strike, ICBM, nuclear capabilities. Even if you don't believe their hype, it suggests bad faith.
Each country can come up with a solution as to how and what they'll be. Let the other countries make their own DNS servers and agree to everyone just co-operating with each other.
That's what the other nations want, and that's what the US is trying to prevent.
The whole approach looks rather complex and costly. What's wrong with 60's and 70's technology? It looks to me that anything developed since has been much more expensive and has had less capacity.
You're just using Java as a glorified loader for your unsafe C/C++/assembler code. Which is all very well if that's what you want to do, but it still doesn't make Java capable of the misbehaviour you'd like it to be.
That's pointless semantics. The fact is that I can write a piece of Java code that contains no reference to JNI or anything else unsafe and yet it can do the same kind of damage as a C# "unsafe" construct. Therefore, any argument that Java keeps programmers from doing unsafe things is bogus.
Can you explain why most Java applications aren't secure? / They aren't secure because nobody has worried about making them secure. / And C# is more secure? Why?
Your question has nothing to do with my point.
C# code is unsafe only if you explicitly choose to make it unsafe. That's exactly the same way it is in Java. Unlike Java, however, if you choose to use unsafe features in C#, C# supports you a lot better than Java does. That's all there is to it.
The point is and remains that Gosling's assertion about unsafe features in C# is wrong (probably deliberate FUD--even Gosling isn't that stupid).
First of all, that's a different sense of "observe the universe from the outside" than the grandparent used.
Secondly, it doesn't matter whether you "live in a simulation" or not if you can't tell.
Thirdly, apparently Oxford philosophers are now reduced to rehashing 40 year old science fiction stories; Oxford is really getting academically stale...
The integrity of the democratic process is weakened by each level that a legislator or official is removed from the electorate.
That's probably true. However, a weak democratic process that lacks integrity is still a democratic process, just not one that works particularly well. The EU may be working poorly, but it is a poorly working democracy.
If this euro-state we keep hearing about uis ever goign to happen we need the power in the hands of the MEPs.
Maybe, maybe not. Foisting direct elections on an unprepared population has proven itself to be an unreliable path to democracy throughout history.
Transitioning to a functioning EU-wide democracy will still take decades. Rushing that may just as much cause chaos as leaving everything to the bureaucrats.
On the whole, I think Europe is doing pretty well. The rejection of the EU constitution is putting the brakes on some of the centralization, and maybe it will be a wakeup call to some of the apathetic European populace.
Nobody said space exploration had to be safe; after all, for all previous manned exploration activities, we accepted high risks of death. Why should modern space explorers be such wimps?
Besides, your comparison is meaningless. The Soyuz system may well be the safer design, but accidents may be due to cheaper materials. Furthermore, what's the total number of manned launches of each nation?
Democracy doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, the people elect representatives, which then in turn elect other representatives. Some parts of the US work that way. Sometimes, representatives negotiate and make decisions on behalf the the people without parliamentary approval (but with a parliamentary mandate). Furthermore, democracies often guarantee that certain wishes of minorities are respected even if they conflict with the wishes of the majority.
As for the EU, everybody participating in Brussels has a democratic mandate; however, the system clearly isn't working very well yet. However, the best structure is still unclear.
I think you'd better wait for ALL the fallout from the SCO trial before you blithely assume that will hold.
I don't need to "assume" or "wait for" anything. I was already using the software before Microsoft started shipping it, so whether Microsoft ships it or not doesn't affect my actions.
The question is what Microsoft is assuming. If Microsoft assumes they can weasel out of GPL requirements on patents or anything else because of the outcome of the SCO trial, they are fools. Even if there were a remote chance for SCO prevailing, betting on that would be a bad bet.
So, let's take your list of Sun's supposed contributions to open source.
OpenWindows,
Sun tried for years to kill off X11 and replace it with their proprietary, non-free window systems. When it became finally clear even to their own managers that their own customers were de-installing the crap Sun shipped and replacing it with X11, Sun finally dumped the remains of their failed efforts on the world as open source.
For you youngsters out there, you ought to know that virtually all Linux distros used Sun's OpenWindows windowing environment as the default in the early days - you can make a credible argument, in fact that it was that open source code that raised Linux up from the crowd, making it a "real" alternative to commercial Unix, especially since BSD was mired in lawsuits at the time.
I have used Linux since pretty much the day it came out, and that's complete nonsense. OpenWindows was a joke even on Sun workstations, and it was irrelevant on Linux.
OpenOffice (probably the largest and most important single body of software *ever* open sourced as a whole, and the only significant contribution that was a pure *gift* to the open source community, not just open-sourced for convenience)
OpenOffice open sourcing wasn't a "gift", it was a vital part of Sun's business strategy. It's good for the FOSS community that Sun was forced to choose a license that they couldn't weasel out of later. That's all one can say about that.
NFS (itself hugely important in the development of the whole idea of networked computing)
NFS is a piece of shit that is still a huge obstacle to UNIX adoption in work group environments.
Solaris itself (and that code has shown how far ahead Solaris really is in many areas that are vitally important if you want to use an OS in mission-critical, enterprise environments.)
Solaris is not doing well commercially. Technically, it's a bloated system suffering from second system effect. Solaris is irrelevant to mainstream computing and will have even less impact than Mach, Hurd, or Darwin.
Java (likewise, huge, and yes, it's really open-sourced - most of us don't care if the license is GPL compatible)
That's a blatant and dangerous misrepresentation of the facts. Java is not open source in any sense of the word. Sun Java source code is proprietary: if you as much as look at it, your future ability to work on anything related to Java implementations is severely limited.
Fortunately, people have been wising up to the lies and misrepresentations coming from people like you and Sun management. Sun is digging its own grave.
Over the last half dozen years, Sun has constantly been trying to redefined the meaning of terms like "open standard", "free", and "open source". At the same time, they have built up an elaborate system of licenses, copyrights, and patents around the Java platform. Altogether, this has been an assault on FOSS, an attempt to replace a free and open infrastructure with Sun proprietary software.
The recent pictures of Ballmer and McNealy hugging and kissing shouldn't surprise us: Sun has found its true religion, and McNealy wants to become Ballmer's Mini-Me.
Fortunately, it's not working. JDS is a failure, Java's adoption on FOSS platforms is unimportant, and Solaris will be a flop, too.
Fortunately, Sun can't take back software they released under true FOSS licenses in the past (like OpenOffice), although they keep trying to entangle even that software in their proprietary Java trap (by attempting to make OpenOffice dependent on Sun Java).
How nice that you have worked it all out for yourself, but, frankly, that's all pseudo-scientific bullshit. Photon's don't "experience" things, and people don't "observe the universe from the outside".
Microsoft's using GPL code and BSD code in Interix, and that has neither let them "outperform" Cygwin nor forced Microsoft to open Interix one skerrick more.
Well, it does a couple of things. First, it forces Microsoft to release GPL'ed source code and to admit that that source code exists and is useful. So much for their arguments against the GPL.
It also immunizes any such code they ship from future patent claims by Microsoft, because by shipping it under the GPL, they have already granted permission to any patents they may hold.
What ESR's saying now is what BSD advocates have been saying for years. Companies that are interested in being productive partners will be productive partners no matter what license you use, and companies that aren't will find ways to stick to the letter of the license while completely gutting its spirit.
That's true, but it only covers part of the reasons the GPL is useful. The GPL also gives users of the source code legal guarantees that BSD doesn't give.
It's not even worth debunking all the technical nonsense on that page; but two points should be mentioned because your lies and misinformation are actually dangerous.
Public Domain APIs - Any Java public apis are part of the public domain,.NET apis are proprietary and can open the door to a law suit.
In order to download the Sun Java API specs you have to agree to a license agreement that severely limits how you can implement the APIs. In contrast, a large chunk of.NET APIs is available from ECMA and not covered by such restrictions.
Standard Library Source Code Availability - Java source code for the core libraries are available in every J2SDK distribution,
Yes, and by looking at it, you agree to a license agreement with Sun that means that Sun owns your brain until you die. Since it sounds like you have looked at Sun source code, please do us all a favor: don't contribute to any open source Java project, because in doing so, you would endanger it.
In both cases, you don't have to believe me, just actually bother to read the license agreements that cover the specifications and Sun Java code. While Sun marketing likes to misrepresent the intellectual property issues surrounding Java, Sun's lawyers have made sure that their license agreements are clear enough. Unfortunately, morons like you click through those license agreements without bothering to read them.
Of course, it is: neither the source code nor the.class file or the.jar file contain any construct that corresponds to C# "unsafe" code. All it does contain is a little bit of file I/O.
As soon as you load that.so file you're not running pure Java any more, and it's that non-Java library that 'does something impure'.
Indeed, at that point it becomes impure. So, what you have is that code that does completely harmless things--a little bit of file I/O--all of a sudden executes code that manipulates memory unsafely.
That's why the notion that you can keep programmers from doing unsafe things in Java is a myth. The lack of an explicit "unsafe" construct in Java is a nuisance for programmers, but it doesn't guarantee anything.
Can you explain why most Java applications aren't secure?
They aren't secure because nobody has worried about making them secure.
I can't remember any security problems in Java applications, altough they are possible...
That's because the question of security isn't relevant to most applications.
Why do you say that using safe constructs makes security worst?
Using safe constructs improves the likelihood that a program will be secure. That's why it's good when programming languages offer safe programming constructs, like both C# and Java do. Limiting the programmer to safe constructs, like Java does, makes security worse, however, because the need for unsafe constructs doesn't go away, but you force the programmer to use more error-prone and less portable JNI modules.
What's next? Array bounds checks in runtime makes more buffer overflows?
What's next is that I think you should be kept away from writing any security relevant software. People like you, who don't even know the difference between safety and security, are a menace. You are worse than the C hacks who think they can do completely without runtime safety; the C hacks are wrong, but at least they know that they need to be careful.
Slashdot Mirror
No. I called the EU undemocratic because the people who make the descisions are not elected by citizens of the EU. I think that's a pretty good definition of "undemocratic".
That's not how democracies work. Supreme court justices, foreign ministers, FDA commissioners, immigration officials, housing authority officials, and city planners, people who make decisions that can make or break your life, are all unelected by the citizens. Most decision makers in a democracy are not elected by the citizens, they are appointed by people with a (usually indirect) mandate to do so. Appointment of representatives of the UK government to the EU is no different.
Furthermore, you are placing blame in the wrong place. The only people who decide who is going to represent the UK at the EU is the UK government. If you think that the selection is "undemocratic", then that's a problem internal to the UK, not a problem with the EU.
Finally, the EU does have a body of directly elected decision makers and power is being transferred to them gradually. The reason that transfer of power isn't happening more quickly is because the representatives of the governments of the member nations don't want it to (probably a good thing).
I think you are really just using complaints about a lack of democracy in the EU as a smokescreen. What really bothers you is the fact that democratically elected representatives from France, Germany, Poland, or Italy can make majority decisions that overrule decisions that your national government makes. You just don't like further European integration.
"And I think you haven't come to terms with the crimes that your nation committed against the rest of the world over the last several centuries, or with the new status of the UK in the world." Forgive me if I ignore the transparent flamebait.
Which part should I forgive? The part where you choose to ignore the actions of Britain as a colonial power? Or the part where you choose ignore the fact that in the 21st century, the UK is not a world power anymore?
That's just silly. What are you then - a citizen of cyberspace?
Now you are asking a different question. I've moved back and forth between several European nations and the US many times and hold dual citizenship if you must know. At this point, I feel more at home in the US, although I think Europe probably has a brighter future, at least if people like you can overcome their lingering nationalism.
I set forth the benefits of democracy, you tell me that democracy doesn't work in practice.
You called the EU "undemocratic" because it has problems. I was just pointing out that all democratic institutions have problems. The EU can justifiably be called a democratic institution, just like the British government or the US government.
The EEC which predated the EU might have had a claim to that effect.
It's the same organization, only the name changed over time to express its growth and tighter integration among its members.
That means all of us greedy genocidal colonial powers managed to get our act together all by ourselves.
No; the immediate changes after WWII were simply due to loss of power. It took sustained efforts by the EEC and EU (plus a good deal of political pressure from the US) to shape European nations into less aggressive and more cooperative players.
Wow, were we all that bad? I think your adjectives are breeding out of control.
And I think you haven't come to terms with the crimes that your nation committed against the rest of the world over the last several centuries, or with the new status of the UK in the world.
I notice you didn't want to say where you came from.
Because there is no meaningful answer to that question.
I suggest you actually bother to read the GPL, which was created and extensively reviewed by lawyers: it explains very clearly what your obligations are with respect to patents under the GPL.
But why so many stories about Amazon's patents in particular?
Because Amazon's patents are particularly evil: they try to patent trivial business methods.
I'm sure you can find plenty to pick on in [IBM's] applications.
Go ahead and review their applications and let us know. We complain about the patents that we know about.
Not to mention that Amazon is often on the receiving end of patent aggression.
All the worse that Amazon is engaging in this kind of conduct themselves and isn't more aggressively working towards changing the patent system.
Note that Amazon's patents do not help them defend against that sort of abuse.
Get a copy of the Book Burro Greasemonkey script for Firefox.
What does it do? All those Amazon links people put on their web pages still work, and you can still use Amazon product search. But it will give you a price comparison right in the browser (a little floating window on top of the Amazon page), together with links to order from other on-line book sellers.
There are other Greasemonkey user scripts that look up the book in your local library and do all sorts of other nice price comparison things for you.
The only virtue of democracy is that it implements the will of the electorate. Democracy is not an end in and of itself. A poor, malfunctional democracy is no democracy at all.
You assume that there are democracies that work really well; there are not. Democracy is a messy business, fraught with compromises, corruption, inequalities, and problems. But, as Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
What is it you think the EU does so well?
It has managed to transform a war-torn, feuding continent of greedy, genocidal colonial powers under a variety of fascist regimes, communist regimes, dictatorships, and monarchies into a prosperous alliance of nations with free movement of individuals, free enterprise, free elections, and sound human rights guarantees. It has led to the longest stretch of peace among its members in recorded history.
I hail from the UK and I very much disagree.
I think you are misinterpreting the loss of cultural identity and political self-determination that unavoidably goes along with integrating into the EU with a lack of democracy. That's not surprising: the UK is used to being in control and it is not used to being told by a another authority how to run its affairs. But the British Empire is history and the UK today is just another European nation on the fringes of the European continent.
No nation is being forced to join the EU. If the UK doesn't want to be a member, that's fine. As Norway and Switzerland show, there is life outside the EU even within Europe. But perhaps it is time for the UK to make up its mind one way or another.
Try to obfuscate that as much as you like by claiming that there's some magical difference in that code based on where it comes from, but at the end of the day you are using JNI, and you do have explicit reference to that fact in the Java code.
.class file containing a class definition with JNI methods, and a corresponding .so file. You convert both into Java strings or byte arrays, and that's what gets put into the actual Java code. The Java code writes them both in the right place for them to be picked up by the loader. Then you call a method in the class you defined. The class gets loaded, the .so gets called, and the unsafe operation takes place. All your Java source code ever contains is a bunch of harmless file I/O operations and constant data.
/proc/self/mem and change any location you like through read/write operations. You can just spawn a debugger process on your own process and use it to change arbitrary memory locations. All of those can be done with standard Java, with either just java.io, or at most the Process class (of course, they are not cross platform but, then, neither is JNI).
No, you don't have to have an explicit reference in the Java code. You start with a
And there are plenty of other ways of wreaking havoc. You can just open
Java cannot prevent any of those unsafe operations; the mechanisms that can prevent Java from doing such things are careful code reviews and the use of operating system security features. The only thing that Java's lack of a built-in "unsafe" construct achieves is that it makes error prone, inefficient, and unportable things that ought to be simple and portable.
"They used the spectral information from the DISR device (think of it as a single pixel of full very accurate color) and then used it to interpolate color for a whole image"
That's what they did, but color doesn't work like that. What they are showing you is what you would get with a camera with a bad white-balance setting.
Chances are that if you actually looked at the scene, you'd see something fairly neutral, closer to the b/w image, or even with blue and green hues.
i.e. when the US acts without the backing of the UN, we're the big, evil bully. However, when the US DOESN'T act when the UN is disinterested, we're the big, evil, unfeeling nation who could care less about the plight of the rest of the world. Right?
You are absolutely right: both of these behaviors are unacceptable.
What the US should do is participate in the UN and support the UN. That means not acting when the UN votes not to act, but to lobby and participate within the UN to get it to do what we think is the right thing to do.
And this is a problem how? This is an honest question.
It's the US government that has hyped up cyberwarfare. If you believe their hype, then keeping control of the root DNS servers gives the US the equivalent of full first-strike, ICBM, nuclear capabilities. Even if you don't believe their hype, it suggests bad faith.
Each country can come up with a solution as to how and what they'll be. Let the other countries make their own DNS servers and agree to everyone just co-operating with each other.
That's what the other nations want, and that's what the US is trying to prevent.
The whole approach looks rather complex and costly. What's wrong with 60's and 70's technology? It looks to me that anything developed since has been much more expensive and has had less capacity.
You're just using Java as a glorified loader for your unsafe C/C++/assembler code. Which is all very well if that's what you want to do, but it still doesn't make Java capable of the misbehaviour you'd like it to be.
That's pointless semantics. The fact is that I can write a piece of Java code that contains no reference to JNI or anything else unsafe and yet it can do the same kind of damage as a C# "unsafe" construct. Therefore, any argument that Java keeps programmers from doing unsafe things is bogus.
Can you explain why most Java applications aren't secure? / They aren't secure because nobody has worried about making them secure. / And C# is more secure? Why?
Your question has nothing to do with my point.
C# code is unsafe only if you explicitly choose to make it unsafe. That's exactly the same way it is in Java. Unlike Java, however, if you choose to use unsafe features in C#, C# supports you a lot better than Java does. That's all there is to it.
The point is and remains that Gosling's assertion about unsafe features in C# is wrong (probably deliberate FUD--even Gosling isn't that stupid).
First of all, that's a different sense of "observe the universe from the outside" than the grandparent used.
Secondly, it doesn't matter whether you "live in a simulation" or not if you can't tell.
Thirdly, apparently Oxford philosophers are now reduced to rehashing 40 year old science fiction stories; Oxford is really getting academically stale...
The integrity of the democratic process is weakened by each level that a legislator or official is removed from the electorate.
That's probably true. However, a weak democratic process that lacks integrity is still a democratic process, just not one that works particularly well. The EU may be working poorly, but it is a poorly working democracy.
If this euro-state we keep hearing about uis ever goign to happen we need the power in the hands of the MEPs.
Maybe, maybe not. Foisting direct elections on an unprepared population has proven itself to be an unreliable path to democracy throughout history.
Transitioning to a functioning EU-wide democracy will still take decades. Rushing that may just as much cause chaos as leaving everything to the bureaucrats.
On the whole, I think Europe is doing pretty well. The rejection of the EU constitution is putting the brakes on some of the centralization, and maybe it will be a wakeup call to some of the apathetic European populace.
Nobody said space exploration had to be safe; after all, for all previous manned exploration activities, we accepted high risks of death. Why should modern space explorers be such wimps?
Besides, your comparison is meaningless. The Soyuz system may well be the safer design, but accidents may be due to cheaper materials. Furthermore, what's the total number of manned launches of each nation?
Democracy doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, the people elect representatives, which then in turn elect other representatives. Some parts of the US work that way. Sometimes, representatives negotiate and make decisions on behalf the the people without parliamentary approval (but with a parliamentary mandate). Furthermore, democracies often guarantee that certain wishes of minorities are respected even if they conflict with the wishes of the majority.
As for the EU, everybody participating in Brussels has a democratic mandate; however, the system clearly isn't working very well yet. However, the best structure is still unclear.
I think you'd better wait for ALL the fallout from the SCO trial before you blithely assume that will hold.
I don't need to "assume" or "wait for" anything. I was already using the software before Microsoft started shipping it, so whether Microsoft ships it or not doesn't affect my actions.
The question is what Microsoft is assuming. If Microsoft assumes they can weasel out of GPL requirements on patents or anything else because of the outcome of the SCO trial, they are fools. Even if there were a remote chance for SCO prevailing, betting on that would be a bad bet.
So, let's take your list of Sun's supposed contributions to open source.
OpenWindows,
Sun tried for years to kill off X11 and replace it with their proprietary, non-free window systems. When it became finally clear even to their own managers that their own customers were de-installing the crap Sun shipped and replacing it with X11, Sun finally dumped the remains of their failed efforts on the world as open source.
For you youngsters out there, you ought to know that virtually all Linux distros used Sun's OpenWindows windowing environment as the default in the early days - you can make a credible argument, in fact that it was that open source code that raised Linux up from the crowd, making it a "real" alternative to commercial Unix, especially since BSD was mired in lawsuits at the time.
I have used Linux since pretty much the day it came out, and that's complete nonsense. OpenWindows was a joke even on Sun workstations, and it was irrelevant on Linux.
OpenOffice (probably the largest and most important single body of software *ever* open sourced as a whole, and the only significant contribution that was a pure *gift* to the open source community, not just open-sourced for convenience)
OpenOffice open sourcing wasn't a "gift", it was a vital part of Sun's business strategy. It's good for the FOSS community that Sun was forced to choose a license that they couldn't weasel out of later. That's all one can say about that.
NFS (itself hugely important in the development of the whole idea of networked computing)
NFS is a piece of shit that is still a huge obstacle to UNIX adoption in work group environments.
Solaris itself (and that code has shown how far ahead Solaris really is in many areas that are vitally important if you want to use an OS in mission-critical, enterprise environments.)
Solaris is not doing well commercially. Technically, it's a bloated system suffering from second system effect. Solaris is irrelevant to mainstream computing and will have even less impact than Mach, Hurd, or Darwin.
Java (likewise, huge, and yes, it's really open-sourced - most of us don't care if the license is GPL compatible)
That's a blatant and dangerous misrepresentation of the facts. Java is not open source in any sense of the word. Sun Java source code is proprietary: if you as much as look at it, your future ability to work on anything related to Java implementations is severely limited.
Fortunately, people have been wising up to the lies and misrepresentations coming from people like you and Sun management. Sun is digging its own grave.
Over the last half dozen years, Sun has constantly been trying to redefined the meaning of terms like "open standard", "free", and "open source". At the same time, they have built up an elaborate system of licenses, copyrights, and patents around the Java platform. Altogether, this has been an assault on FOSS, an attempt to replace a free and open infrastructure with Sun proprietary software.
The recent pictures of Ballmer and McNealy hugging and kissing shouldn't surprise us: Sun has found its true religion, and McNealy wants to become Ballmer's Mini-Me.
Fortunately, it's not working. JDS is a failure, Java's adoption on FOSS platforms is unimportant, and Solaris will be a flop, too.
Fortunately, Sun can't take back software they released under true FOSS licenses in the past (like OpenOffice), although they keep trying to entangle even that software in their proprietary Java trap (by attempting to make OpenOffice dependent on Sun Java).
How nice that you have worked it all out for yourself, but, frankly, that's all pseudo-scientific bullshit. Photon's don't "experience" things, and people don't "observe the universe from the outside".
Microsoft's using GPL code and BSD code in Interix, and that has neither let them "outperform" Cygwin nor forced Microsoft to open Interix one skerrick more.
Well, it does a couple of things. First, it forces Microsoft to release GPL'ed source code and to admit that that source code exists and is useful. So much for their arguments against the GPL.
It also immunizes any such code they ship from future patent claims by Microsoft, because by shipping it under the GPL, they have already granted permission to any patents they may hold.
What ESR's saying now is what BSD advocates have been saying for years. Companies that are interested in being productive partners will be productive partners no matter what license you use, and companies that aren't will find ways to stick to the letter of the license while completely gutting its spirit.
That's true, but it only covers part of the reasons the GPL is useful. The GPL also gives users of the source code legal guarantees that BSD doesn't give.
It's not even worth debunking all the technical nonsense on that page; but two points should be mentioned because your lies and misinformation are actually dangerous.
.NET apis are proprietary and can open the door to a law suit.
.NET APIs is available from ECMA and not covered by such restrictions.
Public Domain APIs - Any Java public apis are part of the public domain,
In order to download the Sun Java API specs you have to agree to a license agreement that severely limits how you can implement the APIs. In contrast, a large chunk of
Standard Library Source Code Availability - Java source code for the core libraries are available in every J2SDK distribution,
Yes, and by looking at it, you agree to a license agreement with Sun that means that Sun owns your brain until you die. Since it sounds like you have looked at Sun source code, please do us all a favor: don't contribute to any open source Java project, because in doing so, you would endanger it.
In both cases, you don't have to believe me, just actually bother to read the license agreements that cover the specifications and Sun Java code. While Sun marketing likes to misrepresent the intellectual property issues surrounding Java, Sun's lawyers have made sure that their license agreements are clear enough. Unfortunately, morons like you click through those license agreements without bothering to read them.
No, the code isn't pure Java.
.class file or the .jar file contain any construct that corresponds to C# "unsafe" code. All it does contain is a little bit of file I/O.
.so file you're not running pure Java any more, and it's that non-Java library that 'does something impure'.
Of course, it is: neither the source code nor the
As soon as you load that
Indeed, at that point it becomes impure. So, what you have is that code that does completely harmless things--a little bit of file I/O--all of a sudden executes code that manipulates memory unsafely.
That's why the notion that you can keep programmers from doing unsafe things in Java is a myth. The lack of an explicit "unsafe" construct in Java is a nuisance for programmers, but it doesn't guarantee anything.
Can you explain why most Java applications aren't secure?
They aren't secure because nobody has worried about making them secure.
I can't remember any security problems in Java applications, altough they are possible...
That's because the question of security isn't relevant to most applications.
Why do you say that using safe constructs makes security worst?
Using safe constructs improves the likelihood that a program will be secure. That's why it's good when programming languages offer safe programming constructs, like both C# and Java do. Limiting the programmer to safe constructs, like Java does, makes security worse, however, because the need for unsafe constructs doesn't go away, but you force the programmer to use more error-prone and less portable JNI modules.
What's next? Array bounds checks in runtime makes more buffer overflows?
What's next is that I think you should be kept away from writing any security relevant software. People like you, who don't even know the difference between safety and security, are a menace. You are worse than the C hacks who think they can do completely without runtime safety; the C hacks are wrong, but at least they know that they need to be careful.