I agree with you that the local morality of what we do in Iraq has to be balanced with practical concerns for our national security, reputation with other countries and inclination to continue risking our own troops lives, vs. the long term benefits/consequences for Iraqis, Americans and the rest of the word if things get FUBAR again in Iraq.
I think decisions should always be moral ones, but preserving your own life and your own fellow citizens lives so you can live to do more good for the world at a later date is also a moral good - so I'm not sure that morality is factored out entirely, just that you have to use a broader measuring stick and look at the longer term horizon when making moral decisions, you can't just make them in a vacuum.
Generally, I agree that they need to fuck it up and discover their own idiocy at some point - that's why I was always a big proponent of beating Iraq the same way we've already pretty much beaten Iran - kill them with McDonald's and the Gap. Say what you will about schlocky Western commercial goods, they tend to bring with them an affinity for Western culture, which accompanies with it a desire among the youth for secular learning and an aversion to fundamentalism. But now that we've won, we might as well make sure they set up a reasonable government - just leaving them in Anarchy to figure it out for themselves, or to let the loudest people with the most Kalashnikov's determine what the next government should look like won't exactly endear us to much of the world either (though the left-wing moral relativism squad seems to feel all warm and fuzzy when "different cultures" set up their happy little true-to-their-culture totalitarian regimes).
Your comments about free will are off base. A people as a group don't make a moral choice, individuals make moral choices. We were talking about boundaries for a form of government - namely that a form of government that respects the rights of its citizens is one that allows moral choices for its own citizens (within the boundaries of laws and social customs). A society based on totalitarianism, such as that of Saddam Hussein's Baath party doesn't allow for much in the way of moral choice at all.
As the victor of a war, we have the _ability_ to force anything we want. We have the _moral obligation_ and certainly the right to force a government that respects rights. In this country, our forefathers wisely set up a Constitution that specifically does not allow us to vote away our rights (well, we can amend the Constitution over time, but it's been made intentionally difficult to do so).
Turkey is a fine example of a country that is relatively democratic, but only by force. This is required in cases like this, where Islamic fundamentalism rejects democracy, and seeks to use democracy to vote away democratic rights by electing fundamentalists. The military and Turkish constitution prevent this from happening. Though there are arguably things wrong with Turkey, the use of force majeure to "enforce" democracy and basic rights is a moral good. This doesn't mean that Iraqis don't get to determine their own fates, in fact it means that we are ensuring that a vocal component of the Shi'a majority don't hijack the civil rights of other members of Iraqi society. This is not colonialism, this is called preventing the replacement of one totalitarian regime with another.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention the "material witness" thing. This has become more and more abused recently. The fact is that this was never intended to give free reign to the government to circumvent the right of the accused to speedy trial and to public announcement of charges.
Not true at all. See this link for example. Also see this informative page. Normally a person can only be held without bail or have a bail set after they have been indicted by a grand jury, and the charges have been announced in an open court (i.e. it is publically announced what the person is charged with and that a grand jury has indicted them).
In any case, 5 weeks with no word, no announcement of charges definitely runs contrary to the spirit of the Constitution with respect to the right to a speedy trial.
Come on, I think it's sort of hard to take that too seriously. I mean, I agree in principal that the existance of Vatican City as a separate national entity rules by Christian Fundamentalism is problematic, however in practice, as far as I know, the only people who really live there are Catholic priests and maybe the Vatican guards, and as far as I know, any real legal issues would still be dealt with by Italian authorities.
I agree that there are Christian Fundamentalists in this country. I don't think I ever expressed any sympathy or support for those nutjobs. The only weapon against such people is ultimately a strong, liberal (in the sense of open-minded and questioning, not in the modern political sense) educational system. This same principle, I believe, applies to fighting fundamentalism in all its forms.
And such it is always with tyrants - what you describe is tyranny of the majority. The majority do not always make morally correct decisions. Hitler was initially elected in Germany as well. I suggest you read some Plato and get a clue before you spew such stuff.
In short, yes, Iraqis should be able to determine their own fate, within the bounds of a system that guarantees protection of minorities and guarantees that Iraq will not seek to support terrorism or the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction. Saying everyone should have the freedom to do whatever they want, including establish a tyrannical regime, is pure anarchism, and rejects any concept of morality. Again, morally relativist bullshit (dare I say it, Chomskyite bullshit - flame away).
I don't know that I said it was illegal in an international law sense. I said it was terrorism. And if it's supported by a nation that is a terrorist-supporting nation. Is that illegal? Well, it will likely get the scorn of the world, and they will get their asses kicked. There isn't really a legal authority governing these interactions, merely a general concept of moral acceptability and accepted rules and practices of warfare. Or you could argue that warfare conducted outside of the bounds of the Geneva Conventions is fundamentally outside of the bounds of "international law". It's not so much illegal as it is alegal.
I don't know enough of the specifics to answer all your questions, but certainly Hamas acts as a terrorist group, though as I understand it, the PLO and Palestinian Authority no longer support targeting civilians. IRA and Protestant militias in Ireland have both been guilty of committing terrorist acts in the past, as I understand it - placing bombs on crowded city streets in trashcans is undoubtedly terrorism since it doesn't even make a semblance of an effort to distinguish targets.
Islamic Fundementalism and Christian Fundamentalism aren't that different, I just don't know of any governments these days that are run as Christian Fundamentalist states. I certainly wouldn't consider people living in any religious fundamentalist nation-state to be free.
Okay, I agree with most of what you say, but how the hell do we _know_ when somebody is a member of Al Qaeda or is a terrorist? Our social contract with our government says that the only way we _know_ things in a legal sense to be true is by using our court process. I'm not holding the same standard to enemy combatants caught on the battlefield as I am to people picked up within the US, of course, and they are clearly very different things. If your military catches somebody armed on the battlefield, it's reasonable that they will be presumed to be a POW, and are not subject to the same rights (though they still have some rights).
I am not claiming there is a black and white delineation between peacetime and wartime, but there is a black and white delineation between a suspect picked up on US soil and a guy with a gun picked up in the Afghan mountains. If somebody is determined a "spy" or enemy combatant on US soil, I believe that determination should be made using our courts and due process, not summarily made behind closed doors, allowing the military to dispose of them as they please. I don't give a fuck if the Supreme Court upheld doing it once in WWII, it's still wrong. If the person is so clearly a spy, we should be able to prove that in court, THEN execute them.
I don't really think you understand that international law doesn't mean a whole lot, aside from treaties signed by nations that they pledge to abide by - which affect their reputation and perception by other nations. The UN doesn't really define a governing body of international law per se, more a consensus building and negotiating mechanism for foreign policy, and a way of allowing nations to interact on a slightly more equal footing than their wealth or geography alone would allow.
I don't believe the US signed a treaty saying it won't go to war with anybody without UN approval. Thus it's not an illegal war. It may very well be an immoral war, and that's a meaningful discussion to have, which can take place on the level of the justifications presented by the US administration, as well as on the real justifications used for the war (which are of course very different).
At the bare minimum, a Freedom Fighter targets military forces and makes at least an effort to avoid civilian casualties whereas a terrorist actively targets civilians and does not differentiate between the two. Generally to be a "freedom fighter" you also have to be challenging some oppressive force that is preventing you from having freedom. If your concept of freedom is Islamic fundamentalism or totalitarianism, there's nothing to say but "you are wrong" (thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'm fighting my one-man battle against moral relativism here).
I think we all will agree that detaining people without presenting a case and ignoring the requirements of due process is generally a bad thing. The Patriot Act and similar pieces of legislation overextend the powers of the executive branch, and deny fundamental rights that we all expect and demand.
Nonetheless, I'm going to withhold judgement on the Mike Hawash case, because at this point, assuming the evidence is as presented in the articles I have read, there certainly sounds like enough, that with some dotted I's and crossed T's, adds up to at least probable cause. I just wish our government would abide by its own rules in the way it prosecutes cases like this, and just show the evidence that lead them to make a detention in the first place. If the guy is really a flight risk, or potential danger to others, and there isn't enough to hold him on, then they could have him followed and monitored until the evidence is available, the same as is done with other criminals and potential criminals. I worry about all the exceptions that are made for terrorism, when increasingly, membership in certain non-terrorist organizations, or computer crimes, or other "mysterious" or "destructive" behavior seems to get bunched in with terrorism.
I'll be the first person to tell you that terrorism is never legitimate, and always criminal, and that we should arrest and prosecute and punish terrorists and attempted terrorists to the fullest extent of the law, and Americans who travel to fight in illegal combat with other terrorists get no sympathy from me. But how can we use different standards of evidence and prosecutorial conduct for cases that we don't _know_ are terrorism until they have gone through the courts? Due process doesn't mean due process when we feel like it - it applies to all citizens and residents, and even others within our borders.
I don't think it was "childish" on the part of Penn, I think they were following explicit instructions from DARPA who "encouraged" them to disallow the 'security-fest' funded by the grant. This is documented in one of the articles above. My guess is that some DARPA PHB heard "Canadian liberal", "anti-war rants", "60 different countries" and most damningly of all the phrase "hack-a-thon" and put 2 and 2 together and got 5. Think of all the connotations - DARPA funding a project that sort of appears to be led by an anti-American "hacker" who is supposedly creating secure operating systems that will benefit the US government. Err... I can definitely see why it got axed.
As for the Penn people, DARPA grants are key to lots of research done at Universities around the country. They tend to be generous grants that encourage you to spend all the money they give you in a year (or it goes back to them). Any University administrator would bend over backwards to do what DARPA wanted if they appeared riled up.
The passive investor defense has gone a mighty long way in the past. There's a reason that venture capitalists structure deals the way they do - they don't take responsibility for any of the actions of the managers of the companies they invest in, generally. There is a reason we have the corporate shield to protect people and organizations from such lawsuits - if you were an LP in an investment fund that put money into a company, would you want your liability for that company's operations to be greater than the share of your monies put into that company?
Sounds like grasping for straws to me, basically the dying gasps of an industry that knows it's fucked. Napster was just the messenger, and these idiots are going to try to squash everyone who helped the messenger. That's like suing the people who ran the colo where Napster hosted their servers - after all, they entered into a business deal that let Napster perpetrate their infringement! Ridiculous. Ain't gonna go nowhere.
Of course, my favorite part is:
Hummer Winblad knowingly facilitated infringement of plaintiff's copyrights for its direct financial benefit.
For some reason, I don't really think they made much money from this investment.:)
I think the Debian group has a point here. If everybody who adds to a piece of documentation tacks on their own political propaganda blurb that is "invariant" to the documentation, you end up fairly rapidly with a document that is not only not-that-free (since a large portion of it can't be modified), but also not terribly useful to end users who have to wade through loads of propaganda to get to useful documentation.
Well, I can understand the confusion. Even C++ isn't always C++. I mean, the difference between a full-fledged Stroustrop-complete C++ program and a simplified, Java-style object-oriented C++ API is large. I can actually read and follow the latter - the former is still a bit of a mystery to me (who learned C++ back in the day before it became such a broad, all-encompassing language, and didn't really touch it again for quite a few years).
So I don't know if I'd say that C and C++ are totally different languages, just that C++ in its entirety is such a complex language that there are many stylistic variations possible that result in greatly different program structure. C certainly has different stylistic variations possible too, but not to the same extent, and clearly structuring a program in C and in C++ usually result in fairly different designs and solutions, though it doesn't have to be that way (object-ish C programming is certainly possible).
I think it's fair to say that somebody exposed to all of these stylistic variations is able to better pick and choose the appropriate techniques for the job at hand, and equally importantly, is able to pick up and read a much wider variety of code than your average schmoe who claims to be a "C/C++" programmer.
What makes me think this is about trademarks? Well, because I read the Phoenix discussion forums on MozillaZine and I keep track of what the Phoenix developers and drivers have discussed there. Their motivation for renaming the project was purely out of concern for complying with trademark law. They chose a name that was aesthetically pleasing, as similar as possible in concept to the original name, and legally sound within the bounds of trademark law.
If you are suggesting the name will result in confusion between Firebird SQL and the Firebird browser, you have the right to your opinion. I was simply pointing out that the existance of the Firebird RDBMS has been mentioned and discussed on the Phoenix forums, so clearly the Mozilla.org lawyers were aware of it, and thus they didn't consider this to be a legal issue. If you consider that rights to a name should be more far-reaching than that, that's fine, but most of us don't consider it to be "commandeering" a name, since any common, decent-sounding English word you can think of will likely have been used as a name for some product at some point in time - the question is how different do products have to be for it to be acceptable, and the best guide we have for that is the law.
That's what they just did. Anyone who's been tracking the process knows they have been delaying this announcement for over a month to give their lawyers time to okay it, so that the name would be stable from now on. So in fact, what you propose is exactly what the Phoenix developers wanted to do. Also note that Mozilla didn't "give" a product a name, a small group of developers, some of whom are part of the Mozilla organization umbrella, started a new browser project to replace the old clunky turd that is Mozilla - they did not know at the time that Phoenix the BIOS company was planning on launching BIOS-embedded web browsing technology, and understandably, this small group of developers didn't go and employ a team of lawyers to research this up front - it didn't make sense to do that until it became clear that Phoenix was a growing, successful project that was going to become the new Mozilla browser core - and when they went from that "early prototype" stage to a project more in the public eye, they changed the project name to something that would withstand legal scrutiny and not infringe any trademarks. What more could we really ask for from them?
They knew perfectly well about other products that use the name Firebird, it's just that they aren't relevant to the domain of web browsing software. Trademark law only grants protection over a certain domain - and Mozilla/Netscape had their lawyers spend several weeks giving the new names a thorough checking-out prior to announcing them.
Okay, howzabout you ask everybody with a vaguely related product to stop threatening the Mozilla project with lawsuits, then they'll stop renaming their browsers.
This advice is not precisely true. There are plenty of good reasons to use an LLC, S-Corp or C-Corp. You should either talk to an accountant about it, or read some books yourself before you make that decision.
For example, with a C corp, you can deduct 100% of your health insurance expenses. Depending on where you live, this can be huge (here in Massachusetts, as a single 23 year old male, mine are about $420 a month for BCBS PPO plan - just imagine with a family... ugh). And an S Corp can be useful because S Corp dividends aren't subject to FICA and FUTA taxes (the 15% "self-employment tax"). This can also be a big hit on the bottom line for a small consulting business (no, you can't dodge all of it, but using S Corp dividends, you can reduce your effective self-employment tax rate substantially below 15%).
Also, you can take advantage of more complex corporate structures and deductions to avoid taxes - you know, the games that people play in big companies can work for your small business too, if you know what you're doing. I am willing to give advice on the specifics, on a consulting basis. From my experience, you have to have a consulting business bringing in at least 100k-150k gross per year for these hoops to be worth jumping through. If you're bringing in substantially less than that, it's probably not worth the overhead of setting up a corporation.
Well, I appreciate your reply, but there is no need for you to be defensive - I wasn't attacking you on an ad hominem basis, merely hypothesizing that sometimes the industry community gets hot and bothered over ideas that are old hat in academic computer science. After skimming David Harel's paper, I agree that there are some additions and extensions to the statechart formalism vs. traditional FSA diagrams. I was never denying that people had proposed such additions nor that they could be useful.
Rather, I was pointing out that without ever reading these formalisms, many of us have similarly used hierarchical, divided or otherwise "non formal" state diagrams to describe either parts of systems or entire systems, where appropriate. I am not questioning the use of such diagrams in system design, since I admitted I have used such tools to communicate system design specifications. Additionally, the fact that software exists that is poorly designed (something nobody denies) does not serve as an effective argument that "statecharts" are substantively different from FSA diagrams. Much software out there in the world is NOT designed by people with sufficient theoretical CS background, or practical engineering experience.
I am not sure about modeling UIs as state machines, but I will reserve my comments as I haven't seen the book.
My point still stands: this is a modest recasting of an existing formalism into a more "relaxed" and practical form that communicates several pieces of information simultaneously. It's nothing I would consider totally new or innovative. It may be useful as a technique for practical system design, but the primary purpose of reading these books is probably to see examples of mapping particular problems to a state machine model - there's nothing magical about a "statechart" that you need to read a book to understand.
As I see it, this looks like the kind of thing that people who don't have a formal CS background might "discover". I mean, I thought it was basically obvious to use FSA diagramming to document state transitions in software systems. I've been doing this for years, without the guidance of a UML "statechart" system. The only benefit of these things is providing examples of "real world" usage and how a particular problem domain was mapped into a FSA, which might make it more obvious how to use the formalism when faced with a particular problem.
Yup, this basically lays it out. If you are hired as a consultant, you are certainly obliged to tell your client when you think they are doing something wrong, or constraining a problem in a way that is not to their benefit. Of course, the question of "how hard do you push it" seems silly to me - you push it as hard as you can without endangering your source of income or your relationships with the people who make the decisions about whether to pay you. It's a job, like any other, you are providing expertise in solving a problem, but in the end, if the client doesn't want to take your advice, you have two choices. One, leave the project, default on your contract, risk lawsuit and get no money. Or two, make the best of it, note (and document) that you disagree with a decision, and move on to making the rest of the project happen.
In the end, you have to accept that your advice won't always be taken, and projects you are involved in may die due to internal mismanagement, regardless of the quality of your work on them. It's happened to me before, but I believe I kept my moral integrity through the whole situation, and managed to walk away with a lot of cash. What more is there to it?
That makes a lot of sense. I have done simple VHDL programming before, so I do have some sense of the complexity involved in synchronizing data flow between different circuits and logic paths (and god knows, I know all about the complexity of multithreaded programming - I'd say only about 10%-20% of programmers have a proper sense of how to write safe multithreaded code).
I think you're right - handling arbitrary control flow, branching and so forth is a complex part of modern compilers, and of modern CPU hardware - and it is only possible because the CPU hardware handles all of the crazy stuff like ordering instructions, managing register contents (especially with all the voodoo that goes on behind the scenes in a modern CPU) and so forth. If you tried to do all of that in the compiler (which is effectively what you are talking about here), the compiler seems like it would have to do a lot more work than standard compilers generating machine code.
The instruction set of a modern CPU serves as the API, the contract between software land and hardware land, and that is what allows the CPU designers to go behind the scenes and do all sorts of optimization, only incrementally versioning the instruction set for large changes (like SIMD). When you eliminate that contract with the generalized computing hardware, and basically are compiling down to arbitrary HDL and gate configurations, it seems like too many degrees of freedom to manage the complexity, without additional constraints (like only trying to solve matrix or other mathematical problems, like the interesting product you point out).
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I think decisions should always be moral ones, but preserving your own life and your own fellow citizens lives so you can live to do more good for the world at a later date is also a moral good - so I'm not sure that morality is factored out entirely, just that you have to use a broader measuring stick and look at the longer term horizon when making moral decisions, you can't just make them in a vacuum.
Generally, I agree that they need to fuck it up and discover their own idiocy at some point - that's why I was always a big proponent of beating Iraq the same way we've already pretty much beaten Iran - kill them with McDonald's and the Gap. Say what you will about schlocky Western commercial goods, they tend to bring with them an affinity for Western culture, which accompanies with it a desire among the youth for secular learning and an aversion to fundamentalism. But now that we've won, we might as well make sure they set up a reasonable government - just leaving them in Anarchy to figure it out for themselves, or to let the loudest people with the most Kalashnikov's determine what the next government should look like won't exactly endear us to much of the world either (though the left-wing moral relativism squad seems to feel all warm and fuzzy when "different cultures" set up their happy little true-to-their-culture totalitarian regimes).
As the victor of a war, we have the _ability_ to force anything we want. We have the _moral obligation_ and certainly the right to force a government that respects rights. In this country, our forefathers wisely set up a Constitution that specifically does not allow us to vote away our rights (well, we can amend the Constitution over time, but it's been made intentionally difficult to do so).
Turkey is a fine example of a country that is relatively democratic, but only by force. This is required in cases like this, where Islamic fundamentalism rejects democracy, and seeks to use democracy to vote away democratic rights by electing fundamentalists. The military and Turkish constitution prevent this from happening. Though there are arguably things wrong with Turkey, the use of force majeure to "enforce" democracy and basic rights is a moral good. This doesn't mean that Iraqis don't get to determine their own fates, in fact it means that we are ensuring that a vocal component of the Shi'a majority don't hijack the civil rights of other members of Iraqi society. This is not colonialism, this is called preventing the replacement of one totalitarian regime with another.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention the "material witness" thing. This has become more and more abused recently. The fact is that this was never intended to give free reign to the government to circumvent the right of the accused to speedy trial and to public announcement of charges.
In any case, 5 weeks with no word, no announcement of charges definitely runs contrary to the spirit of the Constitution with respect to the right to a speedy trial.
I agree that there are Christian Fundamentalists in this country. I don't think I ever expressed any sympathy or support for those nutjobs. The only weapon against such people is ultimately a strong, liberal (in the sense of open-minded and questioning, not in the modern political sense) educational system. This same principle, I believe, applies to fighting fundamentalism in all its forms.
In short, yes, Iraqis should be able to determine their own fate, within the bounds of a system that guarantees protection of minorities and guarantees that Iraq will not seek to support terrorism or the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction. Saying everyone should have the freedom to do whatever they want, including establish a tyrannical regime, is pure anarchism, and rejects any concept of morality. Again, morally relativist bullshit (dare I say it, Chomskyite bullshit - flame away).
I don't know that I said it was illegal in an international law sense. I said it was terrorism. And if it's supported by a nation that is a terrorist-supporting nation. Is that illegal? Well, it will likely get the scorn of the world, and they will get their asses kicked. There isn't really a legal authority governing these interactions, merely a general concept of moral acceptability and accepted rules and practices of warfare. Or you could argue that warfare conducted outside of the bounds of the Geneva Conventions is fundamentally outside of the bounds of "international law". It's not so much illegal as it is alegal.
Islamic Fundementalism and Christian Fundamentalism aren't that different, I just don't know of any governments these days that are run as Christian Fundamentalist states. I certainly wouldn't consider people living in any religious fundamentalist nation-state to be free.
I am not claiming there is a black and white delineation between peacetime and wartime, but there is a black and white delineation between a suspect picked up on US soil and a guy with a gun picked up in the Afghan mountains. If somebody is determined a "spy" or enemy combatant on US soil, I believe that determination should be made using our courts and due process, not summarily made behind closed doors, allowing the military to dispose of them as they please. I don't give a fuck if the Supreme Court upheld doing it once in WWII, it's still wrong. If the person is so clearly a spy, we should be able to prove that in court, THEN execute them.
I don't believe the US signed a treaty saying it won't go to war with anybody without UN approval. Thus it's not an illegal war. It may very well be an immoral war, and that's a meaningful discussion to have, which can take place on the level of the justifications presented by the US administration, as well as on the real justifications used for the war (which are of course very different).
At the bare minimum, a Freedom Fighter targets military forces and makes at least an effort to avoid civilian casualties whereas a terrorist actively targets civilians and does not differentiate between the two. Generally to be a "freedom fighter" you also have to be challenging some oppressive force that is preventing you from having freedom. If your concept of freedom is Islamic fundamentalism or totalitarianism, there's nothing to say but "you are wrong" (thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'm fighting my one-man battle against moral relativism here).
Nonetheless, I'm going to withhold judgement on the Mike Hawash case, because at this point, assuming the evidence is as presented in the articles I have read, there certainly sounds like enough, that with some dotted I's and crossed T's, adds up to at least probable cause. I just wish our government would abide by its own rules in the way it prosecutes cases like this, and just show the evidence that lead them to make a detention in the first place. If the guy is really a flight risk, or potential danger to others, and there isn't enough to hold him on, then they could have him followed and monitored until the evidence is available, the same as is done with other criminals and potential criminals. I worry about all the exceptions that are made for terrorism, when increasingly, membership in certain non-terrorist organizations, or computer crimes, or other "mysterious" or "destructive" behavior seems to get bunched in with terrorism.
I'll be the first person to tell you that terrorism is never legitimate, and always criminal, and that we should arrest and prosecute and punish terrorists and attempted terrorists to the fullest extent of the law, and Americans who travel to fight in illegal combat with other terrorists get no sympathy from me. But how can we use different standards of evidence and prosecutorial conduct for cases that we don't _know_ are terrorism until they have gone through the courts? Due process doesn't mean due process when we feel like it - it applies to all citizens and residents, and even others within our borders.
As for the Penn people, DARPA grants are key to lots of research done at Universities around the country. They tend to be generous grants that encourage you to spend all the money they give you in a year (or it goes back to them). Any University administrator would bend over backwards to do what DARPA wanted if they appeared riled up.
Sounds like grasping for straws to me, basically the dying gasps of an industry that knows it's fucked. Napster was just the messenger, and these idiots are going to try to squash everyone who helped the messenger. That's like suing the people who ran the colo where Napster hosted their servers - after all, they entered into a business deal that let Napster perpetrate their infringement! Ridiculous. Ain't gonna go nowhere.
Of course, my favorite part is:
Hummer Winblad knowingly facilitated infringement of plaintiff's copyrights for its direct financial benefit.
For some reason, I don't really think they made much money from this investment.
I think the Debian group has a point here. If everybody who adds to a piece of documentation tacks on their own political propaganda blurb that is "invariant" to the documentation, you end up fairly rapidly with a document that is not only not-that-free (since a large portion of it can't be modified), but also not terribly useful to end users who have to wade through loads of propaganda to get to useful documentation.
So I don't know if I'd say that C and C++ are totally different languages, just that C++ in its entirety is such a complex language that there are many stylistic variations possible that result in greatly different program structure. C certainly has different stylistic variations possible too, but not to the same extent, and clearly structuring a program in C and in C++ usually result in fairly different designs and solutions, though it doesn't have to be that way (object-ish C programming is certainly possible).
I think it's fair to say that somebody exposed to all of these stylistic variations is able to better pick and choose the appropriate techniques for the job at hand, and equally importantly, is able to pick up and read a much wider variety of code than your average schmoe who claims to be a "C/C++" programmer.
If you are suggesting the name will result in confusion between Firebird SQL and the Firebird browser, you have the right to your opinion. I was simply pointing out that the existance of the Firebird RDBMS has been mentioned and discussed on the Phoenix forums, so clearly the Mozilla.org lawyers were aware of it, and thus they didn't consider this to be a legal issue. If you consider that rights to a name should be more far-reaching than that, that's fine, but most of us don't consider it to be "commandeering" a name, since any common, decent-sounding English word you can think of will likely have been used as a name for some product at some point in time - the question is how different do products have to be for it to be acceptable, and the best guide we have for that is the law.
That's what they just did. Anyone who's been tracking the process knows they have been delaying this announcement for over a month to give their lawyers time to okay it, so that the name would be stable from now on. So in fact, what you propose is exactly what the Phoenix developers wanted to do. Also note that Mozilla didn't "give" a product a name, a small group of developers, some of whom are part of the Mozilla organization umbrella, started a new browser project to replace the old clunky turd that is Mozilla - they did not know at the time that Phoenix the BIOS company was planning on launching BIOS-embedded web browsing technology, and understandably, this small group of developers didn't go and employ a team of lawyers to research this up front - it didn't make sense to do that until it became clear that Phoenix was a growing, successful project that was going to become the new Mozilla browser core - and when they went from that "early prototype" stage to a project more in the public eye, they changed the project name to something that would withstand legal scrutiny and not infringe any trademarks. What more could we really ask for from them?
They knew perfectly well about other products that use the name Firebird, it's just that they aren't relevant to the domain of web browsing software. Trademark law only grants protection over a certain domain - and Mozilla/Netscape had their lawyers spend several weeks giving the new names a thorough checking-out prior to announcing them.
Okay, howzabout you ask everybody with a vaguely related product to stop threatening the Mozilla project with lawsuits, then they'll stop renaming their browsers.
For example, with a C corp, you can deduct 100% of your health insurance expenses. Depending on where you live, this can be huge (here in Massachusetts, as a single 23 year old male, mine are about $420 a month for BCBS PPO plan - just imagine with a family... ugh). And an S Corp can be useful because S Corp dividends aren't subject to FICA and FUTA taxes (the 15% "self-employment tax"). This can also be a big hit on the bottom line for a small consulting business (no, you can't dodge all of it, but using S Corp dividends, you can reduce your effective self-employment tax rate substantially below 15%).
Also, you can take advantage of more complex corporate structures and deductions to avoid taxes - you know, the games that people play in big companies can work for your small business too, if you know what you're doing. I am willing to give advice on the specifics, on a consulting basis. From my experience, you have to have a consulting business bringing in at least 100k-150k gross per year for these hoops to be worth jumping through. If you're bringing in substantially less than that, it's probably not worth the overhead of setting up a corporation.
Rather, I was pointing out that without ever reading these formalisms, many of us have similarly used hierarchical, divided or otherwise "non formal" state diagrams to describe either parts of systems or entire systems, where appropriate. I am not questioning the use of such diagrams in system design, since I admitted I have used such tools to communicate system design specifications. Additionally, the fact that software exists that is poorly designed (something nobody denies) does not serve as an effective argument that "statecharts" are substantively different from FSA diagrams. Much software out there in the world is NOT designed by people with sufficient theoretical CS background, or practical engineering experience.
I am not sure about modeling UIs as state machines, but I will reserve my comments as I haven't seen the book.
My point still stands: this is a modest recasting of an existing formalism into a more "relaxed" and practical form that communicates several pieces of information simultaneously. It's nothing I would consider totally new or innovative. It may be useful as a technique for practical system design, but the primary purpose of reading these books is probably to see examples of mapping particular problems to a state machine model - there's nothing magical about a "statechart" that you need to read a book to understand.
As I see it, this looks like the kind of thing that people who don't have a formal CS background might "discover". I mean, I thought it was basically obvious to use FSA diagramming to document state transitions in software systems. I've been doing this for years, without the guidance of a UML "statechart" system. The only benefit of these things is providing examples of "real world" usage and how a particular problem domain was mapped into a FSA, which might make it more obvious how to use the formalism when faced with a particular problem.
In the end, you have to accept that your advice won't always be taken, and projects you are involved in may die due to internal mismanagement, regardless of the quality of your work on them. It's happened to me before, but I believe I kept my moral integrity through the whole situation, and managed to walk away with a lot of cash. What more is there to it?
I think you're right - handling arbitrary control flow, branching and so forth is a complex part of modern compilers, and of modern CPU hardware - and it is only possible because the CPU hardware handles all of the crazy stuff like ordering instructions, managing register contents (especially with all the voodoo that goes on behind the scenes in a modern CPU) and so forth. If you tried to do all of that in the compiler (which is effectively what you are talking about here), the compiler seems like it would have to do a lot more work than standard compilers generating machine code.
The instruction set of a modern CPU serves as the API, the contract between software land and hardware land, and that is what allows the CPU designers to go behind the scenes and do all sorts of optimization, only incrementally versioning the instruction set for large changes (like SIMD). When you eliminate that contract with the generalized computing hardware, and basically are compiling down to arbitrary HDL and gate configurations, it seems like too many degrees of freedom to manage the complexity, without additional constraints (like only trying to solve matrix or other mathematical problems, like the interesting product you point out).