Every coin has too sides. Oppressive governments can use technology for evil. They've been doing so since the beginning of time. So what?
The great thing about the www is that the barrier to entry for publishing ideas to a wide audience has been greatly reduced. It's a lot like the societal evolutions enabled by the printing press at the end of the dark ages. Don't you agree that decentralizing the ability to publish ideas to a wide audience is a welcome threat to secretive and oppressive governments whose very existence depends on hiding information?
This is true whether or not those same governments use technology for evil.
C# was invented for one reason: locking sytems into a windows deployment. There are some attempts to port C#, but those efforts don't have 10% of the current momentum that java has from a large community of both corporations and volunteer open source contributors.
Java on the other hand is a cross platform environment supported by multiple competing vendors. That will leave you more nimble to develop and deploy on a wide variety of systems. There are great JVM's available from Sun, BEA, IBM and others. There are several great commercial and open source implementations of java servlet containers. Can C# really say the samr thing?
I have a very positive emotional reaction whenever I see technology being used to defeat censorship from fearful totaliatarian governments around the world. This article describes how the current government of mainland China is struggling mightily to embrace information technology while at the same time censoring personal blogs. Their efforts are futile and I think that in 10 years you will see a very different system of government there.
Re:Volunteerism and private enterprise win again
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Blender 2.40 Released
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There, in fact, is a symbolic wall but it's easier to get over than a literal one. Silicon Valley is full of well educated and ambitious people from Canada who moved there for it's abundant opportunities and relatively lower taxes. The brain drain induced by socialism is one of the reasons that the world transforming economic miracle of Silicon Valley happened in the USA rather than in one of the socialist countries that the great minds are running away from.
Re:Volunteerism and private enterprise win again
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Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 1
You seem to be saying that Google's sponsorship of this event is the equivalent of a subsidy from a socialist state. I don't agree. Here's the big difference: all of the people involved in the Google example have made a free and voluntary choice to participate. Google, the benefactors of the Summer Of Code program, and the Google customers who ultimately provided the Google revenue spent on this project have all come togther by free choice. Any of those parties can end their current relationship for any reason. In your Socialist government subsidy example, the revenue providers are coerced through force to pay taxes. There are criminal sanctions if the revenue payers try to end their participation in the subsidy.
Participation in the Google scheme is voluntary. Participation in the Socialist subsidy scheme is coerced. Therefore the Google scheme is on a higher moral plain than the Socialist scheme.
Re:Volunteerism and private enterprise win again
on
Blender 2.40 Released
·
· Score: 1
You say capitalism is evil. What's your alternative that is not evil?
Volunteerism and private enterprise win again
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Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
It's great to see what's possible given enthusastic volunteers and an added dose of private enterprise funding. Capitalism, at times, is much more progressive than socialism.
I still use java every day but I will not miss the hyper-enthusiast. I've interviewed and hired people to work in java for years and I've learned a few things along the way. First, I've never hired someone who has obtained the official Sun Certified Java Developer status. I've learned that these guys have memorized a lot of the java library api's but their judgement is not grounded in the basics of computer science. For example, they have no idea how to choose between using a LinkedList or an ArrayList. The presence of LinkedList is redundant to the superior abilities of an ArrayList in their minds. I've been much better off hiring solid computer science generalists for java jobs whether they currently know java or not.
I thought the problem with IP on power lines is that power lines are really just large unshielded antennas. The IP traffic on them runs a frequencies that will jam Ham and other important radio traffic like air traffic control radio. Has Texas solved this problem or is it Damn The Ham!
Your scenario is not unique to PayPal. Every business that accepts credit card payments is subject to this scam as long as credit card companies offer their 'buyer protection' services. If the buyer disputes a charge then it gets yanked, no questions asked. Eventually, however, if this individual does this enough times then their card will get cancelled. The credit card companies do not like this scam anymore than you do. The entire retail economy depends on the fact that 99.9% of folks out there are honest. Dealing with the other.01% is frustrating but it simply the cost of doing business.
This is an efficency tuning exercise to get higher gas mileage into the fleet of private cars as each generation of cars turns over. I like that as a mean of relative energy use reduction much better than the sledge hammer of higher gasoline taxes. It is interesting to me that higher gas taxes are often advocated here by people who consider themselves liberal. I am a liberal and I recognize that higher gas taxes are extremely regressive. They will greatly hurt those least able to afford them. The people you will be kicking out of their cars with higher taxes are the bus boys, the day care workers, landscape laborers, and even school teachers. These folks will be sitting at bus stops while the BMW drivers whip by in their private cars because a little extra tax does not mean a whole lot to them.
Here is the big difference:.Net (C#) is a proprietary product from a single vendor and it runs on OS's from, you guessed it, the same single vendor. Java, on the other hand, is available on lots of platforms (Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac, etc) with many competing vendors all offering good quality VM's (Sun, IBM, BEA) . Java is well supported by the open standards community and it has a life there despite Sun's quasi ownership of the standard. If you want your application to be vendor nuetral and platform nuetral then you'll pick java over.Net.
That is amazing. Thank God for public key/private key encryption like that implemented by PGP. Then the telcos can store encrypted goo that's very tough to crack. Does the Italian law cover that?
Your argument is so solid that you should convince some game authors to encode it into their licensing agreement. I can just see it now:
You have to pay for this software. Unless, of course, there are no circumstances in which you would pay for it. In which case, you may copy it for free.
Well then, Havenware. What's stopping you? I'm assuming that your better service, based on free everything, will be launched by you any day now. I can't wait.
How does the 'fully encrypted' part of skype work? Is it personalized encryption via public key, private key? Or does skype act as the man in the middle somehow?
I suspect that issue will cause a call for government regulation to ensure wiretapping. In fact, I'll bet that this is a large factor in causing China to try blocking voip.
I agree, except that I expect that in areas where public transit sucks that this will make that clear and give more justification to single car drivers. That's okay by me. I like anything that puts more descision making data directly in the hands of consumers.
If this is truly useful then I don't expect that this will require federal funding at all. It will attract a lot of users because of its inherent value and therefore it will attract lots of private advertisers who want to purchase ad space on this system. There's no reason to compell people by force (aka federal funding) to make this thing work.
Job security is up to the individual and I would not have it any other way. Show me an organization where that is not true and I'll show you an organization full of dead wood that couldn't invent a cup that could hold water.
Job security is available to anyone who stays in touch with the needs of the business and keeps their skills sharp. Take that too heart and you can last as long as you want in a good company. If you are not in a good company then move on and find one.
Both parties freely and voluntarily signed the agreement. Isn't that OK?
If not then please describe an alternative system where an uninvolved 3rd party will step in and stop a voluntary agreement between the musician and the record label.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time Uranus was in the news I got quite a kick out of watching TV news anchors squirm as they talked about Your Anus.
You can use your argument to appease all sorts of nastiness. Where does it stop? Where do you draw the line and say 'Enough!'.
Every coin has too sides. Oppressive governments can use technology for evil. They've been doing so since the beginning of time. So what?
The great thing about the www is that the barrier to entry for publishing ideas to a wide audience has been greatly reduced. It's a lot like the societal evolutions enabled by the printing press at the end of the dark ages. Don't you agree that decentralizing the ability to publish ideas to a wide audience is a welcome threat to secretive and oppressive governments whose very existence depends on hiding information?
This is true whether or not those same governments use technology for evil.
C# was invented for one reason: locking sytems into a windows deployment. There are some attempts to port C#, but those efforts don't have 10% of the current momentum that java has from a large community of both corporations and volunteer open source contributors.
Java on the other hand is a cross platform environment supported by multiple competing vendors. That will leave you more nimble to develop and deploy on a wide variety of systems. There are great JVM's available from Sun, BEA, IBM and others. There are several great commercial and open source implementations of java servlet containers. Can C# really say the samr thing?
I have a very positive emotional reaction whenever I see technology being used to defeat censorship from fearful totaliatarian governments around the world. This article describes how the current government of mainland China is struggling mightily to embrace information technology while at the same time censoring personal blogs. Their efforts are futile and I think that in 10 years you will see a very different system of government there.
There, in fact, is a symbolic wall but it's easier to get over than a literal one. Silicon Valley is full of well educated and ambitious people from Canada who moved there for it's abundant opportunities and relatively lower taxes. The brain drain induced by socialism is one of the reasons that the world transforming economic miracle of Silicon Valley happened in the USA rather than in one of the socialist countries that the great minds are running away from.
You seem to be saying that Google's sponsorship of this event is the equivalent of a subsidy from a socialist state. I don't agree. Here's the big difference: all of the people involved in the Google example have made a free and voluntary choice to participate. Google, the benefactors of the Summer Of Code program, and the Google customers who ultimately provided the Google revenue spent on this project have all come togther by free choice. Any of those parties can end their current relationship for any reason. In your Socialist government subsidy example, the revenue providers are coerced through force to pay taxes. There are criminal sanctions if the revenue payers try to end their participation in the subsidy.
Participation in the Google scheme is voluntary. Participation in the Socialist subsidy scheme is coerced. Therefore the Google scheme is on a higher moral plain than the Socialist scheme.
You say capitalism is evil. What's your alternative that is not evil?
It's great to see what's possible given enthusastic volunteers and an added dose of private enterprise funding. Capitalism, at times, is much more progressive than socialism.
I still use java every day but I will not miss the hyper-enthusiast. I've interviewed and hired people to work in java for years and I've learned a few things along the way. First, I've never hired someone who has obtained the official Sun Certified Java Developer status. I've learned that these guys have memorized a lot of the java library api's but their judgement is not grounded in the basics of computer science. For example, they have no idea how to choose between using a LinkedList or an ArrayList. The presence of LinkedList is redundant to the superior abilities of an ArrayList in their minds. I've been much better off hiring solid computer science generalists for java jobs whether they currently know java or not.
I don't understand this level of hostility for java. It works well for large web application development. EBay.com is implemented with java.
Please explain your loathing of java.
How about this plan:
We begin the call in the clear. We tell each other our public encryption key.
Go silent and key in the other parties public key.
Begin speaking again and the voices are encrypted using the public keys.
On the receiving end, the encrypted packets are decrypted using the private keys.
There we have a phone call that's impossible to tap.
I thought the problem with IP on power lines is that power lines are really just large unshielded antennas. The IP traffic on them runs a frequencies that will jam Ham and other important radio traffic like air traffic control radio. Has Texas solved this problem or is it Damn The Ham!
Your scenario is not unique to PayPal. Every business that accepts credit card payments is subject to this scam as long as credit card companies offer their 'buyer protection' services. If the buyer disputes a charge then it gets yanked, no questions asked. Eventually, however, if this individual does this enough times then their card will get cancelled. The credit card companies do not like this scam anymore than you do. The entire retail economy depends on the fact that 99.9% of folks out there are honest. Dealing with the other .01% is frustrating but it simply the cost of doing business.
This is an efficency tuning exercise to get higher gas mileage into the fleet of private cars as each generation of cars turns over. I like that as a mean of relative energy use reduction much better than the sledge hammer of higher gasoline taxes. It is interesting to me that higher gas taxes are often advocated here by people who consider themselves liberal. I am a liberal and I recognize that higher gas taxes are extremely regressive. They will greatly hurt those least able to afford them. The people you will be kicking out of their cars with higher taxes are the bus boys, the day care workers, landscape laborers, and even school teachers. These folks will be sitting at bus stops while the BMW drivers whip by in their private cars because a little extra tax does not mean a whole lot to them.
Here is the big difference: .Net (C#) is a proprietary product from a single vendor and it runs on OS's from, you guessed it, the same single vendor. Java, on the other hand, is available on lots of platforms (Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac, etc) with many competing vendors all offering good quality VM's (Sun, IBM, BEA) . Java is well supported by the open standards community and it has a life there despite Sun's quasi ownership of the standard. If you want your application to be vendor nuetral and platform nuetral then you'll pick java over .Net.
The telcos have to store email for a year?
That is amazing. Thank God for public key/private key encryption like that implemented by PGP. Then the telcos can store encrypted goo that's very tough to crack. Does the Italian law cover that?
Your argument is so solid that you should convince some game authors to encode it into their licensing agreement. I can just see it now:
You have to pay for this software. Unless, of course, there are no circumstances in which you would pay for it. In which case, you may copy it for free.
Well then, Havenware. What's stopping you? I'm assuming that your better service, based on free everything, will be launched by you any day now. I can't wait.
I agree. I only hope that the governments of the world will stay out of it. We'll get standards a lot faster that way.
How does the 'fully encrypted' part of skype work? Is it personalized encryption via public key, private key? Or does skype act as the man in the middle somehow?
I suspect that issue will cause a call for government regulation to ensure wiretapping. In fact, I'll bet that this is a large factor in causing China to try blocking voip.
I agree, except that I expect that in areas where public transit sucks that this will make that clear and give more justification to single car drivers. That's okay by me. I like anything that puts more descision making data directly in the hands of consumers.
If this is truly useful then I don't expect that this will require federal funding at all. It will attract a lot of users because of its inherent value and therefore it will attract lots of private advertisers who want to purchase ad space on this system. There's no reason to compell people by force (aka federal funding) to make this thing work.
PShaw!
Job security is up to the individual and I would not have it any other way. Show me an organization where that is not true and I'll show you an organization full of dead wood that couldn't invent a cup that could hold water.
Job security is available to anyone who stays in touch with the needs of the business and keeps their skills sharp. Take that too heart and you can last as long as you want in a good company. If you are not in a good company then move on and find one.
Okay. Let's say I accept your premise. What's the alternative that you propose?
Both parties freely and voluntarily signed the agreement. Isn't that OK?
If not then please describe an alternative system where an uninvolved 3rd party will step in and stop a voluntary agreement between the musician and the record label.