Yes they do. But they don't get rid of the mess. They just hide it so you usually don't have to see it. Its effective, but its not really that good.
Abstracting differences between browsers is a practical solution, but its not an ideal solution.
Its really almost exactly like ipv4 with NAT proliferation, and ipv6. The first is a practical solution and you can make some great internet applications with ipv4, and there are libraries to help abstract away the nat traversal issues and so forth...
But ipv6 is still a better solution.
In both cases we have practical solutions that work with what we have but are as ugly as sin, and ideal elegant solutions that would work simpler and better, but are difficult to get up and running because its difficult to get something new to reach critical mass.
Right off the top the restriction to having to use Javascript is a serious flaw in the 'current system'. Javascript is a great language for quick and dirty web forms... but enterprise level web based applications? Get real! its a scripting language, and its not even entirely reliably implemented to spec across browsers.
The ability to use the right tool for the job was one of the major failings of Java and one area where.NET made big improvements. C# is a great language... but its not the 'best language for all possible projects'. Neither is Javascript... or Lisp...or anything else... the ability to use a variety of languages on the CLR "VM" is one of its biggest advantages.
"AJAX" as an platform gets the job done, but we can do so much better.
Yes, so its up to each couple/trio/network to come to their own understanding.
That's sort of beside the point. When discussing the nature of open relationships the mind set of the people discussing it can have very different mental pictures of what is involved; a committed threesome is not the same as a couple who engage in an endless series of transient affairs. (Interestingly both have elements more commonly associated with monogamy than 'open relationships'.)
An imposed "openness" is no openness at all.
Agreed.
But I've never heard anyone argue that those who prefer monogamous relationships for themselves are somehow backward.
I have. From refering to monogamy as a failure to rise above ones animalistic instincts, primitive jealously, childish possessivness, to calling the whole concept little more than a religious tradition with no rational justification. Calling it conformist, calling it an irrational self denial of happiness.
Actually many monogamous relationships run into problems when one partner gets too close to a friend, even if they are sexually exclusive with their partner.
Right Intimacy and Sexuality are different. (And as an aside, perceived infideltiy is just as damaging as actual infidelity; it really doesn't matter in the slightest what actually went on if honesty, perception, and trust break down. That's true of any relationship, open or closed, intimate or casual.)
Regardless of who you go to be with, if one is polyamorous - that is, wired so that you are sometimes in love with more than one person - pretending that you only love one person is living a lie.
Hmmm. Beyond here be dragons...
Seriously though; what does it really mean to be 'wired so that you are sometimes in love with more than one person'; and what does that really have to do with polygamy vs monogamy. If I'm shopping for a home and I find two separate houses that are perfect in every way... am I living a lie by choosing one. Am I 'pretending' anything about my feelings? Or have I simply made a choice and committed to one place to live vs another? If I move into one home and pine for the other does that mean I'm hardwired to want to live in two places, or do I just need to learn to live with the decisions I've made?
Frankly I think love is a lot like that. A monogamist doesn't 'stop' loving everyone else in their life, or pretend that they don't care about others, but they choose to focus on one relationship, to make it their 'home', and they choose to let their feelings for others recede into the background, as a consequence of that focus.
Can you really focus on multiple relationships the same way you can focus on one? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can you have more than one home? Sure you can have more than one house; but are they all really 'home'? Is any of them really home? Is there a point at which you don't really have a home, and just flit around homeless seeking out new partners, not because you are somehow 'wired' to love more than one person, but because you simply refuse to make a choice and dedicate yourself to it, having deluded yourself that such a choice is impossible, and at best would be 'living a lie'?
Of those who have found a working open arrangement, that's great, but I remain doubtful that its the only configuration in which they could be happy. I know I can hypothesize inifitely other configurations in which I could be happy.
Has anyone suggested that it's going to go away? If you want it, choose it for yourself. Just don't try to choose it for me.
*If* it were found to be destructive to society, why not? Or at least why not exclude you from society? You remain free to form your own in your own space. (Though I grant that finding space is a separate, and perhaps unsolvable problem.)
I also concede that its a big *IF*. I don't think it necessarily is bad for society. But at the same time, what if the pendulum did swing the other way - where even committed threesomes w
A trillion dollars! 100 times what even googles total revenues are. Its a problem nobody has.
And lets face it, if your "website" is generating that kind of revenue, you wouldn't have an ISP. You'd BE an ISP, with your own peering, fiber, and so on.
AJAX is an overused acronym. It doesn't do anything that you couldn't do with frames or popups anyways.
To my mind AJAX is more the step its taken towards generic frameworks that hide the html/javascript/xmlhttprequest stuff that's really going on, and all the cruft to support doing it on multiple browsers and presenting it all to developers with as an API.
In that view AJAX is sort of like the OO C++ wrappers for the C windows APIs. (MFC, OWL, etc). Previously C++ programmers would encapsulate what was needed for the application at hand, each sort of hacking something together. And then suddenly there were these big huge frameworks you could program against; that mostly worked pretty well, but occasionally failed in spectacular ways or hid some functionality that you needed. Forcing you go back to the C APIs directly, and work doubly hard to avoid blowing the whole thing up, since the frameworks could be really badly trashed if you started manipulating hWnd's and so forth directly.
The big difference though, is that AJAX is flakier than the OO wrappers ever were.
Lots of old C code is full of with goto statements to break out of loops, or (even worse) to restart them, and return statements everywhere and anywhere.
But you do have the obligation to accurately understand the love-style before deciding if it's to your taste or not, just as you have to hear both Bach and Brahms before rendering your musical judgment; your comments show that you do not.
I disagree with your example. An obligation to accurately understand something does not compel you to immerse yourself in something. No more than a vegetarian needs to eat a hamburger in order to understand eating meat. A thought experiment is enough to make valid commentary.
As to the issue at hand, open relationships mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
Open relationships defy precise definition: Is a committed threesome an open relationship? Is comitted couple couple that engages in swinging or wife-swapping an open relationship? Is a couple where the husband has a mistress an open relationship? What if the wife knows and has accepted it? Is a couple that permits the members to have extramarital encounters, but under the condition they be discreet and not mention them open? Is an individual who refuses to commit, but instead floats from relationship to relationship an "open" individual coping with non-open partners?
I think many versions *are* harmful, and in some cases even self-destructive. I think some versions are theoretically ok.
I personally find it difficult to really believe deep down that at least some individuals involved aren't repressing guilt, jealousy, or other pain by having the open-ness 'imposed' on them; especially as proponents tend to make rubbish arguments about how its more 'enlightened' and that finding it distasteful represents a personal failure of character -- but I understand that some people may genuinely be able to make it work.
That said, I find it dubious that those same people could not make a monogamous relationship work for them too if they chose to; after all there is no social prohibition on having as many close friends as you like. So perhaps its best for the well being of society for monogamy to persist.
Actually, he was off by 100%. But that's beside the point.
People may be annoyed by 2, 4 or even higher wait times, but they'll put up with them in the right circumstances without complaint.
Showing people a blank screen, not so much. Show them a progress bar, and they might wait for it; especially if it contains something they need.
The whole 'get it on the screen in 2 seconds or you've lost them' applies to online shopping, product reviews, forums, etc. But people are willing to wait 5-10 or even longer for their bank, their credit card, to file their taxes, to play a game, or to edit a spreadsheet. (As long as the 'start up time' is at START UP, and not after every click.)
If 'web2.0 apps' like gmail took 5-10 seconds to start up, but didn't exhibit the html/javascript flakeyness that would be worth it. And a lot of the load time could be addressed with caching, and having the VM preloaded, if that was the only stumbling block, hell they really are more *application* than *webpage* -- with some browser support they could be ready to go in the background, selected like wii channels or something, for commonly visited 'sites'.
AJAX is a mostly a train wreck on par with the spaghetti code that we inherited from the Basic/C/Cobol era. Html/javascript just wasn't designed for this sort of use. AJAX is like writing multithreaded real-time applications in Windows 3.0 or MacOS9 cooperative threading models... you can do it... and it can even mostly work most of the time if you don't bang on it too hard. But its never going to be great.
asp.net was a decent move forward, as at least it mostly shielded the developer from the ajax mess. Unless you needed to do something.net didn't support, or worse when.net just didn't work and you had to dig into the javascript and html mess that your neat little.net app generates to find the problem and fix it.
But we *really* need to see a good standards based framework on the browser side, that applications can be written against.
Of course, we've always had Java and ActiveX. But Java was proprietary, and was hampered immensely by Microsofts attempts to discredit it, and embrace/extend/destroy it, including their own incompatible MSJVM, and "Visual J++" version of the language. Plus it was plagued by its own problems. Not to mention that the language itself I always found cumbersome. (I think Microsoft really did a good job with C# by comparison.) And ActiveX? Well, the less said about that plague on mankind the better.:)
JavaFX, at first blush, looks like it might fit the bill.
You forget, the reason why those troops are stationed across the ocean and on foreign soil is that we've already sent 100's of thousands over seas to fight and die in wars against dictators and fascists. Somehow, short sighted people forget about a guy named HITLER, and STALIN, and POL POT. Not to mention the Modern version of them today.
Bush?
Bush is certainly no Hitler, not by a long shot. But he has a lot in common with the fascist dictators you allude to (including the certainty that he's acting out God's Will...). There is however, at least one crucial difference: He has the biggest stick. The US military is bigger than all the other despots of the world combined.
Couple that with his lack of restraint in using it as pre-emptive "defense". "We have to fight them there so that one day we won't have to fight them here"
And thats a dumb argument. If we weren't so busy fighting them there, maybe we could make peace, so we wouldn't have to fight them anywhere anymore. Muslim extremists really deep down don't give a shit about 'America' or its 'freedom' or 'democracy'. They really only care about their own freedom, prosperity, and the fact that America has been interfering in their affairs and ripping them off for a hundred years or so. Now, America can't fix that overnight, simply by pulling out, but a generation or two of honest diplomacy would work far better than 'preemptive defense' war, which only manufactures more discontent around the globe, and manufactures more enemies to fight.
Hint: pre-emptive defense = offense.
Thus the man who most needs to be reigned in on the world stage today is Bush.
Then you are still caught up in dualistic thinking. You believe there is a fundamental subject/object distinction, that you are separate from the universe, and that consequently, you have free will. Understandable, but wrong.
Ok, I think I see where you are standing now. I'll concede the point on the assumption that the universe is entirely causal.
But can free will be an emergent property? a sum that transcends its parts? I prefer to think so.
Besides, if I don't have free will, I'm have not chosen wrong by believing in it...In fact I haven't 'chosen' anything.;)
Oh come off it. This has nothing to do with over-blown over-reaching fear-mongering.
Its a simple matter of law that acting with the clear intention to commit a crime is a criminal act. If I, as an undercover agent sell you blocks of play-doh instead of plastique and you wire it up to a detonator and clock and drive it to a busy street corner, your still guilty of trying to set off a bomb.
The fact that it was actually play-doh and just sat in the truck completely inert is completely irrelevant to your state of mind.
Most criminal prosecution relates as much or more to your state of mind than actual reality. What separates attempted murder from shooting a barrel is not whether there was someone inside it, its whether you THOUGHT there was someone inside it.
Microsoft doesn't expect to make a profit on hardware alone, but "we'll probably be gross margin neutral on that over the life cycle of the product, and try to break even on that".'"
"Probably be gross margin neutral"... "try to break even on that"
Unless, they have to lower hardware prices in response to pressure from a desparate Sony division. Or sales continue to drop off, and not get picked up next christmas. Xbox had a GREAT christmas 2006 simply because PS3 and Wii were nowhere to be found -- next christmans will likely give consumers a real choice of all 3 -- unless Nintendo can't catch up to the Wii devouring demand that shows no sign of letting up, at least around here.
At any rate, nothing to see here. Microsoft genuinely thought 'project Xbox' would make money during its lifecycle, and made announcements of that on several occasions. That they are only announcing they're going to 'probably break even' is pretty telling.
I don't think MS is going to get out of consoles, but I wouldn't be surprised if they try a new approach for the generation.
Aborting any fetus is neither good nor evil, any more than a hurricane is evil for killing people. It just is.
I don't see any parallel between a hurricane causing deaths and an abortion, at any level.
The question is whether a given action furthers or hinders a society or group, whether it is efficient or inefficient, skillful or lacking in skill, conducive to freedom or creating hindrances to freedom.
Even if the given action futhers society, is efficient, skillful, and conducive to freedom it can still be utterly evil.
A simple example: Two men are sick and dieing, one has failing kidneys, the other has a failing heart. If they receive transplants they will survive, the medical competence available on hand can ensure the transplants are successful. However the only source of organs available is a perfectly healthy individual.
Do they harvest the organs and kill him, or not. Utilitarianism dictates they will. And there are people who agree, who feel society would be best served if that choice was made. I however, disagree, and I'm not alone or irrational. Good and evil doesn't become absolute at higher levels, it remains a controversy.
"Good" and "evil" are just shorthand notations for more complex ideals in my way of looking at things.
They represent a balance in any decision, and yes the balance shifts depending on what perspective you look at things from, but at no level does the balance become absolute simply by going "up" levels. Even when looking from the perspective of a society or a species the controversy of some actions remains a controversy. Some acts have strong good and evil components that do not disappear simply by looking from a broader perspective.
Killing a man is evil. Killing a man about to kill your family is still evil, but when seen from the broader perspective of everyone directly involved, the good outweighs the evil. At the level of society, the good outweighs the evil. We want to live in a society that will protect us from someone about to kill us. etc... in this case an evil act becomes more or less absolutely good.
The same is not true in every case, for example, the utilitarian example: killing a man is evil. killing a man to save two people - has both positive and negative elements, and consensus on whether its good or evil can't be reached At the level of society - Do we want to live in a society that does this? Even if appears to save the largest number of people, and allow the largest number of people to have the most freedom. The controversy persists.
That being said, I also have to point out that, while everything is relative on one level, there is always another level on which things are not relative at all. So good and evil may be relative on an individual basis, but absolute on the higher level of the family, tribe, nation, or species. I would say that unjustly* depriving another thinking entity of choices they could have freely made is evil, for the set of all thinking entities. Would you disagree?
I don't know about the OP, but I would disagree.
There are many situations of good vs evil that do not become absolute on a 'higher level'. Abortion of a fetus with severe genetic defects for example is a classic one. No matter how high you elevate the question the controversy doesn't go away. It simply doesn't level out.
But given how few countries actually produce the necessary hardware its not like the whole world needs to adopt the DMCA to create a real scarcity of unburdened hardware.
And China at least is a real x-factor. It may not care to protect american copyrights today, but that could change overnight. And if nothing else, they do care about censorship right now. Mandating recording devices that shut down in the presence of sub-liminal signals would be right up their ally...
I don't really think the analog hole is in any danger of being closed anytime soon, but 50 or 100 years out...? I wouldn't be surprised if we are playing a drm cat and mouse game there too.
The analog hole is sort of the death knell of audio DRM -- sound is easy to record. How long before video succumbs also?
The analog hole is not secure.
There is nothing stopping the industry from encoding information in copy-protected sound or video that will not be visibly or audibly detectable by humans, but which can can be detected by copyright-compliant devices who will respect the embedded signal and refuse to to record, or automatically downgrade quality to a specified level.
At that point, its a choice between hacking the player or hacking the recorder. Both would be illegal under the DMCA, and will likely become increasingly hard.
Beyond that, the only way to exploit the analog hole would be to obtain recording devices that were not restricted by copyright. I'm sure they'll exist, or instruction on building them will exist, etc, but it may not be as easy as you might like. Especially if after recording it, your TV refuses to play it because *it* was able to determine that its an unauthorized duplicate of a copyprotected stream.
An algorithm can be implemented in many different ways,...
Just as a song can be played in many different ways, on different instruments, in different keys, and even remixed into a barely recognizable facsimile of the original. Yet copyright follows it through.
Or one can watch the countless "implementations" of Romeo and Juliette, many of which are only loosely and abstractly based on the play, yet if R&J were still covered by copyright, all these works that draw on it would be impacted by those rights.
Copyright law is plenty flexible.
An algorithm can be implemented in many different ways, so copyright laws will not protect it.
No real reason for that to be true. A screenplay can be implemented as 10 different movies by 10 different producers for 10 different film studios in 10 different languages, and copyright still protects it.
If you volunteer at a nonprofit organization doing what you normally do for pay then you can usually deduct from your federal income the value of that time at your regular rates as a contribution. So when this guy got a buyout offer it's perfectly reasonable to expect him to quote back professional rates.
I think it depends. Maybe he did a lot more than was expected of him. It may have been a reasonable value for what he actually did, but if he'd been contracted to do it at professional rates they might never have gone forward with what he 'volunteered' doing.
I've done volunteer work, and I frequently do far more than is necessary, get the job the done perfect instead of just getting it done, or use it as a skunkworks to develop/practice new skills. Its my time, its a labor of love, so why not?
For example a professional mechanic/bodyshop working on a customers car will see a bit of rust, polish it off, and apply touch up... that same guy working on his own project car, his 'labor of love' might strip the vehicle to the frame and give it an acid wash, weld in new metal anywhere that's showing the first signs of deterioration and then repaint it.
Besides, $49k to a serious presidential candidate is, what, less than 10 plates at an upscale donor dinner?
he did, based upon an approximated value of the time he spent on the profile this year. They scoffed, and went around him.
And if he were a paid professional in stead of a volunteer working on it, that would possibly even be fair value.
Suppose on a lark I bought a beat up motorcycle, and let you, a volunteer work on it for fun. Then one day I decide to race competitively, and offer to compensate you for your time.
So you calculate all the hours you spent on it, lookup what pro pit mechanics are paid an hour, and suggest I pay you for 800 hours at that rate. I'd probably 'balk' at that too.
Volunteers are usually paid nothing. The fact that the campaign was willing to buy him out was the right thing for them to do. Him deciding to value his volunteer time as if he were a contracted professional was probably out of line.
That said, I agree. Its unfortunate that it couldn't be resolved amicalby, but that's life.
You can even enumerate every single possible patent.
I disagree.
Also, I am surprised by your implication that bogosort does not work. Mathematically, it is a perfectly legitimate sorting algorithm, and certainly works if implemented correctly.
When I mentioned that bucket sort and gravity sort 'actually work' I meant that they were actually faster than quicksort, not that bogosort didn't (eventually) work.
The fact is, inventing a good... algorithm... is still an act of creative genius. This is what patents are supposed to reward.
Then why don't we patent books too? or Paintings? or Musical Recordings? or Movies?
Simply being an act of creative genius isn't any reason for it to be patentable.
Software physically has more in common with books than inventions.
Furthermore, software is ALREADY covered by copyright while other inventions are not.
Why exactly should software need or enjoy BOTH protections?
Trying to make DRM better than locks and safes in the real world is futile.
True enough. But its worse than that. Locks and safes are designed to keep people without the key out. Pure and simple.
DRM is some sort of hypocritical attempt to put something in a locked safe that you want people without the key to have access to. So you have to give them key. And to maintain 'security' you hide it inside something else and make it illegal to look at it.
However, the power requirements are small enough that a solar cell/capacitor arrangement
My wallet is pretty dark. How is going to keep time if its only exposed to light briefly a few times a week.
or a very small mechanism that generates a small current from motion (think Eco-drive watches) would be feasible solutions in the future.
One of card spends most of its time in a drawer. Same issue, sure it'll have enough power when I'm trying to use it, but how is it going to keep time between uses?
It would be a lot more useful if the one time passwords could be generated successively without a time factor. It wouldn't be quite as secure, but if each card were seeded differently it would be possible for the client/server to generate the same successive passwords regardless how much time passed between them. If it were made a little looser so the server would accept any of the next 10 or 20 passwords and then re-sync positon we'd be set. (That would allow the end user to generate a dozen or so passwords that don't get submitted to the server for transactions... perhaps due to bumping the card wrong, or whatever.)
If a hacker intercepted a password it would be useless unless they knew the seed. It wouldn't even have a short term use, as the password just used wouldn't be valid anymore. They'd need to get several passwords from the same card in order to guess the seed. With a decent random algorithm and a large seed range it could prove time consuming to brute force even once you had enough passwords from a single card.
Don't confuse the slashdot population versus the general population. The general population never even got enough of a whiff of vista to stop buying PCs with it on it.
That is VERY true. However, a great many IT managers did get a whiff of Vista and they think it stinks. And they ARE looking for alternatives.
t's called XP.
IT Managers are smart enough to KNOW that XP is fast approaching EOL. Even if they are allowed to install it by downgrading their vista licenses to XP 5 years from now provided they have XP media handy, the complete lack of support for XP may not make it worth it. Plus, with the copy protection and genuine advantage and so forth being added to the software, will they be able to effectively exercise downgrade rights.
Now is a good time to look at alternatives to vista that don't require clinging to a dying OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they do. But they don't get rid of the mess. They just hide it so you usually don't have to see it. Its effective, but its not really that good.
.NET made big improvements. C# is a great language... but its not the 'best language for all possible projects'. Neither is Javascript... or Lisp...or anything else... the ability to use a variety of languages on the CLR "VM" is one of its biggest advantages.
Abstracting differences between browsers is a practical solution, but its not an ideal solution.
Its really almost exactly like ipv4 with NAT proliferation, and ipv6. The first is a practical solution and you can make some great internet applications with ipv4, and there are libraries to help abstract away the nat traversal issues and so forth...
But ipv6 is still a better solution.
In both cases we have practical solutions that work with what we have but are as ugly as sin, and ideal elegant solutions that would work simpler and better, but are difficult to get up and running because its difficult to get something new to reach critical mass.
Right off the top the restriction to having to use Javascript is a serious flaw in the 'current system'. Javascript is a great language for quick and dirty web forms... but enterprise level web based applications? Get real! its a scripting language, and its not even entirely reliably implemented to spec across browsers.
The ability to use the right tool for the job was one of the major failings of Java and one area where
"AJAX" as an platform gets the job done, but we can do so much better.
Yes, so its up to each couple/trio/network to come to their own understanding.
That's sort of beside the point. When discussing the nature of open relationships the mind set of the people discussing it can have very different mental pictures of what is involved; a committed threesome is not the same as a couple who engage in an endless series of transient affairs. (Interestingly both have elements more commonly associated with monogamy than 'open relationships'.)
An imposed "openness" is no openness at all.
Agreed.
But I've never heard anyone argue that those who prefer monogamous relationships for themselves are somehow backward.
I have. From refering to monogamy as a failure to rise above ones animalistic instincts, primitive jealously, childish possessivness, to calling the whole concept little more than a religious tradition with no rational justification. Calling it conformist, calling it an irrational self denial of happiness.
Actually many monogamous relationships run into problems when one partner gets too close to a friend, even if they are sexually exclusive with their partner.
Right Intimacy and Sexuality are different. (And as an aside, perceived infideltiy is just as damaging as actual infidelity; it really doesn't matter in the slightest what actually went on if honesty, perception, and trust break down. That's true of any relationship, open or closed, intimate or casual.)
Regardless of who you go to be with, if one is polyamorous - that is, wired so that you are sometimes in love with more than one person - pretending that you only love one person is living a lie.
Hmmm. Beyond here be dragons...
Seriously though; what does it really mean to be 'wired so that you are sometimes in love with more than one person'; and what does that really have to do with polygamy vs monogamy. If I'm shopping for a home and I find two separate houses that are perfect in every way... am I living a lie by choosing one. Am I 'pretending' anything about my feelings? Or have I simply made a choice and committed to one place to live vs another? If I move into one home and pine for the other does that mean I'm hardwired to want to live in two places, or do I just need to learn to live with the decisions I've made?
Frankly I think love is a lot like that. A monogamist doesn't 'stop' loving everyone else in their life, or pretend that they don't care about others, but they choose to focus on one relationship, to make it their 'home', and they choose to let their feelings for others recede into the background, as a consequence of that focus.
Can you really focus on multiple relationships the same way you can focus on one? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can you have more than one home? Sure you can have more than one house; but are they all really 'home'? Is any of them really home? Is there a point at which you don't really have a home, and just flit around homeless seeking out new partners, not because you are somehow 'wired' to love more than one person, but because you simply refuse to make a choice and dedicate yourself to it, having deluded yourself that such a choice is impossible, and at best would be 'living a lie'?
Of those who have found a working open arrangement, that's great, but I remain doubtful that its the only configuration in which they could be happy. I know I can hypothesize inifitely other configurations in which I could be happy.
Has anyone suggested that it's going to go away? If you want it, choose it for yourself. Just don't try to choose it for me.
*If* it were found to be destructive to society, why not? Or at least why not exclude you from society? You remain free to form your own in your own space. (Though I grant that finding space is a separate, and perhaps unsolvable problem.)
I also concede that its a big *IF*. I don't think it necessarily is bad for society. But at the same time, what if the pendulum did swing the other way - where even committed threesomes w
The elephant population will be a lot more dynamic too on the wikipiedia one.
Even if its only 2 million dollars (which is about as low as it can be and be called 'millions')...
24 hours
x60 minutes/hour = 1440 minutes
x360 days/year = 525,600 minutes
x 2,000,000 $/minute = 1,051,200,000,000 $
A trillion dollars! 100 times what even googles total revenues are. Its a problem nobody has.
And lets face it, if your "website" is generating that kind of revenue, you wouldn't have an ISP. You'd BE an ISP, with your own peering, fiber, and so on.
AJAX is an overused acronym. It doesn't do anything that you couldn't do with frames or popups anyways.
To my mind AJAX is more the step its taken towards generic frameworks that hide the html/javascript/xmlhttprequest stuff that's really going on, and all the cruft to support doing it on multiple browsers and presenting it all to developers with as an API.
In that view AJAX is sort of like the OO C++ wrappers for the C windows APIs. (MFC, OWL, etc). Previously C++ programmers would encapsulate what was needed for the application at hand, each sort of hacking something together. And then suddenly there were these big huge frameworks you could program against; that mostly worked pretty well, but occasionally failed in spectacular ways or hid some functionality that you needed. Forcing you go back to the C APIs directly, and work doubly hard to avoid blowing the whole thing up, since the frameworks could be really badly trashed if you started manipulating hWnd's and so forth directly.
The big difference though, is that AJAX is flakier than the OO wrappers ever were.
I've actually never had much exposure to fortran.
Lots of old C code is full of with goto statements to break out of loops, or (even worse) to restart them, and return statements everywhere and anywhere.
But you do have the obligation to accurately understand the love-style before deciding if it's to your taste or not, just as you have to hear both Bach and Brahms before rendering your musical judgment; your comments show that you do not.
I disagree with your example. An obligation to accurately understand something does not compel you to immerse yourself in something. No more than a vegetarian needs to eat a hamburger in order to understand eating meat. A thought experiment is enough to make valid commentary.
As to the issue at hand, open relationships mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
Open relationships defy precise definition:
Is a committed threesome an open relationship?
Is comitted couple couple that engages in swinging or wife-swapping an open relationship?
Is a couple where the husband has a mistress an open relationship? What if the wife knows and has accepted it?
Is a couple that permits the members to have extramarital encounters, but under the condition they be discreet and not mention them open?
Is an individual who refuses to commit, but instead floats from relationship to relationship an "open" individual coping with non-open partners?
I think many versions *are* harmful, and in some cases even self-destructive. I think some versions are theoretically ok.
I personally find it difficult to really believe deep down that at least some individuals involved aren't repressing guilt, jealousy, or other pain by having the open-ness 'imposed' on them; especially as proponents tend to make rubbish arguments about how its more 'enlightened' and that finding it distasteful represents a personal failure of character -- but I understand that some people may genuinely be able to make it work.
That said, I find it dubious that those same people could not make a monogamous relationship work for them too if they chose to; after all there is no social prohibition on having as many close friends as you like. So perhaps its best for the well being of society for monogamy to persist.
Actually, he was off by 100%. But that's beside the point.
.net didn't support, or worse when .net just didn't work and you had to dig into the javascript and html mess that your neat little .net app generates to find the problem and fix it.
:)
People may be annoyed by 2, 4 or even higher wait times, but they'll put up with them in the right circumstances without complaint.
Showing people a blank screen, not so much. Show them a progress bar, and they might wait for it; especially if it contains something they need.
The whole 'get it on the screen in 2 seconds or you've lost them' applies to online shopping, product reviews, forums, etc. But people are willing to wait 5-10 or even longer for their bank, their credit card, to file their taxes, to play a game, or to edit a spreadsheet. (As long as the 'start up time' is at START UP, and not after every click.)
If 'web2.0 apps' like gmail took 5-10 seconds to start up, but didn't exhibit the html/javascript flakeyness that would be worth it. And a lot of the load time could be addressed with caching, and having the VM preloaded, if that was the only stumbling block, hell they really are more *application* than *webpage* -- with some browser support they could be ready to go in the background, selected like wii channels or something, for commonly visited 'sites'.
AJAX is a mostly a train wreck on par with the spaghetti code that we inherited from the Basic/C/Cobol era. Html/javascript just wasn't designed for this sort of use. AJAX is like writing multithreaded real-time applications in Windows 3.0 or MacOS9 cooperative threading models... you can do it... and it can even mostly work most of the time if you don't bang on it too hard. But its never going to be great.
asp.net was a decent move forward, as at least it mostly shielded the developer from the ajax mess. Unless you needed to do something
But we *really* need to see a good standards based framework on the browser side, that applications can be written against.
Of course, we've always had Java and ActiveX. But Java was proprietary, and was hampered immensely by Microsofts attempts to discredit it, and embrace/extend/destroy it, including their own incompatible MSJVM, and "Visual J++" version of the language. Plus it was plagued by its own problems. Not to mention that the language itself I always found cumbersome. (I think Microsoft really did a good job with C# by comparison.) And ActiveX? Well, the less said about that plague on mankind the better.
JavaFX, at first blush, looks like it might fit the bill.
You forget, the reason why those troops are stationed across the ocean and on foreign soil is that we've already sent 100's of thousands over seas to fight and die in wars against dictators and fascists. Somehow, short sighted people forget about a guy named HITLER, and STALIN, and POL POT. Not to mention the Modern version of them today.
Bush?
Bush is certainly no Hitler, not by a long shot. But he has a lot in common with the fascist dictators you allude to (including the certainty that he's acting out God's Will...). There is however, at least one crucial difference: He has the biggest stick. The US military is bigger than all the other despots of the world combined.
Couple that with his lack of restraint in using it as pre-emptive "defense".
"We have to fight them there so that one day we won't have to fight them here"
And thats a dumb argument. If we weren't so busy fighting them there, maybe we could make peace, so we wouldn't have to fight them anywhere anymore. Muslim extremists really deep down don't give a shit about 'America' or its 'freedom' or 'democracy'. They really only care about their own freedom, prosperity, and the fact that America has been interfering in their affairs and ripping them off for a hundred years or so. Now, America can't fix that overnight, simply by pulling out, but a generation or two of honest diplomacy would work far better than 'preemptive defense' war, which only manufactures more discontent around the globe, and manufactures more enemies to fight.
Hint: pre-emptive defense = offense.
Thus the man who most needs to be reigned in on the world stage today is Bush.
Then you are still caught up in dualistic thinking. You believe there is a fundamental subject/object distinction, that you are separate from the universe, and that consequently, you have free will. Understandable, but wrong.
;)
Ok, I think I see where you are standing now.
I'll concede the point on the assumption that the universe is entirely causal.
But can free will be an emergent property? a sum that transcends its parts? I prefer to think so.
Besides, if I don't have free will, I'm have not chosen wrong by believing in it...In fact I haven't 'chosen' anything.
-cheers
Oh come off it. This has nothing to do with over-blown over-reaching fear-mongering.
Its a simple matter of law that acting with the clear intention to commit a crime is a criminal act. If I, as an undercover agent sell you blocks of play-doh instead of plastique and you wire it up to a detonator and clock and drive it to a busy street corner, your still guilty of trying to set off a bomb.
The fact that it was actually play-doh and just sat in the truck completely inert is completely irrelevant to your state of mind.
Most criminal prosecution relates as much or more to your state of mind than actual reality. What separates attempted murder from shooting a barrel is not whether there was someone inside it, its whether you THOUGHT there was someone inside it.
Microsoft doesn't expect to make a profit on hardware alone, but "we'll probably be gross margin neutral on that over the life cycle of the product, and try to break even on that".'"
... "try to break even on that"
"Probably be gross margin neutral"
Unless, they have to lower hardware prices in response to pressure from a desparate Sony division.
Or sales continue to drop off, and not get picked up next christmas. Xbox had a GREAT christmas 2006 simply because PS3 and Wii were nowhere to be found -- next christmans will likely give consumers a real choice of all 3 -- unless Nintendo can't catch up to the Wii devouring demand that shows no sign of letting up, at least around here.
At any rate, nothing to see here. Microsoft genuinely thought 'project Xbox' would make money during its lifecycle, and made announcements of that on several occasions. That they are only announcing they're going to 'probably break even' is pretty telling.
I don't think MS is going to get out of consoles, but I wouldn't be surprised if they try a new approach for the generation.
Aborting any fetus is neither good nor evil, any more than a hurricane is evil for killing people. It just is.
I don't see any parallel between a hurricane causing deaths and an abortion, at any level.
The question is whether a given action furthers or hinders a society or group, whether it is efficient or inefficient, skillful or lacking in skill, conducive to freedom or creating hindrances to freedom.
Even if the given action futhers society, is efficient, skillful, and conducive to freedom it can still be utterly evil.
A simple example: Two men are sick and dieing, one has failing kidneys, the other has a failing heart. If they receive transplants they will survive, the medical competence available on hand can ensure the transplants are successful. However the only source of organs available is a perfectly healthy individual.
Do they harvest the organs and kill him, or not. Utilitarianism dictates they will. And there are people who agree, who feel society would be best served if that choice was made. I however, disagree, and I'm not alone or irrational. Good and evil doesn't become absolute at higher levels, it remains a controversy.
"Good" and "evil" are just shorthand notations for more complex ideals in my way of looking at things.
They represent a balance in any decision, and yes the balance shifts depending on what perspective you look at things from, but at no level does the balance become absolute simply by going "up" levels. Even when looking from the perspective of a society or a species the controversy of some actions remains a controversy. Some acts have strong good and evil components that do not disappear simply by looking from a broader perspective.
Killing a man is evil.
Killing a man about to kill your family is still evil, but when seen from the broader perspective of everyone directly involved, the good outweighs the evil.
At the level of society, the good outweighs the evil. We want to live in a society that will protect us from someone about to kill us.
etc... in this case an evil act becomes more or less absolutely good.
The same is not true in every case, for example, the utilitarian example:
killing a man is evil.
killing a man to save two people - has both positive and negative elements, and consensus on whether its good or evil can't be reached
At the level of society - Do we want to live in a society that does this? Even if appears to save the largest number of people, and allow the largest number of people to have the most freedom. The controversy persists.
That being said, I also have to point out that, while everything is relative on one level, there is always another level on which things are not relative at all. So good and evil may be relative on an individual basis, but absolute on the higher level of the family, tribe, nation, or species. I would say that unjustly* depriving another thinking entity of choices they could have freely made is evil, for the set of all thinking entities. Would you disagree?
I don't know about the OP, but I would disagree.
There are many situations of good vs evil that do not become absolute on a 'higher level'. Abortion of a fetus with severe genetic defects for example is a classic one. No matter how high you elevate the question the controversy doesn't go away. It simply doesn't level out.
That's all true. For now.
But given how few countries actually produce the necessary hardware its not like the whole world needs to adopt the DMCA to create a real scarcity of unburdened hardware.
And China at least is a real x-factor. It may not care to protect american copyrights today, but that could change overnight. And if nothing else, they do care about censorship right now. Mandating recording devices that shut down in the presence of sub-liminal signals would be right up their ally...
I don't really think the analog hole is in any danger of being closed anytime soon, but 50 or 100 years out...? I wouldn't be surprised if we are playing a drm cat and mouse game there too.
The analog hole is sort of the death knell of audio DRM -- sound is easy to record. How long before video succumbs also?
The analog hole is not secure.
There is nothing stopping the industry from encoding information in copy-protected sound or video that will not be visibly or audibly detectable by humans, but which can can be detected by copyright-compliant devices who will respect the embedded signal and refuse to to record, or automatically downgrade quality to a specified level.
At that point, its a choice between hacking the player or hacking the recorder. Both would be illegal under the DMCA, and will likely become increasingly hard.
Beyond that, the only way to exploit the analog hole would be to obtain recording devices that were not restricted by copyright. I'm sure they'll exist, or instruction on building them will exist, etc, but it may not be as easy as you might like. Especially if after recording it, your TV refuses to play it because *it* was able to determine that its an unauthorized duplicate of a copyprotected stream.
Whatever lets you sleep at night...
An algorithm can be implemented in many different ways,...
Just as a song can be played in many different ways, on different instruments, in different keys, and even remixed into a barely recognizable facsimile of the original. Yet copyright follows it through.
Or one can watch the countless "implementations" of Romeo and Juliette, many of which are only loosely and abstractly based on the play, yet if R&J were still covered by copyright, all these works that draw on it would be impacted by those rights.
Copyright law is plenty flexible.
An algorithm can be implemented in many different ways, so copyright laws will not protect it.
No real reason for that to be true. A screenplay can be implemented as 10 different movies by 10 different producers for 10 different film studios in 10 different languages, and copyright still protects it.
Object Oriented?
AhHa... so this has nothing do with catching up to *nix.
PowerShell is really just Microsoft finally Innovating "AppleScript".
If you volunteer at a nonprofit organization doing what you normally do for pay then you can usually deduct from your federal income the value of that time at your regular rates as a contribution. So when this guy got a buyout offer it's perfectly reasonable to expect him to quote back professional rates.
I think it depends. Maybe he did a lot more than was expected of him. It may have been a reasonable value for what he actually did, but if he'd been contracted to do it at professional rates they might never have gone forward with what he 'volunteered' doing.
I've done volunteer work, and I frequently do far more than is necessary, get the job the done perfect instead of just getting it done, or use it as a skunkworks to develop/practice new skills. Its my time, its a labor of love, so why not?
For example a professional mechanic/bodyshop working on a customers car will see a bit of rust, polish it off, and apply touch up... that same guy working on his own project car, his 'labor of love' might strip the vehicle to the frame and give it an acid wash, weld in new metal anywhere that's showing the first signs of deterioration and then repaint it.
Besides, $49k to a serious presidential candidate is, what, less than 10 plates at an upscale donor dinner?
That's really beside the point.
he did, based upon an approximated value of the time he spent on the profile this year. They scoffed, and went around him.
And if he were a paid professional in stead of a volunteer working on it, that would possibly even be fair value.
Suppose on a lark I bought a beat up motorcycle, and let you, a volunteer work on it for fun. Then one day I decide to race competitively, and offer to compensate you for your time.
So you calculate all the hours you spent on it, lookup what pro pit mechanics are paid an hour, and suggest I pay you for 800 hours at that rate. I'd probably 'balk' at that too.
Volunteers are usually paid nothing. The fact that the campaign was willing to buy him out was the right thing for them to do. Him deciding to value his volunteer time as if he were a contracted professional was probably out of line.
That said, I agree. Its unfortunate that it couldn't be resolved amicalby, but that's life.
You can even enumerate every single possible patent.
... algorithm ... is still an act of creative genius. This is what patents are supposed to reward.
I disagree.
Also, I am surprised by your implication that bogosort does not work. Mathematically, it is a perfectly legitimate sorting algorithm, and certainly works if implemented correctly.
When I mentioned that bucket sort and gravity sort 'actually work' I meant that they were actually faster than quicksort, not that bogosort didn't (eventually) work.
The fact is, inventing a good
Then why don't we patent books too? or Paintings? or Musical Recordings? or Movies?
Simply being an act of creative genius isn't any reason for it to be patentable.
Software physically has more in common with books than inventions.
Furthermore, software is ALREADY covered by copyright while other inventions are not.
Why exactly should software need or enjoy BOTH protections?
Trying to make DRM better than locks and safes in the real world is futile.
True enough. But its worse than that. Locks and safes are designed to keep people without the key out. Pure and simple.
DRM is some sort of hypocritical attempt to put something in a locked safe that you want people without the key to have access to. So you have to give them key. And to maintain 'security' you hide it inside something else and make it illegal to look at it.
Likely, by a small lithium battery.
... perhaps due to bumping the card wrong, or whatever.)
And disposable too? Good for the enviroment then.
However, the power requirements are small enough that a solar cell/capacitor arrangement
My wallet is pretty dark. How is going to keep time if its only exposed to light briefly a few times a week.
or a very small mechanism that generates a small current from motion (think Eco-drive watches) would be feasible solutions in the future.
One of card spends most of its time in a drawer. Same issue, sure it'll have enough power when I'm trying to use it, but how is it going to keep time between uses?
It would be a lot more useful if the one time passwords could be generated successively without a time factor. It wouldn't be quite as secure, but if each card were seeded differently it would be possible for the client/server to generate the same successive passwords regardless how much time passed between them. If it were made a little looser so the server would accept any of the next 10 or 20 passwords and then re-sync positon we'd be set. (That would allow the end user to generate a dozen or so passwords that don't get submitted to the server for transactions
If a hacker intercepted a password it would be useless unless they knew the seed. It wouldn't even have a short term use, as the password just used wouldn't be valid anymore. They'd need to get several passwords from the same card in order to guess the seed. With a decent random algorithm and a large seed range it could prove time consuming to brute force even once you had enough passwords from a single card.
Don't confuse the slashdot population versus the general population. The general population never even got enough of a whiff of vista to stop buying PCs with it on it.
That is VERY true. However, a great many IT managers did get a whiff of Vista and they think it stinks. And they ARE looking for alternatives.
t's called XP.
IT Managers are smart enough to KNOW that XP is fast approaching EOL. Even if they are allowed to install it by downgrading their vista licenses to XP 5 years from now provided they have XP media handy, the complete lack of support for XP may not make it worth it. Plus, with the copy protection and genuine advantage and so forth being added to the software, will they be able to effectively exercise downgrade rights.
Now is a good time to look at alternatives to vista that don't require clinging to a dying OS.