Everytime Firefox has a major release, they break all old extensions. People either update/re-write their extensions or they don't work anymore.
That's not really the fault of XUL, though. Most of the problems with updating could be avoided with a simple one-line edit to the install.rdf file in extensions. 99% of the time an extension has stopped working with a new version of Firefox, changing the maxversion tag to read something higher will fix the problem right away.
Of course, the memory leaks are a more serious issue. If those can be done away with by changing to gadgets, then that's great.
That's your argument? That a person is doing the button pushing? That's fucking idiotic.
Hey let me as stupid as you are: since they vote electronically, it's a computer that's making the decision. There.
Duh.
No, it's the person doing the voting. That's the whole point. You can be as obtuse about this as you want to be, but the fact remains that human beings are in the U.N., not abstract countries. And the functions of U.N. representatives go quite a bit beyond "button pushing". Any asswipe can push a button. That's only part of what U.N. representatives do.
This whole thread started because you suggested that representatives in the U.N. were not members of it. My contention is that a delegation to the U.N. is in fact, a member. That's because it's only human beings that can do any of the things that U.N. members do. They do them on behalf of the nations they represent, but that doesn't make them mindless button pushers.
This will be my last response to this topic. You obviously refuse to understand, which fortunately, isn't my problem.
It's not a matter of liking it or not liking it. As a practical matter, people vote, not countries. People represent the countries they're voting for, but it's people that do the voting. No amount of set theory can get around the fact that when a vote is cast at the UN, in a very concrete, literal way, it's a person doing it. In an abstract sense, the country is voting, but in a literal sense, it's that person doing it on behalf of his/her country. There's a difference between representing something and being that thing.
Here's some video of the U.N. Notice in the beginning of the video where repeated reference is made to the representative from Iraq, not simply "Iraq". The difference is non-trivial.
Set theory has nothing to do with this.
The reason that countries cannot be members of organizations that vote is because countries cannot speak. Individuals vote, not countries. It's civics, not set theory.
Spend a little time watching C-SPAN. When members of the House are casting their votes, they cast their vote one way or the other, not their respective districts. In a representative government, individuals are elected to represent a region. The region itself does not vote. An individual may represent a set of people, but it it still that individual that is casting the vote.
Again, countries cannot be members of organizations in any rational sense. A piece of territory cannot vote or make a decision. It's the people within a territory that can do that. You should not confuse the way people talk about what's going on with what's going on in reality. (That is, unless pieces of territory can speak in your reality.)
Unfortunately, it's not blindingly obvious that they only have immunity from having their records seized. 2(b) (which they gained protection from under Reagan) says:
(b) International organizations, their property and their assets, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy the same immunity from suit and every form of Judicial process as is enjoyed by foreign governments, except to the extent that such organizations may expressly waive their immunity for the purpose of any proceedings or by the terms of any contract.
Notice, the act protects the organization, as well as the property and assets, "from suit and every form of Judicial process".
Now, as others have pointed out, it looks as though INTERPOL doesn't have any agents in the U.S. The only people stationed in the U.S. associated with INTERPOL are American law enforcement. But that doesn't mean that this will never be an issue. INTERPOL has a huge government bureaucracy, which can be seen here. How much immunity the people that constitute this bureaucracy have is a legitimate question, is it not?
Again, this isn't about records, because the plain language of the act doesn't limit itself to the organization's records or assets.
I recognize that Obama's order didn't have anything to do with 2(b). But 2(b) does have to do with immunity from prosecution, i.e., "every form of Judicial process".
Again, I'm not saying that Obama did it. I'm simply stating that the law does, in total, grant the immunity.
Let's start with this list of all the ambassadors to the UN that the U.S. has had. As much as it might be cute to refer to the U.N. as an organization composed of countries, it's not. Countries are geographical regions with borders which people inhabit. Countries don't do anything but lie there on the ground and occasionally have their boundaries changed by people fighting over them.
Governments of those countries send people to the U.N. to represent the interests of the governments. The U.N. is not a super-country. It's simply an international political body attempting to negotiate international issues between the governments of nations (those governments, again, being composed of people).
Okay, so if I read this correctly, the only law enforcement officers in the NCB in the US are U.S. citizens, and work for the U.S. That takes care of my objection. Thanks for the information.
Each INTERPOL member country maintains a National Central Bureau staffed by national law enforcement officers. The NCB is the designated contact point for the General Secretariat, regional offices and other member countries requiring assistance with overseas investigations and the location and apprehension of fugitives.
If these agents work for INTERPOL, doesn't this order (and it doesn't really matter whether it was Reagan or Obama who authorized it) give those INTERPOL members immunity?
But the act says that the organization itself enjoys the immunity.
"(b)International organizations, their property and their assets, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy the same immunity from suit and every form of Judicial process".
Wouldn't that extend to members of said organizations? (I'm aware that INTERPOL has no actual policemen, but certainly an organization has to have members, in order to be an organization in the first place.
INTERPOL's own site says:
Each INTERPOL member country maintains a National Central Bureau staffed by national law enforcement officers. The NCB is the designated contact point for the General Secretariat, regional offices and other member countries requiring assistance with overseas investigations and the location and apprehension of fugitives.
The law enforcement officers in the NCB would certainly be considered part of the INTERPOL organization, would they not?
That's where I think there is room for concern with the immunity they're granted under the act.
Reading the article, I would've agreed with you, but if you read the act, you'll see that immunity is what it grants.
(b) International organizations, their property and their assets, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy the same immunity from suit and every form of Judicial process as is enjoyed by foreign governments, except to the extent that such organizations may expressly waive their immunity for the purpose of any proceedings or by the terms of any contract.
As a paraplegic myself (with spina bifida), I'd say that it's not quite a slam dunk that I'd take the cancer risk. It depends on what the increased risk is. Being a paraplegic certainly isn't a roll in the park, but if I had to chose between that and taking a couple of years to die of cancer, I'd take a pass on the cancer. Of course, my willingness to have the treatment would be inversely proportional to that risk, but if the risk of cancer was increased "tremendously", that's not an acceptable risk (to me). I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if I was a quad, though.
Maybe this is what the world needs. God knows I am sick of helping morons who stop windows update from running, even though I set it to "download and install automatically".
Unfortunately, I don't think this will help you. An administrator would never come in contact with this kind of system. Google administers the servers. Anything running Chrome OS is little more than a dumb client.
I think everyone is looking ahead to a point when the desktop and the mobile will merge. As much as smartphones are like trying to read a Reader's Digest condensed version of a novel, but even I find myself using my crappy one more than my desktop. Obviously it's too painful to use for a full-time wordprocessor, but I look at my kids use their's, and I get the feeling it isn't so much an issue of utility as a generational issue.
I don't think it's a generational issue, unless the next generation is going to lose the ability to read and write.
Most kids type very quickly on their cell phones because they're not typing full sentences -- or even full words, in a lot of cases. Anyting you put in your pocket isn't going to be great for text input until one of two things happen:
1) Voice recognition gets to the point where one can dictate flawlessly and have it understood.
Mostly, though, Chrome OS is a clunker because people don't want all their apps to be Web apps on a computer bigger than a cell phone. Yes, something like Google OS could pass okay on a cell phone, because people expect things that light to be on cell phones. But on a laptop? Not so much. A user would be better off with a lightweight Linux version than with Chrome OS, simply because it would be so much more powerful.
Maybe by 2015, when Google expects Chrome OS to be out, Web apps will be a little more serious. But they should've released it closer to then, in that case. Right now, Chrome OS just turns laptops into mobile dumb terminals.
Those criticizing Google should recognize that were Chrome OS an R&D product at any other company, we might hear about it through a few trade shows and blogs, but that would be it, and no sane commentator would be suggesting it be put into production or merged with a production platform.
No sane commentator should be suggesting it be put into production or merged with a production platform. It makes a lot more sense to use Android across the board than it does to use Chrome OS for anything other than dumb terminals with color screens. The goal of a serious OS should be to do more with less, not to do less with less, which is where Chrome OS seems to be.
And if kept open, very very enticing. You could alter your smartphone/desktop in almost limitless ways.
The problem is (at least as things stand right now) Google has no intention of opening up Chrome. In fact, Chrome's design philosophy seems to be the exact opposite of an open system's philosophy. They sacrifice control on the altar of simplicity (e.g., considering even updates to be too complicated for users to deal with).
The whole point of mobile apps is that they're supposed to be for situations where you don't have a lot of hard drive capacity to be holding applications. To condemn laptops to lives as portable dumb terminals makes no sense to me. (And I've tried Chrome OS within VirtualBox, so I have at least some base of reference.) You can get decent battery life without castrating a machine, and local storage gives you a much better experience.
I understand that the current version of Chrome OS isn't how it's going to stay, but the design philosophy itself is absurd. Google should release much more powerful Web apps if they want anyone to take the idea of a laptop Web OS seriously.
And while you're spending your time figuring out why something that isn't broken works, he is coding something that you aren't coding at all. Sure, coding until it passes isn't the ideal, but it's a whole lot better than not coding at all (you).
1) Who says someone who is trying to figure out why something works isn't "coding at all"? What kind of ridiculous assumption is that?
2) The way you find out why something works is by coding. You change the code to test for different conditions. If you find a condition under which the code fails, then you try to figure out why (maybe by entering in different parameters in some kind of systematic way). Does this process take longer? Of course it does, but it's a whole lot better than ascribing the successful output of a program to black magic, which is what you're doing if you don't understand why it works.
At some point, you have to trust that your users aren't morons.
They may not be morons, but they sure are highly unqualified for "administering the phone in the first place" as you put it. Hence, giving them a root access is letting them walk into a minefield.
We're talking about a handheld computer with phone functions, not the space shuttle. How is crippling the user experience appropriate here?
I'm not talking about recompiling the kernel of the OS. But basic things like side-loading applications should be doable out of the box (or at least, without significant effort, and out in the open). The user needs to have ownership of the OS, particularly because that user is the only one responsible for it. (On a phone, you're not dealing with a multi-user system.)
I know that Apple prizes a crash-resistant environment above all else, but sersiously - c'mon... The way iPhones are set up right now reminds me of the way AOL worked in the 90's. Sure, it's dead simple, but it's simple because you can't do a lot of the things you'd be able to do on a system without training wheels. The newer phone OS's (Droid and, to a lesser extent, WebOS) are pointing the way right now in terms of how people want to use their phones. Obviously, Apple's got a serious app advantage in terms of numbers, but they're going to lose that advantage pretty quickly when the better (i.e., more powerful) apps start appearing on other systems. They need to lose their death grip on the applications the phone can run, because they've already taken hits from their reaction to Google Voice and several other apps.
Unsigned apps are encouraged, but I was under the impression that root was another story.
Root access is also encouraged. It's part of the SDK, which Palm makes freely available.
It works like this: Accessing developer mode requires entering either one of two codes from the keyboard (either the konami code, or the newer code that started w/ version 1.1 of the OS). In developer mode you can install unsigned apps.
Root access requires being in developer mode plus the novacomd daemon and novaterm, both of which are supplied by the SDK.
All of these things are freely available from Palm.
Apple absolutely does care what you do with the iPhone. That's why they've updated the ROM in newer 3Gs models to prevent jailbreaking.
Gee, I hope that the OpenSSH guys don't have the gall to forcefully close this valuable way for others to operate your jailbroken iPhone for you.
What the blazes are you talking about, man? OpenSSH allows the user to use ssh and sftp in place of telnet and ftp. Thus, it specifically protects users from others seeing their passwords and other information.
The problem with the way this was implemented on the iPhone is (according to the information about this hack) that it sets a default password for you, and if you don't change it, anyone who knows that default password can get in.
"If Apple was okay with jailbreaking, and just interested in closing security holes, they would work on those holes, rather than on preventing jailbreaking altogether."
Ah, color me confused. Jailbreaking takes place through security holes. If they close the holes, as you suggest, then the phone can no longer be jailbroken. Or are they supposed to leave a backdoor specifically for jailbreaking?
In which case, you've now left a (known) hole in your system for someone (anyone) to exploit.
My position is that there shouldn't be such a concept as "jailbreaking". Users should not feel imprisoned within the iPhone OS. How much more secure does the OS have to be than BSD Unix? That's the base we're really talking about.
The idea that allowing users root access when [i]they're the ones administering the phone in the first place[/i] seems to me to be a huge fallacy. At some point, you have to trust that your users aren't morons.
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That's not really the fault of XUL, though. Most of the problems with updating could be avoided with a simple one-line edit to the install.rdf file in extensions. 99% of the time an extension has stopped working with a new version of Firefox, changing the maxversion tag to read something higher will fix the problem right away.
Of course, the memory leaks are a more serious issue. If those can be done away with by changing to gadgets, then that's great.
That's your argument? That a person is doing the button pushing? That's fucking idiotic.
Hey let me as stupid as you are: since they vote electronically, it's a computer that's making the decision. There.
Duh.
No, it's the person doing the voting. That's the whole point. You can be as obtuse about this as you want to be, but the fact remains that human beings are in the U.N., not abstract countries. And the functions of U.N. representatives go quite a bit beyond "button pushing". Any asswipe can push a button. That's only part of what U.N. representatives do. This whole thread started because you suggested that representatives in the U.N. were not members of it. My contention is that a delegation to the U.N. is in fact, a member. That's because it's only human beings that can do any of the things that U.N. members do. They do them on behalf of the nations they represent, but that doesn't make them mindless button pushers. This will be my last response to this topic. You obviously refuse to understand, which fortunately, isn't my problem.
It's not a matter of liking it or not liking it. As a practical matter, people vote, not countries. People represent the countries they're voting for, but it's people that do the voting. No amount of set theory can get around the fact that when a vote is cast at the UN, in a very concrete, literal way, it's a person doing it. In an abstract sense, the country is voting, but in a literal sense, it's that person doing it on behalf of his/her country. There's a difference between representing something and being that thing. Here's some video of the U.N. Notice in the beginning of the video where repeated reference is made to the representative from Iraq, not simply "Iraq". The difference is non-trivial.
But it must have, since without that, no one would've been any the wiser. ;)
Set theory has nothing to do with this. The reason that countries cannot be members of organizations that vote is because countries cannot speak. Individuals vote, not countries. It's civics, not set theory. Spend a little time watching C-SPAN. When members of the House are casting their votes, they cast their vote one way or the other, not their respective districts. In a representative government, individuals are elected to represent a region. The region itself does not vote. An individual may represent a set of people, but it it still that individual that is casting the vote.
Again, countries cannot be members of organizations in any rational sense. A piece of territory cannot vote or make a decision. It's the people within a territory that can do that. You should not confuse the way people talk about what's going on with what's going on in reality. (That is, unless pieces of territory can speak in your reality.)
Notice, the act protects the organization, as well as the property and assets, "from suit and every form of Judicial process". Now, as others have pointed out, it looks as though INTERPOL doesn't have any agents in the U.S. The only people stationed in the U.S. associated with INTERPOL are American law enforcement. But that doesn't mean that this will never be an issue. INTERPOL has a huge government bureaucracy, which can be seen here. How much immunity the people that constitute this bureaucracy have is a legitimate question, is it not? Again, this isn't about records, because the plain language of the act doesn't limit itself to the organization's records or assets.
I recognize that Obama's order didn't have anything to do with 2(b). But 2(b) does have to do with immunity from prosecution, i.e., "every form of Judicial process". Again, I'm not saying that Obama did it. I'm simply stating that the law does, in total, grant the immunity.
Let's start with this list of all the ambassadors to the UN that the U.S. has had. As much as it might be cute to refer to the U.N. as an organization composed of countries, it's not. Countries are geographical regions with borders which people inhabit. Countries don't do anything but lie there on the ground and occasionally have their boundaries changed by people fighting over them.
Governments of those countries send people to the U.N. to represent the interests of the governments. The U.N. is not a super-country. It's simply an international political body attempting to negotiate international issues between the governments of nations (those governments, again, being composed of people).
Okay, so if I read this correctly, the only law enforcement officers in the NCB in the US are U.S. citizens, and work for the U.S. That takes care of my objection. Thanks for the information.
If these agents work for INTERPOL, doesn't this order (and it doesn't really matter whether it was Reagan or Obama who authorized it) give those INTERPOL members immunity?
The law enforcement officers in the NCB would certainly be considered part of the INTERPOL organization, would they not? That's where I think there is room for concern with the immunity they're granted under the act.
What? I'm a whackjob that believes in the Illuminati as a secret, nefarious society because I can read and quote the act?
That sure sounds pretty cut and dried to me.
As a paraplegic myself (with spina bifida), I'd say that it's not quite a slam dunk that I'd take the cancer risk. It depends on what the increased risk is. Being a paraplegic certainly isn't a roll in the park, but if I had to chose between that and taking a couple of years to die of cancer, I'd take a pass on the cancer. Of course, my willingness to have the treatment would be inversely proportional to that risk, but if the risk of cancer was increased "tremendously", that's not an acceptable risk (to me). I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if I was a quad, though.
Maybe this is what the world needs. God knows I am sick of helping morons who stop windows update from running, even though I set it to "download and install automatically".
Unfortunately, I don't think this will help you. An administrator would never come in contact with this kind of system. Google administers the servers. Anything running Chrome OS is little more than a dumb client.
I think everyone is looking ahead to a point when the desktop and the mobile will merge. As much as smartphones are like trying to read a Reader's Digest condensed version of a novel, but even I find myself using my crappy one more than my desktop. Obviously it's too painful to use for a full-time wordprocessor, but I look at my kids use their's, and I get the feeling it isn't so much an issue of utility as a generational issue.
I don't think it's a generational issue, unless the next generation is going to lose the ability to read and write.
Most kids type very quickly on their cell phones because they're not typing full sentences -- or even full words, in a lot of cases. Anyting you put in your pocket isn't going to be great for text input until one of two things happen:
1) Voice recognition gets to the point where one can dictate flawlessly and have it understood.
2) Projection keyboards like this get cheaper.
Mostly, though, Chrome OS is a clunker because people don't want all their apps to be Web apps on a computer bigger than a cell phone. Yes, something like Google OS could pass okay on a cell phone, because people expect things that light to be on cell phones. But on a laptop? Not so much. A user would be better off with a lightweight Linux version than with Chrome OS, simply because it would be so much more powerful.
Maybe by 2015, when Google expects Chrome OS to be out, Web apps will be a little more serious. But they should've released it closer to then, in that case. Right now, Chrome OS just turns laptops into mobile dumb terminals.
Those criticizing Google should recognize that were Chrome OS an R&D product at any other company, we might hear about it through a few trade shows and blogs, but that would be it, and no sane commentator would be suggesting it be put into production or merged with a production platform.
No sane commentator should be suggesting it be put into production or merged with a production platform. It makes a lot more sense to use Android across the board than it does to use Chrome OS for anything other than dumb terminals with color screens. The goal of a serious OS should be to do more with less, not to do less with less, which is where Chrome OS seems to be.
And if kept open, very very enticing. You could alter your smartphone/desktop in almost limitless ways.
The problem is (at least as things stand right now) Google has no intention of opening up Chrome. In fact, Chrome's design philosophy seems to be the exact opposite of an open system's philosophy. They sacrifice control on the altar of simplicity (e.g., considering even updates to be too complicated for users to deal with).
...no one should be asking.
The whole point of mobile apps is that they're supposed to be for situations where you don't have a lot of hard drive capacity to be holding applications. To condemn laptops to lives as portable dumb terminals makes no sense to me. (And I've tried Chrome OS within VirtualBox, so I have at least some base of reference.) You can get decent battery life without castrating a machine, and local storage gives you a much better experience.
I understand that the current version of Chrome OS isn't how it's going to stay, but the design philosophy itself is absurd. Google should release much more powerful Web apps if they want anyone to take the idea of a laptop Web OS seriously.
And while you're spending your time figuring out why something that isn't broken works, he is coding something that you aren't coding at all. Sure, coding until it passes isn't the ideal, but it's a whole lot better than not coding at all (you).
1) Who says someone who is trying to figure out why something works isn't "coding at all"? What kind of ridiculous assumption is that?
2) The way you find out why something works is by coding. You change the code to test for different conditions. If you find a condition under which the code fails, then you try to figure out why (maybe by entering in different parameters in some kind of systematic way). Does this process take longer? Of course it does, but it's a whole lot better than ascribing the successful output of a program to black magic, which is what you're doing if you don't understand why it works.
At some point, you have to trust that your users aren't morons.
They may not be morons, but they sure are highly unqualified for "administering the phone in the first place" as you put it. Hence, giving them a root access is letting them walk into a minefield.
We're talking about a handheld computer with phone functions, not the space shuttle. How is crippling the user experience appropriate here?
I'm not talking about recompiling the kernel of the OS. But basic things like side-loading applications should be doable out of the box (or at least, without significant effort, and out in the open). The user needs to have ownership of the OS, particularly because that user is the only one responsible for it. (On a phone, you're not dealing with a multi-user system.) I know that Apple prizes a crash-resistant environment above all else, but sersiously - c'mon... The way iPhones are set up right now reminds me of the way AOL worked in the 90's. Sure, it's dead simple, but it's simple because you can't do a lot of the things you'd be able to do on a system without training wheels. The newer phone OS's (Droid and, to a lesser extent, WebOS) are pointing the way right now in terms of how people want to use their phones. Obviously, Apple's got a serious app advantage in terms of numbers, but they're going to lose that advantage pretty quickly when the better (i.e., more powerful) apps start appearing on other systems. They need to lose their death grip on the applications the phone can run, because they've already taken hits from their reaction to Google Voice and several other apps.
For unsigned apps or for root?
Unsigned apps are encouraged, but I was under the impression that root was another story.
Root access is also encouraged. It's part of the SDK, which Palm makes freely available.
It works like this: Accessing developer mode requires entering either one of two codes from the keyboard (either the konami code, or the newer code that started w/ version 1.1 of the OS). In developer mode you can install unsigned apps.
Root access requires being in developer mode plus the novacomd daemon and novaterm, both of which are supplied by the SDK.
All of these things are freely available from Palm.
Apple absolutely does care what you do with the iPhone. That's why they've updated the ROM in newer 3Gs models to prevent jailbreaking.
Gee, I hope that the OpenSSH guys don't have the gall to forcefully close this valuable way for others to operate your jailbroken iPhone for you.
What the blazes are you talking about, man? OpenSSH allows the user to use ssh and sftp in place of telnet and ftp. Thus, it specifically protects users from others seeing their passwords and other information. The problem with the way this was implemented on the iPhone is (according to the information about this hack) that it sets a default password for you, and if you don't change it, anyone who knows that default password can get in.
"If Apple was okay with jailbreaking, and just interested in closing security holes, they would work on those holes, rather than on preventing jailbreaking altogether."
Ah, color me confused. Jailbreaking takes place through security holes. If they close the holes, as you suggest, then the phone can no longer be jailbroken. Or are they supposed to leave a backdoor specifically for jailbreaking?
In which case, you've now left a (known) hole in your system for someone (anyone) to exploit.
My position is that there shouldn't be such a concept as "jailbreaking". Users should not feel imprisoned within the iPhone OS. How much more secure does the OS have to be than BSD Unix? That's the base we're really talking about.
The idea that allowing users root access when [i]they're the ones administering the phone in the first place[/i] seems to me to be a huge fallacy. At some point, you have to trust that your users aren't morons.