Ah, but you miss the point. Greed is the grease that lubricates the wheels of innovation.
No greed, no innovation. Any innovation that
you think you've seen in open source is just
an illusion -- developers copying the work of
good hard-working capitalists who have preceeded
them.
Toungue firmly in cheek of course. History
shows that more innovation comes from sharing
ideas than has ever come from protecting them.
If you haven't yet read it, I strongly recommend
'Guns, Germs and Steel' for a very good perspective on where technology comes from.
Amazing. Back in '92 I went over to Silicon
Graphics for three days to port a simulator we
were writing for Unisys to the MIPS chip. At
the time SGI had one of the first Reality Engine machines in the demo room, and the engineers took
us over to look at it and drool at the mouth over
the incredible beauty of the real-time 3d displays it could produce.
Back then, no matter how cheap PC's eventually became, I couldn't imagine that kind
of liquid photo-realistic 3d ever being affordable.
I'm quite happy to be proven wrong, and be one step closer to photorealistic 3d.
But maturity does. I know 60yr old engineers
whom no one listens to because they are immature,
unable to control their emotions, and insensitive
to the social dynamics of a situation.
Not to imply that they don't have good ideas;
some ideas are very good, but a good idea only
goes a little way. Getting people to listen to
that idea is what is key.
AndyP wrote two months ago that he'd been arrested for
vandalism after one Halloween mischief night when he
was sixteen. An online tracking agency dug up the arrest
-- even though it was a misdeanor offense, was supposed
to be kept sealed, and had happened a decade earlier. "I
was turned down because my company was working on a
government project and we all needed a moderate security
clearance. I never got it sorted out, because it was
technically true. But jeez, it was a spray-painting
incident. I guess in certain quarters, I'm unemployable for
the rest of my life."
Actually when you are getting a DOD security clearance, the problem really isn't what is on your record but the difference between what you
put on your application form, and whatever they
can dig up.
I had a friend in a similar situation who was arrested for PI when he was caught by an officer while he was drunk in a
parking lot and peeing on a car. It took almost
a year to get his clearance (typical delay at the time
was about 3 months), but he did eventually get
it.
But you absolutely cannot lie on those forms. Anything you lie about the DOD considers something that you could later be blackmailed about.
For what its worth though I'd avoid government related service anyway. Anything that requires a clearance has to be staffed for maximum need, so if the work is at all cyclic you'll spend half your time sitting on your hands trying to look busy, and the other half working 12 hour days when you really are busy. But since nothing can be contracted out, and you can't actually hire someone and put them to work for 3+ months, the
defense contractors really have to hire far ahead of need.
(Or if you are the sort of person who wants to work for the DOD because you want to know what is really going on, and think that getting a clearance will let you in on it all; don't waste your time. In five years of working on classified and unclassified programs the data was always just as boring either way. Some vehicle is going to launch on some day, into some specific orbit. Who cares.)
Dude, you know you can get rid of that '-1' rating just by getting a new account don't you?
Why I bother using local mail filters *WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD I'M NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR
PRODUCT OR SERVICE* and don't want to see it in my mailbox period?
I just consider it pragmatic. Why not dump
someone's mail if you have already told them
that you aren't interested in their mail. It is
a lot easier to just stop it than get upset over
it.
Invest some time in learning about local mail
filters. Why bother unsubscribing from a thousand
different mailing lists, each with its own interface when you can simply refuse mail from
their domain or mail that matches any regular
expression in any header field.
If you aren't running your own mail server
you might not get the total satisfaction of
giving them an SMTP protocol error, but dropping
their mail unceremoniously into a bit bucket is
certainly still worthwhile.
The penalty for violating the terms of the GPL
are specified in the GPL. Specifically you are
prohibited from ever distributing any GPL'd
software in the future.
Historically that has been sufficiently motivating to get companies to comply with the
terms of the GPL without the need for a court
order.
About 30 years ago an upstart operating system
called UNIX came up with a solution to all of the
problems with two threads of control that are
running simultaneously trying to get access to the
same resources. Threads have race conditions,
require synchronization primitives to avoid
stepping on eachother's toes or access inconsistent data structures, and when out of control can modify data owned by other threads bringing the whole system down in a heap.
The brilliant innovation of UNIX was to seperate threads into seperate processes, each
with its own stack and data and memory barriers between processes so that no process should have to be completely dependent on the good behavior of another process.
Since that innovation limited the interoperability of processes, UNIX also invented
a series of interprocess communication tools
including pipes, sockets, and explicitly shared
memory. Together these tools have greatly simplified and are probably even responsible for popularizing multi-processing.
So why are we ignoring these fine inventions?
Because Microsoft is unable to implement an efficient multi-processing environment, threading is the only way to efficiently handle multiple simultaneous requests under Windows NT. I think
that this limitation has made threading using
no memory protection, and no IPC, into a fashionable approach for 'efficiency' and
'performance'.
But is that really a good idea? Computers these days are extremely fast; so that even VMs like
Java are often considered sufficiently fast for
use in real projects. Under those circumstances,
wouldn't it be better to avoid multi-threading
in favor of multi-processing? Isn't it really
debugging that takes the most time, so that
losing a bit of performance for a massive increase
in reliability should be an acceptable tradeoff?
</soapbox>
Submitted for your consideration. There are
obviously technologies that don't work well in
a multi-processing environment; CORBA for example
depends heavily on threads, as does Java (running a single JVM is bad enough; can you imagine running a whole array of them one for each thread?) But I do think that people underestimate
the value of Processes and IPC and often choose
Threads when they are highly inappropriate.
Strangely enough jsse is really only
echoing the message that Sun presented at keynote
during the last JavaONE conference. It was completely depressing.
No longer, this is the great stuff we're going to
be doing; here are the exciting new features. Instead last JavaONE all we got was 'don't complain about Java, cause it is making all of
you rich.'
Utter crap.
Luckily Java is larger than Sun, and even if it
weren't there is a lot more of interest happening in the
Sun Community extension processes than you might know if you don't follow them.
So here is my battle cry: Lets try new, INTERESTING, things, and lets do them in the Linux
context. Lets not break everything by changing something. Lets try providing extensions to
Linux, and see how they work out. If they don't work out well (because they are inelegant, not
because they are unused), then rip them out. If they work out well, keep them in, and start using
them.
Dude, if you want to try new interesting
things, please be our guest. Just don't insist
that everyone else who has more need of stable,
well tested, and useful than faster, slicker,
more spoo use it too.
After reading the EULA for Quake 3 I was so
incensed that I drafted and mailed a statement
denying my aquiescence to the contract to both
Loki and to a friend who could witness that I
did my best to show that I do not accept the
terms stated in the EULA if it ever came to a
legal proceeding.
I consider that having paid for the product, that
I own it; and if someone tries to modify that
ownership after it has already been alienated by
including the text of a contract in the box that
states among other things that I won't ever sell
the product to someone else, there isn't any reason at all that I should accept that contract.
I made it completely clear in my letter that I do
not accept the contract, and I urge anyone else
who feels the same to send a similar message.
Interestingly, I did eventually get a mail back
from Loki with some free legal advice, so I wrote
back a reply reiterating my argument, stating
that I did not accept their argument, and that
I was willing to test our difference of opinion
in court if necessary.
But I mostly did that because Q3A is the most onerous of EULAs I have
ever seen. Other EULAs leave a lot to be desired,
but they don't usually take away basic rights that
you have in owning the copyrighted material and
grant you nothing in return.
(Loki tried to argue that by using the product
I had to agree to the license. But use of a
product is not a protected copy right, so I
disagree with their argument; I am fully within
my rights to use a copyrighted work, whether I've
agreed to a contract or not. IMHO, of course.
IANAL.)
I live in Hayward which is definitely working
class, but not unsafe. Crime here may be higher
than Fremont to the south (I haven't looked at
statistics, but that seems to be the general
feeling), but that is probably more due to Fremont
having a really massive police force than anything
wrong with Hayward.
The commute isn't particularly good though
unless you can commute by rail (either to the
city ~30m on Bart, or Santa Clara/San Jose ~35m
on Amtrak); the east shore freeway and bridges
are all parking lots.
Median home price in Hayward I'd guess to be
about $300k, maybe $350k, but the neighborhoods
are really quite varied. I live up in the hills
just north of CSU-Hayward which has a nice 5
mile green trail loop up into the hills, and
several hundred acres of Garin Regional Wilderness
and Pioneer Creek Preserve with more hiking
trails. My wife and I tend to get out on the
trails on our horses every couple of weeks with
a picnic lunch or something, and look down on
the valley and bay with great appreciation to
be up above the smog, endless buildings, and busy streets.
Two or three years ago you could have gotten
a townhouse south of mission in SF for reasonably
cheap if the city is more your style, but the
city is becoming gentrified extremely quickly so
I don't think that is entirely possible any longer.
I guess if I were looking for a place on the
peninsula I'd probably look in one of the areas
that has a reputation for being dangerous, but is
in a really key location where the situation is
bound to improve in the next couple of years. Then
work with local government to insist that it does
improve.
No one wants to move in to a dangerous neighborhood, but then two years later, SOMA
is suddenly the hot spot to live in.
Berkeley also has great food (Zachary's is
IMHO the best deep-dish pizza in the bay area)
as does San Francisco, and there are a few
good places scattered around San Jose (Rangoli is
my favorite Indian restaurant in the whole Bay
Area.)
Mostly though I like the brew pubs.
The bay area has a huge number of microbreweries,
many with tied pubs.
I've lived in the SF Bay Area for 13 years now and I can very much agree that the '.com' crowd
have had a negative impact on the region.
Having multi-millionaires move in next door
bragging about their stock options has had a
somewhat
unpleasant impact on my little street (we're
normally a very neighborly crowd; summer block
parties, etc, but that doesn't seem to mix well
with niveau riche.) And the outrageous housing
prices are almost intolerable for anyone who
isn't already in a home.
But it isn't all negative. Before the net
gained its preeminent importance the valley
was already a great place to work. There is
a culture here that encourages people to move
from job to job spreading technology and ideas
much faster than would otherwise be possible.
Rather than have to work 20 years on writing
and maintaining a single project you are free
to move around and find the projects that are
most interesting to you, in the part of their
life cycle that is most interesting. In 13
years I've worked on half a dozen projects
myself, and I'm a relatively stationary person.
And the projects themselves can be stunningly
interesting. I was able to work with CORBA
in its infancy, I've worked on distributed applications
development from the time I moved out here, and
got my first Internet account back in '88.
The only real key to living here is to get a
place out of the rat race where you can spend
evenings and weekends without thinking about
technology. The local music scene is excellent,
the symphony is excellent, there are lots of
museums, it is easy to get to the theatre for
an evenings entertainment, and there are still
affordable places to live if you are willing
to be a bit adventurous.
So maybe the sense of community is getting lost,
and that is certainly a hard thing to rebuild,
and something that frequently bothers me; but I
wouldn't write us off just yet.
Yeah, and Kentucky uses mechanical voting machines
as well. There was a rumor when I lived there
that a couple of folks in Madison county were
able to get one of their voting machines to
work with the back open.
I wouldn't say that the inability to double check
makes me more confident though. More precisely,
I do not believe in the cute:
So say Confucius:
Man with one watch always know what time it is.
Man with two watches never sure.
Repeatability and open review are the
foundations of science. One watch may always
look right, but that doesn't mean that it is.
Ah, so if the state had not been using paper
ballots there would have been no way to
check the data and so there would have been
no bug, right?
If you can't get it right when there is a check,
what makes you think you can get it right when
there isn't? If we ever do go to an electronic
voting system, I damned well hope that the
software running on the machine is all open
source.
Garbage collectors don't fix memory leaks, they
fix invalid references to already freed memory
by converting them into dangling references (in
other words memory leaks.)
If you've taken enough time to think about when
your objects need to be destroyed then you are
unlikely to forget to free() your memory (rather
more likely you will free() before you should.)
If you
haven't had that think then garbage collection
really just takes a simple to diagnose problem
and turns it into a really hard to diagnose problem.
Too bad neither of you understood or answered
the actual question. 'I would be protectionist.'
'I would promote free trade.' This isn't about
trade, it is about global corporate power! A
stock answer of campaign finance reform would have
been more useful.
I'm not sure I'd agree about JFK, but then I
haven't really studied Kennedy extensively. I do agree
that some of the most notable US presidents have
been idealists (Jefferson, Lincoln, Johnson and
probably others.)
I don't exactly like populists; I just argue that idealists have a tendency to rock the
boat which isn't exactly good for those who like
the status quo.
But then maybe it is time for a bit of rocking.
I just wish that McCain were on the ballot; I
don't think that Al gives a damn about campaign
finance reform really, or even understands the
danger of the excessive intrusion of corporations
into politics. I think that a president who
cared about the topic could (e.g.) mandate a 20yr moratorium on GMOs. (Campaign finance reform
proper on the other hand can really only originate
from the legislature.)
Probably it is just a semantic disagreement. Someone who is swayed by facts, and truth,
and their opnion, but not by media, money,
nor polls is exactly what I mean by an idealist.
Ah, then you'll probably be voting for Al or one
of the third party candidates.
Personally I don't think that the office of
President is very appropriate for idealists;
populists can get a lot more good done, and
putting an idealist at the head of the
executive branch only leads to trouble.
(Or at least when their idealism is driven by
issues, and not e.g: honor, the net result is
an executive branch that ignores the law that
they are meant to enforce and spends all of
its time trying to change something.)
Shrub on the other hand is very much a populist
(IMHO).
Personally I think I'll vote for Nader. The
guy can't win, but a decent showing will make
him a much more effective demagogue so it isn't
really throwing away a vote. And when it comes
to demagoguery, idealism is *definitely* in.
I'd argue that for a Dem president consensus
building will be essentially a requirement for
for anything to come of their most important
issue. So ruling it out essentially means 'if
you were dumb, what would you think is most
important to be powerless to implement?'
On a parallel note I've been trying to figure
out why the Executive and Legislative branches
have been so much at one another's throats for
the last six years. The only reason that springs
to mind is that of familiarity breeding contempt.
Perhaps since the two parties have started
overlapping so nearly completely in their positions (with the exception of abortion), there
isn't any room left for professional courtesy.
Or perhaps we are losing our manners as a society.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you miss the point. Greed is the grease that lubricates the wheels of innovation. No greed, no innovation. Any innovation that you think you've seen in open source is just an illusion -- developers copying the work of good hard-working capitalists who have preceeded them.
Toungue firmly in cheek of course. History shows that more innovation comes from sharing ideas than has ever come from protecting them. If you haven't yet read it, I strongly recommend 'Guns, Germs and Steel' for a very good perspective on where technology comes from.
Amazing. Back in '92 I went over to Silicon Graphics for three days to port a simulator we were writing for Unisys to the MIPS chip. At the time SGI had one of the first Reality Engine machines in the demo room, and the engineers took us over to look at it and drool at the mouth over the incredible beauty of the real-time 3d displays it could produce.
Back then, no matter how cheap PC's eventually became, I couldn't imagine that kind of liquid photo-realistic 3d ever being affordable.
I'm quite happy to be proven wrong, and be one step closer to photorealistic 3d.
But maturity does. I know 60yr old engineers whom no one listens to because they are immature, unable to control their emotions, and insensitive to the social dynamics of a situation.
Not to imply that they don't have good ideas; some ideas are very good, but a good idea only goes a little way. Getting people to listen to that idea is what is key.
Nim is non-zero sum. In Nim the first person to move can always win. Kind of like in Tic-tac-toe the second person to move can always force a tie.
Actually when you are getting a DOD security clearance, the problem really isn't what is on your record but the difference between what you put on your application form, and whatever they can dig up.
I had a friend in a similar situation who was arrested for PI when he was caught by an officer while he was drunk in a parking lot and peeing on a car. It took almost a year to get his clearance (typical delay at the time was about 3 months), but he did eventually get it.
But you absolutely cannot lie on those forms. Anything you lie about the DOD considers something that you could later be blackmailed about.
For what its worth though I'd avoid government related service anyway. Anything that requires a clearance has to be staffed for maximum need, so if the work is at all cyclic you'll spend half your time sitting on your hands trying to look busy, and the other half working 12 hour days when you really are busy. But since nothing can be contracted out, and you can't actually hire someone and put them to work for 3+ months, the defense contractors really have to hire far ahead of need.
(Or if you are the sort of person who wants to work for the DOD because you want to know what is really going on, and think that getting a clearance will let you in on it all; don't waste your time. In five years of working on classified and unclassified programs the data was always just as boring either way. Some vehicle is going to launch on some day, into some specific orbit. Who cares.)
Dude, you know you can get rid of that '-1' rating just by getting a new account don't you?
Why I bother using local mail filters *WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD I'M NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE* and don't want to see it in my mailbox period?
I just consider it pragmatic. Why not dump someone's mail if you have already told them that you aren't interested in their mail. It is a lot easier to just stop it than get upset over it.
Invest some time in learning about local mail filters. Why bother unsubscribing from a thousand different mailing lists, each with its own interface when you can simply refuse mail from their domain or mail that matches any regular expression in any header field.
If you aren't running your own mail server you might not get the total satisfaction of giving them an SMTP protocol error, but dropping their mail unceremoniously into a bit bucket is certainly still worthwhile.
The penalty for violating the terms of the GPL are specified in the GPL. Specifically you are prohibited from ever distributing any GPL'd software in the future.
Historically that has been sufficiently motivating to get companies to comply with the terms of the GPL without the need for a court order.
<soapbox>
About 30 years ago an upstart operating system called UNIX came up with a solution to all of the problems with two threads of control that are running simultaneously trying to get access to the same resources. Threads have race conditions, require synchronization primitives to avoid stepping on eachother's toes or access inconsistent data structures, and when out of control can modify data owned by other threads bringing the whole system down in a heap.
The brilliant innovation of UNIX was to seperate threads into seperate processes, each with its own stack and data and memory barriers between processes so that no process should have to be completely dependent on the good behavior of another process.
Since that innovation limited the interoperability of processes, UNIX also invented a series of interprocess communication tools including pipes, sockets, and explicitly shared memory. Together these tools have greatly simplified and are probably even responsible for popularizing multi-processing.
So why are we ignoring these fine inventions?
Because Microsoft is unable to implement an efficient multi-processing environment, threading is the only way to efficiently handle multiple simultaneous requests under Windows NT. I think that this limitation has made threading using no memory protection, and no IPC, into a fashionable approach for 'efficiency' and 'performance'.
But is that really a good idea? Computers these days are extremely fast; so that even VMs like Java are often considered sufficiently fast for use in real projects. Under those circumstances, wouldn't it be better to avoid multi-threading in favor of multi-processing? Isn't it really debugging that takes the most time, so that losing a bit of performance for a massive increase in reliability should be an acceptable tradeoff?
</soapbox>
Submitted for your consideration. There are obviously technologies that don't work well in a multi-processing environment; CORBA for example depends heavily on threads, as does Java (running a single JVM is bad enough; can you imagine running a whole array of them one for each thread?) But I do think that people underestimate the value of Processes and IPC and often choose Threads when they are highly inappropriate.
Strangely enough jsse is really only echoing the message that Sun presented at keynote during the last JavaONE conference. It was completely depressing.
No longer, this is the great stuff we're going to be doing; here are the exciting new features. Instead last JavaONE all we got was 'don't complain about Java, cause it is making all of you rich.'
Utter crap.
Luckily Java is larger than Sun, and even if it weren't there is a lot more of interest happening in the Sun Community extension processes than you might know if you don't follow them.
So here is my battle cry: Lets try new, INTERESTING, things, and lets do them in the Linux context. Lets not break everything by changing something. Lets try providing extensions to Linux, and see how they work out. If they don't work out well (because they are inelegant, not because they are unused), then rip them out. If they work out well, keep them in, and start using them.
Dude, if you want to try new interesting things, please be our guest. Just don't insist that everyone else who has more need of stable, well tested, and useful than faster, slicker, more spoo use it too.
No, the right to resell something you own is called the doctrine of first sale.
After reading the EULA for Quake 3 I was so incensed that I drafted and mailed a statement denying my aquiescence to the contract to both Loki and to a friend who could witness that I did my best to show that I do not accept the terms stated in the EULA if it ever came to a legal proceeding.
I consider that having paid for the product, that I own it; and if someone tries to modify that ownership after it has already been alienated by including the text of a contract in the box that states among other things that I won't ever sell the product to someone else, there isn't any reason at all that I should accept that contract.
I made it completely clear in my letter that I do not accept the contract, and I urge anyone else who feels the same to send a similar message.
Interestingly, I did eventually get a mail back from Loki with some free legal advice, so I wrote back a reply reiterating my argument, stating that I did not accept their argument, and that I was willing to test our difference of opinion in court if necessary.
But I mostly did that because Q3A is the most onerous of EULAs I have ever seen. Other EULAs leave a lot to be desired, but they don't usually take away basic rights that you have in owning the copyrighted material and grant you nothing in return.
(Loki tried to argue that by using the product I had to agree to the license. But use of a product is not a protected copy right, so I disagree with their argument; I am fully within my rights to use a copyrighted work, whether I've agreed to a contract or not. IMHO, of course. IANAL.)
I live in Hayward which is definitely working class, but not unsafe. Crime here may be higher than Fremont to the south (I haven't looked at statistics, but that seems to be the general feeling), but that is probably more due to Fremont having a really massive police force than anything wrong with Hayward.
The commute isn't particularly good though unless you can commute by rail (either to the city ~30m on Bart, or Santa Clara/San Jose ~35m on Amtrak); the east shore freeway and bridges are all parking lots.
Median home price in Hayward I'd guess to be about $300k, maybe $350k, but the neighborhoods are really quite varied. I live up in the hills just north of CSU-Hayward which has a nice 5 mile green trail loop up into the hills, and several hundred acres of Garin Regional Wilderness and Pioneer Creek Preserve with more hiking trails. My wife and I tend to get out on the trails on our horses every couple of weeks with a picnic lunch or something, and look down on the valley and bay with great appreciation to be up above the smog, endless buildings, and busy streets.
Two or three years ago you could have gotten a townhouse south of mission in SF for reasonably cheap if the city is more your style, but the city is becoming gentrified extremely quickly so I don't think that is entirely possible any longer.
I guess if I were looking for a place on the peninsula I'd probably look in one of the areas that has a reputation for being dangerous, but is in a really key location where the situation is bound to improve in the next couple of years. Then work with local government to insist that it does improve.
No one wants to move in to a dangerous neighborhood, but then two years later, SOMA is suddenly the hot spot to live in.
Ah well, it is hard to predict.
Berkeley also has great food (Zachary's is IMHO the best deep-dish pizza in the bay area) as does San Francisco, and there are a few good places scattered around San Jose (Rangoli is my favorite Indian restaurant in the whole Bay Area.)
Mostly though I like the brew pubs. The bay area has a huge number of microbreweries, many with tied pubs.
I've lived in the SF Bay Area for 13 years now and I can very much agree that the '.com' crowd have had a negative impact on the region.
Having multi-millionaires move in next door bragging about their stock options has had a somewhat unpleasant impact on my little street (we're normally a very neighborly crowd; summer block parties, etc, but that doesn't seem to mix well with niveau riche.) And the outrageous housing prices are almost intolerable for anyone who isn't already in a home.
But it isn't all negative. Before the net gained its preeminent importance the valley was already a great place to work. There is a culture here that encourages people to move from job to job spreading technology and ideas much faster than would otherwise be possible.
Rather than have to work 20 years on writing and maintaining a single project you are free to move around and find the projects that are most interesting to you, in the part of their life cycle that is most interesting. In 13 years I've worked on half a dozen projects myself, and I'm a relatively stationary person.
And the projects themselves can be stunningly interesting. I was able to work with CORBA in its infancy, I've worked on distributed applications development from the time I moved out here, and got my first Internet account back in '88.
The only real key to living here is to get a place out of the rat race where you can spend evenings and weekends without thinking about technology. The local music scene is excellent, the symphony is excellent, there are lots of museums, it is easy to get to the theatre for an evenings entertainment, and there are still affordable places to live if you are willing to be a bit adventurous.
So maybe the sense of community is getting lost, and that is certainly a hard thing to rebuild, and something that frequently bothers me; but I wouldn't write us off just yet.
Yeah, and Kentucky uses mechanical voting machines as well. There was a rumor when I lived there that a couple of folks in Madison county were able to get one of their voting machines to work with the back open.
I wouldn't say that the inability to double check makes me more confident though. More precisely, I do not believe in the cute:
Man with one watch always know what time it is.
Man with two watches never sure.
Repeatability and open review are the foundations of science. One watch may always look right, but that doesn't mean that it is.
Ah, so if the state had not been using paper ballots there would have been no way to check the data and so there would have been no bug, right?
If you can't get it right when there is a check, what makes you think you can get it right when there isn't? If we ever do go to an electronic voting system, I damned well hope that the software running on the machine is all open source.
Garbage collectors don't fix memory leaks, they fix invalid references to already freed memory by converting them into dangling references (in other words memory leaks.)
If you've taken enough time to think about when your objects need to be destroyed then you are unlikely to forget to free() your memory (rather more likely you will free() before you should.) If you haven't had that think then garbage collection really just takes a simple to diagnose problem and turns it into a really hard to diagnose problem.
Re question 7.
Too bad neither of you understood or answered the actual question. 'I would be protectionist.' 'I would promote free trade.' This isn't about trade, it is about global corporate power! A stock answer of campaign finance reform would have been more useful.
I don't exactly like populists; I just argue that idealists have a tendency to rock the boat which isn't exactly good for those who like the status quo.
But then maybe it is time for a bit of rocking. I just wish that McCain were on the ballot; I don't think that Al gives a damn about campaign finance reform really, or even understands the danger of the excessive intrusion of corporations into politics. I think that a president who cared about the topic could (e.g.) mandate a 20yr moratorium on GMOs. (Campaign finance reform proper on the other hand can really only originate from the legislature.)
Ah, then you'll probably be voting for Al or one of the third party candidates.
Personally I don't think that the office of President is very appropriate for idealists; populists can get a lot more good done, and putting an idealist at the head of the executive branch only leads to trouble. (Or at least when their idealism is driven by issues, and not e.g: honor, the net result is an executive branch that ignores the law that they are meant to enforce and spends all of its time trying to change something.)
Shrub on the other hand is very much a populist (IMHO).
Personally I think I'll vote for Nader. The guy can't win, but a decent showing will make him a much more effective demagogue so it isn't really throwing away a vote. And when it comes to demagoguery, idealism is *definitely* in.
On a parallel note I've been trying to figure out why the Executive and Legislative branches have been so much at one another's throats for the last six years. The only reason that springs to mind is that of familiarity breeding contempt. Perhaps since the two parties have started overlapping so nearly completely in their positions (with the exception of abortion), there isn't any room left for professional courtesy.
Or perhaps we are losing our manners as a society.