Whilst the Labour party is to blame for all manner of IT failings and bad technology ideas (ID card systems anyone?) I don't think it's the Labour party per-se if I'm honest.
My experience of public sector was simply that Microsoft basically bribe the right people throughout public sector regardless of the government. In say local government for example, this would normally mean taking the head of IT for a nice meal, sometimes even abroad for a couple of days written off as a "conference". The open source guys of course could never afford to do this.
It's not as if Tony Blair/Gordon Brown was in bed with Microsoft but simply that the Microsoft sales people are effective at targetting the many hundreds of IT decision makers throughout the UK's public sector and buying them over with perks and so forth. The BBC is for example independent of government and yet they too bought into the Microsoft ecosystem for a long time, hence the uproar about the iPlayer originally being restricted to devices that supported Microsoft's DRM (i.e. no open source offerings). They now seem beholden to Apple at the BBC however, so weening them off Microsoft with a public display of distaste over the iPlayer DRM fiasco seemed to do nothing about their susceptibility to single vendor favouritism.
The point is however that I don't think it's that there is some grand conspiracy, but simply that Microsoft have a very strong sales team in the UK with an awful lot of money at their disposal to bring in those big contracts through whatever means necessary.
Interestingly I notice that I no longer get redirected to the UK site when I go to Apple.com too so it suggests they've disabled that, at least for UK visitors so that people see the US site where the apology is not posted.
Say I then click store, because I also have to scroll down to notice I'm set to the wrong country on a 1920x1200 monitor and hence proceed anyway, get to the store, and then realise I'm on the US site because all the prices are in dollars not pounds, and then change country it changes it to the page I'm on completely bypassing the front page where the notice is.
They've gone out their way to try and avoid people seeing this. I do hope the judges are made very aware and that they are properly punished as a result.
Whilst that worked in Germany for Microsoft I do not believe that would work in the UK either. If Apple got such a ruling in place, I suspect the UK courts would really throw the book at Apple at that point regardless of what some Texas judge says. If that involved a fine, and the US courts told Apple they didn't have to pay it, that could well mean the bailiffs moving in on Apple's UK stores and seizing both the properties and the products to pay the fine.
Judges in texas can rule whatever the fuck they want but ultimately when Apple operates in a country it is bound by that countries laws and US judges do not have universal jurisdiction. It's really up to Apple then whether it wants to rely on the US judge's ruling or comply with UK law, if it doesn't it will get punished in the UK regardless.
"Well, two points come to mind. First, that extinction of very specialized species in small niches just isn't that big of a deal. And it's going to happen anyway."
Right, we've been over this, and it seems you like the other guy don't understand the way evolution works, but also seem to believe you have an ability no one else on earth has yet managed - the ability to determine the outcome of extremely complex chaotic systems.
Let's be honest, you don't actually have that ability, so quit saying things that are simply unknowable to you.
"Second, it really does matter how difficult it is for an extinction to occur."
Yes it does, it's fundamentally important because the longer it takes for an extinction event to occur the longer there is for habitat to change putting pressure on a species to also change via natural selection and hence opening the door for great population growth.
"Consider that against humanity which could only go extinct under some extreme circumstances, such as a massive asteroid (probably have to be considerably worse than whatever caused the Permian extinction), a cunning genetically modified disease, or an aggressive and superior life form or machine."
This just shows that you still don't get it. You seem to think that because there is a different scale in the change that that somehow matters - it doesn't, the point is that a dam being built in these creatures habitat is equivalent to an extinction level event happening against humanity.
"And how are these diseases going to survive? They need hosts, and the hosts just died. Plus disease resistance quickly returns once lethal diseases do."
Things treachorous to humans like diseases, viruses and so forth can sit dormant for a long time. Anthrax is one obvious well known example. You assume they need a human host, that's false, how do you think Malaria most commonly spreads? Diseases resistance does quickly return you're right, the problem is you're talking about a population too small to cope with that, and that's kind of the point.
I don't think there's much point taking this any further as you clearly don't have a decent grasp of the way both evolution, disease spread and resistance work. You seem to have a very simplified grade-school view of them but things aren't this simple in reality and further education on the subject will teach you much more. If you don't understand why you need a decent population to provide decent genetic diversity to protect against illness and so forth, and if you don't understand why the extinction of a species has an impact that reaches far beyond the mere death of that species then you really simply do not have the pre-requisite knowledge to have this discussion.
"But for some organisms, destruction of their environment would require the radical changing say of most of Europe and global human civilization and others it would require a modest alteration of a waterfall."
Right, but what's your point? Keep in mind we've whiped out species who spread right across land masses bigger than Europe (e.g. North America). All extinctions still have an effect on the web of life though. A massive asteroid hit could cause just as much damage to humanity in less time than a damn building project could to these toads but just because a massive asteroid hit is less likely doesn't make this more acceptable to whipe them out or mean they were anymore likely to die out naturally than we are. They're also smaller than us and require less resources.
"Not by definition."
Yes it is, new niche features are precisely what taxonomy has always used to define speciation, and that hasn't changed with DNA based taxonomy. When a species enters a new niche that is the line where we define it as a distinct species, or subspecies.
"I disagree. We have a remarkable ability to adapt even over very short time periods. For example, nuclear subs would remain habitable for years. That would be enough time to reestablish a human presence on the surface of Earth."
But this misses another important point, you need a sizeable population to have a sustainable gene pool. The crew of a sub would simply be far too few to sustain a population with a healthy gene pool and by that point you've lost the facilities and medical expertise to diagnose and deal with things like cancer. If 1 in 10 women are prone to breast cancer, you've already lost 10% of your females when it happens and where are you going to find qualified personnel and facilities that are working (no power anymore remember) for chemotherapy? You could butcher them, but what if they get an infection and die anyway? Humanity is much more prone to illness and disease than it ever was because we stopped letting natural selection select such things out. Factor in all the other problems people can suffer and your population is going to dwindle.
"And one can always come up with biological, mechanical, or electrical means to make up the balance of oxygen need."
In the space of a few weeks when half the world is in panic? Not likely, we can't even deal with CO2 emissions when the world isn't in panic and we have many countries and many billions being spent on it and within a timeframe of decades. Do you think people are going to turn up to run power stations and so forth if this sort of scenario were to come about? You might be able to save pockets of disease prone humans but statistically you may end up with someone who has something like AIDs, or some STD that can lead to infertility - have fun when that breaks out. Again, it's not going to be genetically spread enough for a healthy population.
I don't think you get how evolution works. It doesn't work rapidly, it works over an extended period of time.
These toads were fitted to the environment they were in, and no species can change to destruction of their environment overnight.
If humanity hadn't caused such rapid disruption, the changes to their environment that would force evolution to take hold would happen over a much longer time period.
I can think of many examples, but let's say rainfall increased in this area leading to greater bodies of water. This would mean the toads who became better at swimming would likely become more succesful overtime, and if there are connected rivers where this particular habitat is then that may mean they can then swim strongly enough to spread their habitat range, and hence grow their population by water. Similarly, if humidity changed as a gradual process due to say, decreased rainfall over time, then they wouldn't need these misters to stay alive, they would adapt to it slowly.
Invasive species being succesful is rarely about said species being able to cope more generally, but more about the fact that there is no natural predator catered to some unique feature they have in that ecosystem to keep their populations down. Similarly they are in an environment where disease that would also effect their populations and that would've co-evolved with them to minimise population growth hasn't also been brought across.
You're trying to use reason, but you're doing so with a very weak understand of the sort of time scales evolution works on. You're mistakenly assuming that because a creature can't cope with a rapid change (i.e. complete habitat destruction over a few weeks) that it wouldn't have coped with an inevitable slower change, that may possibly occur on the order of even hundreds of thousands of years.
This is exactly why there are so many extinctions related to climate change - not because climate change hasn't happened before, not because animals don't have the capacity to adapt and evolve to cope with climate change on more natural time scales, but because of the rate of change right now is so fast it's unseen and too fast for evolutionary principles to be able to allow species to adapt.
Before you can understand why the original post I was responding to is bullshit you need a better understanding of evolution, specifically:
1) Evolution does not happen in isolation but as an adaptation to slowly changing environments
2) Evolutionary effects naturally occur over much larger timescales than the man made extinction events allow
3) Evolution is a battle between predator and prey, if you take a predator to a new environment where it's co-evolved natural limitations do not exist then it will run rampant regardless of the fitness of the natural species there
4) You say you see no evidence of niche species expanding, and yet that is by definition what must always happen. When humans lost the ability to swing through trees like monkeys and instead became planeswalkers they were inherently a niche at first relative to the much more widely spread monkey populations. A species is always initially a niche as it makes the changes to become a new species, but some niches allow for greater eventual success than others.
What we can't say, given that the habitat of these toads was destroyed in a short time period, not a time period of evolutionary scales, is whether the eventual natural pressures of the environment would've been enough to allow them to spread or not. More than anything it is about how the environment changes that determines success as much as it is how the species evolves but no species can survive a man-made style change. If man fucked up some kind of experiment and it drastically altered the ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere for example over the period of mere weeks, we ourselves would not manage to survive but it has nothing to do with us being evolved into a niche and everything to do with a change to the habitat we've evolved to happening far too quickly for us to cope with the change.
"A lot of the scariest ideas coming down the pipeline are from the UK and Australia when it comes to surveillance and Internet powers. Not all of that is being justified by copyright either, which your claim that is purely driven by the US."
But all that's national and none of it's exported. The UK internet censorship regulations to date have all been driven by the US media industries and this is why people have a problem.
No one gives a shit about China's censorship if China keeps it to itself it's China's problem the problem is that the US exports all it's bad ideas and forces them on everyone else.
"ACTA was defeated in the US because enough people in the US stood up to it, not because it was also defeated in the EU."
ACTA was never defeated in the US full stop, the US government signed up to it and were it not for the EU defeat it would've come into power there. It was signed on the basis that everyone would sign up to it but the EU would not, hence preventing it from becoming law in the US. The US never withdrew it's signature prior to the EU killing the bill so what you say here is completely and utterly false. Perhaps you're confusing it with SOPA/PIPA?
"It's a mistake to give the rest of the governments a pass as just being under the bad influence of the US. They have their own agendas when it comes to the Internet, and freedom, and not all of it is driven by copyrights at all. In fact, copyright most often is just another excuse, like think-of-the-children."
No but most of that ideology IS driven by the US. Much of the non-copyright bad legislation in the UK stems from Murdoch's lobbying (it is his papers that drive it) and it is the US that allows Murdoch to act as a vehicle for pushing it's policy as it does.
This doesn't absolve the UK of blame, the UK should stand up to it, but it doesn't absolve the US either because the US can stop it also by stopping the export of it's ideas abroad in the various ways it does.
"Microecosystems are very fragile yes. But they are also not typically that common."
This is completely false. In the Cactaceae and Orchidaceae plant families alone there are literally hundreds of such examples I can think of. That's before you start looking at every other plant and animal family going.
You also can't simply dismiss them as unimportant, some of these small colony species and plants can be essential to the migratory patterns of other animals who have a much wider effect. Let's look at a real life example, if a species, such as Arrojadoa marylanae, a type of cactus growing in a single mineral rich hill habitat gets whiped out by planned mining of it's habitat then a hummingbird species dependent on it for it's annual migration will no longer have this resource for that migration and will hence likely see decimation of it's population. Decimation of it's population means that potentially hundreds of other plant species dependent on it for pollination along it's migratory path will no longer have a pollinator and continue to suffer, and those animal species which hunt it and it's eggs will also see a loss of a major food source.
You can't also simply assume that such species are headed towards extinction regardless, how do you know this? are you able to calculate a future of such species in the event that humans don't intervene? If so I'm sure many people would love to hear how you're able to understand the eventual outcome of such chaotic systems with such an unfathomable amount of parameters in. How do you know that instead of extinction that these species wont actually evolve to expand? how do you know that there isn't some regular but unknown event which happens on a long time scale we don't know about during which these animals thrive such that they're not just at a temporary low? how do you know these animals have zero impact on the survival of other species?
Most species are "super attached" to one thing or another, humans for example are far more dependent on things like water, than other species are - we can't last anywhere near as long without it as others and similarly we could be quite prone to being whiped out due to a change in the chemical constituency of our atmosphere where many other species would make it through. Neither of these things though is an argument that we should just do what we want even if it means making humanity extinct, because well, we shouldn't have become so super attached to things like water should we?
The point is that the loss of even the most specialised species in the world can potentially have a knock on effect on other species creating a cascading effect to the point it effects species we do actually give a shit about.
I'm not some kind of hardcore environmentalist that thinks we should try our hardest to preserve every living thing to the point we can, but an excuse that amounts to "well it doesn't matter if we whipe it out, it's a meaningless species and was going to die anyway" is so utterly ignorant that it doesn't belong on a site like Slashdot.
Just about every single thing you do when fucking around with nature to the degree of causing species extinction, no matter how irrelevant you think the species is is going to have some kind of negative effect. It's not just the simple loss of 17,000 toads, it's the loss of 17,000 toads, plus 10,000 animals that feed on them, plus the 5,000 that feed on them, and so on, coupled with the loss of any plants/species that were dependent on any effects on the environment of the toads which will often result in the loss of species which grow to much higher numbers (insects, fungus, bacteria) - the point being your 17,000 toads will almost always rapidly extend to be millions of lost living things both plants and animals.
They call it the web of life for a reason, in nature things never really happen in isolation with no impact anywhere else. You can never assume that the loss of one species is the loss of that species and nothing more, because that's never really the case.
Sorry, just reminded me what hole ACTA came out of it and where it was defeated?
It came out of the US and It was defeated by the EU - not national governments, no, governments like the UK's were willing to sign us right up to ACTA.
The EU is actually the only political entity that did listen to people and did then kill off ACTA as a result.
But keep telling yourself the US isn't the problem if it makes you feel better. I agree EU nations follow US demands for stricter copyright enforcement, and the EU does have some copyright fascists (Sarkzy was a good example, Jeremy Hunt still is) but the facilitation of this ideology comes purely from the US. Jeremy Hunt is only where he is because the US has assisted Murdoch in exporting the Atlanticist ideology for so long for example.
That or the fact it's just one of those things that can be quite fun to program, meaning even if no one wants it you can guarantee some dev is going to want to implement it.
Well it is broken, we have unilaterally enforced global internet censorship enforced at the behest of the US and we're getting highest bidder TLDs that completely break the hierarchial structure of the internet and create massive costs for businesses wanting to protect their trademarks whilst opening the doors for more effective phishing and fraud in the longer term, whilst tipping the balance of the internet more in favour of large organisations who can afford to pay.
But back to that censorship thing, you realise the US is the only nation on earth that has and can impose global censorship on the internet? That to me is broken, I believe no one should be able to and taking it out the hands of any one nations control and ability to unilaterally impose that is the only solution.
I would be happy with a US declaration, written into it's constitution if need be to give a cast iron guarantee that they will cease all censorship and whilst retaining control, still listen to global voices on issues such as ICANN's tlds (most people in the world didn't want it).
I believe this is even less likely than ITU taking control though, hence why I support that option as it's the most likely to fix the current problems and create a stalemate where no more damage can be done. If things are left as is, the US is only going to grow ever more authoritarian in it's control over the internet as it's influence wanes and it gets ever more desperate to protect it's IP through censorship.
The thing that annoys me most about these discussions is that the people who defend the status quo are also often the same ones who are quick to condemn the likes of China for internet censorship within their own borders. It's such a double standard and they become blind to it when their own government does it but not just nationally- internationally too.
It depends how effectively you distribute the vaccine, if you do it in bits and pieces over a spread of many years then yes there is a chance for the virus to mutate into something worse.
But if you do a nationwide vaccination programme in a year or two, one country at a time, then it has less chance to mutate before it's whiped out.
No but on the same note big pharma makes massive profits and it's executives get paid disgustingly high wages.
So you'll have to excuse me if I think that IP protections sway just a little bit too far in their favour right now because saving lives is kind of a bit more important than executives getting to have a gold plated circle jerk about how much their stock options are worth on the back of the latest financial results.
"There's no reason why they can't have their convenience along with the power to tinker if they choose to."
Well there is, opening up some things like drivers can have all sorts of repercussions from contract negotation difficulties over patent licensing and potential legal threats and so forth, through to simply having to tidy up the code a little more, and facilitating distribution of it, through to potential increased support headaches as their support team chase round in circles over a problem before finding out the problem exists because someone tinkered with something without knowing what they are doing. All these things combined mean there is a cost to companies in opening up some of their source, and the fact is that the number of people who care whether the drivers are open or not is so minutely small that it's not worth fucking over everyone else by having to pass on increased costs to them just because of this tiny irrelevant little minority who will dick around at driver level. It may even be counterproductive, the price increase they'd have to perform if they want to make even the slightest little things open (component manufacturers for example may hike the price for providing hardware documentation to end users) may be enough that their fully open product is no longer competitive with a competing closed product in the first placing leading to the open product failing and being replaced by close products anyway.
Yes it would be nice if everything was completely open for people like yourself who care about these things but it's not a big enough deal to matter. Even people like myself who have the technical competence to tinker and who download or buy things to tinker with (like the RaspberryPi) often end up finding they don't have time to do so after all anyway such that it ends up sat in a cupboard doing nothing, much less people who don't even have the technical competence in the first place.
You're chasing an ideological fantasy, that, whilst I respect it, and believe the goals of it are noble, just isn't practical in practice right now unfortunately.
I think it's that the government talks about terrorists etc. when in reality what they mean is file sharers and so forth.
The fact is, they're trying to hire people to go after the same sort of culture that those very people are from.
If it was genuinely about defending the nation, dealing with organised crime and shutting down spam botnets as well as researching new security techniques to defend government networks then you'd probably get more interest.
But whilst government is actively hunting down and legislating against geeks then that is the real problem. You wont convince smart people to actively participate in the downfall of the things they hold dear and ideologically so - like internet freedom.
It's like asking an Islamic fundamentalist to help hunt down Islamic terrorists. Good fucking luck with that, a bunch of CIA officers tried exactly that in Afghanistan, and that fundamentalist they recruited blew all seven of them up.
But it's not stagnating is it? Each new release still has new features. Just not the feature you specifically want.
As I say is there a particular scenario you particularly suffer where you don't have an IDE to solve this problem for you, or are you just seeking perfection? I'd wager this is a problem for almost no Java developers in practice, hence why it wouldn't be a high priority.
To be fair it sometimes advocates raping and hitting women and such too, but I'd hope you wouldn't do that.
I do agree with your sentiment though, and it's similar to the hypocrisy from Lily Allen who was one minute going on about how she copied music to create a mix tape once on Twitter, and the next condemning pirates on Twitter, all whilst completely oblivious to the fact she'd never actually had to work hard in her life because Daddy got her where she was due to his contacts. I suppose it's easy to say you should simply be able to buy everything you want when Daddy has done exactly that for you all your life and got you a job to boot.
There is a certain hypocrisy in the industry even from the artists, it's okay for them to break the law for example by doing hard drugs which genuinely does fund organised crime and drugs cartels who actually kill people in the most horrific ways and so forth, but if someone downloads an MP3 from the internet of theirs they believe that person is the devil and should be shot?
Few people haven't broken at least some law in their life (even if they haven't been caught) from smoking weed to breaking the speed limit - I'm sure almost everyone has done at least something. As breaking the law goes, I'd argue that downloading MP3s is the least harmful I can think of though yet it's demonised to be far worse. Killing someone whilst speeding in the UK has many times resulted in less harsh sentences than some people who have been done for criminal copyright infringement such as running a pirate website or selling dodgy DVDs have received and even in the cases where it's criminal copyright infringement like that, whilst I don't support copyright infringement for profit I think that's a gross disparity in punishments.
Lots of features aren't horrific to implement and would be of net benefit, but the danger is letting the language become unweildy because everyone wanted their pet change implemented.
Look I get it, you're an idealist, I don't blame you, I am too, the difference is that experience has taught me that sometimes you have to let it go and realise that there are in fact pragmatic reasons why you can't have your own way immediately.
There are fights that are worth fighting, I've long thought the HTML5 spec is awful but been told I'm wrong by people who are blindsided by the shiny new promises it makes, but now people are actually beginning to use it I'm seeing ever more developers move over to my viewpoint and recognise that HTML5 is as big a step backwards as we had in the 90s with IE/Netscape fighting each other with more horrendous browser incompatibilities and inconsistencies than ever, and new features that are actually far more painful than the old way of doing things.
But this isn't one of those fights, it works, it's not a big deal, as you point out yourself IDEs provide the crutch you need to solve these problems and that reduces the urgency and arguably even the necessity for a language specific fix so why not focus on the things an IDE can't provide so well like lambda support? Is there any reason you want to program Java without an IDE such that you need this to be a language, rather than an IDE thing?
"Only when it needed to be publicly voted on by elected individuals could the outcry actually do anything, and it did."
I'm not sure why you think this is the case, many votes go under the radar if that's what you're referring to and this happens everywhere, but it's up to activists to bring particular votes and discussions to the fore at a point where people can do something - that's what happened with ACTA and that's what happens with the likes of the ITU. What do you think this very news article is about? The difference is because it's more about US nationalism than any real actual worry people aren't going to go out in the streets and protest about it, well, anywhere other than in the US at least.
"I see the ITU as offering that same forum, but without the final check of a public vote, and that's why I think it's bad."
A vote at the ITU is no different, it's no less public than the European parliament vote was.
The only reason votes at the ITU aren't in the public eye recently and rarely ever are is because they're mundane, uninteresting, and there's really nothing controversial about them to complain about. That is a testament if anything to the good job it's done in it's decades of existsence in avoiding getting involved in highly partisan ideas that infringe civil liberties ensuring they stay national, not international issues and instead focus on what it's there to do - merely handle any technical challenges that arise.
"Now some people say you shouldn't have a single file with over 100k lines of code, but some of us like using old school procedural with just a sprinkling of OO."
100k lines of code in a single file has nothing to do with being "old school" and everything to do with abysmal code structure.
You'll still get something more useful out of a Java developer in less time than you will say, a C developer using nothing but a text editor and GCC.
I agree Java could be better in this respect - it's let C# pull the rug out from under it in this respect with it's property system, and shorthand for things like getters/setters, locks, using blocks, lambda implementation and so on.
It's a problem with the age of the language compared with the sluggish pace of development that's allowed C# to outflank it from this point of view, but you see similar problems with languages like PHP, C++ and so forth also so it's not as though it's Java specific.
Code has simply become more complicated and with that brings challenges for IDEs to keep up with increasing productivity requirements, but ultimately we're still better off than we were before we had the likes of Java and IDEs.
So sure, maybe C# and so forth are better languages now because of the sorts of language shortcuts they offer, but you also lose portability with C#, and you lose performance with Python, so it's all about tradeoff. If you/the guy in the article are going to complain about the sort of thing you're complaining about then ask yourself what the alternatives are? Could you be more productive in Python and not care about the performance hit? Are you going Windows only such that C# is fine? If the answer to this sort of question is yes then the problem is not with Java per-se but the fact that you picked the wrong tool for the job in the first place. If however you want fairly cross platform development with better than scripted performance and the benefits of a managed runtime to protect against buffer overflows etc. then Java is still the best tool for the job.
Because that's the way ITU works, there's no "What makes you think" about it, it's the way it is, and it's the way it'll continue to be precisely because no nation wants to have their national telecomms subjugated to a simple majority vote.
Slashdot Mirror
Whilst the Labour party is to blame for all manner of IT failings and bad technology ideas (ID card systems anyone?) I don't think it's the Labour party per-se if I'm honest.
My experience of public sector was simply that Microsoft basically bribe the right people throughout public sector regardless of the government. In say local government for example, this would normally mean taking the head of IT for a nice meal, sometimes even abroad for a couple of days written off as a "conference". The open source guys of course could never afford to do this.
It's not as if Tony Blair/Gordon Brown was in bed with Microsoft but simply that the Microsoft sales people are effective at targetting the many hundreds of IT decision makers throughout the UK's public sector and buying them over with perks and so forth. The BBC is for example independent of government and yet they too bought into the Microsoft ecosystem for a long time, hence the uproar about the iPlayer originally being restricted to devices that supported Microsoft's DRM (i.e. no open source offerings). They now seem beholden to Apple at the BBC however, so weening them off Microsoft with a public display of distaste over the iPlayer DRM fiasco seemed to do nothing about their susceptibility to single vendor favouritism.
The point is however that I don't think it's that there is some grand conspiracy, but simply that Microsoft have a very strong sales team in the UK with an awful lot of money at their disposal to bring in those big contracts through whatever means necessary.
Interestingly I notice that I no longer get redirected to the UK site when I go to Apple.com too so it suggests they've disabled that, at least for UK visitors so that people see the US site where the apology is not posted.
Say I then click store, because I also have to scroll down to notice I'm set to the wrong country on a 1920x1200 monitor and hence proceed anyway, get to the store, and then realise I'm on the US site because all the prices are in dollars not pounds, and then change country it changes it to the page I'm on completely bypassing the front page where the notice is.
They've gone out their way to try and avoid people seeing this. I do hope the judges are made very aware and that they are properly punished as a result.
Whilst that worked in Germany for Microsoft I do not believe that would work in the UK either. If Apple got such a ruling in place, I suspect the UK courts would really throw the book at Apple at that point regardless of what some Texas judge says. If that involved a fine, and the US courts told Apple they didn't have to pay it, that could well mean the bailiffs moving in on Apple's UK stores and seizing both the properties and the products to pay the fine.
Judges in texas can rule whatever the fuck they want but ultimately when Apple operates in a country it is bound by that countries laws and US judges do not have universal jurisdiction. It's really up to Apple then whether it wants to rely on the US judge's ruling or comply with UK law, if it doesn't it will get punished in the UK regardless.
"Well, two points come to mind. First, that extinction of very specialized species in small niches just isn't that big of a deal. And it's going to happen anyway."
Right, we've been over this, and it seems you like the other guy don't understand the way evolution works, but also seem to believe you have an ability no one else on earth has yet managed - the ability to determine the outcome of extremely complex chaotic systems.
Let's be honest, you don't actually have that ability, so quit saying things that are simply unknowable to you.
"Second, it really does matter how difficult it is for an extinction to occur."
Yes it does, it's fundamentally important because the longer it takes for an extinction event to occur the longer there is for habitat to change putting pressure on a species to also change via natural selection and hence opening the door for great population growth.
"Consider that against humanity which could only go extinct under some extreme circumstances, such as a massive asteroid (probably have to be considerably worse than whatever caused the Permian extinction), a cunning genetically modified disease, or an aggressive and superior life form or machine."
This just shows that you still don't get it. You seem to think that because there is a different scale in the change that that somehow matters - it doesn't, the point is that a dam being built in these creatures habitat is equivalent to an extinction level event happening against humanity.
"And how are these diseases going to survive? They need hosts, and the hosts just died. Plus disease resistance quickly returns once lethal diseases do."
Things treachorous to humans like diseases, viruses and so forth can sit dormant for a long time. Anthrax is one obvious well known example. You assume they need a human host, that's false, how do you think Malaria most commonly spreads? Diseases resistance does quickly return you're right, the problem is you're talking about a population too small to cope with that, and that's kind of the point.
I don't think there's much point taking this any further as you clearly don't have a decent grasp of the way both evolution, disease spread and resistance work. You seem to have a very simplified grade-school view of them but things aren't this simple in reality and further education on the subject will teach you much more. If you don't understand why you need a decent population to provide decent genetic diversity to protect against illness and so forth, and if you don't understand why the extinction of a species has an impact that reaches far beyond the mere death of that species then you really simply do not have the pre-requisite knowledge to have this discussion.
"But for some organisms, destruction of their environment would require the radical changing say of most of Europe and global human civilization and others it would require a modest alteration of a waterfall."
Right, but what's your point? Keep in mind we've whiped out species who spread right across land masses bigger than Europe (e.g. North America). All extinctions still have an effect on the web of life though. A massive asteroid hit could cause just as much damage to humanity in less time than a damn building project could to these toads but just because a massive asteroid hit is less likely doesn't make this more acceptable to whipe them out or mean they were anymore likely to die out naturally than we are. They're also smaller than us and require less resources.
"Not by definition."
Yes it is, new niche features are precisely what taxonomy has always used to define speciation, and that hasn't changed with DNA based taxonomy. When a species enters a new niche that is the line where we define it as a distinct species, or subspecies.
"I disagree. We have a remarkable ability to adapt even over very short time periods. For example, nuclear subs would remain habitable for years. That would be enough time to reestablish a human presence on the surface of Earth."
But this misses another important point, you need a sizeable population to have a sustainable gene pool. The crew of a sub would simply be far too few to sustain a population with a healthy gene pool and by that point you've lost the facilities and medical expertise to diagnose and deal with things like cancer. If 1 in 10 women are prone to breast cancer, you've already lost 10% of your females when it happens and where are you going to find qualified personnel and facilities that are working (no power anymore remember) for chemotherapy? You could butcher them, but what if they get an infection and die anyway? Humanity is much more prone to illness and disease than it ever was because we stopped letting natural selection select such things out. Factor in all the other problems people can suffer and your population is going to dwindle.
"And one can always come up with biological, mechanical, or electrical means to make up the balance of oxygen need."
In the space of a few weeks when half the world is in panic? Not likely, we can't even deal with CO2 emissions when the world isn't in panic and we have many countries and many billions being spent on it and within a timeframe of decades. Do you think people are going to turn up to run power stations and so forth if this sort of scenario were to come about? You might be able to save pockets of disease prone humans but statistically you may end up with someone who has something like AIDs, or some STD that can lead to infertility - have fun when that breaks out. Again, it's not going to be genetically spread enough for a healthy population.
I don't think you get how evolution works. It doesn't work rapidly, it works over an extended period of time.
These toads were fitted to the environment they were in, and no species can change to destruction of their environment overnight.
If humanity hadn't caused such rapid disruption, the changes to their environment that would force evolution to take hold would happen over a much longer time period.
I can think of many examples, but let's say rainfall increased in this area leading to greater bodies of water. This would mean the toads who became better at swimming would likely become more succesful overtime, and if there are connected rivers where this particular habitat is then that may mean they can then swim strongly enough to spread their habitat range, and hence grow their population by water. Similarly, if humidity changed as a gradual process due to say, decreased rainfall over time, then they wouldn't need these misters to stay alive, they would adapt to it slowly.
Invasive species being succesful is rarely about said species being able to cope more generally, but more about the fact that there is no natural predator catered to some unique feature they have in that ecosystem to keep their populations down. Similarly they are in an environment where disease that would also effect their populations and that would've co-evolved with them to minimise population growth hasn't also been brought across.
You're trying to use reason, but you're doing so with a very weak understand of the sort of time scales evolution works on. You're mistakenly assuming that because a creature can't cope with a rapid change (i.e. complete habitat destruction over a few weeks) that it wouldn't have coped with an inevitable slower change, that may possibly occur on the order of even hundreds of thousands of years.
This is exactly why there are so many extinctions related to climate change - not because climate change hasn't happened before, not because animals don't have the capacity to adapt and evolve to cope with climate change on more natural time scales, but because of the rate of change right now is so fast it's unseen and too fast for evolutionary principles to be able to allow species to adapt.
Before you can understand why the original post I was responding to is bullshit you need a better understanding of evolution, specifically:
1) Evolution does not happen in isolation but as an adaptation to slowly changing environments
2) Evolutionary effects naturally occur over much larger timescales than the man made extinction events allow
3) Evolution is a battle between predator and prey, if you take a predator to a new environment where it's co-evolved natural limitations do not exist then it will run rampant regardless of the fitness of the natural species there
4) You say you see no evidence of niche species expanding, and yet that is by definition what must always happen. When humans lost the ability to swing through trees like monkeys and instead became planeswalkers they were inherently a niche at first relative to the much more widely spread monkey populations. A species is always initially a niche as it makes the changes to become a new species, but some niches allow for greater eventual success than others.
What we can't say, given that the habitat of these toads was destroyed in a short time period, not a time period of evolutionary scales, is whether the eventual natural pressures of the environment would've been enough to allow them to spread or not. More than anything it is about how the environment changes that determines success as much as it is how the species evolves but no species can survive a man-made style change. If man fucked up some kind of experiment and it drastically altered the ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere for example over the period of mere weeks, we ourselves would not manage to survive but it has nothing to do with us being evolved into a niche and everything to do with a change to the habitat we've evolved to happening far too quickly for us to cope with the change.
"A lot of the scariest ideas coming down the pipeline are from the UK and Australia when it comes to surveillance and Internet powers. Not all of that is being justified by copyright either, which your claim that is purely driven by the US."
But all that's national and none of it's exported. The UK internet censorship regulations to date have all been driven by the US media industries and this is why people have a problem.
No one gives a shit about China's censorship if China keeps it to itself it's China's problem the problem is that the US exports all it's bad ideas and forces them on everyone else.
"ACTA was defeated in the US because enough people in the US stood up to it, not because it was also defeated in the EU."
ACTA was never defeated in the US full stop, the US government signed up to it and were it not for the EU defeat it would've come into power there. It was signed on the basis that everyone would sign up to it but the EU would not, hence preventing it from becoming law in the US. The US never withdrew it's signature prior to the EU killing the bill so what you say here is completely and utterly false. Perhaps you're confusing it with SOPA/PIPA?
"It's a mistake to give the rest of the governments a pass as just being under the bad influence of the US. They have their own agendas when it comes to the Internet, and freedom, and not all of it is driven by copyrights at all. In fact, copyright most often is just another excuse, like think-of-the-children."
No but most of that ideology IS driven by the US. Much of the non-copyright bad legislation in the UK stems from Murdoch's lobbying (it is his papers that drive it) and it is the US that allows Murdoch to act as a vehicle for pushing it's policy as it does.
This doesn't absolve the UK of blame, the UK should stand up to it, but it doesn't absolve the US either because the US can stop it also by stopping the export of it's ideas abroad in the various ways it does.
"Microecosystems are very fragile yes. But they are also not typically that common."
This is completely false. In the Cactaceae and Orchidaceae plant families alone there are literally hundreds of such examples I can think of. That's before you start looking at every other plant and animal family going.
You also can't simply dismiss them as unimportant, some of these small colony species and plants can be essential to the migratory patterns of other animals who have a much wider effect. Let's look at a real life example, if a species, such as Arrojadoa marylanae, a type of cactus growing in a single mineral rich hill habitat gets whiped out by planned mining of it's habitat then a hummingbird species dependent on it for it's annual migration will no longer have this resource for that migration and will hence likely see decimation of it's population. Decimation of it's population means that potentially hundreds of other plant species dependent on it for pollination along it's migratory path will no longer have a pollinator and continue to suffer, and those animal species which hunt it and it's eggs will also see a loss of a major food source.
You can't also simply assume that such species are headed towards extinction regardless, how do you know this? are you able to calculate a future of such species in the event that humans don't intervene? If so I'm sure many people would love to hear how you're able to understand the eventual outcome of such chaotic systems with such an unfathomable amount of parameters in. How do you know that instead of extinction that these species wont actually evolve to expand? how do you know that there isn't some regular but unknown event which happens on a long time scale we don't know about during which these animals thrive such that they're not just at a temporary low? how do you know these animals have zero impact on the survival of other species?
Most species are "super attached" to one thing or another, humans for example are far more dependent on things like water, than other species are - we can't last anywhere near as long without it as others and similarly we could be quite prone to being whiped out due to a change in the chemical constituency of our atmosphere where many other species would make it through. Neither of these things though is an argument that we should just do what we want even if it means making humanity extinct, because well, we shouldn't have become so super attached to things like water should we?
The point is that the loss of even the most specialised species in the world can potentially have a knock on effect on other species creating a cascading effect to the point it effects species we do actually give a shit about.
I'm not some kind of hardcore environmentalist that thinks we should try our hardest to preserve every living thing to the point we can, but an excuse that amounts to "well it doesn't matter if we whipe it out, it's a meaningless species and was going to die anyway" is so utterly ignorant that it doesn't belong on a site like Slashdot.
Just about every single thing you do when fucking around with nature to the degree of causing species extinction, no matter how irrelevant you think the species is is going to have some kind of negative effect. It's not just the simple loss of 17,000 toads, it's the loss of 17,000 toads, plus 10,000 animals that feed on them, plus the 5,000 that feed on them, and so on, coupled with the loss of any plants/species that were dependent on any effects on the environment of the toads which will often result in the loss of species which grow to much higher numbers (insects, fungus, bacteria) - the point being your 17,000 toads will almost always rapidly extend to be millions of lost living things both plants and animals.
They call it the web of life for a reason, in nature things never really happen in isolation with no impact anywhere else. You can never assume that the loss of one species is the loss of that species and nothing more, because that's never really the case.
Sorry, just reminded me what hole ACTA came out of it and where it was defeated?
It came out of the US and It was defeated by the EU - not national governments, no, governments like the UK's were willing to sign us right up to ACTA.
The EU is actually the only political entity that did listen to people and did then kill off ACTA as a result.
But keep telling yourself the US isn't the problem if it makes you feel better. I agree EU nations follow US demands for stricter copyright enforcement, and the EU does have some copyright fascists (Sarkzy was a good example, Jeremy Hunt still is) but the facilitation of this ideology comes purely from the US. Jeremy Hunt is only where he is because the US has assisted Murdoch in exporting the Atlanticist ideology for so long for example.
Yes, and continue losing.
Because for all those hundreds of years they've been fighting it, information has only become more accessible, and more free.
That or the fact it's just one of those things that can be quite fun to program, meaning even if no one wants it you can guarantee some dev is going to want to implement it.
rarely != never
Well it is broken, we have unilaterally enforced global internet censorship enforced at the behest of the US and we're getting highest bidder TLDs that completely break the hierarchial structure of the internet and create massive costs for businesses wanting to protect their trademarks whilst opening the doors for more effective phishing and fraud in the longer term, whilst tipping the balance of the internet more in favour of large organisations who can afford to pay.
But back to that censorship thing, you realise the US is the only nation on earth that has and can impose global censorship on the internet? That to me is broken, I believe no one should be able to and taking it out the hands of any one nations control and ability to unilaterally impose that is the only solution.
I would be happy with a US declaration, written into it's constitution if need be to give a cast iron guarantee that they will cease all censorship and whilst retaining control, still listen to global voices on issues such as ICANN's tlds (most people in the world didn't want it).
I believe this is even less likely than ITU taking control though, hence why I support that option as it's the most likely to fix the current problems and create a stalemate where no more damage can be done. If things are left as is, the US is only going to grow ever more authoritarian in it's control over the internet as it's influence wanes and it gets ever more desperate to protect it's IP through censorship.
The thing that annoys me most about these discussions is that the people who defend the status quo are also often the same ones who are quick to condemn the likes of China for internet censorship within their own borders. It's such a double standard and they become blind to it when their own government does it but not just nationally- internationally too.
It depends how effectively you distribute the vaccine, if you do it in bits and pieces over a spread of many years then yes there is a chance for the virus to mutate into something worse.
But if you do a nationwide vaccination programme in a year or two, one country at a time, then it has less chance to mutate before it's whiped out.
No but on the same note big pharma makes massive profits and it's executives get paid disgustingly high wages.
So you'll have to excuse me if I think that IP protections sway just a little bit too far in their favour right now because saving lives is kind of a bit more important than executives getting to have a gold plated circle jerk about how much their stock options are worth on the back of the latest financial results.
"There's no reason why they can't have their convenience along with the power to tinker if they choose to."
Well there is, opening up some things like drivers can have all sorts of repercussions from contract negotation difficulties over patent licensing and potential legal threats and so forth, through to simply having to tidy up the code a little more, and facilitating distribution of it, through to potential increased support headaches as their support team chase round in circles over a problem before finding out the problem exists because someone tinkered with something without knowing what they are doing. All these things combined mean there is a cost to companies in opening up some of their source, and the fact is that the number of people who care whether the drivers are open or not is so minutely small that it's not worth fucking over everyone else by having to pass on increased costs to them just because of this tiny irrelevant little minority who will dick around at driver level. It may even be counterproductive, the price increase they'd have to perform if they want to make even the slightest little things open (component manufacturers for example may hike the price for providing hardware documentation to end users) may be enough that their fully open product is no longer competitive with a competing closed product in the first placing leading to the open product failing and being replaced by close products anyway.
Yes it would be nice if everything was completely open for people like yourself who care about these things but it's not a big enough deal to matter. Even people like myself who have the technical competence to tinker and who download or buy things to tinker with (like the RaspberryPi) often end up finding they don't have time to do so after all anyway such that it ends up sat in a cupboard doing nothing, much less people who don't even have the technical competence in the first place.
You're chasing an ideological fantasy, that, whilst I respect it, and believe the goals of it are noble, just isn't practical in practice right now unfortunately.
I don't think it's that or the wage issue.
I think it's that the government talks about terrorists etc. when in reality what they mean is file sharers and so forth.
The fact is, they're trying to hire people to go after the same sort of culture that those very people are from.
If it was genuinely about defending the nation, dealing with organised crime and shutting down spam botnets as well as researching new security techniques to defend government networks then you'd probably get more interest.
But whilst government is actively hunting down and legislating against geeks then that is the real problem. You wont convince smart people to actively participate in the downfall of the things they hold dear and ideologically so - like internet freedom.
It's like asking an Islamic fundamentalist to help hunt down Islamic terrorists. Good fucking luck with that, a bunch of CIA officers tried exactly that in Afghanistan, and that fundamentalist they recruited blew all seven of them up.
But it's not stagnating is it? Each new release still has new features. Just not the feature you specifically want.
As I say is there a particular scenario you particularly suffer where you don't have an IDE to solve this problem for you, or are you just seeking perfection? I'd wager this is a problem for almost no Java developers in practice, hence why it wouldn't be a high priority.
To be fair it sometimes advocates raping and hitting women and such too, but I'd hope you wouldn't do that.
I do agree with your sentiment though, and it's similar to the hypocrisy from Lily Allen who was one minute going on about how she copied music to create a mix tape once on Twitter, and the next condemning pirates on Twitter, all whilst completely oblivious to the fact she'd never actually had to work hard in her life because Daddy got her where she was due to his contacts. I suppose it's easy to say you should simply be able to buy everything you want when Daddy has done exactly that for you all your life and got you a job to boot.
There is a certain hypocrisy in the industry even from the artists, it's okay for them to break the law for example by doing hard drugs which genuinely does fund organised crime and drugs cartels who actually kill people in the most horrific ways and so forth, but if someone downloads an MP3 from the internet of theirs they believe that person is the devil and should be shot?
Few people haven't broken at least some law in their life (even if they haven't been caught) from smoking weed to breaking the speed limit - I'm sure almost everyone has done at least something. As breaking the law goes, I'd argue that downloading MP3s is the least harmful I can think of though yet it's demonised to be far worse. Killing someone whilst speeding in the UK has many times resulted in less harsh sentences than some people who have been done for criminal copyright infringement such as running a pirate website or selling dodgy DVDs have received and even in the cases where it's criminal copyright infringement like that, whilst I don't support copyright infringement for profit I think that's a gross disparity in punishments.
Lots of features aren't horrific to implement and would be of net benefit, but the danger is letting the language become unweildy because everyone wanted their pet change implemented.
Look I get it, you're an idealist, I don't blame you, I am too, the difference is that experience has taught me that sometimes you have to let it go and realise that there are in fact pragmatic reasons why you can't have your own way immediately.
There are fights that are worth fighting, I've long thought the HTML5 spec is awful but been told I'm wrong by people who are blindsided by the shiny new promises it makes, but now people are actually beginning to use it I'm seeing ever more developers move over to my viewpoint and recognise that HTML5 is as big a step backwards as we had in the 90s with IE/Netscape fighting each other with more horrendous browser incompatibilities and inconsistencies than ever, and new features that are actually far more painful than the old way of doing things.
But this isn't one of those fights, it works, it's not a big deal, as you point out yourself IDEs provide the crutch you need to solve these problems and that reduces the urgency and arguably even the necessity for a language specific fix so why not focus on the things an IDE can't provide so well like lambda support? Is there any reason you want to program Java without an IDE such that you need this to be a language, rather than an IDE thing?
Because expecting every language to be everything to everyone is unrealistic.
"Only when it needed to be publicly voted on by elected individuals could the outcry actually do anything, and it did."
I'm not sure why you think this is the case, many votes go under the radar if that's what you're referring to and this happens everywhere, but it's up to activists to bring particular votes and discussions to the fore at a point where people can do something - that's what happened with ACTA and that's what happens with the likes of the ITU. What do you think this very news article is about? The difference is because it's more about US nationalism than any real actual worry people aren't going to go out in the streets and protest about it, well, anywhere other than in the US at least.
"I see the ITU as offering that same forum, but without the final check of a public vote, and that's why I think it's bad."
A vote at the ITU is no different, it's no less public than the European parliament vote was.
The only reason votes at the ITU aren't in the public eye recently and rarely ever are is because they're mundane, uninteresting, and there's really nothing controversial about them to complain about. That is a testament if anything to the good job it's done in it's decades of existsence in avoiding getting involved in highly partisan ideas that infringe civil liberties ensuring they stay national, not international issues and instead focus on what it's there to do - merely handle any technical challenges that arise.
"Now some people say you shouldn't have a single file with over 100k lines of code, but some of us like using old school procedural with just a sprinkling of OO."
100k lines of code in a single file has nothing to do with being "old school" and everything to do with abysmal code structure.
Why is it an issue? Does it hamper productivity?
You'll still get something more useful out of a Java developer in less time than you will say, a C developer using nothing but a text editor and GCC.
I agree Java could be better in this respect - it's let C# pull the rug out from under it in this respect with it's property system, and shorthand for things like getters/setters, locks, using blocks, lambda implementation and so on.
It's a problem with the age of the language compared with the sluggish pace of development that's allowed C# to outflank it from this point of view, but you see similar problems with languages like PHP, C++ and so forth also so it's not as though it's Java specific.
Code has simply become more complicated and with that brings challenges for IDEs to keep up with increasing productivity requirements, but ultimately we're still better off than we were before we had the likes of Java and IDEs.
So sure, maybe C# and so forth are better languages now because of the sorts of language shortcuts they offer, but you also lose portability with C#, and you lose performance with Python, so it's all about tradeoff. If you/the guy in the article are going to complain about the sort of thing you're complaining about then ask yourself what the alternatives are? Could you be more productive in Python and not care about the performance hit? Are you going Windows only such that C# is fine? If the answer to this sort of question is yes then the problem is not with Java per-se but the fact that you picked the wrong tool for the job in the first place. If however you want fairly cross platform development with better than scripted performance and the benefits of a managed runtime to protect against buffer overflows etc. then Java is still the best tool for the job.
Because that's the way ITU works, there's no "What makes you think" about it, it's the way it is, and it's the way it'll continue to be precisely because no nation wants to have their national telecomms subjugated to a simple majority vote.