PDF isn't great, but there actually is decent tool support. There's free readers (e.g., xpdf), and I believe Ghostscript supports PDF decently. There's a Postscript to PDF converter, and Postscript is pretty well supported. Also, there's many programmatic ways to create PDFs, like Reportlab for Python -- there's similar things for many other languages.
The format itself isn't sufficient for many domains -- I rather dislike PDF-only documentation, and indexing and searching is sufficient but not great. But I get the impression that the format itself is fairly transparent, and while Adobe has not been a good owner, PDF is doing pretty well. However, it does show that an "open" format doesn't mean much until there's actual competing products, and it's taken a long time to get that for PDF -- it will likely be the same for other "open" standards that have proprietary roots.
I don't think the card itself is a big problem. Sure, you could store medical information and all that on it, but I'm not sure what point there would really be to that (beyond the medical information cards people already carry). We all have cards already, and at certain circumstances we have to present them. Making it harder to fake IDs doesn't hurt anyone who's legit.
The real problem is much more trivial -- universally machine-readable cards. Just having a standard on how IDs are stored in a bar-code form would be enough -- the ID numbers already exist (every state has a license ID, prepend the state code and you've got a national ID). This doesn't exclude the possibility of having more than one ID and number (I assume there's nothing exclusionary in having different state IDs), but that would be easy to fix too (just match up SSN during ID signup).
Once you have this reader possibility, big brother has nearly everything necessary. They're talking about swiping cards at every large building, every federal building, and with the new public-private "security initiatives", there's no reason this couldn't be matched up to all sorts of other systems.
This could lead to a thorough record of certain activities -- many related to our fundamental rights and duties as a citizen. If the database was expanded further -- in particular, credit cards and other automated payment systems -- people's lives could be tracked quite closely. This wouldn't necessarily track any one activity, but would be a way of profiling. (Past experience shows that the FBI will use this to track any sort of dissident -- considering how often they've done it in the past, and that they have never been reformed, only slightly hobbled a couple times)
But don't worry, the card would be voluntary (haha -- as long as you consider interstate travel voluntary, internet commerce voluntary, etc).
There are people in Government too, should they not be allow to choose whatever suits their job best?
No one's going to tell them what they are allowed to run on their home computers. There is no question of freedom or fairness when it comes to what you use at work -- that's a policy decision to be made by the employer, not the employee (unless the decision is delegated). The employer, in this case, is the public. You are saying that it's wrong for the public to decide to use open source software. That's unfair -- I as an individual can make that decision. Any corporation can make that decision. Why can't the public make that decision?
And no one's criticising Microsoft for advocating a position to the government -- if you believe in something, you have a duty to try to convince the public of the same thing. People are criticising Microsoft for being a lier, for being a criminal, for creating astroturf grassroots campaigns, for not noting affiliations when it is important, for pretending to be people they are not, and for red baiting. And probably some other things too.
It's insufficient to say that the document should be available in some open format. It is essential that the canonical representation of the document be in an open format.
Sure, it's easy enough to make all government documents available as PDF files. Then the public can read the documents without using Word or whatever. But that's not sufficient, or even very important -- you can read Word documents on just about any platform at this point, at least sufficiently to get the information (and Word has always been horrible at describing the layout of a document cross-platform).
If all the documents are available in PDF, though, that will just suck. You don't open a PDF file in an editor and change it. The canonical form of the document is in Word, or PageMaker, or some other (usually proprietary) format. This means that the document will very possibly become obsolete in the future (almost inevitable, really). That means that the future public will be locked out of its previous resources.
Really, everything produced by the government should be in an open format -- not just a finish representation, but all intermediate forms of the document. Word should never save a DOC file -- maybe RTF, maybe HTML (though HTML sucks for that sort of thing).
The product is not an item. It's a license to use something. The value of the software is tied to its license. Software with a poor license is simply poor software.
Access to source is also part of the product. Ease of future maintenance is part of the product. Future adaptability is part of the product.
Still, a proprietary product may be more useful in some cases. But public policy has to make a line, it has to create a standard, even where the standard may not be necessary in all cases (and I think it's demonstrable that it is necessary in many cases). Without standards the public leaves itself open to graft, expedient but short-sighted decisions, and the sometimes ignorant judgement of some of its civil servants. The public is invested in these systems for a much longer time than any one government employee, and the decision should ultimately be in the hands of the public.
By adopting a more serious attitude at events like this, now you start to get recognition where it counts, like in the Wall Street Journal.
You shouldn't buy into Wall Street Journal's bullshit. They claim relevency for themselves, for their economic order, for their definition of achievement, for their suits and their lingo. But the free software we have was written by individuals, and they didn't wear those suits, they haven't been doing it for that model of success, and they don't use that lingo. They have been and continue to be relevant because of their actions and their creations.
Linux has survived all the dot-com bullshit because it was always by the people and for the people. The companies that have come and gone never effected the sole of the movement. They've helped at times, they've hurt at times, but they never were essential. If they all went away, free software would continue. If all the hackers went away, free software would die -- even if its licenses lived on and were used, even if its code continued to be extended by hired hands, its sole would be gone. It would just be another business efficiency, cast aside at some future date when the suit's whimsy changed.
We didn't get here by asking suits what was important or trying to get their approval. We didn't need them then, and we need them even less now. We might be able to use them -- but they aren't us and never will be. We should not forget that.
Re:I dislike guns, but the NRA's tactics work
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Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 2
I strongly dislike dishonesty, even for Good Ends. But I don't think that's necessary for this sort of thing -- politicians have gotten used to absolutely no scrutiny. The press doesn't even bother to check the most basic of assertions, or even look into the politicians past as listed in the public record.
The attacks don't have to be entirely based on their IP policies, though. You could mark the politician as a corporate whore without getting into anything technical -- maybe by talking about businesses they've been involved in, conflicts of interest in their past, hints of graft and kickbacks, and publicizing who's payed for what (not just campaign funds, but suspicious activities like funding parties and whatnot).
I'm convinced we can be very truthful and very damning at the same time. Especially with the sort of corporate scum that we'd be attacking, where IP policy is not their only ethically compromised position.
Let's get serious
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Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Just a couple days ago someone posted a comment that suggested we use NRA-like tactics. Instead of trying to change all the politicians, we pick out the worst politician, and put all our efforts into getting that one person defeated.
I think it's a great idea, which is why I'm bringing it up again. Lobbying congress and educating them on these matters just isn't going to work. Politicians aren't passing things like the DMCA because they're ignorant -- they are doing it because they are bad politicians. After failing to do the right thing over and over, we can't give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. We can't reform corporate shills, but maybe we can replace them.
Instead of pleading with them to do the right thing, we need to at least try to make them do the right thing. In a case when it's hard to identify the good politician -- especially the good and effective politician -- it's a lot easier to identify the bad guy. There's lots of politicians that aren't standing up for the public's rights. But there's only a few that are standing up to actively take those rights away. We should focus on them.
When we do, we can run online ads, radio ads, and grassroot ads, anything to try to defeat this person. It doesn't have to be that expensive. We play the negative game -- it doesn't matter who the opponent is, this is a question of symbolism, of asserting our power. Because if we can cost that one politician the election, that will really mean something. Sure, there'll be more to step up in his place, but maybe we can get them out too -- do it a couple times, and people will be afraid to be the corporate media lacky.
And yeah, that's not the nicest political game. It's classic "special interest" tactics. But shit... if politics was so nice, we wouldn't be having these problems. And we're not doing this to get ourselves subsidies or for other selfish reasons (mostly) -- we're doing it for the public. And there's nothing wrong with negative politics -- that's how this country has worked since the beginning.
Unlike all the other techniques -- that dream of the day when there's massive participation -- this doesn't seem that remote. I bet $50,000 and a lot of volunteer manpower could could counter $500,000 in campaign finances, if the target was right and the manpower clever.
Your clothing and other items are not a symbol, they are functional. A diamonds only value is sentimental. A conscientious person -- who may make compromises in their life -- may still recognize the taint in an item they presumably will keep and wear their entire life.
Everyone seems to think she'll be terribly ashamed if she can't show her friends a diamond. Alright, I probably hang out with a different sort of people, but I feel pretty confident in our circles that wouldn't be a problem (at least among the opinions of people me and my SO would care about). Diamonds are just a status symbol, an empty vanity.
But, if there's a problem, I don't think it's a hard problem. If you give her an engagement ring that has some meaning -- even if it's a little sappy -- that will be much better than a diamond. She won't be able to show off the size of her stone, but she will have a story to tell, and that's a lot better. A diamond is just a commodity, whose value is a complete illusion. I don't know what sort of racket appraisers are involved in, but they are obviously lying when they value the items.
Coming up with a meaningful ring is hard, though (of course, that's what makes it more valuable to your fiancee). Maybe there's something in your or her family's past. If there's no ring, maybe there's something else that could be set in a ring. Maybe there's some tradition -- ethnic or otherwise -- that could serve as the basis of a design. Even if it's a tradition that only goes back one generation, you have to start somewhere.
Get something custom made by a good metalsmith, and you'll have something with far greater sentimental value than a boring stone. It might not be cheaper -- but you'll be supporting an artist, and not a cartel. (Remember though that it may take a while to get that ring made)
The real relation to Postscript is that you're building all the graphical primitives into X (via the Render extension). But that's not related to Postscript the language, except that you could more easily build a Postscript interpreter that rendered to X, because you wouldn't have to write your own graphical routines.
But what your adding is really on the level of Xlib -- primitive graphic operations that very few people write to directly. Instead there are programming layers -- widget sets, things like Tk's Canvas, or DPS/DGS -- that would access that low level. And presumably when these layers are updated to user the Render extension, our apps will seemlessly support the new graphics (though of course most won't know what to do with the resolution independence they've just attained, but in time that will change).
Your history is a little off. OS X is NeXTSTEP (reborn). And porting APIs to a *nix will make it a NeXTSTEP clone, because NeXTSTEP, just like OS X, was built off a BSD core. Obviously you don't get the trademark along with it, so it's just a clone:)
There's distribution-level issues (filesystem layout and so on), but you can fake that if you need to.
The email is pretty technical, and doesn't give any idea of what their goals are. Is this just fiddling around for the fun of it, or are they thinking about introducing a new extension for mainstream use?
If they are thinking of taking this someplace serious, it could be interesting. People probably remember that OS X uses PDF to display items, and its inspiration (NeXTSTEP) used Postscript. This gives resolution-independent display, and highly accurate WYSIWYG possibilities (since you render to the printer just like you render to the screen).
GNUStep is a clone of NeXTSTEP, and uses some sort of similar rendering. I'm not clear on their status -- for a long time they were waiting for a Display Ghostscript (DGS) extension, so they could copy NeXTSTEP faithfully. Proprietary Postscript extensions for X have been around for a long time. Ultimately, it seemed like someone didn't want to wait around, and wrote a straight Xlib backend for GNUStep, with none of the vector-graphics properties. I think that backend has stuck, since it works, and DGS isn't the primary platform at this point. But I'm not sure.
This could be an alternative to DGS, or something to build ontop of, or maybe it's just people fooling around with another alternative that wouldn't be useful. Obviously, fonts and anti-aliasing and all that jazz is really essential for a complete rendering platform -- just doing splines is a long ways from that.
(If you can't get to gnustep.org, try gnustep.net -- it's good stuff, even if development has been slow over the years. Too bad FSF/GNU didn't back GNUStep instead of creating GNOME -- I don't know what was up with that)
It sounds like you don't like dishonest ads. That's something different than not liking negative ads. You can be dishonest in a positive ad -- for instance, taking credit for something you didn't really support. Bush did this several times with healthcare issues -- claiming credit for Texas laws that he merely didn't veto (he didn't even sign them) -- taking credit for those were dishonest.
Blaming someone for voting in a certain way is difficult, there's always extra circumstances. It's also easy to manipulate -- if you know a vote is going a certain way (no matter your personal vote), you can vote as your constituents want even if you would vote differently if your vote did matter.
But you can be honest in ads -- and more than just truthful, but truly honest -- and still have very negative things to say. It would be easier to do this if all procedings of congress were public, so you can see what people say and do, not just what they vote. You could see who got those riders put in, for instance. But even without that, there's a lot more to say than you read in the papers or hear in the debates.
Hell yeah. I've always thought negative campaigning was underrated (not just effectiveness, but in terms of legitimacy). People who want "positive" campaigns are mostly politicians who are bad, and don't want to get called out on their political and personal decisions. Or people who have an inflated opinion of the current system, and want to keep it all as an inside job. And I think personal attacks are fair game too -- people who are dishonest and immoral in their personal lives usually act similarly in their political lives. (Though I'd draw the line at relationships and family)
So, a few dollars (not even that many) and a will to tear up a politician can go a long way. I'd give to a anti-Hollings fund. (And hell yes that's free speach, not "soft money" -- if defaming public figures isn't a free speach issue, I don't know what is)
We could also put the low price of online ads to our advantage. I think a "Hollings: corporate shill" ads would probably attract more attention than the low ad prices would imply.
That's unfortunate for you that your company has decided, willfully, to tie itself intimately to Word. That was a choice -- there were many possible alternatives. Most of them are not exactly analogous to the technique you've used, but they can achieve the same results.
Your complaint is like saying, "Perl is no good, because we can't run our Visual Basic programs in it." It's not the fault of other office suites that they aren't Word -- they aren't Word by definition. Your company wrote your software against a very proprietary interface, and so you're stuck with Word until you rewrite.
workplaces are so scattered and decentralized that buses take too long to get anyone anywhere useful, and extensive commuter and light rail would have to be practically everywhere, with lots of parallel east-west and north-south lines and express tracks in order to work.
Then maybe SkyTrans would be more appropriate. Fast maglev transportation, point-to-point -- kind of what you describe, only scaled differently.
The big downside being that it's not even reached prototype. But if it panned out like they think it will, it would be cheaper than one big train line even with R&D included. More conventional PRT designs could address the last-mile issue, but probably wouldn't be appropriate for the long-haul, and a maglev-like fat pipe might be necessary. (Though there might be enough rooms on the highway if shorter trips were redirected)
True, but that can only go so far. I don't think people's primary moral guide is fear of punishment. It's empathy. Then perhaps social conditioning, and then maybe fear.
Of course, it would be better to punish corporations for their wrongdoings than not to. But that only gets them up to the moral equivalent of the three year old.
I agree with you, but from a descriptive standpoint the original statement (no right and wrong except profit) is true for the publically traded corporation (which is not the end-all and be-all of business).
The (publically traded) corporation is an entity that has only one purpose -- profit. It does not have children, it doesn't care what the weather is, and it doesn't have any natural basis for morality. It is a carefully constructed fiction.
The people in business have moral anchors. They have lives and connections to the people around them -- they have reasons to be good people. They may ignore these, but those moral anchors still exist.
But a publically traded corporation truly has no moral standard. It has "human capital" which may carry moral baggage with them, but that is just an unfortunate attribute of the resource -- you get what you pay for. And if you pay enough, you can even get human capital without moral baggage. No corporation has ever had to stop business because it couldn't find people to do their immoral bidding (sadly).
But your point probably remains -- just because the beast is amoral does not mean we can't redefine it by moral standards.
An interesting hypothesis. But isn't the generational war you describe really a class war? It's not about old people and young people, it's about the capitalists and the consumers (or perhaps the anti-consumers) -- sure, the capitalists are mostly older, but that's just because it takes time to accumulate wealth and economic power.
For example, in his youth Bush was a drug user and a draft dodger. On the face of it, he was the typical implicitly anti-establishment youth of his time. But he wasn't really -- he wasn't the target or ever likely to be a victim of the drug war. He was always a capitalist, even when he was a youth.
I think we was talking about "inner loops" -- a classic speed problem for languages like Python. For example, Python is very bad at something like:
i = 1 for j in xrange(1000): i = i + some_func(j)
Dumb example, but it more or less shows the issue... when you are dealing with data structures the overhead of the loop isn't that significant (e.g., doing list manipulation). But when you are dealing with numbers there's the potential to be much more efficient, and Python's for loop overhead will be very significant.
Of course Numeric Python can solve many of these problems, as can SciPy's weave and Pyrex, which compiles psuedo-Python to C. You can also program your inner loops directly in C, and make a Python module out of it. Or even write the module in Fortran.
Python clearly isn't a good language to write number crunching algorithms. But it's great for using those algorithms -- and it makes it possible (and relatively easy) to mix in other languages that are good for those algorithms.
You do not have any right not to be bothered at a public address -- email, phone, or physical.
Commercial speech is not afforded the same protections under the first ammendment as other forms of speech. You'll note that all anti-telemarketer legislation only applies to commercial calls -- non-profits can call you at any time. The same is true of spam laws -- they do not apply to non-commercial emails.
So it isn't that spam can be made illegal because emailing is not protected by free speech. It can be made illegal only insofar as it is commercial.
I think there are certain provisions about communications in which the receiver pays the cost, and email does (somewhat) fall under this. I'm not sure if even a non-profit can call you unsolicited at a cell number -- though maybe they could, I don't know. The cost of email is so low, though, that I don't think you could make that argument unless the emailer was being particularly aggressive -- e.g., sending email to random addresses at a domain.
Tell us more -- who sells the service, and what kind of government control is there? Is there competition? At what level? (Where I am, there's DSL competition, but only trivial competition -- Ameritech controls everything, and there's just a few other front organizations)
So what's Canada (or Calgary) done differently (and obviously better) than the US?
I think the big question however is that would only the government have use of this e-mail account? I'm not sure how spam could be prevented otherwise.
Easy, charge for sending mail to those mailboxes. It could be done cheaper than snail mail, so it'd be competetive, and the post office could still back it up with paper delivery for non-email-using patrons.
This would put it out of the hands of most peer communication (unless you wanted to be official about something), but it would still be very useful. Maybe they'd have accounts associated with a public key, you'd put money in the account, and then sign your messages that you sent to post office emails (which would also increase overall security when doing official business). You could provide a PDF attachment to compliment the plaintext, and they could print and deliver that if you didn't read the email within a certain amount of time (perhaps that you yourself specify in the email).
It could be a pretty slick system, really. And when I think about it, I'd trust the post office as a PK certification authority much more than any other institution (public or private) that I can think of. Verisign is evil, and they're what comes out of private authorities. From the FBI I'd expect Clipper chip, Echelon, or other security-compromising malicious activity. But the post office is pretty damned good at security (massive, mundane security, like not opening letters). And they are politically neutral, while most other government agencies are not. And they don't gouge the market, whether or not they are a monopoly, unlike private industry. And they are democratic, creating a real infrastructure even in areas where there isn't profit to be made.
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The format itself isn't sufficient for many domains -- I rather dislike PDF-only documentation, and indexing and searching is sufficient but not great. But I get the impression that the format itself is fairly transparent, and while Adobe has not been a good owner, PDF is doing pretty well. However, it does show that an "open" format doesn't mean much until there's actual competing products, and it's taken a long time to get that for PDF -- it will likely be the same for other "open" standards that have proprietary roots.
The real problem is much more trivial -- universally machine-readable cards. Just having a standard on how IDs are stored in a bar-code form would be enough -- the ID numbers already exist (every state has a license ID, prepend the state code and you've got a national ID). This doesn't exclude the possibility of having more than one ID and number (I assume there's nothing exclusionary in having different state IDs), but that would be easy to fix too (just match up SSN during ID signup).
Once you have this reader possibility, big brother has nearly everything necessary. They're talking about swiping cards at every large building, every federal building, and with the new public-private "security initiatives", there's no reason this couldn't be matched up to all sorts of other systems. This could lead to a thorough record of certain activities -- many related to our fundamental rights and duties as a citizen. If the database was expanded further -- in particular, credit cards and other automated payment systems -- people's lives could be tracked quite closely. This wouldn't necessarily track any one activity, but would be a way of profiling. (Past experience shows that the FBI will use this to track any sort of dissident -- considering how often they've done it in the past, and that they have never been reformed, only slightly hobbled a couple times)
But don't worry, the card would be voluntary (haha -- as long as you consider interstate travel voluntary, internet commerce voluntary, etc).
And no one's criticising Microsoft for advocating a position to the government -- if you believe in something, you have a duty to try to convince the public of the same thing. People are criticising Microsoft for being a lier, for being a criminal, for creating astroturf grassroots campaigns, for not noting affiliations when it is important, for pretending to be people they are not, and for red baiting. And probably some other things too.
Sure, it's easy enough to make all government documents available as PDF files. Then the public can read the documents without using Word or whatever. But that's not sufficient, or even very important -- you can read Word documents on just about any platform at this point, at least sufficiently to get the information (and Word has always been horrible at describing the layout of a document cross-platform).
If all the documents are available in PDF, though, that will just suck. You don't open a PDF file in an editor and change it. The canonical form of the document is in Word, or PageMaker, or some other (usually proprietary) format. This means that the document will very possibly become obsolete in the future (almost inevitable, really). That means that the future public will be locked out of its previous resources.
Really, everything produced by the government should be in an open format -- not just a finish representation, but all intermediate forms of the document. Word should never save a DOC file -- maybe RTF, maybe HTML (though HTML sucks for that sort of thing).
Still, a proprietary product may be more useful in some cases. But public policy has to make a line, it has to create a standard, even where the standard may not be necessary in all cases (and I think it's demonstrable that it is necessary in many cases). Without standards the public leaves itself open to graft, expedient but short-sighted decisions, and the sometimes ignorant judgement of some of its civil servants. The public is invested in these systems for a much longer time than any one government employee, and the decision should ultimately be in the hands of the public.
Linux has survived all the dot-com bullshit because it was always by the people and for the people. The companies that have come and gone never effected the sole of the movement. They've helped at times, they've hurt at times, but they never were essential. If they all went away, free software would continue. If all the hackers went away, free software would die -- even if its licenses lived on and were used, even if its code continued to be extended by hired hands, its sole would be gone. It would just be another business efficiency, cast aside at some future date when the suit's whimsy changed.
We didn't get here by asking suits what was important or trying to get their approval. We didn't need them then, and we need them even less now. We might be able to use them -- but they aren't us and never will be. We should not forget that.
The attacks don't have to be entirely based on their IP policies, though. You could mark the politician as a corporate whore without getting into anything technical -- maybe by talking about businesses they've been involved in, conflicts of interest in their past, hints of graft and kickbacks, and publicizing who's payed for what (not just campaign funds, but suspicious activities like funding parties and whatnot).
I'm convinced we can be very truthful and very damning at the same time. Especially with the sort of corporate scum that we'd be attacking, where IP policy is not their only ethically compromised position.
I think it's a great idea, which is why I'm bringing it up again. Lobbying congress and educating them on these matters just isn't going to work. Politicians aren't passing things like the DMCA because they're ignorant -- they are doing it because they are bad politicians. After failing to do the right thing over and over, we can't give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. We can't reform corporate shills, but maybe we can replace them.
Instead of pleading with them to do the right thing, we need to at least try to make them do the right thing. In a case when it's hard to identify the good politician -- especially the good and effective politician -- it's a lot easier to identify the bad guy. There's lots of politicians that aren't standing up for the public's rights. But there's only a few that are standing up to actively take those rights away. We should focus on them.
When we do, we can run online ads, radio ads, and grassroot ads, anything to try to defeat this person. It doesn't have to be that expensive. We play the negative game -- it doesn't matter who the opponent is, this is a question of symbolism, of asserting our power. Because if we can cost that one politician the election, that will really mean something. Sure, there'll be more to step up in his place, but maybe we can get them out too -- do it a couple times, and people will be afraid to be the corporate media lacky.
And yeah, that's not the nicest political game. It's classic "special interest" tactics. But shit... if politics was so nice, we wouldn't be having these problems. And we're not doing this to get ourselves subsidies or for other selfish reasons (mostly) -- we're doing it for the public. And there's nothing wrong with negative politics -- that's how this country has worked since the beginning.
Unlike all the other techniques -- that dream of the day when there's massive participation -- this doesn't seem that remote. I bet $50,000 and a lot of volunteer manpower could could counter $500,000 in campaign finances, if the target was right and the manpower clever.
Your clothing and other items are not a symbol, they are functional. A diamonds only value is sentimental. A conscientious person -- who may make compromises in their life -- may still recognize the taint in an item they presumably will keep and wear their entire life.
But, if there's a problem, I don't think it's a hard problem. If you give her an engagement ring that has some meaning -- even if it's a little sappy -- that will be much better than a diamond. She won't be able to show off the size of her stone, but she will have a story to tell, and that's a lot better. A diamond is just a commodity, whose value is a complete illusion. I don't know what sort of racket appraisers are involved in, but they are obviously lying when they value the items.
Coming up with a meaningful ring is hard, though (of course, that's what makes it more valuable to your fiancee). Maybe there's something in your or her family's past. If there's no ring, maybe there's something else that could be set in a ring. Maybe there's some tradition -- ethnic or otherwise -- that could serve as the basis of a design. Even if it's a tradition that only goes back one generation, you have to start somewhere.
Get something custom made by a good metalsmith, and you'll have something with far greater sentimental value than a boring stone. It might not be cheaper -- but you'll be supporting an artist, and not a cartel. (Remember though that it may take a while to get that ring made)
The real relation to Postscript is that you're building all the graphical primitives into X (via the Render extension). But that's not related to Postscript the language, except that you could more easily build a Postscript interpreter that rendered to X, because you wouldn't have to write your own graphical routines.
But what your adding is really on the level of Xlib -- primitive graphic operations that very few people write to directly. Instead there are programming layers -- widget sets, things like Tk's Canvas, or DPS/DGS -- that would access that low level. And presumably when these layers are updated to user the Render extension, our apps will seemlessly support the new graphics (though of course most won't know what to do with the resolution independence they've just attained, but in time that will change).
Sounds very cool.
There's distribution-level issues (filesystem layout and so on), but you can fake that if you need to.
If they are thinking of taking this someplace serious, it could be interesting. People probably remember that OS X uses PDF to display items, and its inspiration (NeXTSTEP) used Postscript. This gives resolution-independent display, and highly accurate WYSIWYG possibilities (since you render to the printer just like you render to the screen).
GNUStep is a clone of NeXTSTEP, and uses some sort of similar rendering. I'm not clear on their status -- for a long time they were waiting for a Display Ghostscript (DGS) extension, so they could copy NeXTSTEP faithfully. Proprietary Postscript extensions for X have been around for a long time. Ultimately, it seemed like someone didn't want to wait around, and wrote a straight Xlib backend for GNUStep, with none of the vector-graphics properties. I think that backend has stuck, since it works, and DGS isn't the primary platform at this point. But I'm not sure.
This could be an alternative to DGS, or something to build ontop of, or maybe it's just people fooling around with another alternative that wouldn't be useful. Obviously, fonts and anti-aliasing and all that jazz is really essential for a complete rendering platform -- just doing splines is a long ways from that.
(If you can't get to gnustep.org, try gnustep.net -- it's good stuff, even if development has been slow over the years. Too bad FSF/GNU didn't back GNUStep instead of creating GNOME -- I don't know what was up with that)
Blaming someone for voting in a certain way is difficult, there's always extra circumstances. It's also easy to manipulate -- if you know a vote is going a certain way (no matter your personal vote), you can vote as your constituents want even if you would vote differently if your vote did matter.
But you can be honest in ads -- and more than just truthful, but truly honest -- and still have very negative things to say. It would be easier to do this if all procedings of congress were public, so you can see what people say and do, not just what they vote. You could see who got those riders put in, for instance. But even without that, there's a lot more to say than you read in the papers or hear in the debates.
So, a few dollars (not even that many) and a will to tear up a politician can go a long way. I'd give to a anti-Hollings fund. (And hell yes that's free speach, not "soft money" -- if defaming public figures isn't a free speach issue, I don't know what is)
We could also put the low price of online ads to our advantage. I think a "Hollings: corporate shill" ads would probably attract more attention than the low ad prices would imply.
Your complaint is like saying, "Perl is no good, because we can't run our Visual Basic programs in it." It's not the fault of other office suites that they aren't Word -- they aren't Word by definition. Your company wrote your software against a very proprietary interface, and so you're stuck with Word until you rewrite.
The big downside being that it's not even reached prototype. But if it panned out like they think it will, it would be cheaper than one big train line even with R&D included. More conventional PRT designs could address the last-mile issue, but probably wouldn't be appropriate for the long-haul, and a maglev-like fat pipe might be necessary. (Though there might be enough rooms on the highway if shorter trips were redirected)
Of course, it would be better to punish corporations for their wrongdoings than not to. But that only gets them up to the moral equivalent of the three year old.
The (publically traded) corporation is an entity that has only one purpose -- profit. It does not have children, it doesn't care what the weather is, and it doesn't have any natural basis for morality. It is a carefully constructed fiction.
The people in business have moral anchors. They have lives and connections to the people around them -- they have reasons to be good people. They may ignore these, but those moral anchors still exist.
But a publically traded corporation truly has no moral standard. It has "human capital" which may carry moral baggage with them, but that is just an unfortunate attribute of the resource -- you get what you pay for. And if you pay enough, you can even get human capital without moral baggage. No corporation has ever had to stop business because it couldn't find people to do their immoral bidding (sadly).
But your point probably remains -- just because the beast is amoral does not mean we can't redefine it by moral standards.
Then you are more truly their enemy.
For example, in his youth Bush was a drug user and a draft dodger. On the face of it, he was the typical implicitly anti-establishment youth of his time. But he wasn't really -- he wasn't the target or ever likely to be a victim of the drug war. He was always a capitalist, even when he was a youth.
i = 1
for j in xrange(1000): i = i + some_func(j)
Dumb example, but it more or less shows the issue... when you are dealing with data structures the overhead of the loop isn't that significant (e.g., doing list manipulation). But when you are dealing with numbers there's the potential to be much more efficient, and Python's for loop overhead will be very significant.
Of course Numeric Python can solve many of these problems, as can SciPy's weave and Pyrex, which compiles psuedo-Python to C. You can also program your inner loops directly in C, and make a Python module out of it. Or even write the module in Fortran.
Python clearly isn't a good language to write number crunching algorithms. But it's great for using those algorithms -- and it makes it possible (and relatively easy) to mix in other languages that are good for those algorithms.
Commercial speech is not afforded the same protections under the first ammendment as other forms of speech. You'll note that all anti-telemarketer legislation only applies to commercial calls -- non-profits can call you at any time. The same is true of spam laws -- they do not apply to non-commercial emails.
So it isn't that spam can be made illegal because emailing is not protected by free speech. It can be made illegal only insofar as it is commercial.
I think there are certain provisions about communications in which the receiver pays the cost, and email does (somewhat) fall under this. I'm not sure if even a non-profit can call you unsolicited at a cell number -- though maybe they could, I don't know. The cost of email is so low, though, that I don't think you could make that argument unless the emailer was being particularly aggressive -- e.g., sending email to random addresses at a domain.
So what's Canada (or Calgary) done differently (and obviously better) than the US?
This would put it out of the hands of most peer communication (unless you wanted to be official about something), but it would still be very useful. Maybe they'd have accounts associated with a public key, you'd put money in the account, and then sign your messages that you sent to post office emails (which would also increase overall security when doing official business). You could provide a PDF attachment to compliment the plaintext, and they could print and deliver that if you didn't read the email within a certain amount of time (perhaps that you yourself specify in the email).
It could be a pretty slick system, really. And when I think about it, I'd trust the post office as a PK certification authority much more than any other institution (public or private) that I can think of. Verisign is evil, and they're what comes out of private authorities. From the FBI I'd expect Clipper chip, Echelon, or other security-compromising malicious activity. But the post office is pretty damned good at security (massive, mundane security, like not opening letters). And they are politically neutral, while most other government agencies are not. And they don't gouge the market, whether or not they are a monopoly, unlike private industry. And they are democratic, creating a real infrastructure even in areas where there isn't profit to be made.