What a bunch of bullshit. First off, one of the reasons Wikipedia gained popularity was because they relied on the good will of volunteers, the same volunteers that might have been put off by commercial ads.
Second, Wikipedia has changed a lot since its inception, like the editing tools, policies, infrastructure, etc. There's no way they could have scaled up to the size it is now without change.
And to call it a "glorified blog", when articles are often referenced and edited for encyclopedic quality is ridiculous. The simple fact is that it's incredibly an useful encyclopedia, much more useful than anything ever attempted by hiring experts.
Just to chime in on this point, from what I've heard (I've never looked it up myself) the city in Texas I lived while I was in high school (late '90s, early 2000s) and where my parents are still living has the highest concealed carry per capita in the entire state, and also has the lowest violent crimes rate per capita in the entire state.
What you say is very plausible, because what the linked article says is that the wealthiest districts have the highest rate of concealed carry licenses. There's less crime in wealthy neighborhoods.
So long as we give people general-purpose tools that let them build things, we're OK. It's when we start to take them away that we get into trouble. I hope we always have popular machines people can use that aren't restricted, so that those who have the desire and ideas to do something can, and can share it with others.
Obviously a concern about the "walled garden" approach to software.
Nature has given you a body, which means you have innate rights that come with that body (the right to think, the right to speak, the right to defend yourself from harm, and so on().
By the same logic, nature has given you the right to attack others. Your argument holds no water.
I really wonder if the things Google has done in recent years has the full consent of the founders.
Of course it does. If not, heads would roll, policies would change, and you would hear about it. Instead, they keep heading down the path of building an information empire that knows everything about you. I seem to recall in an interview early on with one of the founders that he wanted users to ask Google what they were going to do that day, or something to that effect. It sounded like it was said only half-jokingly.
The GPL grants rights to everyone. Copyright takes rights away from everyone. That's the difference. The GPL currently relies on copyright as a legal hack to ensure those rights, but really those rights should be part of consumer protection laws, and copyright should be done away with entirely.
It's a debatable position to say that the GPL "right" of getting the source code should be enshrined in a consumer protection law, but it's bullshit to just assume that it is, in fact, some right that doesn't take away from the rights of others.
Consumer protection laws are regulations on freedom for the overall benefit of society. For example, requiring a list of ingredients in packaged food -- arguably, the free market could decide this, where people would only by food that had the ingredients listed. This is already true to some extent -- you don't get a list of ingredients at a restaurant, for example.
Even if government did not exist you have a natural right to defend yourself from my attack (i.e. kill me). That body was given to you by Nature and you have the right to protect it from harm.
And I have a natural right to conquer others and take over territory, as any student with even a cursory history education or study of nature could tell you.
There are no absolute rights. We as a society decide what they are.
I doubt we'd use them in general communication applications anyway, for the simple reason that what we have right now isn't broken, and thus doesn't need to be fixed.
If it was actually feasible, it would be very useful for intercontinental telecommunication. Current methods are both expensive and have high latencies (either satellite or laying fiber across ocean floors).
There's no official Google policy page where it says you can use an anonymous pseudonym -- it says just the opposite. The post by Yonatan basically says that their algorithm tries to enforce something that looks like a name, but if you are flagged then your profile will be deleted if you can't back it up with either something like a license or a current online following. The official policy, in two different places:
To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable. "
"Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. Because of this, it's important to use your common name so that the people you want to connect with can find you. Your common name is the name your friends, family or coworkers usually call you." [emphasis mine]
[..]
"Most people use their legal name, or some variant of it, in the real world. We recognize that this isn't always the case and allow for other common names in Google+. If we challenge the name you intend to use, you will be asked to submit proof that this is an established identity with a meaningful following. You can do so by providing links to other social networking sites, news articles, or official documents in which you are referred to by this name. Note that this name and your profile must represent you, and not an avatar or other secondary online identity."
I'll grant you that C is the lingua franca of operating systems, but I do think it's worth mentioning that for iOS it's because Apple is running it like an iron-fisted dictator, and preventing developers from choosing the best technology as they see fit.
The fact that C# could be a valid choice for IE in no way invalidates my position that portability is a valid reason for choosing C/C++ over C#.
It does when browsers like IE fall prey to the same bugs, and you were speaking generally about, "In theory, you can develop a safe image parser. Image parsers didn't get exploited because they traded safety for speed, but because the people who wrote them made mistakes and/or didn't consider some edge case, as humans always do."
There's no reason an image parser in IE should fall prey to a memory corruption bug. There's no reason it should happen on iOS, either, if there was actually choice allowed.
That's Apple's decision to restrict their platform. Also, iOS is Objective C when it comes to libraries, not straight C.
Which in many cases - like, for example, browsers - is.
So image parsing bugs written in C are because of a portability problem for IE, which only runs on Windows?
And yet it still suffers from buffer overflows - in their image parsers, no less!
Because they either wrote the underlying implementation in C or used a C library. If anything, it should be a lesson to stop writing code in C unless you really need it.
If somebody can't get online the typical response is to assume the site is down and go elsewhere. I've also seen protests at stores and had no trouble getting through, and traffic was not backed up. A protest may back up traffic, but you aren't allowed to do so intentionally by blocking the street. Denial of service is explicitly meant to stop service, and that's why it is different.
Firstly, there are more reasons besides performance to avoid Java, C# or scripting languages; portability, for example.
Java is portable and scripting languages are portable, with fewer porting problems than C/C++. C# with.NET is meant to replace the Win32 API, so if that's your target, portability isn't a concern.
Secondly, while the language themselves (as in, syntax + semantics) may not suffer from them, the language implementations (the JVM, the CLR, etc) do.
But by using the memory-safe languages, much less code is created that suffers these problems. If you look at the Java API, for example, a lot of the API is written in Java itself.
With all respect, you use Java with an IDE because the language is nearly unprogrammable without one.
No, that's a bunch of bullshit. I use an IDE because it automates common tasks down to a single keystroke, the same tasks that I'd do in either a scripting language or a statically typed one like Java.
Scripting languages are much more manageable; it's practical to write them without an IDE precisely because they have a REPL instead.
I've done plenty of work in scripting languages, and I always miss the power of an IDE that Java allows. I can also get the same experience as a REPL with the Java IDE by running code within the IDE.
Image parsers didn't get exploited because they traded safety for speed
Yes, they did, because they were written in C or C++, which allows memory corruption and is how these image parsers were exploited. There are languages that don't allow memory corruption (Java, C#, just about any scripting language, etc.), but they aren't used for performance reasons.
"Although in practice no nonstationary physical process can be exactly physically reversible or isentropic, there is no known limit to the closeness with which we can approach perfect reversibility, in systems that are sufficiently well-isolated from interactions with unknown external environments, when the laws of physics describing the system's evolution are precisely known.
Probably the largest motivation for the study of technologies aimed at actually implementing reversible computing is that they offer what is predicted to be the only potential way to improve the energy efficiency of computers beyond the fundamental von Neumann-Landauer limit [2] of kT ln(2) energy dissipated per irreversible bit operation.
[..]
Although achieving this goal presents a significant challenge for the design, manufacturing, and characterization of ultra-precise new physical mechanisms for computing, there is at present no fundamental reason to think that this goal cannot eventually be accomplished [..]"
I guess it's a good thing I didn't say, suggest, or imply it.
It's implied that when you complain about inherit faults of capitalism that the other major systems tried in the last century wouldn't have the same problem.
I use Java with an IDE with features that benefit from static typing, such as accurate code completion, finding definitions, references, and documentation with single keystrokes. It also features an interactive debugger that also lets me test snippets of code, as well as go back in the stack trace and examine data. This makes me 4 times more productive than Python, for example.
The point of a denial of service attack is to prevent people from getting to the site, whether it's for a few minutes or hours. That's very different from being insulted for crossing a picket line. Nobody is making protest illegal -- there are alternative and legal ways. Two examples are "Bank Transfer Day" and "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day".
Sometimes very smart people can be mostly insightful, but very spectacularly wrong on some points.
Dijkstra turned into a figurative monk in his later years, dedicating himself to austerity and impractical principles. Kinda like Stallman is for "Software Freedom". There's some value in that, but the rest of us need to get work done, perfection being the enemy of the good.
Why is a DDOS illegal, how is different that a RL protest outside a shop/factory ?
You can't legally prevent other people from gaining access to the shop/factory with your protest, and that's why a denial of service attack is different.
I've never had a flashback. [..] Cigarettes had that "acid" feel for a couple days (smokers who have tripped will know what I mean), and weed would make me feel like I was tripping, sometimes a week or more later although that could have been my imagination.
Which could be considered a flashback. Somebody else posted this link in response to you, and it what it says seems appropriate:
"Studies of flashbacks are hard to evaluate because the term has been used so loosely and variably. On the broadest definition, it means the transitory recurrence of emotions and perceptions originally experienced while under the influence of a psychedelic drug. It can last seconds or hours; it can mimic any of the myriad aspects of a trip; and it can be blissful, interesting, annoying, or frightening. [..] Marihuana [sic] smoking is probably the most common single source of flashbacks."
Why can't he release a detailed list of every edit he made (allowing someone else with a nonlinear editing suite, lots of time on his hands, and fewer qualms about BitTorrent to piece it together)?
The article is actually a good overview of the resulting movie and major edits made. Granted, there's a lot of work if anybody wants to try to use it as a guide for a similar edit, but it's at least a starting point.
Slashdot Mirror
What a bunch of bullshit. First off, one of the reasons Wikipedia gained popularity was because they relied on the good will of volunteers, the same volunteers that might have been put off by commercial ads.
Second, Wikipedia has changed a lot since its inception, like the editing tools, policies, infrastructure, etc. There's no way they could have scaled up to the size it is now without change.
And to call it a "glorified blog", when articles are often referenced and edited for encyclopedic quality is ridiculous. The simple fact is that it's incredibly an useful encyclopedia, much more useful than anything ever attempted by hiring experts.
Just to chime in on this point, from what I've heard (I've never looked it up myself) the city in Texas I lived while I was in high school (late '90s, early 2000s) and where my parents are still living has the highest concealed carry per capita in the entire state, and also has the lowest violent crimes rate per capita in the entire state.
I did look it up.
What you say is very plausible, because what the linked article says is that the wealthiest districts have the highest rate of concealed carry licenses. There's less crime in wealthy neighborhoods.
I like this bit from the article:
So long as we give people general-purpose tools that let them build things, we're OK. It's when we start to take them away that we get into trouble. I hope we always have popular machines people can use that aren't restricted, so that those who have the desire and ideas to do something can, and can share it with others.
Obviously a concern about the "walled garden" approach to software.
Nature has given you a body, which means you have innate rights that come with that body (the right to think, the right to speak, the right to defend yourself from harm, and so on().
By the same logic, nature has given you the right to attack others. Your argument holds no water.
I really wonder if the things Google has done in recent years has the full consent of the founders.
Of course it does. If not, heads would roll, policies would change, and you would hear about it. Instead, they keep heading down the path of building an information empire that knows everything about you. I seem to recall in an interview early on with one of the founders that he wanted users to ask Google what they were going to do that day, or something to that effect. It sounded like it was said only half-jokingly.
The GPL grants rights to everyone. Copyright takes rights away from everyone. That's the difference. The GPL currently relies on copyright as a legal hack to ensure those rights, but really those rights should be part of consumer protection laws, and copyright should be done away with entirely.
It's a debatable position to say that the GPL "right" of getting the source code should be enshrined in a consumer protection law, but it's bullshit to just assume that it is, in fact, some right that doesn't take away from the rights of others.
Consumer protection laws are regulations on freedom for the overall benefit of society. For example, requiring a list of ingredients in packaged food -- arguably, the free market could decide this, where people would only by food that had the ingredients listed. This is already true to some extent -- you don't get a list of ingredients at a restaurant, for example.
That's the beauty of jokes -- you can make them out of anything.
Or claim anything is a joke when it isn't.
Even if government did not exist you have a natural right to defend yourself from my attack (i.e. kill me). That body was given to you by Nature and you have the right to protect it from harm.
And I have a natural right to conquer others and take over territory, as any student with even a cursory history education or study of nature could tell you.
There are no absolute rights. We as a society decide what they are.
I doubt we'd use them in general communication applications anyway, for the simple reason that what we have right now isn't broken, and thus doesn't need to be fixed.
If it was actually feasible, it would be very useful for intercontinental telecommunication. Current methods are both expensive and have high latencies (either satellite or laying fiber across ocean floors).
There's no official Google policy page where it says you can use an anonymous pseudonym -- it says just the opposite. The post by Yonatan basically says that their algorithm tries to enforce something that looks like a name, but if you are flagged then your profile will be deleted if you can't back it up with either something like a license or a current online following. The official policy, in two different places:
https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/+/policy/content.html
"13. User Profile Name
To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable. "
http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271
"Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. Because of this, it's important to use your common name so that the people you want to connect with can find you. Your common name is the name your friends, family or coworkers usually call you." [emphasis mine]
[..]
"Most people use their legal name, or some variant of it, in the real world. We recognize that this isn't always the case and allow for other common names in Google+. If we challenge the name you intend to use, you will be asked to submit proof that this is an established identity with a meaningful following. You can do so by providing links to other social networking sites, news articles, or official documents in which you are referred to by this name. Note that this name and your profile must represent you, and not an avatar or other secondary online identity."
Irrelevant. C is still more portable.
I'll grant you that C is the lingua franca of operating systems, but I do think it's worth mentioning that for iOS it's because Apple is running it like an iron-fisted dictator, and preventing developers from choosing the best technology as they see fit.
The fact that C# could be a valid choice for IE in no way invalidates my position that portability is a valid reason for choosing C/C++ over C#.
It does when browsers like IE fall prey to the same bugs, and you were speaking generally about, "In theory, you can develop a safe image parser. Image parsers didn't get exploited because they traded safety for speed, but because the people who wrote them made mistakes and/or didn't consider some edge case, as humans always do."
There's no reason an image parser in IE should fall prey to a memory corruption bug. There's no reason it should happen on iOS, either, if there was actually choice allowed.
So, what's the JVM for iOS?
That's Apple's decision to restrict their platform. Also, iOS is Objective C when it comes to libraries, not straight C.
Which in many cases - like, for example, browsers - is.
So image parsing bugs written in C are because of a portability problem for IE, which only runs on Windows?
And yet it still suffers from buffer overflows - in their image parsers, no less!
Because they either wrote the underlying implementation in C or used a C library. If anything, it should be a lesson to stop writing code in C unless you really need it.
If somebody can't get online the typical response is to assume the site is down and go elsewhere. I've also seen protests at stores and had no trouble getting through, and traffic was not backed up. A protest may back up traffic, but you aren't allowed to do so intentionally by blocking the street. Denial of service is explicitly meant to stop service, and that's why it is different.
Firstly, there are more reasons besides performance to avoid Java, C# or scripting languages; portability, for example.
Java is portable and scripting languages are portable, with fewer porting problems than C/C++. C# with .NET is meant to replace the Win32 API, so if that's your target, portability isn't a concern.
Secondly, while the language themselves (as in, syntax + semantics) may not suffer from them, the language implementations (the JVM, the CLR, etc) do.
But by using the memory-safe languages, much less code is created that suffers these problems. If you look at the Java API, for example, a lot of the API is written in Java itself.
With all respect, you use Java with an IDE because the language is nearly unprogrammable without one.
No, that's a bunch of bullshit. I use an IDE because it automates common tasks down to a single keystroke, the same tasks that I'd do in either a scripting language or a statically typed one like Java.
Scripting languages are much more manageable; it's practical to write them without an IDE precisely because they have a REPL instead.
I've done plenty of work in scripting languages, and I always miss the power of an IDE that Java allows. I can also get the same experience as a REPL with the Java IDE by running code within the IDE.
Hand-waving nonsense.
Image parsers didn't get exploited because they traded safety for speed
Yes, they did, because they were written in C or C++, which allows memory corruption and is how these image parsers were exploited. There are languages that don't allow memory corruption (Java, C#, just about any scripting language, etc.), but they aren't used for performance reasons.
I must admit that I don't understand either the utility, or the feasibility, of such a system.
Wikipedia gives an answer:
"Although in practice no nonstationary physical process can be exactly physically reversible or isentropic, there is no known limit to the closeness with which we can approach perfect reversibility, in systems that are sufficiently well-isolated from interactions with unknown external environments, when the laws of physics describing the system's evolution are precisely known.
Probably the largest motivation for the study of technologies aimed at actually implementing reversible computing is that they offer what is predicted to be the only potential way to improve the energy efficiency of computers beyond the fundamental von Neumann-Landauer limit [2] of kT ln(2) energy dissipated per irreversible bit operation.
[..]
Although achieving this goal presents a significant challenge for the design, manufacturing, and characterization of ultra-precise new physical mechanisms for computing, there is at present no fundamental reason to think that this goal cannot eventually be accomplished [..]"
I guess it's a good thing I didn't say, suggest, or imply it.
It's implied that when you complain about inherit faults of capitalism that the other major systems tried in the last century wouldn't have the same problem.
I use Java with an IDE with features that benefit from static typing, such as accurate code completion, finding definitions, references, and documentation with single keystrokes. It also features an interactive debugger that also lets me test snippets of code, as well as go back in the stack trace and examine data. This makes me 4 times more productive than Python, for example.
The point of a denial of service attack is to prevent people from getting to the site, whether it's for a few minutes or hours. That's very different from being insulted for crossing a picket line. Nobody is making protest illegal -- there are alternative and legal ways. Two examples are "Bank Transfer Day" and "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day".
Sometimes very smart people can be mostly insightful, but very spectacularly wrong on some points.
Dijkstra turned into a figurative monk in his later years, dedicating himself to austerity and impractical principles. Kinda like Stallman is for "Software Freedom". There's some value in that, but the rest of us need to get work done, perfection being the enemy of the good.
Why is a DDOS illegal, how is different that a RL protest outside a shop/factory ?
You can't legally prevent other people from gaining access to the shop/factory with your protest, and that's why a denial of service attack is different.
I've never had a flashback. [..] Cigarettes had that "acid" feel for a couple days (smokers who have tripped will know what I mean), and weed would make me feel like I was tripping, sometimes a week or more later although that could have been my imagination.
Which could be considered a flashback. Somebody else posted this link in response to you, and it what it says seems appropriate:
"Studies of flashbacks are hard to evaluate because the term has been used so loosely and variably. On the broadest definition, it means the transitory recurrence of emotions and perceptions originally experienced while under the influence of a psychedelic drug. It can last seconds or hours; it can mimic any of the myriad aspects of a trip; and it can be blissful, interesting, annoying, or frightening. [..] Marihuana [sic] smoking is probably the most common single source of flashbacks."
Why can't he release a detailed list of every edit he made (allowing someone else with a nonlinear editing suite, lots of time on his hands, and fewer qualms about BitTorrent to piece it together)?
The article is actually a good overview of the resulting movie and major edits made. Granted, there's a lot of work if anybody wants to try to use it as a guide for a similar edit, but it's at least a starting point.