Somehow, however, UCS received an "Ideological Spectrum Rating" of "1" (Radical Left) from the Capital Research Center.
And I suppose you are going to tell me that the Scaife-funded "Capital Research Center" is a neutral, objective, unbiased commenter on political ideology.
even if they printed super fake proof IDs with a little dancing hologram Bush in them and they were perfect, it still wouldn't stop any sort of anything they're trying to stop by using them.
Your assuming that what they are actually trying to do is what they see they are trying to do. Now, that could be the case, but if its that obvious that they could never do what they say they are trying to do even if the cards were perfect, you should at least consider that they might be being dishonest about the goal.
Where does the federal government claim to derive the power to mandate federal IDs?
Congress doesn't have to say what power they are using when they pass a law (it would be interesting if they had to cite their Constitutional authority in the act, and any defense of the Constitutionality of the law when challenged was limited to the cited authority, but that's not the system we have.)
RealID, since, IIRC, its enforcement is through withholding highway funding, would probably be argued to be an application of the Spending Power, though I suppose a creative defender could argue it was an application of Congress' power to organize the militia, what with the militia being universal and all, and being able to identify its members being a critical component of organizing it.
Are they using the interstate commerce clause yet again? There's one part of the Constitution that has been seriously misused time and time again and is in dire need of fixing.
I've yet to see anyone making this argument (which is fairly common) actually present a proposed fix, and I think that its rather critical to the argument that something "needs fixing" to establish that there is a viable fix that would repair the supposed problem in the status quo without creating a bigger problem.
The point is that I rather like PHP and being able to quickly produce working code. PHP has the same advantage Java has: A large standard library that allow it to do everything from string manipulation to SQL to PDF generation.
But, again, one of your main complaints is the inconsistency in the standard library. So is it really better to fork and remake PHP when compared to, say, just taking Python, which has a similar kitchen-sink approach, perhaps misses some features that the PHP standard library has in its standard distribution, but has readily available, open-source modules covering very similar scope (perhaps wider, even) than are available for PHP? I mean, is redesigning PHP really a better approach then (for example) simply rolling available free Python modules into a bigger distribution? Is PHP, at its core, a better scripting language than Python (or insert another widely-supported scripting language, if you prefer)?
Leaving aside whether the UCS practices “politicized science”, or instead merely reacts to others’ politicization of science, they certainly didn't invent politicized science, having been founded in 1969, which certainly is later than birth of the scientific pretense of Marxism-Leninism as practiced by the Soviet state, which itself was hardly, itself, the birth of the politicization of science.
Heck, the cloak of modern empirical science was probably grabbed by political factions for their own ends without regard to scientific merits about a day after the first politician noticed that the whole idea of empiricism had started to catch on and have some influence. Politics are like that: any thing, religion, science, etc., that has utility for selling ideas it is associated with will be used to sell them.
No, good public policy was never the norm, though lack of scientific knowledge hasn't been the only major reason (indeed, isn't even #1, which is "lack of interest in the public good among the governing elite".) But its certainly a limiting factor, nonetheless.
You don't need a recent scientific study from a top-tier university for knowing a _lot_ of things.
That's true. Unfortunately, almost any area of public policy requires knowing lots of things, some of which, for almost any policy question imaginable, are of the type that are non-obvious and for which systematic study is necessary to get right other than by chance.
some things your parents taught you; and some things humans have learned over centuries.
And much of that received, traditional knowledge may be generally correct, but have rather severe limitations that don't become obvious until you try to apply it outside of the context in which that knowledge was generated. You can do that either by systematic study before you implement policy, or by implementing disastrous policy.
Of course, much of that received, traditional "knowledge" is just plain factually incorrect, too.
Or we could just watch the Futurama episodes in which Zap Branigan, et al., appear and pretend they constitute the new Star Trek animated series, and it would still probably be better...
If there are bugs in CMS's (or whatever) written in PHP, then those (professional) programmers made errors. You really don't... go blaming your tools. You chose them.
That's often said, but its misleading and somewhat of a false dichotomy.
Sometimes the mistake you made was choosing the wrong tool, and its perfectly valid to point to the defects of the tool relative to the use in explaining why that is so, even if (of course) all mistakes belong to some human at some point in time, not to a tool.
If someone wrecks my computer because they tried to open the case with a sledgehammer rather than a screwdriver, I think its right to point to the choice of tool as a central part of their error. That's not "blaming the tool", that's just identifying the problem. Likewise, if people use PHP for a purpose for which that language is ill-suited because of its set of features and bugs, and consequently produce insecure applications or ones with other systematic problems, then pointing out why the language is not a good choice for that use isn't "blaming the tool", its just identifying the problem.
Eh, HTML embedding is what PHP is largely about (its a recursive acronym for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor"), and a lot of the warts are related to its fundamental purpose: being an easy to use HTML-embedded scripting language.
Yeah, you could fork PHP drop a lot of the central ideas, and build a decent general purpose scripting language, but there are already plenty of good general purpose scripting languages that don't have the disadvantage of baggage from design for a radically different purpose. Other than challenge and satisfaction of having done it (which I'm sure would make the project attractive to some people), what's the point?
If there was no library API which handed an abritrary string to SQL interpreter for one step parsing and execution, it would discourage the practices that make SQL injection possible.
Don't many languages standardized DB APIs allow passing arbitrary strings to SQL interpreters in order to (1) support using SQL rather than language-specific methods of database access for most tasks, and (2) support, using a similar API, different back-end DBs?
Lots of DB APIs also provide safer ways to pass in one or several sets of host-language values as parameters to an SQL query that are safer from SQL injection (and often more efficient for repeated operations) than just building a string, and encourage the use of those methods.
Wouldn't a better focus be on battery backed up RAM drives instead?
For servers and desktop, maybe... But for laptops it is impractical given the restrictions of keeping it powered.
Seems to me that you could do RAM+flash; have it work as a RAM drive when "powered on", but then when powered off (either with the whole system, or by power management powering the drive down due to inactivity) it dumps the RAM to the flash, and restores the RAM from flash when powering up. You get better performance, and save read/write cycles on the flash (of course, it'll be much more expensive than a flash drive, too.)
You might ask "why not just get more system RAM", and of course, that's a viable approach. OTOH, this way you might save money for the amount of fairly-fast storage by getting RAM that's not as fast as you'd want for system RAM, but still faster than reading from a traditional harddrive or flash. Of course, given the size of RAM modules, it won't be good for the "main" drive except in specialized applications, but it might be useful for special-purpose drives where access speed is critical.
I'd rather see some of the existing trek timespan looked at through a different light, rather than yet another reboot the setting and fly a federation starship around it.
That was, I think, the strength of DS9, and one reason while, after all the seasons of TOS and TNG, it still had something going for it, whereas Voyager and Enterprise just seemed to flounder.
Well, no, Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland were copyright cases.
Those cases are a big part of the reason that software companies now seek patents to protect look and feel (since copyright fails to protect that), but the legal issues aren't the same, as patent law is not the same as copyright law.
If you consider that an attack, then you are way, way too personally invested in his reputation.
I don't care about Linus' reputation. Saying someone lacks perspective is an attack. Saying it without any argument supporting it is a lazy, gratuitous attack.
Years ago, there were Lotus 1-2-3 clones, which copied not only the general visual appearance but the actual menu layout, sequences, names, and functionality.
One of the more famous was literally named "Carbon Copy." That was the product name. Really.
Lotus took the company to court and lost.
I've never heard of Carbon Copy. The only lawsuit I know of over a product with the degree of copying of 1-2-3 that you refer to is Lotus v. Paperback Software over VP-Planner, which Lotus won, on copyright grounds.
IIRC The court ruled that it was OK to copy the look, feel, and details of the Lotus product's menus, because there was no other way to produce a competitive product.
The court in Lotus v. Paperback actually ruled the exact opposite, on the basis of the fact that there were successful competing products that didn't do that.
How the heck can a perfect functional duplicate of a complete menu tree be OK, but a vague organization of elements on a web screen be copyrightable?
Patents are not copyrights and are governed by different law. The reason people seek these kinds of patents now is that efforts to use copyright to protect general look and feel and short of fairly exact copying (such as that at issue in Lotus v. Paperback) failed in the 1980s and 1990s, (e.g., in Apple vs. HP and Microsoft, and in Lotus v. Borland), which have led companies to seek different means of protecting this aspect of their product from copycats; I don't think is a case of a change in what the US is willing to grant IP protection for so much as a change in what companies are seeking a particular kind of IP protection for, as a direct result of the failure of a different kind of IP protection to protect it.
If he was, then he's an even bigger tool than I have previously taken him for. Lots of people seem to think the FSF is a radical organisation of long haired hippies who don't listen to anyone but Stallman.
GP said "the RMS crowd", not the FSF. There clearly is a crowd of RMS adoring geeks that worship the gospel according to Stallman; that group is not the same as the FSF.
From another perspective, Linus's algorithm for deciding pragmatism is based on a greedy algorithm - it always spits out answers that look reasonable in the short term.
Can you give us some examples where Linus' decisions have seemed reasonable in the short term but proven poor in the longer term?
He may be an excellent programmer and good project leader, but he seems to lack a sense of perspective.
Care to provide specific examples supporting this broad, general attack?
Well, FSF's sense of "long-term" perspective has given them HURD. Linus's "lack" of perspective gives me Working Software Right Now(tm). In the end, that's all businesses really care about.
And most users, too. Even users that care about more than that tend to see working software as a threshold requirement.
wait, isn't incest a sin?
So was sex if you take the story literally.
Reading a few different versions of Gen 3:16 it seems to rather strongly imply that, quite to the contrary, Adam and Eve were happily, innocently having sex and babies before the incident with the serpent and the fruit that was the first sin; and that, among other punishments inflicted on Eve as a consequence of that defiance, God increased the pain associated with childbirth.
Or were you referring to some other story?
For general purpose use, however (say I wanted to watch a movie on my glasses on the bus on the way home, or look at pr0n or something), 640x480 is still lacking in it's ability to show detail.
640x480 resolution is exactly enough to show a standard size and aspect ratio 480i/p TV picture; it'll be the equivalent of 480pX where X is whatever its refresh rate is, at 60Hz, it'll do DVD-quality playback (either at 480i60 or 480p24/30) and better (480p60).
Sorry, I entered some street addresses and it didn't work. And now?
There is a not particularly subtle maps link on the Google Homepage. If you know you are looking for a map, its not that hard to figure out. OTOH, if you type anything that Google recognizes as structured like a street address in the main Google search box, you should get map links at the top of your results for Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and MapQuest, even if it isn't a valid address.
some "clutter" is better than having to click 5 links to go to where you want to
Sure, but what's better is to have no clutter and to have what you want available, which is exactly what the Google interface is designed to do.
Oh," people rush to object, "the Google search page is so spare, clean, elegant, not crowded with other stuff."
True, but that's because you can only do one thing from their home page: search. Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks -- if you can remember how to get to them.
Most of what Google does is search. And most of it can be accessed, surprisingly enough, through the search box (and, except for a few features, without any special tags), except for account-centered activities. Of course, for those, you need to create a Google account first, and if you've done that, you probably are also using a Google Customized Homepage from which the personal account functions you actually use can easily be made directly available.
Want a map? Type the address in the search box. Want travel information (like airline flight status)? Type the request in the search box. Movie listings? Type "movie:" followed by a zip code, title, plot detail, whatever, in the search box. What definitions? Use either "define" or "define:" with what you want defined, in the search box. Currency conversions? search box. Do some arbitrary arithmetic calculations? Search box. Want news? Just use the search box, if there are news results, you'll get them the top few at the top of the search results with a link to get all the news results. Books? Same thing.
Well, the tasks an office software suite should perform haven't changed all that much over the years.
I don't think that's really true, particularly when it comes to spreadsheets. I'll agree that expectations haven't changed, but I think that's a product of a stable monopoly stifling innovations which freezes expectation, rather than the reason there haven't been many changes.
Slashdot Mirror
And I suppose you are going to tell me that the Scaife-funded "Capital Research Center" is a neutral, objective, unbiased commenter on political ideology.
Your assuming that what they are actually trying to do is what they see they are trying to do. Now, that could be the case, but if its that obvious that they could never do what they say they are trying to do even if the cards were perfect, you should at least consider that they might be being dishonest about the goal.
Congress doesn't have to say what power they are using when they pass a law (it would be interesting if they had to cite their Constitutional authority in the act, and any defense of the Constitutionality of the law when challenged was limited to the cited authority, but that's not the system we have.)
RealID, since, IIRC, its enforcement is through withholding highway funding, would probably be argued to be an application of the Spending Power, though I suppose a creative defender could argue it was an application of Congress' power to organize the militia, what with the militia being universal and all, and being able to identify its members being a critical component of organizing it.
I've yet to see anyone making this argument (which is fairly common) actually present a proposed fix, and I think that its rather critical to the argument that something "needs fixing" to establish that there is a viable fix that would repair the supposed problem in the status quo without creating a bigger problem.
But, again, one of your main complaints is the inconsistency in the standard library. So is it really better to fork and remake PHP when compared to, say, just taking Python, which has a similar kitchen-sink approach, perhaps misses some features that the PHP standard library has in its standard distribution, but has readily available, open-source modules covering very similar scope (perhaps wider, even) than are available for PHP? I mean, is redesigning PHP really a better approach then (for example) simply rolling available free Python modules into a bigger distribution? Is PHP, at its core, a better scripting language than Python (or insert another widely-supported scripting language, if you prefer)?
Leaving aside whether the UCS practices “politicized science”, or instead merely reacts to others’ politicization of science, they certainly didn't invent politicized science, having been founded in 1969, which certainly is later than birth of the scientific pretense of Marxism-Leninism as practiced by the Soviet state, which itself was hardly, itself, the birth of the politicization of science.
Heck, the cloak of modern empirical science was probably grabbed by political factions for their own ends without regard to scientific merits about a day after the first politician noticed that the whole idea of empiricism had started to catch on and have some influence. Politics are like that: any thing, religion, science, etc., that has utility for selling ideas it is associated with will be used to sell them.
No, good public policy was never the norm, though lack of scientific knowledge hasn't been the only major reason (indeed, isn't even #1, which is "lack of interest in the public good among the governing elite".) But its certainly a limiting factor, nonetheless.
That's true. Unfortunately, almost any area of public policy requires knowing lots of things, some of which, for almost any policy question imaginable, are of the type that are non-obvious and for which systematic study is necessary to get right other than by chance.
And much of that received, traditional knowledge may be generally correct, but have rather severe limitations that don't become obvious until you try to apply it outside of the context in which that knowledge was generated. You can do that either by systematic study before you implement policy, or by implementing disastrous policy.
Of course, much of that received, traditional "knowledge" is just plain factually incorrect, too.
No, its about the misrepresentation of data.
And, on that note, when thinking of misrepresentation, the phrase "Slasdhot editor" comes to mind.
Or we could just watch the Futurama episodes in which Zap Branigan, et al., appear and pretend they constitute the new Star Trek animated series, and it would still probably be better...
That's often said, but its misleading and somewhat of a false dichotomy.
Sometimes the mistake you made was choosing the wrong tool, and its perfectly valid to point to the defects of the tool relative to the use in explaining why that is so, even if (of course) all mistakes belong to some human at some point in time, not to a tool.
If someone wrecks my computer because they tried to open the case with a sledgehammer rather than a screwdriver, I think its right to point to the choice of tool as a central part of their error. That's not "blaming the tool", that's just identifying the problem. Likewise, if people use PHP for a purpose for which that language is ill-suited because of its set of features and bugs, and consequently produce insecure applications or ones with other systematic problems, then pointing out why the language is not a good choice for that use isn't "blaming the tool", its just identifying the problem.
Eh, HTML embedding is what PHP is largely about (its a recursive acronym for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor"), and a lot of the warts are related to its fundamental purpose: being an easy to use HTML-embedded scripting language.
Yeah, you could fork PHP drop a lot of the central ideas, and build a decent general purpose scripting language, but there are already plenty of good general purpose scripting languages that don't have the disadvantage of baggage from design for a radically different purpose. Other than challenge and satisfaction of having done it (which I'm sure would make the project attractive to some people), what's the point?
Don't many languages standardized DB APIs allow passing arbitrary strings to SQL interpreters in order to (1) support using SQL rather than language-specific methods of database access for most tasks, and (2) support, using a similar API, different back-end DBs?
Lots of DB APIs also provide safer ways to pass in one or several sets of host-language values as parameters to an SQL query that are safer from SQL injection (and often more efficient for repeated operations) than just building a string, and encourage the use of those methods.
Or am I missing something?
Seems to me that you could do RAM+flash; have it work as a RAM drive when "powered on", but then when powered off (either with the whole system, or by power management powering the drive down due to inactivity) it dumps the RAM to the flash, and restores the RAM from flash when powering up. You get better performance, and save read/write cycles on the flash (of course, it'll be much more expensive than a flash drive, too.)
You might ask "why not just get more system RAM", and of course, that's a viable approach. OTOH, this way you might save money for the amount of fairly-fast storage by getting RAM that's not as fast as you'd want for system RAM, but still faster than reading from a traditional harddrive or flash. Of course, given the size of RAM modules, it won't be good for the "main" drive except in specialized applications, but it might be useful for special-purpose drives where access speed is critical.
That was, I think, the strength of DS9, and one reason while, after all the seasons of TOS and TNG, it still had something going for it, whereas Voyager and Enterprise just seemed to flounder.
Well, no, Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland were copyright cases.
Those cases are a big part of the reason that software companies now seek patents to protect look and feel (since copyright fails to protect that), but the legal issues aren't the same, as patent law is not the same as copyright law.
Care to elaborate.
I don't care about Linus' reputation. Saying someone lacks perspective is an attack. Saying it without any argument supporting it is a lazy, gratuitous attack.
I've never heard of Carbon Copy. The only lawsuit I know of over a product with the degree of copying of 1-2-3 that you refer to is Lotus v. Paperback Software over VP-Planner, which Lotus won, on copyright grounds.
The court in Lotus v. Paperback actually ruled the exact opposite, on the basis of the fact that there were successful competing products that didn't do that.
Patents are not copyrights and are governed by different law. The reason people seek these kinds of patents now is that efforts to use copyright to protect general look and feel and short of fairly exact copying (such as that at issue in Lotus v. Paperback) failed in the 1980s and 1990s, (e.g., in Apple vs. HP and Microsoft, and in Lotus v. Borland), which have led companies to seek different means of protecting this aspect of their product from copycats; I don't think is a case of a change in what the US is willing to grant IP protection for so much as a change in what companies are seeking a particular kind of IP protection for, as a direct result of the failure of a different kind of IP protection to protect it.
GP said "the RMS crowd", not the FSF. There clearly is a crowd of RMS adoring geeks that worship the gospel according to Stallman; that group is not the same as the FSF.
Can you give us some examples where Linus' decisions have seemed reasonable in the short term but proven poor in the longer term?
Care to provide specific examples supporting this broad, general attack?
And most users, too. Even users that care about more than that tend to see working software as a threshold requirement.
640x480 resolution is exactly enough to show a standard size and aspect ratio 480i/p TV picture; it'll be the equivalent of 480pX where X is whatever its refresh rate is, at 60Hz, it'll do DVD-quality playback (either at 480i60 or 480p24/30) and better (480p60).
Admittedly, its not enough to show HD content.
There is a not particularly subtle maps link on the Google Homepage. If you know you are looking for a map, its not that hard to figure out. OTOH, if you type anything that Google recognizes as structured like a street address in the main Google search box, you should get map links at the top of your results for Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and MapQuest, even if it isn't a valid address.
Sure, but what's better is to have no clutter and to have what you want available, which is exactly what the Google interface is designed to do.
Most of what Google does is search. And most of it can be accessed, surprisingly enough, through the search box (and, except for a few features, without any special tags), except for account-centered activities. Of course, for those, you need to create a Google account first, and if you've done that, you probably are also using a Google Customized Homepage from which the personal account functions you actually use can easily be made directly available.
Want a map? Type the address in the search box. Want travel information (like airline flight status)? Type the request in the search box. Movie listings? Type "movie:" followed by a zip code, title, plot detail, whatever, in the search box. What definitions? Use either "define" or "define:" with what you want defined, in the search box. Currency conversions? search box. Do some arbitrary arithmetic calculations? Search box. Want news? Just use the search box, if there are news results, you'll get them the top few at the top of the search results with a link to get all the news results. Books? Same thing.
I don't think that's really true, particularly when it comes to spreadsheets. I'll agree that expectations haven't changed, but I think that's a product of a stable monopoly stifling innovations which freezes expectation, rather than the reason there haven't been many changes.