The fact that companies rarely have non-financial motivations may be interesting but it has nothing to do with the question I asked.
It is directly relevant in pointing out that their motivation for pursuing HTML5 in the browser as an RIA platform, which they are manifestly currently doing, is almost certainly an economic motivation, whether or not the exact nature of that motivation is apparent (and, of course, it is apparent in both cases: Apple doesn't want Microsoft's OS dominance combined with reliance on proprietary RIA platforms to result in Apple's offerings being marginalized because RIA platform vendors don't focus on Apple's desktop and mobile platforms, Google doesn't want content walled off in proprietary forms that its search engine and mashup tools can't get at: the entire Google business model relies on the accessibility of other's content on the internet to its various tools, which web standards enhance and proprietary platforms detract from.)
Since whatever motivation either has to push HTML5 in the browser as an RIA platform alternative also a motivation to see HTML5 actually get used by content providers, and since that is itself a motiation to see that authoring tools get built, they have such an economic motivation. Which is the answer to your question.
Only a million more projects to go....before it catches up to something like fortran.
Within the domain on which it is focussed (roughly, systems providing highly parallel communications infrastructure), Erlang is flourishing. Sure, that's not an area where there are as many individual projects as, say, scientific number crunching. And, sure, it hasn't been as long (or as early in the history of programming when there were so few competing options) as Fortran, either. So what?
For-profit, publicly-traded corporations like Google or Apple rarely have any other kinds of motivations. (Mozilla is, of course, a different story; but if they have a motivation to put money behind HTML5, they have a motivation to put money into getting it used, whether or not it is an economic motivation.)
Both Mozilla and Apple are already working on HTML5 and CSS3 support. I'm not sure about Opera, but I'd guess they're already working on it.
Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari already, in either the current general beta versions, have support for a variety of parts of HTML5 and CSS3, and even IE supports a little bit.
Is there any economic motivation for someone else to invest the money in creating a Flash-style editor to compete?
Sure. Anyone whose determined it is in their interest to support HTML5 + Javascript as an alternative to Flash has an interest in seeing that it gets used, so everyone that has been embracing HTML5 for browsers -- Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, just to name the browser publishers -- also has an interest in creating tooling to make sure that HTML5 doesn't just sit around unused in favor of Flash and Silverlight.
If my pwnd browser can talk to a "chooser" that has access to the entire filesystem, how is that any different than having a pwnd browser that has access to the entire filesystem.
If the "chooser" component itself isn't compromised, and requires the user to select the file to provide to the requesting applications, it makes a big difference for the browser to have access to the "chooser" (so it can send it a request that amounts to "have the user choose a file and give it to me") rather than direct read access to the file system (where it can hunt around and pick up whatever files it wants without the user knowing.)
In either case the pwnd browser can read and write whatever it wants, subject to filesystem permissions.
No, if the browser doesn't have access to the file system, it can't read and write anything subject to file system permissions, since it has no access to the file system. If it has access only to the chooser components, it can request things from the chooser, subject to the way the chooser works.
BZZZT. wrong. I have verizon DSL, and I think its terms are similar to most, and they ban servers, period.
This seems pretty common for telco and cable providers, but ISPs that aren't telcos or cable TV companies (and thus, depend on customers that aren't just picking the easiest choice that's shoved down their throat) tend, IME, to allow servers on even their most basic plans.
While it is an interesting idea, in the US at least it would run afoul of the TOS most people agreed to when they signed up for their broadband connection.
Most people have lame ISPs.
That's no reason to punish those who don't.
(Not that I really want a web server in my browser; its easy enough to get a cheap, low-power, always on system to run a web server if I want to host content.)
That and bandwidth constraints on the upload side of their connection.
Most people aren't going to be providing content that enough people will care about to tax the upload bandwidth on their connection.
As long as the market Opera was searching for is the Home user, I guess opening up another 10 attack vectors into a users desktop/laptop isn't necessarily a bad thing but this has all but eliminated Opera from ever being a viable enterprise browser candidate.
An optional feature that can presumably be completely disabled or not even installed in an enterprise installation disqualifies it as an enterprise browser candidate...why, exactly?
Since copyright is a government grant how can this be called stolen code?
All property rights -- whether in real property, tangible personal property, or intellectual or other intangible personal property -- are government grants, regardless of whether or not some governments (implicitly or explicitly) invoke quasi-religious ideas of "natural law" as the motivation for granting certain property rights while invoking more utilitarian reasons for other grants of property rights.
I wish that this could become a universal precept of software design, shaping everything from OS's to desktop apps -- Joe Armstrong: "Stopping a system to upgrade the code is an admission of failure."
Cory - If a student is going to be spending most of their working life repaying their college loans, they made a bad choice of college.
Certainly, if most of their income over their working life repays their college loans, they've made a bad choice. But being in the process of repaying them for most of your working life may be the result of good choices: college loans are often very low interest, so its often better to keep the longer repayment terms (and lower payments), and use the invest the extra money (or reduce other borrowing you might engage in) rather than paying off student loans as quickly as possible. And, of course, the more quickly you make enough to retire, the shorter the "working life" you are talking about in the first place.
After seeing the tech for myself, I don't see any reason why a reliable fanless mid-range system can't exist. All the tools already exist. After this discussion, now I'm seriously considering building one just to show that it's possible to cool a reasonably powerful machine entirely with convection currents and smart vent placement.
Be sure to report back; I'm sure (depending on exactly how you define "mid-range") there'd be no shortage of interest in such a project.
Ah, now we're getting somewhere! Could you give an example of a case where you suspect the rule gives the "wrong" result?
The public-employee-requesting-time-off-for-health-reasons example (if using the "public official" rule to determine the scope of "the State"): its clearly public officials acting within the course of their duties, and so would clearly seem to fall into the "transparency for the State" side of the rule, but I don't think people arguing for the rule are generally intending to argue that public employees would lose health privacy in this area. Alternatively, the voting example if one uses the "law-making process" rule to determine what is "the State" rather than the "public official" rule: again, its something that would fall within the zone of "transparency for the State", but I don't think all the people arguing for that would support the abolition of the secret ballot.
I want to make it clear that I think the maxim expresses something that is a valid factor in balancing privacy against transparency, I just don't think it alone works as a simple, straightforward rule for deciding concrete cases.
Now imagine everyone giving a dollar to those causes every time someone repeats the "let's solve all the problems on Earth before we start exploring space" mantra.
This would seem to be very bad for the substantial portion of the world's population living on $1/day or less, as the usage of the mantra on Slashdot alone would force them to donate several dozen times their total income.
They are not "rhetorical questions" in the sense of not expecting response; they are, however, "rhetorical" in that part of the purpose they serve is to illustrate a point.
Do any of them actually seem difficult to answer to you?
They are, for the most part, very easy to answer in terms of what I would prefer as policy.
Several are considerably less easy to answer in terms of what applying the maxim "privacy for individuals, transparency for the State" would mean in terms of the specific cases, and some of the ones that are easy to answer in those terms (particularly with the amplification offered that the latter means that "public officials" have no privacy in terms of what they do in the course of that role) would seem to fly in the face of what I would think the people suggesting the maximum would want in that specific case. Which is why I suspect that the maxim, while it may be useful starting point in finding the right balance of privacy vs. transparency, is nothing more than a starting point; it is not something that provides a simple and unambiguous answeres to real-world issues.
They are, in that sense, illustrative of the issues I think that have not been adequately considered by those proposing the maxim as the guideline, and as in itself a resolution of the apparent conflict between privacy and transparency, and they (among others) are questions I think anyone who would seriously advance the maxim as a rule and solution rather than a very rough and incomplete starting point need to be able both to answer and to show how the answers flow naturally from the rule.
By your logic, netbooks don't exist because the market that bought expensive ultralight laptops already existed.
No, that's not "by my logic". Its not even by any close analogy to the argument I used, since the argument wasn't of the form "since market X exists, product Y does not exist."
I have no idea what you are going on about.
The netbook market came out of nowhere, remember.
It is certainly possible to "remember" things that aren't true, but I try to avoid it.
Consumers didn't buy small inexpensive laptops because they didn't exist.
Prior to "netbooks", per se, a number of computing devices existed with features overlapping those of netbooks to one degree or another, most particularly UMPCs, subnotebooks, and a number of (mostly, IIRC, not portable, but often extremely compact) dedicated purpose email stations, etc. The netbook was a convergence of many trends in computing, it didn't emerge ex nihilo.
That's not really a "similarly", to the extent that its true, nor true, to the extent that its similar. Netbooks stripped features, compared to other laptops, to get light and cheap. You want more features at lower price. You can get "robust" (in the sense discussed upthread, i.e., fanless) inexpensive PCs now -- fanless netbooks and nettops exist, after all, at around $300. You want get a fanless PC that runs a top-of-the-line CPU and a top-of-the-line GPU, at full (or, a fortiori, overclocked) speeds in a standard-sized case without paying extra (probably for liquid cooling in place of the fan), but then, you aren't going to get a cheap, inexpensive laptop with equal processing power to a conventional desktop, either.
It used to be that small laptops were expensive niche products too, but these days you can pick up an Aspire One pretty much anywhere for 300 bucks. The problem isn't the consumers, it's the producers, who have an incentive to build a product that'll self-destruct every couple years.
Except, of course, that producers do make fanless products, and they are well received where low-maintenance and long-life are critical to consumers. Or where quiet operation is critical to consumers.
They aren't the main thing that people buy as desktop/tower PCs, because for that use, the maintenance burden or turnover is something that those who are aware of are willing to put up with, and those who aren't, well, aren't aware.
Common air filters require regular (about annual) maintenance.
Sure, but an external filter would require less intrusive maintenance than having unfiltered fans blowing around inside a case, particularly one with all kinds of open connectors.
No other piece of digital(or analogue, for that matter) electronics I own requires regular maintenance of this sort.
Fan free electronics usually have lower power consumption for the size of the case they are in compared to common desktop computers, which, assuming air cooling, requires less speed of air moving over them (and, particularly, tend to lack the sharp hotspots of modern higher-end CPU and GPUs.)
Since it's possible to create PCs that won't burn themselves out with fan lint within an arbitrary time period, I consider it a design error that we continue to refuse to do so.
PCs without fans are built. They tend to be either less powerful or more expensive, and aren't in the sweet spot that purchasers look for most, and tend therefore to be niche or special purpose products.
So no person can mention personally identifiable information about another person to any third person without express consent of the identified person? So a victim of crime who knows their attacker can't give the name to the police without the attacker's consent?
I would submit that many people who would state "privacy for individuals" as an important goal would see health matters as a particularly important part of that.
But, certainly, that particular one of the many issues raised by the "privacy for individuals, transparency for government" idea becomes easier if you just simply decide that, even for individuals, health privacy isn't important.
Slashdot Mirror
It is directly relevant in pointing out that their motivation for pursuing HTML5 in the browser as an RIA platform, which they are manifestly currently doing, is almost certainly an economic motivation, whether or not the exact nature of that motivation is apparent (and, of course, it is apparent in both cases: Apple doesn't want Microsoft's OS dominance combined with reliance on proprietary RIA platforms to result in Apple's offerings being marginalized because RIA platform vendors don't focus on Apple's desktop and mobile platforms, Google doesn't want content walled off in proprietary forms that its search engine and mashup tools can't get at: the entire Google business model relies on the accessibility of other's content on the internet to its various tools, which web standards enhance and proprietary platforms detract from.)
Since whatever motivation either has to push HTML5 in the browser as an RIA platform alternative also a motivation to see HTML5 actually get used by content providers, and since that is itself a motiation to see that authoring tools get built, they have such an economic motivation. Which is the answer to your question.
Within the domain on which it is focussed (roughly, systems providing highly parallel communications infrastructure), Erlang is flourishing. Sure, that's not an area where there are as many individual projects as, say, scientific number crunching. And, sure, it hasn't been as long (or as early in the history of programming when there were so few competing options) as Fortran, either. So what?
For-profit, publicly-traded corporations like Google or Apple rarely have any other kinds of motivations. (Mozilla is, of course, a different story; but if they have a motivation to put money behind HTML5, they have a motivation to put money into getting it used, whether or not it is an economic motivation.)
Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari already, in either the current general beta versions, have support for a variety of parts of HTML5 and CSS3, and even IE supports a little bit.
Sure. Anyone whose determined it is in their interest to support HTML5 + Javascript as an alternative to Flash has an interest in seeing that it gets used, so everyone that has been embracing HTML5 for browsers -- Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, just to name the browser publishers -- also has an interest in creating tooling to make sure that HTML5 doesn't just sit around unused in favor of Flash and Silverlight.
Facebook chat, the rewrite of Delicious (formerly deli.cio.us), CouchDB, ejabberd, RabbitMQ, etc., etc., etc.
If the "chooser" component itself isn't compromised, and requires the user to select the file to provide to the requesting applications, it makes a big difference for the browser to have access to the "chooser" (so it can send it a request that amounts to "have the user choose a file and give it to me") rather than direct read access to the file system (where it can hunt around and pick up whatever files it wants without the user knowing.)
No, if the browser doesn't have access to the file system, it can't read and write anything subject to file system permissions, since it has no access to the file system. If it has access only to the chooser components, it can request things from the chooser, subject to the way the chooser works.
This seems pretty common for telco and cable providers, but ISPs that aren't telcos or cable TV companies (and thus, depend on customers that aren't just picking the easiest choice that's shoved down their throat) tend, IME, to allow servers on even their most basic plans.
Most people have lame ISPs.
That's no reason to punish those who don't.
(Not that I really want a web server in my browser; its easy enough to get a cheap, low-power, always on system to run a web server if I want to host content.)
Most people aren't going to be providing content that enough people will care about to tax the upload bandwidth on their connection.
An optional feature that can presumably be completely disabled or not even installed in an enterprise installation disqualifies it as an enterprise browser candidate...why, exactly?
All property rights -- whether in real property, tangible personal property, or intellectual or other intangible personal property -- are government grants, regardless of whether or not some governments (implicitly or explicitly) invoke quasi-religious ideas of "natural law" as the motivation for granting certain property rights while invoking more utilitarian reasons for other grants of property rights.
I wish that this could become a universal precept of software design, shaping everything from OS's to desktop apps -- Joe Armstrong: "Stopping a system to upgrade the code is an admission of failure."
They do both. Otherwise, you'd be creating a vacuum inside the case, not providing circulation for cooling.
You put the filter where the air comes into the case.
Certainly, if most of their income over their working life repays their college loans, they've made a bad choice. But being in the process of repaying them for most of your working life may be the result of good choices: college loans are often very low interest, so its often better to keep the longer repayment terms (and lower payments), and use the invest the extra money (or reduce other borrowing you might engage in) rather than paying off student loans as quickly as possible. And, of course, the more quickly you make enough to retire, the shorter the "working life" you are talking about in the first place.
Be sure to report back; I'm sure (depending on exactly how you define "mid-range") there'd be no shortage of interest in such a project.
The public-employee-requesting-time-off-for-health-reasons example (if using the "public official" rule to determine the scope of "the State"): its clearly public officials acting within the course of their duties, and so would clearly seem to fall into the "transparency for the State" side of the rule, but I don't think people arguing for the rule are generally intending to argue that public employees would lose health privacy in this area. Alternatively, the voting example if one uses the "law-making process" rule to determine what is "the State" rather than the "public official" rule: again, its something that would fall within the zone of "transparency for the State", but I don't think all the people arguing for that would support the abolition of the secret ballot.
I want to make it clear that I think the maxim expresses something that is a valid factor in balancing privacy against transparency, I just don't think it alone works as a simple, straightforward rule for deciding concrete cases.
This would seem to be very bad for the substantial portion of the world's population living on $1/day or less, as the usage of the mantra on Slashdot alone would force them to donate several dozen times their total income.
The term you are looking for, then, would be "express permission" not "expressed permission".
They are not "rhetorical questions" in the sense of not expecting response; they are, however, "rhetorical" in that part of the purpose they serve is to illustrate a point.
They are, for the most part, very easy to answer in terms of what I would prefer as policy.
Several are considerably less easy to answer in terms of what applying the maxim "privacy for individuals, transparency for the State" would mean in terms of the specific cases, and some of the ones that are easy to answer in those terms (particularly with the amplification offered that the latter means that "public officials" have no privacy in terms of what they do in the course of that role) would seem to fly in the face of what I would think the people suggesting the maximum would want in that specific case. Which is why I suspect that the maxim, while it may be useful starting point in finding the right balance of privacy vs. transparency, is nothing more than a starting point; it is not something that provides a simple and unambiguous answeres to real-world issues.
They are, in that sense, illustrative of the issues I think that have not been adequately considered by those proposing the maxim as the guideline, and as in itself a resolution of the apparent conflict between privacy and transparency, and they (among others) are questions I think anyone who would seriously advance the maxim as a rule and solution rather than a very rough and incomplete starting point need to be able both to answer and to show how the answers flow naturally from the rule.
No, that's not "by my logic". Its not even by any close analogy to the argument I used, since the argument wasn't of the form "since market X exists, product Y does not exist."
I have no idea what you are going on about.
It is certainly possible to "remember" things that aren't true, but I try to avoid it.
Prior to "netbooks", per se, a number of computing devices existed with features overlapping those of netbooks to one degree or another, most particularly UMPCs, subnotebooks, and a number of (mostly, IIRC, not portable, but often extremely compact) dedicated purpose email stations, etc. The netbook was a convergence of many trends in computing, it didn't emerge ex nihilo.
That's not really a "similarly", to the extent that its true, nor true, to the extent that its similar. Netbooks stripped features, compared to other laptops, to get light and cheap. You want more features at lower price. You can get "robust" (in the sense discussed upthread, i.e., fanless) inexpensive PCs now -- fanless netbooks and nettops exist, after all, at around $300. You want get a fanless PC that runs a top-of-the-line CPU and a top-of-the-line GPU, at full (or, a fortiori, overclocked) speeds in a standard-sized case without paying extra (probably for liquid cooling in place of the fan), but then, you aren't going to get a cheap, inexpensive laptop with equal processing power to a conventional desktop, either.
Except, of course, that producers do make fanless products, and they are well received where low-maintenance and long-life are critical to consumers. Or where quiet operation is critical to consumers.
They aren't the main thing that people buy as desktop/tower PCs, because for that use, the maintenance burden or turnover is something that those who are aware of are willing to put up with, and those who aren't, well, aren't aware.
So, yeah, its the consumers.
Sure, but an external filter would require less intrusive maintenance than having unfiltered fans blowing around inside a case, particularly one with all kinds of open connectors.
Fan free electronics usually have lower power consumption for the size of the case they are in compared to common desktop computers, which, assuming air cooling, requires less speed of air moving over them (and, particularly, tend to lack the sharp hotspots of modern higher-end CPU and GPUs.)
PCs without fans are built. They tend to be either less powerful or more expensive, and aren't in the sweet spot that purchasers look for most, and tend therefore to be niche or special purpose products.
So no person can mention personally identifiable information about another person to any third person without express consent of the identified person? So a victim of crime who knows their attacker can't give the name to the police without the attacker's consent?
I would submit that many people who would state "privacy for individuals" as an important goal would see health matters as a particularly important part of that.
But, certainly, that particular one of the many issues raised by the "privacy for individuals, transparency for government" idea becomes easier if you just simply decide that, even for individuals, health privacy isn't important.
What about between people that are not companies?