Re:Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler mor
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Hibernate in Action
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No offense, but the Prevayler site is pretty lame. I'm quite sure it's fast, but anybody who's written an in-memory system before knows that. Whenever your working data set is small enough to fit in memory, and your transactionality requirements force you to serialize processing at the application level anyway, your performance will be much better with a simple object-in-memory design.
Anyway, the point is the site doesn't do anything to elucidate the limitations on ACID compliance, querying capabilities, etc. that you would expect from an object database system. Hell, they don't even seem to recognize that Prevayler is just a limited subset of an object database system (i.e. a memory-resident one). I'm glad somebody has written a reusable chunk of code to do this and all, but I wish the people doing it were more aware of the theory behind databases, and what trade-off decisions they were actually making so they could better document and explain them to their users.
Anyway, if you are just comparing it to MySQL (hehe) I'm sure there are lots of great use cases for Prevayler, but when you compare it to a real RDBMS and look at real enterprise application usage scenarios, it's a bit of a different situation.
The ONLY reason this took so long is Sun was unwilling to add language features until C# forced them to. Real Java developers have been arguing for Generics since... well, since they first had to work in Java. Yes, Java is not a fun language to work in as Paul Graham aptly points out, because it takes into account the balance between developer features and code consistency/readability. I can sit down at almost anybody's Java code and comprehend it far faster than I can your average chunk of C++ that's been "spruced up" with lots of spiffy language features, for example.
Anyway, a bit of syntactic sugar does tip the balance away from "here's the one way of doing things" which made large Java projects easy to manage and to ramp up new developers on (relatively speaking), but if it saves a substantial amount of typing time and energy with minimal readability sacrificed, it's probably worth it. And Generics are just necessary, in my opinion, since you end up using too many non-typesafe constructs in Java that open things up to runtime errors.
The only thing on this list that I'm not sure how I feel about is the boxing/unboxing thing. I don't know if I like the idea of autoboxing, since it can create hard-to-track-down performance issues with object allocation. But I guess people liked it enough in C# that it was deemed a worthwhile tradeoff.
Re:flamebait
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Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, I think some people might be trying to help Java compete on the desktop. Have you heard of SWT and Eclipse? It does have IBM behind it. I agree that Sun seriously dropped the ball with desktop Java for years, so nobody used it for that. As for developing desktop apps in C++, yes Visual Studio 6 was a very solid choice. Is VS.NET as good? Many people seem to think not. I haven't spent enough time with it to know, and don't really have the desire to.
Re:All in it together
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Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, but are you sure it's stepping you in the right direction?
Agreed, the SA8000 boxes do suck, but so do the Pioneer boxes. Unfortunately, for most of us who live in Manhattan (i.e. big apartment buildings, no satellite option available unless you have a terrace with unblocked southern exposure like my buddy over on West End Ave.), cable in the only option, and generally most buildings are cable monopoly by building. So if you don't like your cable company you can always just buy a new apartment for a cool few mil.:) In my case, I've decided to just live with Time Warner.
So I'm stuck with this POS Pioneer HD box attached to my otherwise excellent 60" Grand Wega III LCD RP set. I also have my Tivo attached, so I can switch between Tivo mode and direct box access for HD viewing. I generally don't leave the Pioneer box tuned to HD channels overnight because it has a tendency to freeze and require a reboot every few days if it's left tuned to HD. Yup, it thoroughly sucks. What I want: HD Tivo box with CableCard support, so I can ditch this Time Warner equipment for equipment. When is it coming Tivo? Where's the innovation guys?
That's all nice, but nobody around here wants to hear it. I don't care if you support Bush's foreign policy or not, John Ashcroft is far and away the worst human being in the Bush administration and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near my country's federal government. I don't give a shit about the election he lost in Missouri, I care about the devastation this guy wants to wreak on my nation and our freedoms. If you were even half a true conservative (not one of the sickening fascist authoritarian new Republicans), you'd agree with me and wouldn't bother lifting a finger to defend this man when people make admittedly snide, off-handed criticisms of him.
To be fair, a corporation is obliged to their shareholders to protect their trademarks, since if they don't, they stand to lose rights to them. Now, agreed, this is a parody which should be protected, but according to many other posters, this item was too deceptively similar to a real CNN story, and 95% of the HTML was verbatim copied from CNN, and apparently there was no obvious notice or demarcation of the parody itself.
The rights to parody are limited. Before you run a parody of a large, popular brand on the public internet, perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the law and jurisprudence on parody rights. But hey, what do you expect from one of these right wing blogger nutjobs?
And add to that a disclaimer on the bottom of the page indicating that it's a parody - the same thing that magazines will often to do distinguish a parody as such from their normal content (unless they happen to be a humor magazine where the content can be assumed to be parody). Yes, parody should be an affirmative defense to trademark infringement (although copyright infringement is less clear, I believe the protection parody provides in that case is substantially weaker). But no, that doesn't just mean you can do whatever you want and say it's a parody.
Given that I can't see the original page in question here since it's been taken down again, it's hard to say much about it definitively. But I stand by the guy's rights to run an appropriately labelled parody, even if he is a right wing fucknut.
You are clearly trolling since nobody said anything about the spammer getting spammed or lex talionis.
I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to your out of context post, but the reason that we consider raping the rapist to be morally bankrupt is that rape is an awful violation of somebody's human rights, even if that person has themselves committed that crime. Spam, while an annoyance and a pain in the ass, is not a violation of human rights, just a negative externality (and one I certainly despise). So the point is that when a thief gets something stolen from him or a spammer gets spammed, it's not comparable to a rapist being raped. As to the effectiveness as a means of prophylaxis or rehabilitation, I'm not sure that ANY means of punishment have been shown to be effective in those ways.
While I agree with most of what you say, I reached the opposite conclusion. The Treo 600 has some annoying issues, but is still the best SmartPhone on the market. Yes, the P900 comes closest, but it can't really compete with Palm OS for usability, application availability and power/simplicity balance.
The one thing the P900 does well is BT, which is nice, but with the Treo 600 my need for BT is much more limited, since the data capabilities are quite excellent, and the thumb keyboard makes real email, SMS and IM applications usable. Yes the GPRS battery suck problem is an issue, so I let it disconnect when it's not being used, since reconnection takes a pretty trivial amount of time. I have almost never used enough data in one day to suck the battery dry, I think it's happened to me twice. Yes, it is fishy that I can use the thing for 3 or 4 days of regular voice use without needing a recharge, and one to two days with modest data use, max, but this is a small compromise to make for the power of this phone.
Hopefully Palm One will continue to offer their upgrade program in the future so I can get the promised improved battery life and bluetooth in the Treo 650 for a reasonable price. Then my life would be truly complete. I just hope Palm keeps delivering, so I don't have to stoop to getting a Symbian device... ugh.
Well, everybody around here bitches all the time that their elected representatives only pay attention to people who give them money. So moral opinions on the issue aside, I figure I might as well give some money so I can do some good.
But yes, it is fucked that just being a constituent doesn't give you as much voice as somebody who gives lots of money in campaign contributions, but that's the way it is.
Right, we need some sort of trust mechanism much better than "how many people are linking to this page". It's pretty easy to see how gameable Google is - there's no reason people won't try to game semantic content to push their products and services as well.
In fact, it seems like the trust problem isn't that different at all, perhaps the only real difference is that with the WWW, you get to look at every page yourself and make the judgment call, "does this look like a scammer, are there lots of blink tags or mismatched colors and large text, or fake 'search engine' results?" If so, you ignore it and move on to the next result. With the semantic web, you are relying on an agent to make inferences for you, so it needs to be able to make those assessments in at least a semi-automated fashion.
Even the Greeks thought their own system sucked. Our founders tried to form the best system they could based on the model of the Republic, pre-Imperium Rome, and ancient Greece. They mostly did a pretty good job of it too, with a few exceptions.
Has anybody else noticed that the more destructive to the common good a piece of legislation is, the more likely it is to be slickly marketed, known by a friendly acronym, sometimes one with hokey or friendly connotations, or just an unassuming set of letters, or associated with a person with positive connotations to cover up the bills real intentions? Take, for example, the PATRIOT Act. Real patriotic stuff there. We don't agree on much here on Slashdot, but I think almost all agree that this piece of turd is a real loser (see Bush's insanely lame defense of it tonight, and even Kerry pretty much admitted that he and the rest of the senate were misled on this one, and that he supports a few good pieces of it, but feels it's too easily abused).
Then there's the DMCA, also known as the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act". Well hell, it's got digital and millenium in it, so it must be good, right? INDUCE - oh well that one actually sounds a bit scary, but I guess that's because those dangerous VCR manufacturers just won't stop "inducing" us all to violate copyright.
This this winner has something called the CREATE Act (what do you bet this doesn't have anything to do with reforming copyright legislation to encourage actual creativity, and rather protects the vested interests of large media conglomerates). And the PDEA, aka "Pirace Deterrence and Education Act (Pirates bad, Education good, must be a good bill), and the PIRATE Act (Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act) - well, it's pretty clear that anybody who opposes this must be a pirate, since the bill tells you so right there.
Notice how it was the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act" (well, it must be for the benefit of nice artists if it's got Sonny Bono's name on it), not the "Eliminate the Commons Constitutional Vandalism Act". It's sad that this stuff gets packaged and marketed this way.
Then when something actually in the public interest comes around, like getting rid of spyware, it's just the "Internet Spyware Prevention Act", no slick marketing labels, no crazy acronyms, there's really not much to say because it actually speaks for itself, and deals with one specific issue that is actually in our interest to deal with.
Ya know, I care about this issue more than almost anybody. I give money to organizations like the EFF and try to find candidates with reasonable policies on these IP issues. Mind you, this is generally impossible, so I just give more money to the EFF and make calls for the SaveBetamax campaign, especially to my own Senator's office. Heck, I'm even planning on giving him some money so my opinion has some validity.
I am a software industry veteran, and I consider myself an activist for copyright reform. And I can't even keep track of these bills, get up to speed on the issues and be on top of things fast enough before they roll out another one. This is attrition tactics by the media industry - they know that eventually, they'll slip one through right before a big holiday weekend when nobody's paying attention, or when some news story in their favor came out the week before. If they just keep getting their shills to propose these bills, like feces thrown at a wall, eventually something will stick.
I want to find candidates to vote for and promote who have reasonable IP policies that promote a balance between a business' right to make money on its investment and the interest of the commons and the citizenry, but it's pretty hard to find these candidates. I know a lot of us here give money to the EFF, but where is this money going? Besides Rep. Boucher of VA, what friends do we have on Capitol Hill, and how do we make more?
Maybe we need to be approaching people earlier on in their political careers, and running broader grass roots campaigns to bring public attention to copyright issues with issues of broad interest like the attempts to kill your right to tape shows in your own house, or the death of our heritage of freely available songs and characters in the form of a cultural commons, which have fueled the imaginations of artists throughout this century, only to be killed by the businesses built on those artists' work.
I accept that copyright law is never going to be of as immediate concern as health insurance, skyrocketing medical costs, nuclear proliferation, rising unemployment and thousands of people dying in war. But we need to make people realize that this is an issue of interest to all of us and that while we are worrying about those immediate problems facing us, certain industries are cynically trying to slip through legislation against the public interest in the hopes that we are too distracted to take action against them.
AOL releases a branded version of IE. AOL, definitely evil.
Look, AOL is a big fucking company. They are going to do lots of good and evil things, because there are lots of people making decisions at different levels of the company. Do they have a coherent browser strategy? Not really. Have they tromped on the corpse of Netscape? Definitely.
There's finally a good browser based on Gecko (Firefox) and they've basically abandoned the Netscape browser. But AOL is just dealing with the reality of who their user base is and what they expect (the trailing edge of the Internet revolution, if you will - these people think IE is great, and will think a better IE is even better). And for all I know there may still be deals in place keeping them working with MS on the browser front - for a long time they were locked into that deal to get pre-installed AOL with Windows. Also, I wouldn't be shocked to see an AOL-branded or Netscape-branded version of Firefox come down the pipe 4 or 5 months from now too (post 1.0, of course).
As for the rest of us, let's just enjoy the cool shit that AOL occasionally produces, and continue to ignore the rest of the crap that will invariably come out of them.
This looks like it's supported by a number of industry players, and the specification is under a real patent-right-granting, royalty-free license, not like the junk that MS occasionally tries to "innovate" the market with. I'm not saying it will sweep the world or replace all the SNMP devices out there, but I'll give them an A for effort to play nicely on this one.
People are more likely to adopt standards that they can implement without getting sued or shelling out large quantities of money to be allowed to adhere to. Despite the comments about the protocol being heavier than SNMP (TCP based, SOAP envelopes, etc.) I think there are cases where a richer, more extensible XML-based syntax would be nice for this kind of application. Or maybe SNMP is "good enough" that adoption will be limited (hard to say without reading the whole spec and comparing), but I don't think crapping on it just because it's Microsoft is fair, at least during those rare moments when they are playing well with others.
I tend to agree. It just makes them look like an oppressed victim of an overzealous right-wing government (which they are), instead of a whiny radical left wing semi-news outlet (which they also are).
This is a good question. What was the implication? I understand that liberals may dislike Republicans, but do they think Republican delegates, those who hold an honorary position serving the Republican National Convention, deserve to die or be injured (the way radical antiabortionists *DO* think about abortion providers, as has been documented on quite a few occasions through their actions). I know I'm liberal, but I find the idea of hurting Republican convention delegates very distasteful. Which leads me to question exactly what these names and addresses are intended to be used for anyway.
This is a grey area - on the one hand, you are serving in a (nominal) party position, and thus the idea of keeping your identity secret seems distasteful. On the other hand, posting people's home addresses in this _context_ doesn't serve any clear public interest, and I can't imagine a use for that much information other than for purposes of threats or intimidation. And I don't support the right of any website to incite threats or intimidation (uhh... unless it's against the executives of SCO, in that case, well, they are evil enough to deserve it).
While this is true, read Plato sometime. It's pretty clear that the ancient Greeks, who (at least in the aristocratic circles) practiced homosexual acts among otherwise "heterosexual" men, still had a concept that some guys were fundamentally more homosexual in that they actually exclusively enjoyed or practiced homosexual sex, or saw it as more than just a bonding ritual between men. And such men were open to ridicule as being, well, "girlie men" to borrow Schwarzenegger's phrase.
Obviously the modern construct of homosexuality is just a manifestation of the Christian construct. In any Judeo-Christian culture, it's tough to be "somewhat gay" because of that (this obviously has changed in recent years in more liberal places like New York City, where bisexuality has even been the vogue at times). Obviously the stereotype of certain characteristics is a modern construct, but the association of feminizing characteristics with homosexual behavior doesn't seem very new at all. Certain patterns seem to be consistent - smaller portions of the population do seem to prefer members of the same sex to the other sex, and even radically disparate cultures do have ideas of "gayness" built around this. And many cultures seem to have transgendered individuals, people who cross-dress or otherwise assume the identity of the other sex (more often this seems to be men).
I don't know if this means that there is a biological basis for the trait, or if it's a truly genetic trait, or if the observation is simply a coincidence. The latter seems unlikely to me, but as has been pointed out, there still seems to be no strong proof of a biological basis for sexual preference (that I'm aware of anyway - some biological correlations have been made some time ago, but I don't know if those have held up, and I certainly don't think any causational links were established or mechanisms suggested).
1. Yes they were. They were the number 1 afternoon program in at least 12 major radio markets, with very large followings in the North East.
2. I don't think so. They had their own routines and gags, they didn't just parrot Howard Stern. But none of these guys are doing anything particularly brilliant or original, it's all just the same stuff from various forms of dirty comedy routines transposed to radio.
3. First of all, it's not clear that this is true - the reason they haven't been working for two years is NOT that they couldn't get work elsewhere, it's that they were under their old contract and getting paid not to work - because their old employers didn't want them competing against them for another company. They had their show back on the air roughly the first day they legally could.
4. Well over 200k people signed up for XM for the O&A show before the first showing. It's a small number still compared to their old listener base (several million, don't know exactly how many) and very small compared to Howard Stern's listenership (roughly 15 million), but they didn't get to pimp their transition to satellite on the air the way Howard is. I have a feeling that in a year and a half the number of O&A subscribers, while still substantially less than the number of people Howard will bring with him, will not be off by more than a factor of 3 or 4.
Finally your last point - you don't have to like them. I don't like everything they do. I find Howard fairly impossible to listen to half the time too - he takes cheap shots at retarded people. O&A take cheap shots at failed entertainers. I can stand the latter (sometimes - frankly, I can only take so much shock jocking, period), but the former is beyond my tastes. As for "miserable failures" - their show has not been around anywhere near as long as Stern. They were making huge inroads into new markets all the time before they got booted off the air. They were getting paid NOT to work for 2 years for fear of the competition. Doesn't really sound like miserable failure to me.
I don't think any of this stuff is very intellectual or enlightening, it's just cheap entertainment, but I do think O&A are clever and entertaining in their own way, and apparently a lot of other people do to. Based on your critique, it sounds like you're a Stern fan - why do you people feel a relentless need to rip on O&A? A lot of people used to listen to both shows, and many people still enjoy both. Can't you people just live and let live?
I highly doubt Opie and Anthony has anything to do with it.
That's fine, but you are wrong. You think the fact that he announced it three days after their show started airing, and about 2 months after the O&A announcement was made by XM, is a complete coincidence? You don't think maybe he actually started talks with XM and Sirius a couple months ago, and made a deal with Sirius after O&A made their announcement? You don't think that his announcement was timed, probably at the behest of Sirius, to take the steam out of the O&A launch 3 days ago?
If you don't see the connection here, I'm not going to bother trying to explain it to you.
Please don't feed Howard's ego. He *IS* the one following suit. Opie and Anthony, who were kicked off the air 2 years ago, just came back and started their show up again as of 3 days ago, with XM radio (after their old contract expired). Stern did this because he's afraid because they're up in the morning now against him, and will have reach to all markets in the nation. Yes, he has a larger listenership than O&A did for their afternoon show at its peak, but they were growing rapidly, and now they are in the morning spot.
Anyway, I resent Howard Stern pretending that he's the big innovator here. I'm sure he's been thinking about this and discussing it for some time, but he is following on the heels of O&A, realizing that their move to satellite made a lot of sense and not wanting to compete in the morning shock jock market from a a hampered position with the FCC breathing down his neck.
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Anyway, the point is the site doesn't do anything to elucidate the limitations on ACID compliance, querying capabilities, etc. that you would expect from an object database system. Hell, they don't even seem to recognize that Prevayler is just a limited subset of an object database system (i.e. a memory-resident one). I'm glad somebody has written a reusable chunk of code to do this and all, but I wish the people doing it were more aware of the theory behind databases, and what trade-off decisions they were actually making so they could better document and explain them to their users.
Anyway, if you are just comparing it to MySQL (hehe) I'm sure there are lots of great use cases for Prevayler, but when you compare it to a real RDBMS and look at real enterprise application usage scenarios, it's a bit of a different situation.
Anyway, a bit of syntactic sugar does tip the balance away from "here's the one way of doing things" which made large Java projects easy to manage and to ramp up new developers on (relatively speaking), but if it saves a substantial amount of typing time and energy with minimal readability sacrificed, it's probably worth it. And Generics are just necessary, in my opinion, since you end up using too many non-typesafe constructs in Java that open things up to runtime errors.
The only thing on this list that I'm not sure how I feel about is the boxing/unboxing thing. I don't know if I like the idea of autoboxing, since it can create hard-to-track-down performance issues with object allocation. But I guess people liked it enough in C# that it was deemed a worthwhile tradeoff.
Well, I think some people might be trying to help Java compete on the desktop. Have you heard of SWT and Eclipse? It does have IBM behind it. I agree that Sun seriously dropped the ball with desktop Java for years, so nobody used it for that. As for developing desktop apps in C++, yes Visual Studio 6 was a very solid choice. Is VS.NET as good? Many people seem to think not. I haven't spent enough time with it to know, and don't really have the desire to.
Yes, but are you sure it's stepping you in the right direction?
So I'm stuck with this POS Pioneer HD box attached to my otherwise excellent 60" Grand Wega III LCD RP set. I also have my Tivo attached, so I can switch between Tivo mode and direct box access for HD viewing. I generally don't leave the Pioneer box tuned to HD channels overnight because it has a tendency to freeze and require a reboot every few days if it's left tuned to HD. Yup, it thoroughly sucks. What I want: HD Tivo box with CableCard support, so I can ditch this Time Warner equipment for equipment. When is it coming Tivo? Where's the innovation guys?
That's all nice, but nobody around here wants to hear it. I don't care if you support Bush's foreign policy or not, John Ashcroft is far and away the worst human being in the Bush administration and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near my country's federal government. I don't give a shit about the election he lost in Missouri, I care about the devastation this guy wants to wreak on my nation and our freedoms. If you were even half a true conservative (not one of the sickening fascist authoritarian new Republicans), you'd agree with me and wouldn't bother lifting a finger to defend this man when people make admittedly snide, off-handed criticisms of him.
The rights to parody are limited. Before you run a parody of a large, popular brand on the public internet, perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the law and jurisprudence on parody rights. But hey, what do you expect from one of these right wing blogger nutjobs?
Given that I can't see the original page in question here since it's been taken down again, it's hard to say much about it definitively. But I stand by the guy's rights to run an appropriately labelled parody, even if he is a right wing fucknut.
I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to your out of context post, but the reason that we consider raping the rapist to be morally bankrupt is that rape is an awful violation of somebody's human rights, even if that person has themselves committed that crime. Spam, while an annoyance and a pain in the ass, is not a violation of human rights, just a negative externality (and one I certainly despise). So the point is that when a thief gets something stolen from him or a spammer gets spammed, it's not comparable to a rapist being raped. As to the effectiveness as a means of prophylaxis or rehabilitation, I'm not sure that ANY means of punishment have been shown to be effective in those ways.
Howzabout you suffer with my hangover, and then I'll laugh at the jokes.
The one thing the P900 does well is BT, which is nice, but with the Treo 600 my need for BT is much more limited, since the data capabilities are quite excellent, and the thumb keyboard makes real email, SMS and IM applications usable. Yes the GPRS battery suck problem is an issue, so I let it disconnect when it's not being used, since reconnection takes a pretty trivial amount of time. I have almost never used enough data in one day to suck the battery dry, I think it's happened to me twice. Yes, it is fishy that I can use the thing for 3 or 4 days of regular voice use without needing a recharge, and one to two days with modest data use, max, but this is a small compromise to make for the power of this phone.
Hopefully Palm One will continue to offer their upgrade program in the future so I can get the promised improved battery life and bluetooth in the Treo 650 for a reasonable price. Then my life would be truly complete. I just hope Palm keeps delivering, so I don't have to stoop to getting a Symbian device... ugh.
But yes, it is fucked that just being a constituent doesn't give you as much voice as somebody who gives lots of money in campaign contributions, but that's the way it is.
In fact, it seems like the trust problem isn't that different at all, perhaps the only real difference is that with the WWW, you get to look at every page yourself and make the judgment call, "does this look like a scammer, are there lots of blink tags or mismatched colors and large text, or fake 'search engine' results?" If so, you ignore it and move on to the next result. With the semantic web, you are relying on an agent to make inferences for you, so it needs to be able to make those assessments in at least a semi-automated fashion.
Even the Greeks thought their own system sucked. Our founders tried to form the best system they could based on the model of the Republic, pre-Imperium Rome, and ancient Greece. They mostly did a pretty good job of it too, with a few exceptions.
Then there's the DMCA, also known as the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act". Well hell, it's got digital and millenium in it, so it must be good, right? INDUCE - oh well that one actually sounds a bit scary, but I guess that's because those dangerous VCR manufacturers just won't stop "inducing" us all to violate copyright.
This this winner has something called the CREATE Act (what do you bet this doesn't have anything to do with reforming copyright legislation to encourage actual creativity, and rather protects the vested interests of large media conglomerates). And the PDEA, aka "Pirace Deterrence and Education Act (Pirates bad, Education good, must be a good bill), and the PIRATE Act (Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act) - well, it's pretty clear that anybody who opposes this must be a pirate, since the bill tells you so right there.
Notice how it was the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act" (well, it must be for the benefit of nice artists if it's got Sonny Bono's name on it), not the "Eliminate the Commons Constitutional Vandalism Act". It's sad that this stuff gets packaged and marketed this way.
Then when something actually in the public interest comes around, like getting rid of spyware, it's just the "Internet Spyware Prevention Act", no slick marketing labels, no crazy acronyms, there's really not much to say because it actually speaks for itself, and deals with one specific issue that is actually in our interest to deal with.
I am a software industry veteran, and I consider myself an activist for copyright reform. And I can't even keep track of these bills, get up to speed on the issues and be on top of things fast enough before they roll out another one. This is attrition tactics by the media industry - they know that eventually, they'll slip one through right before a big holiday weekend when nobody's paying attention, or when some news story in their favor came out the week before. If they just keep getting their shills to propose these bills, like feces thrown at a wall, eventually something will stick.
I want to find candidates to vote for and promote who have reasonable IP policies that promote a balance between a business' right to make money on its investment and the interest of the commons and the citizenry, but it's pretty hard to find these candidates. I know a lot of us here give money to the EFF, but where is this money going? Besides Rep. Boucher of VA, what friends do we have on Capitol Hill, and how do we make more?
Maybe we need to be approaching people earlier on in their political careers, and running broader grass roots campaigns to bring public attention to copyright issues with issues of broad interest like the attempts to kill your right to tape shows in your own house, or the death of our heritage of freely available songs and characters in the form of a cultural commons, which have fueled the imaginations of artists throughout this century, only to be killed by the businesses built on those artists' work.
I accept that copyright law is never going to be of as immediate concern as health insurance, skyrocketing medical costs, nuclear proliferation, rising unemployment and thousands of people dying in war. But we need to make people realize that this is an issue of interest to all of us and that while we are worrying about those immediate problems facing us, certain industries are cynically trying to slip through legislation against the public interest in the hopes that we are too distracted to take action against them.
Yeah I know, but everybody still seems to call it wxWindows, I just figured nobody would know what I was talking about if I called it wxWidgets. :)
AOL sticks with IE in a deal with the devil! AOL is evil.
AOL buys Nullsoft. Definitely good!
AOL axes Gnutella, Justin leaves for greener pastures. AOL, clearly evil.
AOL uses wxWindows in AOL Communicator. AOL is obviously good!
AOL releases a branded version of IE. AOL, definitely evil.
Look, AOL is a big fucking company. They are going to do lots of good and evil things, because there are lots of people making decisions at different levels of the company. Do they have a coherent browser strategy? Not really. Have they tromped on the corpse of Netscape? Definitely.
There's finally a good browser based on Gecko (Firefox) and they've basically abandoned the Netscape browser. But AOL is just dealing with the reality of who their user base is and what they expect (the trailing edge of the Internet revolution, if you will - these people think IE is great, and will think a better IE is even better). And for all I know there may still be deals in place keeping them working with MS on the browser front - for a long time they were locked into that deal to get pre-installed AOL with Windows. Also, I wouldn't be shocked to see an AOL-branded or Netscape-branded version of Firefox come down the pipe 4 or 5 months from now too (post 1.0, of course).
As for the rest of us, let's just enjoy the cool shit that AOL occasionally produces, and continue to ignore the rest of the crap that will invariably come out of them.
People are more likely to adopt standards that they can implement without getting sued or shelling out large quantities of money to be allowed to adhere to. Despite the comments about the protocol being heavier than SNMP (TCP based, SOAP envelopes, etc.) I think there are cases where a richer, more extensible XML-based syntax would be nice for this kind of application. Or maybe SNMP is "good enough" that adoption will be limited (hard to say without reading the whole spec and comparing), but I don't think crapping on it just because it's Microsoft is fair, at least during those rare moments when they are playing well with others.
I tend to agree. It just makes them look like an oppressed victim of an overzealous right-wing government (which they are), instead of a whiny radical left wing semi-news outlet (which they also are).
This is a grey area - on the one hand, you are serving in a (nominal) party position, and thus the idea of keeping your identity secret seems distasteful. On the other hand, posting people's home addresses in this _context_ doesn't serve any clear public interest, and I can't imagine a use for that much information other than for purposes of threats or intimidation. And I don't support the right of any website to incite threats or intimidation (uhh... unless it's against the executives of SCO, in that case, well, they are evil enough to deserve it).
Obviously the modern construct of homosexuality is just a manifestation of the Christian construct. In any Judeo-Christian culture, it's tough to be "somewhat gay" because of that (this obviously has changed in recent years in more liberal places like New York City, where bisexuality has even been the vogue at times). Obviously the stereotype of certain characteristics is a modern construct, but the association of feminizing characteristics with homosexual behavior doesn't seem very new at all. Certain patterns seem to be consistent - smaller portions of the population do seem to prefer members of the same sex to the other sex, and even radically disparate cultures do have ideas of "gayness" built around this. And many cultures seem to have transgendered individuals, people who cross-dress or otherwise assume the identity of the other sex (more often this seems to be men).
I don't know if this means that there is a biological basis for the trait, or if it's a truly genetic trait, or if the observation is simply a coincidence. The latter seems unlikely to me, but as has been pointed out, there still seems to be no strong proof of a biological basis for sexual preference (that I'm aware of anyway - some biological correlations have been made some time ago, but I don't know if those have held up, and I certainly don't think any causational links were established or mechanisms suggested).
2. I don't think so. They had their own routines and gags, they didn't just parrot Howard Stern. But none of these guys are doing anything particularly brilliant or original, it's all just the same stuff from various forms of dirty comedy routines transposed to radio.
3. First of all, it's not clear that this is true - the reason they haven't been working for two years is NOT that they couldn't get work elsewhere, it's that they were under their old contract and getting paid not to work - because their old employers didn't want them competing against them for another company. They had their show back on the air roughly the first day they legally could.
4. Well over 200k people signed up for XM for the O&A show before the first showing. It's a small number still compared to their old listener base (several million, don't know exactly how many) and very small compared to Howard Stern's listenership (roughly 15 million), but they didn't get to pimp their transition to satellite on the air the way Howard is. I have a feeling that in a year and a half the number of O&A subscribers, while still substantially less than the number of people Howard will bring with him, will not be off by more than a factor of 3 or 4.
Finally your last point - you don't have to like them. I don't like everything they do. I find Howard fairly impossible to listen to half the time too - he takes cheap shots at retarded people. O&A take cheap shots at failed entertainers. I can stand the latter (sometimes - frankly, I can only take so much shock jocking, period), but the former is beyond my tastes. As for "miserable failures" - their show has not been around anywhere near as long as Stern. They were making huge inroads into new markets all the time before they got booted off the air. They were getting paid NOT to work for 2 years for fear of the competition. Doesn't really sound like miserable failure to me.
I don't think any of this stuff is very intellectual or enlightening, it's just cheap entertainment, but I do think O&A are clever and entertaining in their own way, and apparently a lot of other people do to. Based on your critique, it sounds like you're a Stern fan - why do you people feel a relentless need to rip on O&A? A lot of people used to listen to both shows, and many people still enjoy both. Can't you people just live and let live?
That's fine, but you are wrong. You think the fact that he announced it three days after their show started airing, and about 2 months after the O&A announcement was made by XM, is a complete coincidence? You don't think maybe he actually started talks with XM and Sirius a couple months ago, and made a deal with Sirius after O&A made their announcement? You don't think that his announcement was timed, probably at the behest of Sirius, to take the steam out of the O&A launch 3 days ago?
If you don't see the connection here, I'm not going to bother trying to explain it to you.
Please don't feed Howard's ego. He *IS* the one following suit. Opie and Anthony, who were kicked off the air 2 years ago, just came back and started their show up again as of 3 days ago, with XM radio (after their old contract expired). Stern did this because he's afraid because they're up in the morning now against him, and will have reach to all markets in the nation. Yes, he has a larger listenership than O&A did for their afternoon show at its peak, but they were growing rapidly, and now they are in the morning spot.
Anyway, I resent Howard Stern pretending that he's the big innovator here. I'm sure he's been thinking about this and discussing it for some time, but he is following on the heels of O&A, realizing that their move to satellite made a lot of sense and not wanting to compete in the morning shock jock market from a a hampered position with the FCC breathing down his neck.