> This, as far as I understand, is simply not possibly in Java
Its certainly possible for Java. There is JNI... and SWIG supports it. You can also directly compile Java to native code using GCJ or other commercial AoT compilers. It's usually just not worth the trouble though and sometimes the performance is even worse.
You can get a major boost in Python with a native extension. Modern Java is already fast (regardless of what you might have heard). So the extra complexity is usually not worth it.
> slow, rather unresponsive and crash often
Framework bloat and misuse. The JVM itself is robust. You might as well blame C/C++ for buffer overflows and crashes.
> If I want to write a program quickly, I write it in Python even though I know the program will run quite slowly.
Most of the times I write in Python, I know that the program will run almost as quickly as native code for practical purposes, since for most of the common cases that need fast code, a native extension module is already readily available - so its just a little call overhead that is extra. In my 12 years of Python use, including processing large amounts of research data, I rarely needed to even use Cython. Of course, YMMV.
I don’t get your rant on student loans. She lied about having a doctoral degree. No one should be doing a doctoral degree on a student loan. Bachelors and Masters – sure. But, not for a doctoral degree. Not having money is not a reason for not having a doctorate.
> as HR passes over you repeatedly
This has nothing to do with glass ceiling at HR. In fact, HR does not handle doctorates well. They don't understand them for most part. They almost seem to count it as a liability. The only people who respect it are other people with doctorates since they know what it takes to get one and about how to put such candidates to use. This lady was NOT going through a HR filter. Few who make close to $600K do. She did not betray a faceless HR. She betrayed people who would most likely know her by name, for grants that cost millions of tax payer dollars.
Most of these studies in humanities don't get verifications. You trust the people who have done them because they have been trained for a decade in a culture of academic honesty. Now, all the studies she would have done in the past would need to be called into question since she might have faked data. Your defense of her is quite bizarre. This isn't a put-food-on-table, livelihood position.
> The conservatives have hated public education since it was first introduced
How did you manage to turn this into a partisan issue?
> she just proved their demands of needing a college degree are hollow and stupid.
She has college degrees alright, from good institutions too - a bachelors from NYU and a masters from Columbia. She did not have a doctoral degree from NYU that she claimed she had.
You clearly have not been in academia and you have no idea what you are talking about. Forgetting to cite things in a paper can get you into a world of trouble. Faking a doctorate, in grant applications no less, is pretty much an academic death sentence - in any country, at any level - not just US elite institutions.
> I have my doubts about the average slashdotter's ability to even read the lines, let alone between them... hence this post.
You clearly consider yourself far above this average that you seem to have computed. Why hang around here if we are not your intellectual equals? For the benefit of gracing us with your insights from above, oh elite mind?
The average slashdotter is fine. It is you who is seeing imaginary lines and projecting.
Yeah. He will cash in. To enjoy the pleasures of living in his eighties. Because that's why one becomes a politician for close to 40 years and generally be an outcast in his party... because being a gynecologist alone just does not bring in enough cash to live it up in the eighties.
> In other words, the NSA spying on foreigners is their job.
Spying on foreigners who are SPIES and perhaps those in government is their job. A spy agency spying on all foreign civilians they can is quite unprecedented. This further changes perceptions on US worldwide. As a citizen, this matters you. If you are a person in US IT, it especially matters to you. Foreign companies are beginning to move away from US products.
> If you're a foreigner being spied on by the NSA, take it up with your own government. If YOUR government won't protect you from OUR government, consider getting a new government.
Fair points. It would be interesting to see some other data on this - some thing a bit more rigorous and controlled, without a little New Age bent like in that article.
> And let me tell you - the current cultivars are almost invariably better at that than their 1950 era relatives.
Do you have any data to back that up? This recent NYT article seems to disagree.
Modern cultivars are selected for business reasons rather than health reasons - better yield, pest/pesticide resistance, transportability and presentation. We are still at the start of the green revolution. Now that we got the business stuff in control, perhaps the next generation plant genetics research can focus on healthier stuff.
No conjectures please. Find actual quotes (to show it even exists) from recent scientists, and several of them (to show it is a phenomenon, rather than an exception), who said that they did it out of laziness (exact word or proper synonyms - not some loose interpretation of it) and I might believe you. I have done science and it is not at all as you imagine.
> An intelligent, creative person will think about better, faster, easier ways to do the same thing.
That intelligent, creative person who is at a stage to make better splicing is usually a Principal Investigator who has cheap grad students to do the wet work. Laziness is hardly a motivation for him to improve the process. Getting a grant in the process and becoming famous for the method would be. That's just standard science work, not laziness by any conventional definition. Mainstream science is nothing like hobby engineering around the house like the parent suggested. You often don't see the results of the work simplify your own life.
> presenter said he also called it "beer driven development"
Sure, it happens in IT. That's my point. IT is not complicated. With a little flair, you can read half a dozen books with no further background and you can be an overpaid sysadmin. Write a few scripts that you were expected to be able to anyway and you can pretend you are being creative.
But, show me "beer driven science" and you can have your point.
> Uh, no. Laziness accounts for the wheel, fire, steel, assembly line, powered flight and every form of transportation ever, computers in general, all of robotics, electricity, gps and satellite communications, the internet - pretty much all inventions which increase efficiency of any kind.
Now you are just making stuff up. We don't even know how the wheel and fire got started. None of the other stuff was invented out of laziness (did Henry Ford or Wright Brothers actually say they did it out of laziness?) and most of the stuff did not save any time for the pioneers (and they were not doing it to save time). You just made a teleological argument... that if it improved efficiency, it must by definition be laziness.
Wanting to make more money by inventing better methods is called having a business plan, not laziness. Wanting to improve things for humanity and move to the next level (all of that stuff created more work, not make time for fun - our goal is to do higher things, not fewer things), and perhaps make a name or money in the process, is not called laziness in any conventional sense of the word.
Laziness may be a great skill for IT, especially for mundane automation. But this is about science and creativity. Laziness does not cut it there. Writing a little script for yourself is not considered greatly creative or scientific. Its just a little clever.
He never suggested that. He meant QtCreator is a good C++ IDE, even if you just want to create non-Qt C++ apps.
> only an idiot - masochistic glorious idiot - would try to code qt with eclipse.
Why? Why call names? Eclipse was an officially supported IDE for Qt, before QtCreator. It supported both C++ and Java (Qt Jambi - now defunct) for Qt.
> c/c++ in eclipse is horrible and you most definitely are NOT going to be coding.net in eclipse.
Why bring up.NET?.NET is not officially supported by the Eclipse project and there are no major efforts underway by third-party efforts. But C++ via CDT has been supported by the project for a very long time, even if it stalled for a bit, in between.
While CDT may not be a perfect C++ IDE for you, it is still a pretty good C++ IDE compared to the popular open source options.
I don't think there is any ground for any of your snarkiness in what he said.
There is an entire book exploring this Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security - by Daniel J. Solove "Daniel J. Solove is the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and an internationally-known expert in privacy law." http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Hide-Tradeoff-between-Security/dp/0300172338
Arm yourself with arguments to refute enthusiastic or apathetic proponents of the surveillance state.
Sometime ago, I was reading the mailing list post where the devs discuss removing the minimize button. The lead removes it, tests it on two, just two devs, whom he admits are atypical users. They are not happy about the change, but say they can live with it. So he removes it. Huh?
I thought that the Gnome foundation was big on HCI... and this is what passes for testing radical changes to on one of the most established UI conventions of the universal WIMP interface for the most popular Linux Desktop at the time? I am all for trying out new Window Managers and interaction metaphors, but you just don't mess with a mainstream UI without a lot of testing and feedback, especially for Gnome, which was not meant to be an adventurous desktop, but rather something you used without thinking too much about it.
First, the murder rates are always counted per 100,000 (see the very first line of the page you cite). I am very familiar with this page and stats.
> Mass murders may make headlines
True. Mass murders are a minority of total murders in civil societies. Still, my point is that they are only possible in societies with free access to guns.
> The truth is that the murder rate is based on poverty and civil unrest
Correct. *Therefore* I expect homicide rates to be much, much higher in India and China due to the reasons I stated above (less literate, emotional, poor population under little law enforcement - check our prison stats with yours). Yet, the murder rates are lower even though we have violent insurgencies in some parts of the country.
> The availability and type of weapons has little to do with it... Where there's a will, there's a way.
For well-planned murders, perhaps (will -> way), but still. Much of this intentional murder is not long-deliberated murder and happens in the spur of the moment. Guns greatly increase the effectiveness. To compare like nations, it would be more interesting to see % of fatal stabbings in UK vs. % fatal shootings in US.
A gun also emboldens a thoughtless attacker (like that New Orleans Mothers Day thug). Most criminals are thoughtless. They are not willful individuals who carefully acquire weapons and rationally weigh consequences. They work with what's at hand. Availability of weapons has a lot to do with it, all other factors remaining equal.
> Where there's a will, there's a way.
If you really believe that guns don't change murder rate, I suppose it does not matter that Fast and Furious put all those guns in Mexico. After all, the gangs there will be just as effective at murdering without those guns. Right? Will-Way. And there is no point in disarming felons in US too. After all, they will find a way anyway. Right?
> In Monaco, there were no murders for the entire year recorded. In the Ivory coast, the rate is 56 per 1000.
I am not sure why you bring up Monaco. It is a rather small and exceptional state of less than a square mile that one cannot extrapolate anything from it. Next you will be mentioning Vatican. I am also not sure why you bring up Ivory Coast. Poor, lawless country with guns has high murder rate? Sounds about right.
No. Technology does fix social problems. But it also creates new problems. It does not simply change or amplify existing problems. The new social problems that emerge are *fundamentally different* than old problems. Industrialization did solve old problems (Eg: low economic power of women) and the problems it created were of a new kind (Eg: uprooting of cultural communities).
> Take away guns and people use knives.
I am aware of all the US gun vendor propaganda. None of the recent single-person perpetrated mass murders (Colorado, Arizona, Newtown) could have happened with knives. I am in India. We have a lot more people and have a lot more undiagnosed mental illness around (if that is what you mean by underlying social problem). No ones goes to a shrink here, even though we are in a greater social turmoil, with all the change around us. People are still less educated and the police are ineffective. Yet, we don't deal with people going postal, because guns are hard to get and you don't get far with knives (also harder to make rap videos and movies romanticizing untrained people who can solve problems with knives). The two knife attackers in China caused limited harm compared any massacre in US. Yes, people do throw rocks when rioting. But that is a much different problem. We have economically impotent and disaffected young men too, but the window of opportunities within which they may express themselves through violence is much more limited.
If US was a gun free zone, it would not have had much problem with urban gangs. It might have other problems, but not urban gangs. Historically, knife wielding gangs (as brigands) could only operate with force in the wild, not in urban environments. Let's move away from this topic that attracts emotions.
Currently, the relationship between the government and its citizens in indeed changing. And it is entirely due to technology changes. Digital snooping is suddenly cheap. Big data is suddenly cheap. Technology does not overlay social problems. Social problems (or benefits) are a direct consequence of technology. For instance, the only reason US jobs are being exported is because of the emergence of cheap travel & shipping and the Internet (shipping of information products), not because of selfish business men. Colonial era only happened because of the emergence of better shipping technology.
Just like organisms are a mere manifestation of DNA, social problems are often (although not always) mere expressions of technology application.
I wish people would stop using terms like "parasitic" and the more popular term... "viral".
Both connote that the GPL component got there without your intervention and parasitic implies that it is draining you without providing any benefits... like a tapeworm. The author explicitly chose to use GPL component because it had value and when the rules it sets forth presented an acceptable price or better, an alignment with one's own values. A GPL component is neither like a real virus nor a computer virus. It is entirely there by free and rational choice. Of course, you know all that.
That AC is either a little insane or at least a major drama queen. The only freedom GPL takes away from him is his "freedom" to take away other people's freedom. If that does not suit him - fine. But calling that "evil by definition" or "all such freedoms end" is ridiculous.
Based on GP post, I think he is referring to presidential candidates doing a reversal on their strongly stated positions once elected, rather than to technologies.
Does Pidgin have an iOS implementation or a BlackBerry implementation? I sure can't find a libpurple implementation in AppStore on a quick search (don't have a BlackBerry, so no idea).
> libpurple has an android port. So whatever interface you make, will have all the same back end as pidgin, and all the same features like an OTR plugin.
I am not sure what you are getting at here. Libraries are useless for consumers. They want apps. They are not going to make interfaces. Which libpurple based apps can I recommend to my friend in middle east who uses an iOS device and a BlackBerry? He says that the only app he found across all his devices was WhatsApp (and what everyone else uses).
Please let me know which open source implementation covers Android, BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, iOS, Series 40, Symbian (S60), and Windows Phone (from WhatsApp Wikipedia page) on a common network (or a collection of implementations that cover a common network on all devices).
No lectures on benefits on open source benefits please. I have been developing with open source technologies for 12 years and am aware of pidgin, libpurple, jabber, open SIP clients etc.
The problem with the current open source alternatives is that while they cover all desktop platforms, they don't do mobile messaging, much less cross-platform mobile messaging.
Nixon is said to have argued during Watergate that it is legal if the president does it. Nobody bought that argument then. I don't see why it should be legal now.
Slashdot Mirror
> This, as far as I understand, is simply not possibly in Java
Its certainly possible for Java. There is JNI... and SWIG supports it. You can also directly compile Java to native code using GCJ or other commercial AoT compilers. It's usually just not worth the trouble though and sometimes the performance is even worse.
You can get a major boost in Python with a native extension. Modern Java is already fast (regardless of what you might have heard). So the extra complexity is usually not worth it.
> slow, rather unresponsive and crash often
Framework bloat and misuse. The JVM itself is robust. You might as well blame C/C++ for buffer overflows and crashes.
> If I want to write a program quickly, I write it in Python even though I know the program will run quite slowly.
Most of the times I write in Python, I know that the program will run almost as quickly as native code for practical purposes, since for most of the common cases that need fast code, a native extension module is already readily available - so its just a little call overhead that is extra. In my 12 years of Python use, including processing large amounts of research data, I rarely needed to even use Cython. Of course, YMMV.
Exactly why do we discuss articles like this? There is zero evidence so far that China is doing mass surveillance outside of China.
The articles acknowledges it, and asks questions that cannot be answered, while providing no new insights.
I don’t get your rant on student loans. She lied about having a doctoral degree. No one should be doing a doctoral degree on a student loan. Bachelors and Masters – sure. But, not for a doctoral degree. Not having money is not a reason for not having a doctorate.
> as HR passes over you repeatedly
This has nothing to do with glass ceiling at HR. In fact, HR does not handle doctorates well. They don't understand them for most part. They almost seem to count it as a liability. The only people who respect it are other people with doctorates since they know what it takes to get one and about how to put such candidates to use. This lady was NOT going through a HR filter. Few who make close to $600K do. She did not betray a faceless HR. She betrayed people who would most likely know her by name, for grants that cost millions of tax payer dollars.
Most of these studies in humanities don't get verifications. You trust the people who have done them because they have been trained for a decade in a culture of academic honesty. Now, all the studies she would have done in the past would need to be called into question since she might have faked data. Your defense of her is quite bizarre. This isn't a put-food-on-table, livelihood position.
> The conservatives have hated public education since it was first introduced
How did you manage to turn this into a partisan issue?
> she just proved their demands of needing a college degree are hollow and stupid.
She has college degrees alright, from good institutions too - a bachelors from NYU and a masters from Columbia. She did not have a doctoral degree from NYU that she claimed she had.
You clearly have not been in academia and you have no idea what you are talking about. Forgetting to cite things in a paper can get you into a world of trouble. Faking a doctorate, in grant applications no less, is pretty much an academic death sentence - in any country, at any level - not just US elite institutions.
> I have my doubts about the average slashdotter's ability to even read the lines, let alone between them... hence this post.
You clearly consider yourself far above this average that you seem to have computed. Why hang around here if we are not your intellectual equals? For the benefit of gracing us with your insights from above, oh elite mind?
The average slashdotter is fine. It is you who is seeing imaginary lines and projecting.
Yeah. He will cash in. To enjoy the pleasures of living in his eighties. Because that's why one becomes a politician for close to 40 years and generally be an outcast in his party... because being a gynecologist alone just does not bring in enough cash to live it up in the eighties.
> In other words, the NSA spying on foreigners is their job.
Spying on foreigners who are SPIES and perhaps those in government is their job.
A spy agency spying on all foreign civilians they can is quite unprecedented.
This further changes perceptions on US worldwide. As a citizen, this matters you.
If you are a person in US IT, it especially matters to you. Foreign companies are beginning to move away from US products.
> If you're a foreigner being spied on by the NSA, take it up with your own government. If YOUR government won't protect you from OUR government, consider getting a new government.
How colonial of you.
Fair points. It would be interesting to see some other data on this - some thing a bit more rigorous and controlled, without a little New Age bent like in that article.
> And let me tell you - the current cultivars are almost invariably better at that than their 1950 era relatives.
Do you have any data to back that up? This recent NYT article seems to disagree.
Modern cultivars are selected for business reasons rather than health reasons - better yield, pest/pesticide resistance, transportability and presentation. We are still at the start of the green revolution. Now that we got the business stuff in control, perhaps the next generation plant genetics research can focus on healthier stuff.
> Suppose you have some sort...
No conjectures please. Find actual quotes (to show it even exists) from recent scientists, and several of them (to show it is a phenomenon, rather than an exception), who said that they did it out of laziness (exact word or proper synonyms - not some loose interpretation of it) and I might believe you. I have done science and it is not at all as you imagine.
> An intelligent, creative person will think about better, faster, easier ways to do the same thing.
That intelligent, creative person who is at a stage to make better splicing is usually a Principal Investigator who has cheap grad students to do the wet work. Laziness is hardly a motivation for him to improve the process. Getting a grant in the process and becoming famous for the method would be. That's just standard science work, not laziness by any conventional definition. Mainstream science is nothing like hobby engineering around the house like the parent suggested. You often don't see the results of the work simplify your own life.
> presenter said he also called it "beer driven development"
Sure, it happens in IT. That's my point. IT is not complicated. With a little flair, you can read half a dozen books with no further background and you can be an overpaid sysadmin. Write a few scripts that you were expected to be able to anyway and you can pretend you are being creative.
But, show me "beer driven science" and you can have your point.
> Uh, no. Laziness accounts for the wheel, fire, steel, assembly line, powered flight and every form of transportation ever, computers in general, all of robotics, electricity, gps and satellite communications, the internet - pretty much all inventions which increase efficiency of any kind.
Now you are just making stuff up. We don't even know how the wheel and fire got started. None of the other stuff was invented out of laziness (did Henry Ford or Wright Brothers actually say they did it out of laziness?) and most of the stuff did not save any time for the pioneers (and they were not doing it to save time). You just made a teleological argument... that if it improved efficiency, it must by definition be laziness.
Wanting to make more money by inventing better methods is called having a business plan, not laziness. Wanting to improve things for humanity and move to the next level (all of that stuff created more work, not make time for fun - our goal is to do higher things, not fewer things), and perhaps make a name or money in the process, is not called laziness in any conventional sense of the word.
Laziness may be a great skill for IT, especially for mundane automation.
But this is about science and creativity. Laziness does not cut it there.
Writing a little script for yourself is not considered greatly creative or scientific. Its just a little clever.
That's mostly unnecessary
> you going to code java with qt creator?
He never suggested that. He meant QtCreator is a good C++ IDE, even if you just want to create non-Qt C++ apps.
> only an idiot - masochistic glorious idiot - would try to code qt with eclipse.
Why? Why call names?
Eclipse was an officially supported IDE for Qt, before QtCreator. It supported both C++ and Java (Qt Jambi - now defunct) for Qt.
> c/c++ in eclipse is horrible and you most definitely are NOT going to be coding .net in eclipse.
Why bring up .NET? .NET is not officially supported by the Eclipse project and there are no major efforts underway by third-party efforts. But C++ via CDT has been supported by the project for a very long time, even if it stalled for a bit, in between.
While CDT may not be a perfect C++ IDE for you, it is still a pretty good C++ IDE compared to the popular open source options.
I don't think there is any ground for any of your snarkiness in what he said.
There is an entire book exploring this
Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security - by Daniel J. Solove
"Daniel J. Solove is the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and an internationally-known expert in privacy law."
http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Hide-Tradeoff-between-Security/dp/0300172338
Arm yourself with arguments to refute enthusiastic or apathetic proponents of the surveillance state.
Donate via Humble Bundle then?
Sometime ago, I was reading the mailing list post where the devs discuss removing the minimize button. The lead removes it, tests it on two, just two devs, whom he admits are atypical users. They are not happy about the change, but say they can live with it. So he removes it. Huh?
I thought that the Gnome foundation was big on HCI... and this is what passes for testing radical changes to on one of the most established UI conventions of the universal WIMP interface for the most popular Linux Desktop at the time? I am all for trying out new Window Managers and interaction metaphors, but you just don't mess with a mainstream UI without a lot of testing and feedback, especially for Gnome, which was not meant to be an adventurous desktop, but rather something you used without thinking too much about it.
I ended up with Cinnamon as well.
First, the murder rates are always counted per 100,000 (see the very first line of the page you cite). I am very familiar with this page and stats.
> Mass murders may make headlines
True. Mass murders are a minority of total murders in civil societies. Still, my point is that they are only possible in societies with free access to guns.
> The truth is that the murder rate is based on poverty and civil unrest
Correct. *Therefore* I expect homicide rates to be much, much higher in India and China due to the reasons I stated above (less literate, emotional, poor population under little law enforcement - check our prison stats with yours). Yet, the murder rates are lower even though we have violent insurgencies in some parts of the country.
> The availability and type of weapons has little to do with it... Where there's a will, there's a way.
For well-planned murders, perhaps (will -> way), but still. Much of this intentional murder is not long-deliberated murder and happens in the spur of the moment. Guns greatly increase the effectiveness. To compare like nations, it would be more interesting to see % of fatal stabbings in UK vs. % fatal shootings in US.
A gun also emboldens a thoughtless attacker (like that New Orleans Mothers Day thug). Most criminals are thoughtless. They are not willful individuals who carefully acquire weapons and rationally weigh consequences. They work with what's at hand. Availability of weapons has a lot to do with it, all other factors remaining equal.
> Where there's a will, there's a way.
If you really believe that guns don't change murder rate, I suppose it does not matter that Fast and Furious put all those guns in Mexico. After all, the gangs there will be just as effective at murdering without those guns. Right? Will-Way. And there is no point in disarming felons in US too. After all, they will find a way anyway. Right?
> In Monaco, there were no murders for the entire year recorded. In the Ivory coast, the rate is 56 per 1000.
I am not sure why you bring up Monaco. It is a rather small and exceptional state of less than a square mile that one cannot extrapolate anything from it. Next you will be mentioning Vatican. I am also not sure why you bring up Ivory Coast. Poor, lawless country with guns has high murder rate? Sounds about right.
No. Technology does fix social problems. But it also creates new problems. It does not simply change or amplify existing problems. The new social problems that emerge are *fundamentally different* than old problems. Industrialization did solve old problems (Eg: low economic power of women) and the problems it created were of a new kind (Eg: uprooting of cultural communities).
> Take away guns and people use knives.
I am aware of all the US gun vendor propaganda. None of the recent single-person perpetrated mass murders (Colorado, Arizona, Newtown) could have happened with knives. I am in India. We have a lot more people and have a lot more undiagnosed mental illness around (if that is what you mean by underlying social problem). No ones goes to a shrink here, even though we are in a greater social turmoil, with all the change around us. People are still less educated and the police are ineffective. Yet, we don't deal with people going postal, because guns are hard to get and you don't get far with knives (also harder to make rap videos and movies romanticizing untrained people who can solve problems with knives). The two knife attackers in China caused limited harm compared any massacre in US. Yes, people do throw rocks when rioting. But that is a much different problem. We have economically impotent and disaffected young men too, but the window of opportunities within which they may express themselves through violence is much more limited.
If US was a gun free zone, it would not have had much problem with urban gangs. It might have other problems, but not urban gangs. Historically, knife wielding gangs (as brigands) could only operate with force in the wild, not in urban environments. Let's move away from this topic that attracts emotions.
Currently, the relationship between the government and its citizens in indeed changing. And it is entirely due to technology changes. Digital snooping is suddenly cheap. Big data is suddenly cheap. Technology does not overlay social problems. Social problems (or benefits) are a direct consequence of technology. For instance, the only reason US jobs are being exported is because of the emergence of cheap travel & shipping and the Internet (shipping of information products), not because of selfish business men. Colonial era only happened because of the emergence of better shipping technology.
Just like organisms are a mere manifestation of DNA, social problems are often (although not always) mere expressions of technology application.
I wish people would stop using terms like "parasitic" and the more popular term... "viral".
Both connote that the GPL component got there without your intervention and parasitic implies that it is draining you without providing any benefits... like a tapeworm. The author explicitly chose to use GPL component because it had value and when the rules it sets forth presented an acceptable price or better, an alignment with one's own values. A GPL component is neither like a real virus nor a computer virus. It is entirely there by free and rational choice. Of course, you know all that.
That AC is either a little insane or at least a major drama queen. The only freedom GPL takes away from him is his "freedom" to take away other people's freedom. If that does not suit him - fine. But calling that "evil by definition" or "all such freedoms end" is ridiculous.
Exactly a month ago, New York Times had an article on how mundane a tactic this is in China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/world/asia/in-china-hacking-has-widespread-acceptance.html
ForeignPolicy.com did a piece on US IP piracy from Britain when it was the emerging power like China
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/12/05/we_were_pirates_too
No one is a saint.
Based on GP post, I think he is referring to presidential candidates doing a reversal on their strongly stated positions once elected, rather than to technologies.
Does Pidgin have an iOS implementation or a BlackBerry implementation? I sure can't find a libpurple implementation in AppStore on a quick search (don't have a BlackBerry, so no idea).
> libpurple has an android port. So whatever interface you make, will have all the same back end as pidgin, and all the same features like an OTR plugin.
I am not sure what you are getting at here. Libraries are useless for consumers. They want apps. They are not going to make interfaces. Which libpurple based apps can I recommend to my friend in middle east who uses an iOS device and a BlackBerry? He says that the only app he found across all his devices was WhatsApp (and what everyone else uses).
Please let me know which open source implementation covers Android, BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, iOS, Series 40, Symbian (S60), and Windows Phone (from WhatsApp Wikipedia page) on a common network (or a collection of implementations that cover a common network on all devices).
No lectures on benefits on open source benefits please. I have been developing with open source technologies for 12 years and am aware of pidgin, libpurple, jabber, open SIP clients etc.
The problem with the current open source alternatives is that while they cover all desktop platforms, they don't do mobile messaging, much less cross-platform mobile messaging.
Nixon is said to have argued during Watergate that it is legal if the president does it. Nobody bought that argument then. I don't see why it should be legal now.