JIT compilers aren't "interpreters", they are real compilers. And not only do they not "struggle" with optimizations, they open up the ability to perform optimizations that batch compilers simply cannot reasonably perform. For example, they offer template instantiation without the bloat associated of C++ templates, they perform dynamic method inlining, and they optimize code for the specific set of processors and communication hardware available on a given piece of hardware.
The profusion of architectures, as well as extensive code reuse, are what is increasingly driving JITs, and the more complex and parallel hardware gets, the more import JITs become because batch compilers are hitting a brick wall there.
(1) Java's market presence for UI applications has been decreasing: applets have largely disappeared, and the JRE is preinstalled on fewer and fewer desktops.
(2) Even on OS X, where Java is pre-installed and exceptionally well supported and integrated, there are few applications written in Java, and even fewer written in Java using Swing.
(3) Java's UI classes don't integrate well with native desktops, and it is impossible with them to write a cross-platform UI that conforms to every target platform's conventions.
(4) Within the span of just a couple of years, Mono and.NET have already far surpassed Java desktop usage on their respective platforms (and Mono makes both sets of APIs cross-platform if you want).
(5) Sun's licensing and compatibility requirements have made Java unattractive for Linux desktop distributions, and it seems doubtful that that will change (it looks like Sun may open source their implementation, but the specs will probably remain restrictive).
(6) As far as cross-platform GUIs go, the most widely used tools are wxWidgets, Qt, Tcl/Tk, and Gtk, plus their various language bindings (even Eclipse uses its own toolkit, not Swing).
But at some point Java/Swing programs will have accumulated enough performance and features that they are good enough for what people want to do, and they have the added advantage of not being tied to Windows.
And that attitude is why Java/Swing isn't succeeding. As a Linux and Mac user, I don't want cross-platform scraps thrown to me, I want high-quality applications that integrate well with my desktop. And given that people are creating those based on Gnome, KDE, ObjC-Cocoa, and Mono, I have no incentive for using Java applications. Of course, Windows users don't have any interest in third-rate Java replacements for their native apps either, and.NET is a better platform for developing Windows apps anyway.
Even better, the Gnome, KDE, and Mono apps even run on Windows, so that even Java's cross-platform aspects are uninteresting.
SUN seems to be in this Java business for the long haul,
Well, that's another problem: I think many people are unconvinced that Sun is in anything for the long haul; the company has serious problems.
If your native code is running as slow as interpreted, I would really recommend getting that looked at. It would seem that people are losing the ability to write clean code since the crutch of interpreted languages is hiding so much of the finer grains of computer science.
First of all, when experienced programmers write big systems in interpreted languages, you can rest assured that they know what they are doing and are doing the benchmarks to make sure they aren't losing performance where they need it. If they need special, high-performance algorithms or libraries, they will figure out the minimal set of C/C++ primitives they need and make them a native code library inside the scripting language.
And whether code is "clean" really has nothing to do with the language. People can write clean Perl code and unclean C code.
Finally, "the finer grains of computer science" are absolutely and positively not concerned with the kind of low-level mess that C exposes.
I'm currently working on learning SDL in C/C++ for exactly that reason.
Good, so you are in a very early stage of your development as a programmer. As you mature, you'll figure out how to get the job done without wasting all your time on C/C++ programming.
In general, when experienced programmers use languages like Python or Ruby with native code plug-ins, or when they use languages like Java or C#, they produce code with better performance and fewer bugs than straight C/C++, simply because they end up having more time implementing good data structures and focussing their efforts where it counts.
Given your comment, I know one thing: I don't want you anywhere near the code. If you knew what you were doing, you'd realize that you already have an interpreted language in there: SQL. And that's likely your performance limiting factor. Whether you write the rest of the application in C/C++, Java, or PHP is immaterial from a performance point of view.
And if it's about coding something "hard", then C/C++ and Java are clearly the wrong choices because they result in big, bloated, complicated systems; you need something much more high level.
I suspect lots of companies and people would have liked to stick it to the IEEE and Linksys, and if the Chinese had prepared their position well, negotiated carefully, and put in a good proposal for an open, patent-unencumbered, well-tested, and clean encryption standard, they could have won this debate.
I don't know what exactly they actually did, but from the strongly negative reactions, I'm concluding that they must have failed on not just one, but several of these points.
There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences.
While there are many valid functions for government, protecting people from their own stupidity or ignorance shouldn't be one of them. Furthermore, with the amount of money that currently goes into policing, we could create informational campaigns that ensure that everybody knows the dangers.
They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc.
Given a choice, the drugs people tend to take are drugs that make them happy and make them feel good; legalizing drugs would probably reduce use of drugs that cause people to harm others.
I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?
Drug addiction doesn't generally cause parents to abandon their children; except for unusually severe cases, most people with drug addiction can function reasonably well and seem to overcome addiction after some time if support is available. It is the fact that drugs are illegal that results in children growing up without their parents, either because their parents got killed or because they got incarcerated.
I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.
I'm not a libertarian or anarchist; I just think that proponents of drug laws have failed to demonstrate that they work. Oh, people like you use lots of "mights" and "mays" and "think of the children", but, in the end, the reasonable conclusion based on all available data is that drug laws make the consequences of drug addiction worse, both in human and in finanical terms.
The big network providers already get to charge by bandwidth. If Google uses a lot of bandwidth, then they pay more to their own ISP, which, in turn, does the right kind of accounting with its peers. Right now, we have a mostly neutral system in which bandwidth is fungible.
What rankles network service providers is that the current infrastructure doesn't give them much freedom to charge by what people are able to pay; that greatly reduces their opportunity for revenue. Telephone companies, for example, have been able to charge a premium to individual residential customers because individual residential customers don't have much ability to negotiate. While that premium may be small in absolute terms, it's huge in terms of percentages. The same is true for other customer categories. They also want to be able to continue to charge excessive rates for specific services, such as voice. With the proposed changes, network providers can implement that kind of differential pricing again.
There is absolutely no justification for any of this; all it does is create market inefficiencies that make telecommunications services unnecessarily expensive. Both from an economic and a public policy point of view, net neutrality is clearly the better system.
I think we should deregulate almost all drugs. If you want to mess up your body or your mind with steroids or "smart drugs", that's your business. If you want to feel good through chemistry, that should be your decision. If you die 30 years before your time because of various kinds of drug abuse, that's nobody's business but yours--just don't expect exceptional measures from doctors to try to reverse the effects.
The only drugs that should be far more tightly regulated than they are are antibiotics and antivirals, because incorrect use by one person harms other people.
With that kind of attitude, I guarantee you that you won't get very far in business. Politics is part of any organization, and it serves real and important functions in actually getting things done. You better get used to that and learn to live with it.
Being aware of politics doesn't mean that you need to turn into a Machiavellian maniac, it means that you recognize how things work, try to improve things where you can, and still have the smarts to survive when other people screw up or conspire against you (and always keep in mind that screw-ups are far more frequent than deception).
Having said that, there are some bad organizations out there that really don't function well; you can try to spot them before you get into them, but if you find yourself in a bad situation, just start looking for a new job.
Attempts at classifying malware automatically have been around for a number of years. Trouble is: 90% isn't good enough--it's too many false alarms. You need something that works almost perfectly in order to deploy it on real machines.
First of all, many US companies derive disproportionately more revenue abroad than they create jobs abroad--that's an imbalance that must be corrected. From that point of view alone, outsourcing is inevitable.
Second, current employees have a choice: they can drop their pencils immediately and leave without severance pay, or they can do an unpleasant chore with severance pay.
Third, in training their replacements, they might also try to teach their foreign replacements about collective bargaining, US salary levels and benefits, and the kind of profits that their company will be making.
Well, those employees that still know about that sort of thing can. If you're part of the SUV-driving, Bible thumping, Republican voting crowd and don't remember why exactly people used to organize in unions and that sort of thing, then just think of the outsourcing as a free market mechanism for getting rid of inefficiencies--you in this case.
You folks seem to be using definition 1 for "republic" and definitions 3 and 5 for "democracy", which is fine. Most slashdoters seem to use definition 2 for "republic" and 4 for "democracy, which is also completely correct.
Both definitions 1 and 2 apply to modern democracies, so the statement that democracies and republics are mutually exclusive is wrong. Conversely, definition 4 of democracy is still consistent with a republic because "majority rule" is in itself not a mathematically precise definition. Furthermore, you simply don't get to pick and choose your dictionary defnitions--the appropriate definition depends on context; for example, even if you interpreted "majority rule" with mathematical precision, then you'd simply end up with a term that does not apply to any of the nations calling themselves "democracies".
I'm sorry, but even a narrow interpretation of the dictionary definitions does not support the hare-brained statements people make about some supposed opposition between republics and democracies on/. No, what people on/. are doing is they are twisting and misapplying definitions in order to push a particular political viewpoint about some supposed difference between the US and the rest of the world. There are many differences, but this is not one of them. The US is a democracy, just like European nations are, and the US is arguably more similar to, say, Germany, than Germany is to, say, the UK.
Purely from a practical point of view, if anything, the US political system has evolved into a system that is much more akin to tyranny of the majority, due to its various winnner-take-all mechanisms. European democracies represent a much wider variety of viewpoints due to mechanisms like proportional representation. (That doesn't imply a value judgement--the European approach may well result in less effective government as well, but it does represent minority viewpoints more strongly than the US.)
but again -- it's the ISP's infrastructure and they can choose their own business model.
If there is a compelling public interest, the government can legitimately restrict that choice. That's the case in many domains, and arguably, it should be the case here.
They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from.
Yeah, but we can't legislate additional wires or ISPs into existence. We can, however, legislate that the wires and ISPs exist are used equitably and in a way that protects people from arbitrary pricing and restrictions.
so I ended up going with a local company for DSL
The fact that you have that choice is itself a consequence of a legal framework that gives you that choice. Completely unregulated, your phone company would be the only DSL provider, and they'd charge monopoly prices (actually, completely unregulated, you'd be on a 19.2kbps dial-up line, if you're lucky).
So, legislation like this works, and you have just given another example of that.
If there were big ones, there would likely be small ones, and moons around the big ones. Furthermore, just the fact that there is "stuff" at all would help. Alas, it likely isn't true.
Incidentally, huge mass isn't necessarily an obstacle to life or even colonization; there are potentially regions around big planets where the gravity and pressure are tolerable and where one could "float".
Democracy itself has no inherent protection for minority rights.
I didn't claim it was "inherent", I claimed that it, contrary to the article, not only is it compatible with democratic governments, modern democracies consider it an essential part of a functioning modern democracy. I challenge you to name a major democracy that doesn't have it. In contrast, minority protection is not an essential part of republics.
Make no mistake; this is one group imposing their will on another, and telling another group that if they don't follow a purely religious prohibition, they will be given fewer rights.
No, that's not true. The argument for the "gay marriage amendment" is not that religion requires it, but that it will improve society by holding families together. The argument is completely bogus, of course, but that doesn't change the fact that even the proponents feel the obligation to make a utilitarian argument. If their argument were actually supported by facts and logic, the amendment would be defensible even in the face of "minority protections". For example, few people have problems with laws against consentual sex between adults and children, because there is consensus that the potential harm is greater than the benefits to the minority group.
Democracy, by itself, quite often is a tyranny of the majority
Democracy is about tradeoffs, and it is often about tradeoffs that involve the benefit and costs to majorities and minorities. But in modern democracies, those tradeoffs are ruled by basic rights, legal constraints, and legislative process, and that's what makes the inevitable tradeoffs democratic, as opposed to tyrannical.
The original Microsoft and Apple BASICs were justly maligned, but standard BASIC and later versions of BASIC were decent programming languages that really were easy to use. I think they got their bad reputation in part because large numbers of people with no experience managed to do something in them, while languages like C++ kept the riff-raff out.
"Thin skinned"? No, merely frustrated at the flood of shitty papers that come across my desk every day: sloppy write-ups of half-baked ideas that even the authors didn't completely understand and where they felt it beneath their dignity to work out the details.
Whether people like you want it or not, this will change over the next few decades. We now have both the technology and the economic incentive to fix it.
So it should be legal for me to use a night-vision scope to look into my neighbor's bedroom window at night?
Yes.
Amplifying it into a visible image, digitizing it, and making it available on the Internet seems like a perfectly logical step, doesn't it?
No, making it available on the Internet is not. That's where society draws the line for specific kinds of content. That's not so much to protect people against this case, but to protect people against fabricated data.
People have an expectation of privacy.
And when they use curtains, their expectation will be fulfilled.
Privacy is a much more desirable-to-society right than is the ability to spy on our neighbors, and so privacy wins.
I'm all for strong privacy protection. But protecting people who decide to waltz around naked in front of curtainless windows from their own stupidity has nothing to do with privacy protection.
Yes, Word gives a "great user experience", in the sense that it gives people what they think they want and that makes them happy. Unfortunately, that's not the best way for them to actually get their work done, at least when it comes to anything more complicated than a simple letter.
For tables, the WYSIWYG approach isn't too bad, but for most other things, it is inefficient. And we know that now precisely because we have had 30 years of experience with it. And that's why WYSIWYG is increasingly on the way out.
The term "republic" is simply a term that arose historically to signify that a nation was not a monarchy or dictatorship. Far from being mutually exclusive, all democracies actually are republics. Democracies in which the people vote on representatives are called "representative democracies"; most democracies are of that form these days because nothing else is really practical.
The US used to be a republic (no monarch) but probably shouldn't be considered a democracy during its first century or so (too limited representation). These days, the US is a representative democracy, not much different from European democracies.
Contrary to what that article says, democracy is not tyranny of the majority; protecting minority rights is an essentical part of democratic government (but not of all republican government, in which historically large parts of the population weren't represented at all).
Ah, yes, the refuge of people who just can't put a clear argument together: calling people they disagree with "trolls".
I have a more apt moniker for you: "incompetent". Unfortunately, your kind of incompetence is pretty common in the sciences and mathematics, which is why the published literature is so rife with poorly written papers and incorrect results. No doubt, you have contributed your share.
Fortunately, this kind of mess will be cleaned up and people like you will be forced to change your ways or leave the field; mathematics and science can't progress otherwise.
HP has official support for Linux, and I suspect that all of those are actually supported. Note that the drivers the Mac uses for HP (and many other printers) are actually the Linux drivers.
This isn't theoretical: I have three HP printers, including a very recent model that I just bought, and they all work with both Linux and OSX.
The hardware compatibility lists could probably be improved, as could various marketing efforts, but, again, there is a wide range of printing and scanning hardware out there that works with Linux, from cheap to top-of-the-line.
Slashdot Mirror
JIT compilers aren't "interpreters", they are real compilers. And not only do they not "struggle" with optimizations, they open up the ability to perform optimizations that batch compilers simply cannot reasonably perform. For example, they offer template instantiation without the bloat associated of C++ templates, they perform dynamic method inlining, and they optimize code for the specific set of processors and communication hardware available on a given piece of hardware.
The profusion of architectures, as well as extensive code reuse, are what is increasingly driving JITs, and the more complex and parallel hardware gets, the more import JITs become because batch compilers are hitting a brick wall there.
There are several reasons.
.NET have already far surpassed Java desktop usage on their respective platforms (and Mono makes both sets of APIs cross-platform if you want).
.NET is a better platform for developing Windows apps anyway.
(1) Java's market presence for UI applications has been decreasing: applets have largely disappeared, and the JRE is preinstalled on fewer and fewer desktops.
(2) Even on OS X, where Java is pre-installed and exceptionally well supported and integrated, there are few applications written in Java, and even fewer written in Java using Swing.
(3) Java's UI classes don't integrate well with native desktops, and it is impossible with them to write a cross-platform UI that conforms to every target platform's conventions.
(4) Within the span of just a couple of years, Mono and
(5) Sun's licensing and compatibility requirements have made Java unattractive for Linux desktop distributions, and it seems doubtful that that will change (it looks like Sun may open source their implementation, but the specs will probably remain restrictive).
(6) As far as cross-platform GUIs go, the most widely used tools are wxWidgets, Qt, Tcl/Tk, and Gtk, plus their various language bindings (even Eclipse uses its own toolkit, not Swing).
But at some point Java/Swing programs will have accumulated enough performance and features that they are good enough for what people want to do, and they have the added advantage of not being tied to Windows.
And that attitude is why Java/Swing isn't succeeding. As a Linux and Mac user, I don't want cross-platform scraps thrown to me, I want high-quality applications that integrate well with my desktop. And given that people are creating those based on Gnome, KDE, ObjC-Cocoa, and Mono, I have no incentive for using Java applications. Of course, Windows users don't have any interest in third-rate Java replacements for their native apps either, and
Even better, the Gnome, KDE, and Mono apps even run on Windows, so that even Java's cross-platform aspects are uninteresting.
SUN seems to be in this Java business for the long haul,
Well, that's another problem: I think many people are unconvinced that Sun is in anything for the long haul; the company has serious problems.
If your native code is running as slow as interpreted, I would really recommend getting that looked at. It would seem that people are losing the ability to write clean code since the crutch of interpreted languages is hiding so much of the finer grains of computer science.
First of all, when experienced programmers write big systems in interpreted languages, you can rest assured that they know what they are doing and are doing the benchmarks to make sure they aren't losing performance where they need it. If they need special, high-performance algorithms or libraries, they will figure out the minimal set of C/C++ primitives they need and make them a native code library inside the scripting language.
And whether code is "clean" really has nothing to do with the language. People can write clean Perl code and unclean C code.
Finally, "the finer grains of computer science" are absolutely and positively not concerned with the kind of low-level mess that C exposes.
I'm currently working on learning SDL in C/C++ for exactly that reason.
Good, so you are in a very early stage of your development as a programmer. As you mature, you'll figure out how to get the job done without wasting all your time on C/C++ programming.
In general, when experienced programmers use languages like Python or Ruby with native code plug-ins, or when they use languages like Java or C#, they produce code with better performance and fewer bugs than straight C/C++, simply because they end up having more time implementing good data structures and focussing their efforts where it counts.
Given your comment, I know one thing: I don't want you anywhere near the code. If you knew what you were doing, you'd realize that you already have an interpreted language in there: SQL. And that's likely your performance limiting factor. Whether you write the rest of the application in C/C++, Java, or PHP is immaterial from a performance point of view.
And if it's about coding something "hard", then C/C++ and Java are clearly the wrong choices because they result in big, bloated, complicated systems; you need something much more high level.
I suspect lots of companies and people would have liked to stick it to the IEEE and Linksys, and if the Chinese had prepared their position well, negotiated carefully, and put in a good proposal for an open, patent-unencumbered, well-tested, and clean encryption standard, they could have won this debate.
I don't know what exactly they actually did, but from the strongly negative reactions, I'm concluding that they must have failed on not just one, but several of these points.
There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences.
While there are many valid functions for government, protecting people from their own stupidity or ignorance shouldn't be one of them. Furthermore, with the amount of money that currently goes into policing, we could create informational campaigns that ensure that everybody knows the dangers.
They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc.
Given a choice, the drugs people tend to take are drugs that make them happy and make them feel good; legalizing drugs would probably reduce use of drugs that cause people to harm others.
I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?
Drug addiction doesn't generally cause parents to abandon their children; except for unusually severe cases, most people with drug addiction can function reasonably well and seem to overcome addiction after some time if support is available. It is the fact that drugs are illegal that results in children growing up without their parents, either because their parents got killed or because they got incarcerated.
I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.
I'm not a libertarian or anarchist; I just think that proponents of drug laws have failed to demonstrate that they work. Oh, people like you use lots of "mights" and "mays" and "think of the children", but, in the end, the reasonable conclusion based on all available data is that drug laws make the consequences of drug addiction worse, both in human and in finanical terms.
The big network providers already get to charge by bandwidth. If Google uses a lot of bandwidth, then they pay more to their own ISP, which, in turn, does the right kind of accounting with its peers. Right now, we have a mostly neutral system in which bandwidth is fungible.
What rankles network service providers is that the current infrastructure doesn't give them much freedom to charge by what people are able to pay; that greatly reduces their opportunity for revenue. Telephone companies, for example, have been able to charge a premium to individual residential customers because individual residential customers don't have much ability to negotiate. While that premium may be small in absolute terms, it's huge in terms of percentages. The same is true for other customer categories. They also want to be able to continue to charge excessive rates for specific services, such as voice. With the proposed changes, network providers can implement that kind of differential pricing again.
There is absolutely no justification for any of this; all it does is create market inefficiencies that make telecommunications services unnecessarily expensive. Both from an economic and a public policy point of view, net neutrality is clearly the better system.
I think we should deregulate almost all drugs. If you want to mess up your body or your mind with steroids or "smart drugs", that's your business. If you want to feel good through chemistry, that should be your decision. If you die 30 years before your time because of various kinds of drug abuse, that's nobody's business but yours--just don't expect exceptional measures from doctors to try to reverse the effects.
The only drugs that should be far more tightly regulated than they are are antibiotics and antivirals, because incorrect use by one person harms other people.
With that kind of attitude, I guarantee you that you won't get very far in business. Politics is part of any organization, and it serves real and important functions in actually getting things done. You better get used to that and learn to live with it.
Being aware of politics doesn't mean that you need to turn into a Machiavellian maniac, it means that you recognize how things work, try to improve things where you can, and still have the smarts to survive when other people screw up or conspire against you (and always keep in mind that screw-ups are far more frequent than deception).
Having said that, there are some bad organizations out there that really don't function well; you can try to spot them before you get into them, but if you find yourself in a bad situation, just start looking for a new job.
So how long has XGrid been available on the Mac? Two or three years?
Good question. After all, we all know that, to a Mac zealot, something doesn't count "innovation" until Apple has copied it from Linux or Xerox.
Attempts at classifying malware automatically have been around for a number of years. Trouble is: 90% isn't good enough--it's too many false alarms. You need something that works almost perfectly in order to deploy it on real machines.
First of all, many US companies derive disproportionately more revenue abroad than they create jobs abroad--that's an imbalance that must be corrected. From that point of view alone, outsourcing is inevitable.
Second, current employees have a choice: they can drop their pencils immediately and leave without severance pay, or they can do an unpleasant chore with severance pay.
Third, in training their replacements, they might also try to teach their foreign replacements about collective bargaining, US salary levels and benefits, and the kind of profits that their company will be making.
Well, those employees that still know about that sort of thing can. If you're part of the SUV-driving, Bible thumping, Republican voting crowd and don't remember why exactly people used to organize in unions and that sort of thing, then just think of the outsourcing as a free market mechanism for getting rid of inefficiencies--you in this case.
You folks seem to be using definition 1 for "republic" and definitions 3 and 5 for "democracy", which is fine. Most slashdoters seem to use definition 2 for "republic" and 4 for "democracy, which is also completely correct.
/. No, what people on /. are doing is they are twisting and misapplying definitions in order to push a particular political viewpoint about some supposed difference between the US and the rest of the world. There are many differences, but this is not one of them. The US is a democracy, just like European nations are, and the US is arguably more similar to, say, Germany, than Germany is to, say, the UK.
Both definitions 1 and 2 apply to modern democracies, so the statement that democracies and republics are mutually exclusive is wrong. Conversely, definition 4 of democracy is still consistent with a republic because "majority rule" is in itself not a mathematically precise definition. Furthermore, you simply don't get to pick and choose your dictionary defnitions--the appropriate definition depends on context; for example, even if you interpreted "majority rule" with mathematical precision, then you'd simply end up with a term that does not apply to any of the nations calling themselves "democracies".
I'm sorry, but even a narrow interpretation of the dictionary definitions does not support the hare-brained statements people make about some supposed opposition between republics and democracies on
Purely from a practical point of view, if anything, the US political system has evolved into a system that is much more akin to tyranny of the majority, due to its various winnner-take-all mechanisms. European democracies represent a much wider variety of viewpoints due to mechanisms like proportional representation. (That doesn't imply a value judgement--the European approach may well result in less effective government as well, but it does represent minority viewpoints more strongly than the US.)
but again -- it's the ISP's infrastructure and they can choose their own business model.
If there is a compelling public interest, the government can legitimately restrict that choice. That's the case in many domains, and arguably, it should be the case here.
They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from.
Yeah, but we can't legislate additional wires or ISPs into existence. We can, however, legislate that the wires and ISPs exist are used equitably and in a way that protects people from arbitrary pricing and restrictions.
so I ended up going with a local company for DSL
The fact that you have that choice is itself a consequence of a legal framework that gives you that choice. Completely unregulated, your phone company would be the only DSL provider, and they'd charge monopoly prices (actually, completely unregulated, you'd be on a 19.2kbps dial-up line, if you're lucky).
So, legislation like this works, and you have just given another example of that.
If there were big ones, there would likely be small ones, and moons around the big ones. Furthermore, just the fact that there is "stuff" at all would help. Alas, it likely isn't true.
Incidentally, huge mass isn't necessarily an obstacle to life or even colonization; there are potentially regions around big planets where the gravity and pressure are tolerable and where one could "float".
Democracy itself has no inherent protection for minority rights.
I didn't claim it was "inherent", I claimed that it, contrary to the article, not only is it compatible with democratic governments, modern democracies consider it an essential part of a functioning modern democracy. I challenge you to name a major democracy that doesn't have it. In contrast, minority protection is not an essential part of republics.
Make no mistake; this is one group imposing their will on another, and telling another group that if they don't follow a purely religious prohibition, they will be given fewer rights.
No, that's not true. The argument for the "gay marriage amendment" is not that religion requires it, but that it will improve society by holding families together. The argument is completely bogus, of course, but that doesn't change the fact that even the proponents feel the obligation to make a utilitarian argument. If their argument were actually supported by facts and logic, the amendment would be defensible even in the face of "minority protections". For example, few people have problems with laws against consentual sex between adults and children, because there is consensus that the potential harm is greater than the benefits to the minority group.
Democracy, by itself, quite often is a tyranny of the majority
Democracy is about tradeoffs, and it is often about tradeoffs that involve the benefit and costs to majorities and minorities. But in modern democracies, those tradeoffs are ruled by basic rights, legal constraints, and legislative process, and that's what makes the inevitable tradeoffs democratic, as opposed to tyrannical.
No, guess again :-(
The original Microsoft and Apple BASICs were justly maligned, but standard BASIC and later versions of BASIC were decent programming languages that really were easy to use. I think they got their bad reputation in part because large numbers of people with no experience managed to do something in them, while languages like C++ kept the riff-raff out.
"Thin skinned"? No, merely frustrated at the flood of shitty papers that come across my desk every day: sloppy write-ups of half-baked ideas that even the authors didn't completely understand and where they felt it beneath their dignity to work out the details.
Whether people like you want it or not, this will change over the next few decades. We now have both the technology and the economic incentive to fix it.
So it should be legal for me to use a night-vision scope to look into my neighbor's bedroom window at night?
Yes.
Amplifying it into a visible image, digitizing it, and making it available on the Internet seems like a perfectly logical step, doesn't it?
No, making it available on the Internet is not. That's where society draws the line for specific kinds of content. That's not so much to protect people against this case, but to protect people against fabricated data.
People have an expectation of privacy.
And when they use curtains, their expectation will be fulfilled.
Privacy is a much more desirable-to-society right than is the ability to spy on our neighbors, and so privacy wins.
I'm all for strong privacy protection. But protecting people who decide to waltz around naked in front of curtainless windows from their own stupidity has nothing to do with privacy protection.
Yes, Word gives a "great user experience", in the sense that it gives people what they think they want and that makes them happy. Unfortunately, that's not the best way for them to actually get their work done, at least when it comes to anything more complicated than a simple letter.
For tables, the WYSIWYG approach isn't too bad, but for most other things, it is inefficient. And we know that now precisely because we have had 30 years of experience with it. And that's why WYSIWYG is increasingly on the way out.
The page you point to is bullshit.
The term "republic" is simply a term that arose historically to signify that a nation was not a monarchy or dictatorship. Far from being mutually exclusive, all democracies actually are republics. Democracies in which the people vote on representatives are called "representative democracies"; most democracies are of that form these days because nothing else is really practical.
The US used to be a republic (no monarch) but probably shouldn't be considered a democracy during its first century or so (too limited representation). These days, the US is a representative democracy, not much different from European democracies.
Contrary to what that article says, democracy is not tyranny of the majority; protecting minority rights is an essentical part of democratic government (but not of all republican government, in which historically large parts of the population weren't represented at all).
Ah, yes, the refuge of people who just can't put a clear argument together: calling people they disagree with "trolls".
I have a more apt moniker for you: "incompetent". Unfortunately, your kind of incompetence is pretty common in the sciences and mathematics, which is why the published literature is so rife with poorly written papers and incorrect results. No doubt, you have contributed your share.
Fortunately, this kind of mess will be cleaned up and people like you will be forced to change your ways or leave the field; mathematics and science can't progress otherwise.
HP has official support for Linux, and I suspect that all of those are actually supported. Note that the drivers the Mac uses for HP (and many other printers) are actually the Linux drivers.
This isn't theoretical: I have three HP printers, including a very recent model that I just bought, and they all work with both Linux and OSX.
The hardware compatibility lists could probably be improved, as could various marketing efforts, but, again, there is a wide range of printing and scanning hardware out there that works with Linux, from cheap to top-of-the-line.