This remindes me of the last time someone found out a way to crash firefox and jumped up and down saying ZOMG!! teh hax!!11. And my computer science friends who couldn't recognize a shell if it bashed them in the face will be prancing around saying Use IE, it's the most secure (even though there's a million ways to crash IE remotely). And what really gets me is that the editors at slashdot are dumb enough to post this nonsense.
Chances are someone they respect said the same thing "Atheists have no moral capacity" and thought, hey this person is saying something bad about Atheists, it must be true!
Don't tell me that you've never believed something based on authority. I'd wadger a guess that you've never actually been to Antartica and seen it for yourself, but you sure as hell won't believe me if I start saying that it's full of tropical wildlife. This is because you've been told by authorities (whom you trust) that Antartica is a cold place and that tropical animals can't live in cold places.
The proper fear comes from the human consequences. Eat Pork in 1500BC and you will have issues, weave different kinds of thread, you will have issues, or the bigger laws, Covet and you will pay $5K for a PS3.
Maybe so, but this is not morality. Morality implies some sort of right versus wrong, this is efficiency versus inefficiency (on a societial scale).
user shouldn't have to work around insecurity on the Internet
Then who will? Do you think the browser creators will? We'll they might, but it's rather iffy. Just take a look at Internet Explorer. It is the most popular web browser from a very large company and it has major problems. Microsoft is just not interested in providing users with a high level of security. That leaves the various organizations that administrate internet related stuff and all of them have shown as much effectiveness as a dead badger.
So at the end of day the users are left with the responsibility of keeping themselves safe. Of course, they have no clue how to do this which is why we still see IE and Windows computers all over the place. Instead they go about practicing their Norton voodoo and listening to everything the big media companies say.
believes women are second-class citizens, homosexuals should be discriminated against or beaten, etc.
believes that the Bible is the only source of any worthwhile laws
will cheerfully shout you down and work to make laws to limit your freedoms you because you disagree
Sounds a lot like modern American Evangelical Christians. Only the degree in which they want to "punish" the "infidels" is different.
...though, I believe if they thought they could get away with it, most Evangelical Christians wouldn't mind killing homosexuals and those that disagree with them.
I'm a Canadian, so I can't speak directly for the American Evangelicals, but the ones I know aren't that different from those of us up here. In reality, there are only a few Evangelicals who would fit these brash generalizations. One problem is that news media isn't interested in talking about nice people, so they'll find a few brutes and then trump the story up as much as they can. Outrageous stories are popular. I'd guess that the Islamic people have suffered a lot of the same fate as well.
The women thing definitly an issue in many Evangelical churches, although that is more for cultural reasons that anything else. Women are not so much less equal, they just have different spheres of influence then men. The homophobia thing is definitly a problem, although I've noticed it's just as bad among Evangelicals as everyone else (in fact I've found the secular crowd to be the worst in this regard, at least the other groups acknoledge it).
As a rule Evangelicals take a pretty strong view of the separation of Church and State. So while we may have ideosycratic and controversial dogma, we don't force it on anyone else. Our theology is descendant from the original American Evangelicals who founded the United States. Unfortunately, there is a small group of Evangelicals who are trying to bring the State under their control. There are often referred to as the Religious Right or something like that and only some of them are Evangelials. As far as I can tell, the marriage of Church and State is always a bad thing, but fortunately these guys seem to be loosing right now (Bush is still in power, but not for long).
Maybe it's just me, but I think that drug abuse isn't that bad of a crime over here (at least in Canada). Also I would gess that drug abuse causes is a somewhat more dangerous addiction.
This isn't just Christians. It's part of our modern (or rather, post-modern) culture. Just watch Oprah's popular show. She loves religiosity, but the moment someone who actually believes something, and has the slightest bit of conviction in anything but magical poop, she gets very awkward. Once she invited Billy Graham to the show and the the result was hilarious when he started evangilizing to her (well Oprah didn't think so).
This is not to be confused with religious tolerance. Tolerance is accepting people in spite of their belief. Popular culture wants to accept people and say that their beliefs don't matter (which I find rather offesive. If I didn't think my believes mattered I wouldn't be believing in the first place). Unfortunatly, many Christians have tried to synthesize Christian Theology with popular philosophy. It's been done many time in history, and has never done any good. Gnostisim was what happend when they merged with Hellenic phylosophy, Divine Right came from feudalism, Deism came from the enlightement and rationalism, the Roman Catholic animism that exists in many ex-European colonies, and that weird "God made black people our slaves" thing that came out of the Southern United States.
Exactly what is a real word? Is "ain't" a real word, would you punch or maybe spliting their infinitives. As Churchill said, this "is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."
There may actually be something within those pages this time. Maybe.
Common sense tells me that after all this time and bickering they should have gotten it right by now. Unfortunatly, my experience tells me that my common sense doesn't work very well around Microsoft.
If someone produces hardware that only runs binaries signed by Linus, does he have to give up his key
No. They are required to give up Linus' key, but they can't, because they don't own Linus' key. In short, they're screwed.
I think a proper analogy for this would be if I owned a nice piece of land by a river. It was the only peice of land by the river that was usable. I sign a contract with you to sell it to you for 6 million dollars. Then someone else offered me 7 million dollars. Being the foolish retard that I am I sell it to the second guy. Then you come back to make good on the contract. Now I owe you the land, but I don't own it. I still need to give it to you, (or something equivilant). So I can try to buy it back from the guy who gave me 7 million for it, but if he isn't willing then I'm screwed. Since there's now other land by the river that's usable we would probably end up going to court and the judge would decide what an appropriate equivilant trade plus some punitary damages for me being such a retard.
That's how things work out at the moment, I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure how it would transfer over to a GPL3 case, but my guess is that the people who produce the offending software would be required to give all their users equivilant hardware without those code-signing restrictions (or buy Linus' private key, which would be slightly expensive).
the Church of England, a far from fundamentalist branch of Christianity
The church of England is a very weird thing. At one end you have the guys over in the US and Canada, who are so permissive they're just about to get kicked out. Then there are the churches over in Africa and other third-world countries that are rather conservative (maybe even what you call 'fundamentalist'). And then there's the part that's actually in England which is leaning towards the permissiveness of the US and the Canadians. If things continue as they are going right now, the Church of England might not exist in England anymore!
At any rate, the Anglicans are a rather diverse bunch and it's unfair to make a blanket statement about them. Even my generalisations were probalby too much.
If you create your own language, than you can claim ownership of it as long as no one (besides you) ever uses it. The issue is that a language is essentially created by the people who use it. So if the Mapuche leaders get the agreement of everyone who has ever spoken or written Mapuche (including those who have been dead for less than 75 years) they might have a case. Even if the leaders can resurrect the dead and get their permission, I think Microsoft's use of the language falls under Fair Use, so yeah, their stupid.
Your point is a good one, but they had reason's for why they did it as they did. Culture has changed durastically in the past half-century. The things that the original readers would have found enjoyable in the books just go straight over most peoples heads today. I think the change is not so much because poeple have become stupider (although there probably is some of that) but that the theather targets a much less educated audience. Bookworms and couch potatoes are pretty different audinences. People like you and I are a rarety these days (actually, I think we always have been). The movie studios wanted to produce something that most poeple could understand, and they had to make compromises to accomplish that.
Does the analogy with Reardon Metal, or McDonalds Secret Sauce, end when you realize that software is inherently different than a physical substance? If so, why is that? How is it different?
If were going for food, this would be a more correct analogy: Say I bought some Maccaroni from Kraft, and in order to cook Maccaroni and Cheese I also had to by my milk, cheese, salt, and water from Kraft. Using ingredients from another company would cause the macaroni to shrivel up and turn hard.
It's the interoptability thing that's a problem. So that's at least one reason why there's a significant difference.
Well, not a bear, but there's a story about a lion being baptized (note: in the early church being baptized was the same thing, and there was only one church, so all christians were catholic).
Because the library is not were it belongs. It's really quite possible to build a 'non-office' application that makes use of those controls. As to why the UI is included with Office? It's probably just a nasty trick to force people to buy Office because applications need it for their guis.
Your description remindes me of OpenID. It's a really cool system, and you don't even have to worry about lugging it around. The problem isn't that the tech is not there. My guess is that people avoid it because they don't know how the system works and their afraid they'll screw something up. Also OpenID won't be really, really useful until a lot more websites start using it.
But hey, I'm sure there's some technical reason you're right and noone cares.
I don't know if this is actually an issue with Qt on OSX, but often emulated features have pretty poor support for native accesibility related features, so it's not always just a silly technical reason.
It's quite possible that Qt has built in support for all that kind of stuff. If the have, more power too them.
If the OS was perfect nobody would buy the next version
While that is a common theme with proprietary software development, I don't think that's what's happening here. I doubt that MS has any plan to implement soft-links in the nearby future. To do so would be a great help for several cross-platform applications, and Microsoft does not like cross-platform anything.
I think geeks tend to (incorrectly) make the assumption that if someone speakes and acts like a businessman, they aren't be technically apt. Often it's true, however, not nessicarily. People like Gates are almost always speaking to a less knowledge able audience that us. They are smart enough to know that and craft their words and half-truths to take advantage of the audience's ignorace. (This is not unique to the computer field by any means). I don't know how smart the guy actually is (I wouldn't say a genius), but it's probably more than we give him credit for.
"Our intention with this deal was not to create a problem, but rather to solve one,"
You see their intention actually was to create a problem. They were slightly sneeky about it though. You see the created a solution, for a problem that didn't exsist (patent infringment in Linux). Now people think if there's a solution, it must have solved something (ergo Linux must have patent infringment issues).
Um, no? They would make it slightly harder, but not unhackable. Anyone who has sufficient access to your computer to install a keylogger could install software to monitor mouse clicks and get a copy of the image or image map. In fact if I knew what I was working with, I could probably write a JavaScript script to do it in a couple minutes, and then pug it into IE with activeX, Firefox as an addon (there's even more descrete ways to do this, but I'm not that familier with it), or Opera as a user-scripty thingy (whatever they're called).
Backwards Compatibility is not a binary thing. There can be systems that are partially compatible and even among those which are not, breaking compatibility amongst hidden kernel interfaces is much different that breaking compatibility with a file format. Also sometimes the benefit can over-weigh the cost. For example computers are not really backwards-compatible with pen-and-paper, but that doesn't mean computers are bad.
I think what we need is more separation of data formats which should be very, very backwards compatible, API's which should be available as long as their actually being used, and the actual implementations which could turn inside out without bothering the users.
In this view, Linux isn't actually all that bad. It does have a habit of dropping API's prematurely, especially in the kernel parts, but things like tk and motif are still hanging around for the few applications that use them and data format libraries like libpng etc aren't going anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Your exactly right.
This remindes me of the last time someone found out a way to crash firefox and jumped up and down saying ZOMG!! teh hax!!11. And my computer science friends who couldn't recognize a shell if it bashed them in the face will be prancing around saying Use IE, it's the most secure (even though there's a million ways to crash IE remotely). And what really gets me is that the editors at slashdot are dumb enough to post this nonsense.
Don't tell me that you've never believed something based on authority. I'd wadger a guess that you've never actually been to Antartica and seen it for yourself, but you sure as hell won't believe me if I start saying that it's full of tropical wildlife. This is because you've been told by authorities (whom you trust) that Antartica is a cold place and that tropical animals can't live in cold places.
Maybe so, but this is not morality. Morality implies some sort of right versus wrong, this is efficiency versus inefficiency (on a societial scale).
I'm not so sure. I think I'd go for Google's. After all, it doesn't have any bugs.
Then who will? Do you think the browser creators will? We'll they might, but it's rather iffy. Just take a look at Internet Explorer. It is the most popular web browser from a very large company and it has major problems. Microsoft is just not interested in providing users with a high level of security. That leaves the various organizations that administrate internet related stuff and all of them have shown as much effectiveness as a dead badger.
So at the end of day the users are left with the responsibility of keeping themselves safe. Of course, they have no clue how to do this which is why we still see IE and Windows computers all over the place. Instead they go about practicing their Norton voodoo and listening to everything the big media companies say.
I'm a Canadian, so I can't speak directly for the American Evangelicals, but the ones I know aren't that different from those of us up here. In reality, there are only a few Evangelicals who would fit these brash generalizations. One problem is that news media isn't interested in talking about nice people, so they'll find a few brutes and then trump the story up as much as they can. Outrageous stories are popular. I'd guess that the Islamic people have suffered a lot of the same fate as well.
The women thing definitly an issue in many Evangelical churches, although that is more for cultural reasons that anything else. Women are not so much less equal, they just have different spheres of influence then men. The homophobia thing is definitly a problem, although I've noticed it's just as bad among Evangelicals as everyone else (in fact I've found the secular crowd to be the worst in this regard, at least the other groups acknoledge it).
As a rule Evangelicals take a pretty strong view of the separation of Church and State. So while we may have ideosycratic and controversial dogma, we don't force it on anyone else. Our theology is descendant from the original American Evangelicals who founded the United States. Unfortunately, there is a small group of Evangelicals who are trying to bring the State under their control. There are often referred to as the Religious Right or something like that and only some of them are Evangelials. As far as I can tell, the marriage of Church and State is always a bad thing, but fortunately these guys seem to be loosing right now (Bush is still in power, but not for long).
Actually, I think it was first hijacked by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Maybe it's just me, but I think that drug abuse isn't that bad of a crime over here (at least in Canada). Also I would gess that drug abuse causes is a somewhat more dangerous addiction.
This isn't just Christians. It's part of our modern (or rather, post-modern) culture. Just watch Oprah's popular show. She loves religiosity, but the moment someone who actually believes something, and has the slightest bit of conviction in anything but magical poop, she gets very awkward. Once she invited Billy Graham to the show and the the result was hilarious when he started evangilizing to her (well Oprah didn't think so).
This is not to be confused with religious tolerance. Tolerance is accepting people in spite of their belief. Popular culture wants to accept people and say that their beliefs don't matter (which I find rather offesive. If I didn't think my believes mattered I wouldn't be believing in the first place). Unfortunatly, many Christians have tried to synthesize Christian Theology with popular philosophy. It's been done many time in history, and has never done any good. Gnostisim was what happend when they merged with Hellenic phylosophy, Divine Right came from feudalism, Deism came from the enlightement and rationalism, the Roman Catholic animism that exists in many ex-European colonies, and that weird "God made black people our slaves" thing that came out of the Southern United States.
Exactly what is a real word? Is "ain't" a real word, would you punch or maybe spliting their infinitives. As Churchill said, this "is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."
Common sense tells me that after all this time and bickering they should have gotten it right by now. Unfortunatly, my experience tells me that my common sense doesn't work very well around Microsoft.
No. They are required to give up Linus' key, but they can't, because they don't own Linus' key. In short, they're screwed.
I think a proper analogy for this would be if I owned a nice piece of land by a river. It was the only peice of land by the river that was usable. I sign a contract with you to sell it to you for 6 million dollars. Then someone else offered me 7 million dollars. Being the foolish retard that I am I sell it to the second guy. Then you come back to make good on the contract. Now I owe you the land, but I don't own it. I still need to give it to you, (or something equivilant). So I can try to buy it back from the guy who gave me 7 million for it, but if he isn't willing then I'm screwed. Since there's now other land by the river that's usable we would probably end up going to court and the judge would decide what an appropriate equivilant trade plus some punitary damages for me being such a retard.
That's how things work out at the moment, I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure how it would transfer over to a GPL3 case, but my guess is that the people who produce the offending software would be required to give all their users equivilant hardware without those code-signing restrictions (or buy Linus' private key, which would be slightly expensive).
The church of England is a very weird thing. At one end you have the guys over in the US and Canada, who are so permissive they're just about to get kicked out. Then there are the churches over in Africa and other third-world countries that are rather conservative (maybe even what you call 'fundamentalist'). And then there's the part that's actually in England which is leaning towards the permissiveness of the US and the Canadians. If things continue as they are going right now, the Church of England might not exist in England anymore!
At any rate, the Anglicans are a rather diverse bunch and it's unfair to make a blanket statement about them. Even my generalisations were probalby too much.
If you create your own language, than you can claim ownership of it as long as no one (besides you) ever uses it. The issue is that a language is essentially created by the people who use it. So if the Mapuche leaders get the agreement of everyone who has ever spoken or written Mapuche (including those who have been dead for less than 75 years) they might have a case. Even if the leaders can resurrect the dead and get their permission, I think Microsoft's use of the language falls under Fair Use, so yeah, their stupid.
Your point is a good one, but they had reason's for why they did it as they did. Culture has changed durastically in the past half-century. The things that the original readers would have found enjoyable in the books just go straight over most peoples heads today. I think the change is not so much because poeple have become stupider (although there probably is some of that) but that the theather targets a much less educated audience. Bookworms and couch potatoes are pretty different audinences. People like you and I are a rarety these days (actually, I think we always have been). The movie studios wanted to produce something that most poeple could understand, and they had to make compromises to accomplish that.
If were going for food, this would be a more correct analogy: Say I bought some Maccaroni from Kraft, and in order to cook Maccaroni and Cheese I also had to by my milk, cheese, salt, and water from Kraft. Using ingredients from another company would cause the macaroni to shrivel up and turn hard.
It's the interoptability thing that's a problem. So that's at least one reason why there's a significant difference.
Well, not a bear, but there's a story about a lion being baptized (note: in the early church being baptized was the same thing, and there was only one church, so all christians were catholic).
Because the library is not were it belongs. It's really quite possible to build a 'non-office' application that makes use of those controls. As to why the UI is included with Office? It's probably just a nasty trick to force people to buy Office because applications need it for their guis.
Your description remindes me of OpenID. It's a really cool system, and you don't even have to worry about lugging it around. The problem isn't that the tech is not there. My guess is that people avoid it because they don't know how the system works and their afraid they'll screw something up. Also OpenID won't be really, really useful until a lot more websites start using it.
I don't know if this is actually an issue with Qt on OSX, but often emulated features have pretty poor support for native accesibility related features, so it's not always just a silly technical reason.
It's quite possible that Qt has built in support for all that kind of stuff. If the have, more power too them.
While that is a common theme with proprietary software development, I don't think that's what's happening here. I doubt that MS has any plan to implement soft-links in the nearby future. To do so would be a great help for several cross-platform applications, and Microsoft does not like cross-platform anything.
I think geeks tend to (incorrectly) make the assumption that if someone speakes and acts like a businessman, they aren't be technically apt. Often it's true, however, not nessicarily. People like Gates are almost always speaking to a less knowledge able audience that us. They are smart enough to know that and craft their words and half-truths to take advantage of the audience's ignorace. (This is not unique to the computer field by any means). I don't know how smart the guy actually is (I wouldn't say a genius), but it's probably more than we give him credit for.
From Hilf:
You see their intention actually was to create a problem. They were slightly sneeky about it though. You see the created a solution, for a problem that didn't exsist (patent infringment in Linux). Now people think if there's a solution, it must have solved something (ergo Linux must have patent infringment issues).
Um, no? They would make it slightly harder, but not unhackable. Anyone who has sufficient access to your computer to install a keylogger could install software to monitor mouse clicks and get a copy of the image or image map. In fact if I knew what I was working with, I could probably write a JavaScript script to do it in a couple minutes, and then pug it into IE with activeX, Firefox as an addon (there's even more descrete ways to do this, but I'm not that familier with it), or Opera as a user-scripty thingy (whatever they're called).
Backwards Compatibility is not a binary thing. There can be systems that are partially compatible and even among those which are not, breaking compatibility amongst hidden kernel interfaces is much different that breaking compatibility with a file format. Also sometimes the benefit can over-weigh the cost. For example computers are not really backwards-compatible with pen-and-paper, but that doesn't mean computers are bad.
I think what we need is more separation of data formats which should be very, very backwards compatible, API's which should be available as long as their actually being used, and the actual implementations which could turn inside out without bothering the users.
In this view, Linux isn't actually all that bad. It does have a habit of dropping API's prematurely, especially in the kernel parts, but things like tk and motif are still hanging around for the few applications that use them and data format libraries like libpng etc aren't going anywhere.