Obviously this is an injustice in its own right. Regardless of what "the real world" is like, this is not how it is supposed to be.
But what's especially troubling is that it can be used as precedent to shut down corporate/government whistleblowers. If an institution's rules apply even when you're outside of that institution, your employer owns you.
This kind of stuff is why this analogy is completely useless.
First there's the fact that you're comparing an email program and a music program to services that people rely on to stay alive in civilized contexts. It's not an appropriate comparison because they're not even analogues for the purpose of discussion. I mean, if you wanted to make an apt but still trivializing comparison, it'd be:
Memory protection, kernel, scheduler: emergency and waste services Power management : power utilities Standard libraries : water utilities
Like I said, still trivializing. But at least it makes some kind of sense. With that in mind, it might make some sense for Apple to say "you are reinventing the wheel", but it certainly wouldn't make sense for them to prevent you from distributing it.
Second, it vastly misunderstands the nature of, and exaggerates the importance of, the concepts and practices of regulation and deregulation of business. It also creates a false dichotomy (like, the options for solving public needs for emergency services are limited to either state ownership/manipulation or corporate ownership). And uses this as the basis for what would be a salient point about anticompetitive business practices and their merits.
This reminds me of why I hate both capitalism and socialism as economic philosophies. There are only two ways a modern society can organize themselves: subservient to the power of a state or subservient to the power of corporations. Just be sure that you're subservient to something!
Moreover, this is being used as apologetics for Apple shilling its platform with false promises of a chance for developers. It would be one thing if the platform were advertised as an environment regulated by the undisclosed whims of Apple; it's another thing when it's advertised as quite something else.
Capitalist, imperialist, statist. There are differences between the Democrats and Republicans, so far as that goes, but the differences are not "left" and "right". They're both corporate parties, they're both in favor of expansion of both the scope and power of the government, they're both in favor of increased police power, they're both in favor of increased US power. They both take donations from, and serve, the oil and power industries, the pharmaceutical industry, huge corporate agricultural interests, pretty much every industry with money and influence to throw around.
They both use the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the FBI to assassinate and destabilize political opponents both in the US and abroad. They both send the military on imperial adventures. They both persecute religious minorities. They're both two faced about immigration law, pandering to the largely racist "reformists" but doing nothing to threaten the cheap labor that lax enforcement provides.
If you don't call all of that right wing, fine. I'm not too hung up on terminology. Call it what you want, but they serve power, and in that they're more alike than different. Their differences largely center around what strategies they think are most effective in these pursuits. But they both serve power.
And outfits like Fox seem to favor the Republicans (although I'll say that I think they'll show their true colors under a Democratic administration, and they'll pander to the Dems quite a lot more than they have before). And outfits like MSNBC... well, they favor whoever's in charge, and that's just blatantly obvious. They like a good controversy--that's good tv!--but when it comes down to it, they serve the White House. And well, Kos? They serve the Democrats.
So, "right wing" terminology aside... as far as I'm concerned, all three are very close politically. And arguing about which of them is the most... whatever... strikes me as a distraction, and one that serves all of them well.
"Often they are placed inside the body, so they have to be downloaded before the browser can render the site! So speedier Javascript engines are *not* goint to fix it."
That's also true if they're linked with script src. All of the "modern" browsers freeze rendering until the script is loaded and executes. This is, generally, meant to avoid a race condition.
With rare exception (like Intel), every company that provides any product offers bulk discounts, effectively subsidizing higher volume orders with higher margin orders. Why would pay-per-usage Internet be any different? Either way, you'd have low bandwidth users paying for high bandwidth users.
And Flash isn't inherently more bloated than HTML for the same data as far as bandwidth is concerned. In fact, because of the hardheadedness of the IE team, one can save a lot of bandwidth on really simple things (vector graphics don't need to be rasterized, simple things like gradients and shadows and rounded corners can be done with built-in tools) using Flash. Moreover, Flash provides the same experience on every browser, requiring much less conditional code, and therefore less bloat. Note, I am not a Flash advocate (and rarely develop with it) but we should be careful to place the blame where it belongs, and as far as bandwidth goes, Flash isn't where it belongs.
Presumably not everything the browser does goes into each process (a lot would go into the parent process hosting the window), and presumably many libraries are shared, as the OS allows.
"If you don't think the US is making an effort then I find it hard to believe that you will think that much of anyone is making an effort."
I don't. But you're welcome to show me I'm wrong.
"I'm not totally convinced that the global warming is even totally a man made issue."
Well, we could have a religious debate (which is what it amounts to; my beliefs versus yours), but I think it's basic common sense that you can't radically alter what's in the air, the water, the land and expect it to have no impact.
"I don't think that we can just reverse it by cutting back on CO2 emissions by 5% of 1990's levels. Is that really the margin of error for us? 5% was the tipping point?"
What? I don't even know what you're talking about. Industrialism didn't begin in the 90s. And climate change isn't on a linear timeline. We're seeing the effects of over a century of planetary abuse just start to rear their heads.
"And remember, this was done during an environmentalist democrat run Senate."
LOL. The Democrats are about as environmentalist as... well to be perfectly blunt, as the oil and other industrial interests that manage them.
"The fact of the matter that all this doomsday shit has got to go."
Instead of writing off what I said, tell me what part of what I said is wrong.
"Yes, the United States was a major polluter, the worst at one point. But the air is cleaner today in America than what it was 50 years ago. Things ARE being done."
This is a little bit disingenuous though. So much of the pollution comes from manufacturing, and manufacturing is way down in the US. But consumption isn't down. How can this be? Well, it would seem this is classic "externalization": the US has exported its pollution along with its "jobs". In other words, how much of Chinese pollution is actually US pollution? Actions don't stop at the end of your fingertips: if you buy Chinese goods, you are helping to pollute in China.
"all of this crap that people spew about how the United States has such horrible air and the right wingers don't care and the sky is falling"
It's been a long time since I've been called Chicken Little, it's kind of refreshing! Well, I didn't exactly say any of those things. I said that US efforts to be environmentally responsible are, at best, completely ineffectual and at worst completely cynical lies.
"We need to always be mindful, but enough with all the alarmist bullshit already."
I don't know if you noticed but... the ice at the north pole is melting at a rate which can only be described as alarming; rates of illness due to quality of environment are skyrocketing at rates which can only be described as alarming. Alarm is a perfectly rational and natural reaction to danger.
"And if China doesn't want to play by the rules and its such a big deal, then put your money where your mouth is, buy from companies that operate in countries that you agree with."
"Its not that we don't realize it, its just that it costs a lot of money and political will to stop it and fix it."
Or we could just call everything "green" and buy more toxic lightbulbs and organic monoculture and cars that use more fuel to produce but less to operate and "sustainable" mansions and grow corn anywhere we can get seeds in the ground and pump coal exhaust and nuclear waste into the ground.
"You can't blame all of us Americans for that."
What can we blame Americans for? I'm asking, as an American. Because it's to the point that nothing's our fault, whether we do it or just don't take the responsibility to stop it. Innocentamericans really is one word isn't it? Like, I'm not trying to be combative, but I don't understand how no one's responsible for what Americans do, and Americans seem determined to keep their privilege and completely absurd lifestyle as if it's a god-given right.
"At least we recognize the problem and many of us are trying to do something about it."
Exactly what are we doing? I'd be happy to give out the points for effort if there's something actually happening.
"You also have to stipulate to the fact that when the US was in its major industrialization buildup, pollution wasn't recognized as a problem."
Sure it was. Do you think all of the occupational and environmental illnesses were just regarded as magic voodoo? Do you think the most polluted, congested places were occupied by the most poor people by sheer coincidence?
"China on the other hand seems to use developed nations as an excuse to pollute, even though it is globally irresponsible to do so, and the technology exists not to."
So what's our excuse? Hell, we don't even do all that manufacturing stuff that has the worst impacts anymore. We just glut and glut and glut.
"Its not our scientists fault that we pollute"
No, of course not. Science has nothing to do with the internal combustion engine and manufacturing.
Okay. There are, to a small extent, differences in language implementation. A very small extent. The real clusterfuck is in the DOM, not in the language. On that I think we agree.
As far as the table thing, I think all the "modern" (or Yahoo!'s "grade A" list) browsers assume a thead and tbody for th and td elements outside a thead/tbody respectively, and populate the DOM tree that way.
Um, it is 3.1. Neither had been accepted except as presumed version numbers until that point. Harmony isn't the original 3.1 proposal, but it is what is anticipated to be the 3.1 standard when complete.
"I just assumed they'd add function and regexp to the JSON (so it wouldn't be exactly JSON; however, RegExp in JSON would be nice.)"
I think it'd be good for a meta-JSON standard like JSON Schema, but as the JS object literal, of which JSON is a subset. I'd like to see JSON remain a data-only format. Not that I have any sway over it, but that's my preference.
"No, implementations would not have to support Console, just be required to ignore the use of it. Detailed specifics of debug output do not need to be specified; just the JS interface to Console."
I won't object to that. Especially because JS doesn't, to my knowledge, include an output function in the core language.
"JS is not a compiled language. Without seriously complex client side optimization it will SLOW DOWN. We don't want the kind of overhead that makes javac so darn fast.. Not to mention code bulk will increase as well. There are reasonable methods to get OOP like abilities in JS now (and wonderful scoping abilities.)"
I think this last bit is why both ECMA factions are confident that classes are okay. Moreover, it's been demonstrated that one can coerce Javascript into having class-style inheritance and implementation. I don't think this has much if any overhead in real world use. If the standard implements classes as sugar, as they propose, I can't see the harm. If you don't want it, don't use it.:)
"Well, I've run into fun times with violations and collisions with property names over the years. Props like 'constructor' being accessed; which is an Object property. Creating properties is not much use if you can't access them consistently. I escaped stuff, I admit I've not followed the browser issues on this matter for years."
If you can't access it as obj.property, you can access it as obj['property']. I just ran a test of an object literal with a property named with each of the Javascript reserved words, then ran this on it:
for(var i in test) {
alert('test.'+i+': '+test[i]); }
(Just to stay sane, I replaced window.alert with console.log in Safari and Firefox.)
Tested in the following browsers: Safari 3.1.1; Firefox 1, 1.5, 2 and 3; IE 6, 7 and 8b; Opera 9.5. None of them had trouble with it.
"How about assignment actually replaces the built-in properties on Object?"
Doesn't it? The following behaves exactly as I'd expect:
"Yeah, 'cause you clearly are incapable of stepping back from the keyboard yourself."
I'm not the one posting to somewhere that allows anyone and everyone to reply then demanding someone stop replying. If you don't want my reply, stop inviting it. You drop it, I'll drop it.
"I expressed no such agreement"
You said: "That's generally true of standards committees."
Shrug.
"Do you want to have the last word now?"
I don't care. If you bore me enough I'll lose interest, but if I'm interested I'll respond.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously this is an injustice in its own right. Regardless of what "the real world" is like, this is not how it is supposed to be.
But what's especially troubling is that it can be used as precedent to shut down corporate/government whistleblowers. If an institution's rules apply even when you're outside of that institution, your employer owns you.
This kind of stuff is why this analogy is completely useless.
First there's the fact that you're comparing an email program and a music program to services that people rely on to stay alive in civilized contexts. It's not an appropriate comparison because they're not even analogues for the purpose of discussion. I mean, if you wanted to make an apt but still trivializing comparison, it'd be:
Memory protection, kernel, scheduler: emergency and waste services
Power management : power utilities
Standard libraries : water utilities
Like I said, still trivializing. But at least it makes some kind of sense. With that in mind, it might make some sense for Apple to say "you are reinventing the wheel", but it certainly wouldn't make sense for them to prevent you from distributing it.
Second, it vastly misunderstands the nature of, and exaggerates the importance of, the concepts and practices of regulation and deregulation of business. It also creates a false dichotomy (like, the options for solving public needs for emergency services are limited to either state ownership/manipulation or corporate ownership). And uses this as the basis for what would be a salient point about anticompetitive business practices and their merits.
This reminds me of why I hate both capitalism and socialism as economic philosophies. There are only two ways a modern society can organize themselves: subservient to the power of a state or subservient to the power of corporations. Just be sure that you're subservient to something!
Moreover, this is being used as apologetics for Apple shilling its platform with false promises of a chance for developers. It would be one thing if the platform were advertised as an environment regulated by the undisclosed whims of Apple; it's another thing when it's advertised as quite something else.
Mod parent up for its rare insight into politics.
Capitalist, imperialist, statist. There are differences between the Democrats and Republicans, so far as that goes, but the differences are not "left" and "right". They're both corporate parties, they're both in favor of expansion of both the scope and power of the government, they're both in favor of increased police power, they're both in favor of increased US power. They both take donations from, and serve, the oil and power industries, the pharmaceutical industry, huge corporate agricultural interests, pretty much every industry with money and influence to throw around.
They both use the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the FBI to assassinate and destabilize political opponents both in the US and abroad. They both send the military on imperial adventures. They both persecute religious minorities. They're both two faced about immigration law, pandering to the largely racist "reformists" but doing nothing to threaten the cheap labor that lax enforcement provides.
If you don't call all of that right wing, fine. I'm not too hung up on terminology. Call it what you want, but they serve power, and in that they're more alike than different. Their differences largely center around what strategies they think are most effective in these pursuits. But they both serve power.
And outfits like Fox seem to favor the Republicans (although I'll say that I think they'll show their true colors under a Democratic administration, and they'll pander to the Dems quite a lot more than they have before). And outfits like MSNBC... well, they favor whoever's in charge, and that's just blatantly obvious. They like a good controversy--that's good tv!--but when it comes down to it, they serve the White House. And well, Kos? They serve the Democrats.
So, "right wing" terminology aside... as far as I'm concerned, all three are very close politically. And arguing about which of them is the most... whatever... strikes me as a distraction, and one that serves all of them well.
Fox News, MSNBC, Kos.
I'm talking about how boring it is to compare the relative bias or display thereof from a bunch of right wing news sources.
By making it longer I think they're trying to make it more like a short episode, less like an ad.
Women all want the same thing, good point.
The video is a pretty good showcase of his comedic "talents". Six of one...
So a crypto-right-wing news corporation strikes you as more biased than an openly right-wing news corporation. Shrug.
Oh.
"Often they are placed inside the body, so they have to be downloaded before the browser can render the site! So speedier Javascript engines are *not* goint to fix it."
That's also true if they're linked with script src. All of the "modern" browsers freeze rendering until the script is loaded and executes. This is, generally, meant to avoid a race condition.
Uh. OpenDNS isn't running your own DNS. You just use their DNS servers instead of your ISP's.
With rare exception (like Intel), every company that provides any product offers bulk discounts, effectively subsidizing higher volume orders with higher margin orders. Why would pay-per-usage Internet be any different? Either way, you'd have low bandwidth users paying for high bandwidth users.
And Flash isn't inherently more bloated than HTML for the same data as far as bandwidth is concerned. In fact, because of the hardheadedness of the IE team, one can save a lot of bandwidth on really simple things (vector graphics don't need to be rasterized, simple things like gradients and shadows and rounded corners can be done with built-in tools) using Flash. Moreover, Flash provides the same experience on every browser, requiring much less conditional code, and therefore less bloat. Note, I am not a Flash advocate (and rarely develop with it) but we should be careful to place the blame where it belongs, and as far as bandwidth goes, Flash isn't where it belongs.
Yeah the moderation system sucks. Why is there no "banal" option?
Presumably not everything the browser does goes into each process (a lot would go into the parent process hosting the window), and presumably many libraries are shared, as the OS allows.
Cookies taste good at any point in the baking process from before-baking to almost-burnt.
"If you don't think the US is making an effort then I find it hard to believe that you will think that much of anyone is making an effort."
I don't. But you're welcome to show me I'm wrong.
"I'm not totally convinced that the global warming is even totally a man made issue."
Well, we could have a religious debate (which is what it amounts to; my beliefs versus yours), but I think it's basic common sense that you can't radically alter what's in the air, the water, the land and expect it to have no impact.
"I don't think that we can just reverse it by cutting back on CO2 emissions by 5% of 1990's levels. Is that really the margin of error for us? 5% was the tipping point?"
What? I don't even know what you're talking about. Industrialism didn't begin in the 90s. And climate change isn't on a linear timeline. We're seeing the effects of over a century of planetary abuse just start to rear their heads.
"And remember, this was done during an environmentalist democrat run Senate."
LOL. The Democrats are about as environmentalist as... well to be perfectly blunt, as the oil and other industrial interests that manage them.
"The fact of the matter that all this doomsday shit has got to go."
Instead of writing off what I said, tell me what part of what I said is wrong.
"Yes, the United States was a major polluter, the worst at one point. But the air is cleaner today in America than what it was 50 years ago. Things ARE being done."
This is a little bit disingenuous though. So much of the pollution comes from manufacturing, and manufacturing is way down in the US. But consumption isn't down. How can this be? Well, it would seem this is classic "externalization": the US has exported its pollution along with its "jobs". In other words, how much of Chinese pollution is actually US pollution? Actions don't stop at the end of your fingertips: if you buy Chinese goods, you are helping to pollute in China.
"all of this crap that people spew about how the United States has such horrible air and the right wingers don't care and the sky is falling"
It's been a long time since I've been called Chicken Little, it's kind of refreshing! Well, I didn't exactly say any of those things. I said that US efforts to be environmentally responsible are, at best, completely ineffectual and at worst completely cynical lies.
"We need to always be mindful, but enough with all the alarmist bullshit already."
I don't know if you noticed but... the ice at the north pole is melting at a rate which can only be described as alarming; rates of illness due to quality of environment are skyrocketing at rates which can only be described as alarming. Alarm is a perfectly rational and natural reaction to danger.
"And if China doesn't want to play by the rules and its such a big deal, then put your money where your mouth is, buy from companies that operate in countries that you agree with."
Which countries and companies do you suggest?
"Its not that we don't realize it, its just that it costs a lot of money and political will to stop it and fix it."
Or we could just call everything "green" and buy more toxic lightbulbs and organic monoculture and cars that use more fuel to produce but less to operate and "sustainable" mansions and grow corn anywhere we can get seeds in the ground and pump coal exhaust and nuclear waste into the ground.
"You can't blame all of us Americans for that."
What can we blame Americans for? I'm asking, as an American. Because it's to the point that nothing's our fault, whether we do it or just don't take the responsibility to stop it. Innocentamericans really is one word isn't it? Like, I'm not trying to be combative, but I don't understand how no one's responsible for what Americans do, and Americans seem determined to keep their privilege and completely absurd lifestyle as if it's a god-given right.
"At least we recognize the problem and many of us are trying to do something about it."
Exactly what are we doing? I'd be happy to give out the points for effort if there's something actually happening.
"You also have to stipulate to the fact that when the US was in its major industrialization buildup, pollution wasn't recognized as a problem."
Sure it was. Do you think all of the occupational and environmental illnesses were just regarded as magic voodoo? Do you think the most polluted, congested places were occupied by the most poor people by sheer coincidence?
"China on the other hand seems to use developed nations as an excuse to pollute, even though it is globally irresponsible to do so, and the technology exists not to."
So what's our excuse? Hell, we don't even do all that manufacturing stuff that has the worst impacts anymore. We just glut and glut and glut.
"Its not our scientists fault that we pollute"
No, of course not. Science has nothing to do with the internal combustion engine and manufacturing.
Okay. There are, to a small extent, differences in language implementation. A very small extent. The real clusterfuck is in the DOM, not in the language. On that I think we agree.
As far as the table thing, I think all the "modern" (or Yahoo!'s "grade A" list) browsers assume a thead and tbody for th and td elements outside a thead/tbody respectively, and populate the DOM tree that way.
Um, it is 3.1. Neither had been accepted except as presumed version numbers until that point. Harmony isn't the original 3.1 proposal, but it is what is anticipated to be the 3.1 standard when complete.
"I just assumed they'd add function and regexp to the JSON (so it wouldn't be exactly JSON; however, RegExp in JSON would be nice.)"
I think it'd be good for a meta-JSON standard like JSON Schema, but as the JS object literal, of which JSON is a subset. I'd like to see JSON remain a data-only format. Not that I have any sway over it, but that's my preference.
"No, implementations would not have to support Console, just be required to ignore the use of it. Detailed specifics of debug output do not need to be specified; just the JS interface to Console."
I won't object to that. Especially because JS doesn't, to my knowledge, include an output function in the core language.
"JS is not a compiled language. Without seriously complex client side optimization it will SLOW DOWN. We don't want the kind of overhead that makes javac so darn fast.. Not to mention code bulk will increase as well. There are reasonable methods to get OOP like abilities in JS now (and wonderful scoping abilities.)"
I think this last bit is why both ECMA factions are confident that classes are okay. Moreover, it's been demonstrated that one can coerce Javascript into having class-style inheritance and implementation. I don't think this has much if any overhead in real world use. If the standard implements classes as sugar, as they propose, I can't see the harm. If you don't want it, don't use it. :)
"Well, I've run into fun times with violations and collisions with property names over the years. Props like 'constructor' being accessed; which is an Object property. Creating properties is not much use if you can't access them consistently. I escaped stuff, I admit I've not followed the browser issues on this matter for years."
If you can't access it as obj.property, you can access it as obj['property']. I just ran a test of an object literal with a property named with each of the Javascript reserved words, then ran this on it:
for(var i in test) {
alert('test.'+i+': '+test[i]);
}
(Just to stay sane, I replaced window.alert with console.log in Safari and Firefox.)
Tested in the following browsers: Safari 3.1.1; Firefox 1, 1.5, 2 and 3; IE 6, 7 and 8b; Opera 9.5. None of them had trouble with it.
"How about assignment actually replaces the built-in properties on Object?"
Doesn't it? The following behaves exactly as I'd expect:
alert({ 'foo': 'bar' }.toString());
Object.prototype.toString = function() {
return 'blah';
};
alert({ 'zig': 'zag' }.toString());
alert({ toString: function() { return 'asdf'; } }.toString());
Or am I misunderstanding what you want to do?
"Yeah, 'cause you clearly are incapable of stepping back from the keyboard yourself."
I'm not the one posting to somewhere that allows anyone and everyone to reply then demanding someone stop replying. If you don't want my reply, stop inviting it. You drop it, I'll drop it.
"I expressed no such agreement"
You said: "That's generally true of standards committees."
Shrug.
"Do you want to have the last word now?"
I don't care. If you bore me enough I'll lose interest, but if I'm interested I'll respond.
Slashdot ate some of my linebreaks. Slashdot is hungry hungry hippos.