"wouldn't a judge have to throw out such evidence as its method of gathering is a clear end-run around the Constitution?"
In theory, sure, the courts would have to uphold our constitutional rights. In practice, the courts ruled that the government can use information collected by corporations, and congress created laws to prevent that behavior (a rare display of backbone). The courts also ruled that email stored on a third party system is not subject to 4th amendment protections.
"However, it also means it would be possible to use "linux" at ten different jobs and have ten completely different experiences."
Which is exactly why the FSF's philosophy on calling it "GNU/Linux" has some merit -- "Linux" as a catch-all term for operating systems that use a Linux kernel causes massive confusion. I happen to use Fedora, but I still frequently get questions about Ubuntu, many of them completely unanswerable for someone who is not an Ubuntu user (e.g. things related to configuration, packages, etc.). This is why I prefer to use the name of the distro, which is less ambiguous.
"A big advantage of Microsoft products is that they CAN'T be changed by everyone and a user's experience with, for example, Windows 7 will be damn near the same anywhere they go."
In reality, though, most Linux users spend little time hacking their system, or if they do they are only hacking one particular package, so the situation is exactly what you described: Fedora 12 will be nearly identical everywhere you go (except a possibly different window manager/desktop environment).
"we have the presence of US companies, services, and products in China, which is beneficial both economically and (in the long run) socially and politically."
Beneficial socially and politically? Funny, the presence of US corporations has not done much for the citizens of Saudi Arabia, who continue to be persecuted by their government. What reason is there to think that the Chinese will magically see better lives just because US corporations happen to operate in China? Particularly since those corporations are doing absolutely nothing to buck the censorship or monitoring efforts.
Sure, the Chinese economy has grown very rapidly in recent years, but do not confuse "high GDP" or "more corporations" with "better lives for the people."
I would not refer to it as DRM since there is nothing digital about it and nothing is being "managed."
"If you give it away, you can't read it anymore."
Yes, but that has nothing to do with DRM. With an ebook, you are not really "giving it away," you are giving a copy of the book to someone, and that does not deprive you of the book; this is equally true of a paper book. What restriction technologies are used for in this case is to deceive the user into thinking that they are giving away their book to a friend, which is not at all what they are doing.
"Isn't that kind of thing also part of the intention of DRM?"
I would say that it goes even further than that. As far as I can tell, the publishers are using DRM not just to keep us all dependent on them, but to increase that dependence. Restriction technologies can do a lot more than just prevent copying, and publishers have indicated in the past that they are planning to use DRM to overcome certain "problems."
For example, textbook publishers hate the idea of used book sales, and they are even more worried about it than they are about filesharing. Some time ago, the NY Times ran an article about this issue, and about how publishers try to thwart such sales. The obvious stuff, like changing around problem sets and refusing to sell older editions of the books, was all covered, but then they started discussing some future plans, which included the possibility of creating ebooks that can only be accessed for a limited period of time.
From where I sit, DRM is about ensuring that a certain group of rich and powerful members of society can remain rich and powerful.
No, I will continue my anti-patent stance, thanks. I hope these suits result in a massive reform of the patent system, but I have a feeling I will be disappointed.
On September 10, 2001, the intelligence agencies knew that Osama bin Laden's men were in the country, that they were going to participate in a major attack, and that they were planning to use airplanes in the attack. The people who could have done something about it were not assuming that everyone who got on an airplane wanted to get off of it alive; after decades of dealing with suicide bombers in the middle east, why would anyone assume that bin Laden's men were hoping to survive their own attack?
The only difference between then and now is that these days, the government pretends to be working to keep us safe, and the people expect that fantasy to be maintained for them. People who remain calm and think for a few moments see right through most of it, but most of the population does not bother to think and just go on assuming that when their government says "this will keep you safe" it will really keep them safe.
"the iPod took the concept and made it popular for the people."
Which "concept" would you be referring to here? If it is the "concept" of portable music, no, Apple did nothing to bring that to the people. The "concept" of portable digital music was also not introduced to the masses by the iPod, nor was the concept of more than 72 minutes of portable music. Really, as with most Apple products, the only innovation to speak of was the advertising.
"Mp3 players were just another tech until the iPod came along - it wasn't the first, or even the best, but it was certainly the one that changed the portable music world."
No, the iPod just happens to be a highly popular and recognizable portable music player. MP3 players were "just another tech" until P2P filesharing brought millions upon millions of MP3 encoded songs into the picture, which is the only reason there was ever a market for the iPod to dominate. Very few people want to take the time to rip enough CDs to justify the expense of an iPod, or even to avoid the inconvenience of carrying a CD player and some CDs around, a fact that is as true now as it was in 1997 when the first portable MP3 players were sold. Portable CD players remain profitable on the mass market, mainly because they are so inexpensive and so many people still have larger CD collections than MP3 libraries.
As for the "gigantic runaway success" of the iTunes store, it was hardly the first such success, it is just the longest running. mp3.com was just as successful, considering the number of users and the smaller market size at that time. As I noted above, the only innovation or revolution to speak of here is the advertising.
Perhaps that is because so much of their funding came after they agreed to do things for the corporations that were offering to sponsor them? Like, say, agreeing that they would produce a system that could run Windows? As the AC noted, a $100 laptop is not at all impossible to produce, you just need to have modest hardware.
Well the OLPC can be used as an eBook reader, and from a technology standpoint possessing just a handful of the machines could mean unprecedented access to books for a school. Of course, this is assuming that the books are available, in a libre format, in the language that is being used at the school, which leaves few books available even for schools in developed nations.
In my opinion, what is killing the OLPC program is not that it was misguided from the start, but that it must fight a tidal wave of people whose interests run counter to the entire concept. American and European corporations see the developing world as a fresh market, with fresh business opportunities, but the OLPC project seeks to raise the standard of education without making the schools dependent on developed nations (in the long run). That is the root of the problem: the very capital and technical expertise that would be needed to jump start the project comes from people and corporations who stand to gain less if the project succeeds in its primary goal.
Microsoft was already caught seek to turn the OLPC project into a vehicle for entering third world schools and ensuring that they have a market in those countries. I wonder how many other companies had internal memos detailing which aspects of the project ran counter to their goals and how they could try to manipulate the project into compliance.
If using GPL software is so dangerous for business, why are so many companies running Linux in production environments? These are some of the most successful companies in the world, and they have been using Linux for a while -- where are the problems that you seem so sure would ensue from such a situation? If you remain close minded about the GPL, you will be missing out on a lot of high quality software...
I had an uncle working for MetLife in the early 90s; had he and his team not put in many months of work back then, the Y2K bug would have left millions of insurance claims unpayable, from business insurance to health plans. On any given day, thousands upon thousands of insurance transactions are processed automatically by a computer, which would have rejected everything as invalid because the claim dates would have appeared to be before the policies were opened.
People who think Y2K was not a big deal were either children when the problem was solved or never really understood the problem to begin with. Y2K38 is the next big date/time bug to deal with; many people here on/. will probably wind up working on fixing the problem long before it causes catastrophes, and we will be pretty old on January 1, 2038. I am also pretty sure that people like you will be saying, "There was never really a problem" for many years afterward, and someone like me will probably have to reply with a story about a relative who solved the problem before the press started running stories about the end of the world.
What this chapter completely misses is that the emergency spending on Y2K fixes was just the tail end of a long effort of companies updating their software. Journalists were not talking about the Y2K bug in 1991, but plenty of programmers were already aware of it and already working on solutions to the problem. By the time the story got interesting -- as the year 2000 approached -- the problem had been mostly solved without any prodding from the media or pushing from the president. This whole situation was compounded by the fact that most people, including the journalists covering the story, had no understanding of how computers stored dates, and the fact that companies whose products had nothing to do with the Y2K bug were advertising their software as "Y2K compliant," and everyone wound up thinking that there was impending doom.
For the record, the Y2K bug did actually threaten critical computer systems, many of which were mainframes installed decades earlier, but those systems were fixed long before the story ever ran on the news.
Perhaps Richard Stallman's argument applies here: copyrights are out of date, and the entire concept needs to be rethought. Stallman argues that copyrights were originally an industrial regulation, created in an age where one required industrial grade equipment to efficiently copy creative works. Personal computers and the Internet have changed the situation, since individuals routinely possess both the equipment and knowledge of how to efficiently copy information. The very concept of a copyright needs to be updated to reflect new technologies.
Of course, the people who stand to lose money from a revamped copyright system also happen to be the people with the most influence over the government, which is why instead we keep seeing laws passed that try to disguise reality and make us all think that nothing has really changed with regard to creative works (e.g. the DMCA).
Part of the issue is the culture surrounding C and C++ code: there is a demand for backward compatibility. The C++ standards committee is very wary of breaking compatibility with previous editions of the standard, notwithstanding the breakage that compiler writers introduce. Thus, we are left with antiquated and frankly dangerous features that should not be used, but which novices wind up using anyway.
Strings are a perfect example. The C++ standard defines a string type that is decent enough and fixes a lot of problems associated with C-style strings. However, because of the demand for backward compatibility, C-style strings remain in the language, remain in use in parts of the library, and continue to wreak havoc on C++ programs.
I am not saying that the backward compatibility is a back thing -- in fact, I appreciate it very much, given the large body of old but useful code out there -- but I cannot deny that it creates problems. What I am saying is that I can see why someone would develop a new language to replace C++ instead of just writing a C++ library, given that there are a lot of people who write new code using these out of date features, thus creating a stream of horror stories about C++.
"ever read someone's c++ code? has it been a good experience?"
Sure, when the code is written by someone who really knows how to use C++. Ever read bad PHP code? Bad Java code? I have seen programmers do things like this:
int int1, int2, int3, int4, int6, int7;
No, that is neither a joke nor an exaggeration, and the missing number is deliberate. This is a declaration I saw on a recent project. This kind of poor coding is language agnostic, and it is entirely irrelevant whether someone is using C++, PHP, or even a language like Haskell (bad Haskell code is worse than that worst C++ code I have ever seen -- if you use a functional language, get it right!).
On the other hand, I have seen some maintainable C++ code, with appropriate and useful comments, well thought out classes and class relationships, and expert use of the STL. I once worked on a project with C++ code that dated back to the early 90s, and had been continuous updated to support new features and needs, to make use of the STL (yes, this can be written into old code without causing a disaster), and so support systems that did not even exist when the code was originally written.
Don't blame the language, blame programmers who never learned about good programming practices. Blame computer science programs that give people degrees they do not deserve. Blame an industry that will hire anyone who can write a hello world program and then assume that they are capable of writing a maintainable system with millions of lines of code. The best programming language in the world will not solve the problem of poor programmers and poor coding practices.
In other words, look at how things were done back in the 90s.
"People would have to refresh their browsers to display/submit forms,"
Why would you need to refresh your browser to submit a form? You enter your form data, and you hit the submit button, and everything is good to go. No muss, no fuss, and no need to send request after request to your server -- two are sufficient (one to get the form, one to submit the form). Considering that a lot of website use does not even involve form submission, you can save even more -- one request per page is entirely sufficient.
"which would require Apache/PHP to serve a *full web page* for every form displayed and submitted."
Serving a full web page is not a terrible strain; in fact, for static content, it can be highly efficient. A while back, Slashdot ran a story about the servers that run Slashdot itself; the majority were serving static content that was pregenerated and refreshed every so often, and only those users who absolutely required dynamic content (such as those submitting a comment) would be served by the dynamic server. I have seen many websites that are linked to from Slashdot switch to static content just to handle the load (a tactic that is successful in some cases).
"This in itself causes a load on servers, before dynamic content is even considered."
Load which is unavoidable even with AJAX. The AJAX code itself must be sent, at the very least, as well as the various UI elements and CSS that are necessary with AJAX -- all of which is still being served like a static page. This is not factoring in any dynamic content that is sent along with that code, which is almost always present, and all this has to happen before any of the AJAX code actually does anything.
You might say that the AJAX code reduces the overall overhead, because it lowers the amount of dynamic content that must be generated. This might be true in a few cases, particularly those where the data is constantly being fed and where there is only one page of interest (think stock market data), but I would be very wary of any assertion that AJAX lowers overhead on a website like Facebook, where the users frequently browse to different pages (different profiles) and where various AJAX applications follow them around (instant messenger, etc.).
"If anything, AJAX *lowers* server load."
The funny thing is that in most cases where I have heard of AJAX causing a significantly lower overhead, the problem has been the use of HTTP itself -- other protocols are inherently more efficient for those tasks. AJAX makes web pages look nicer (in some cases) and feel more like desktop applications, but I would not claim that it reduces server loads except in a few niche cases.
What you said might have been true 10 years ago, before all this AJAX code. When you have millions of users pumping out AJAX requests, your middleware is going to wind up working a lot harder, and the database is still doing all the things it was doing back in the 90s.
"What about the environmental impact of the extra time required to write the same functionality in C++?"
Should be about equal to the environment impact of maintaining the PHP language itself; in fact, it is likely to be less than that, since there would be no need to maintain the actual interpreter, but only duplicate some functionality. This is really a one-off, and the libraries could be reused by thousands of enterprises.
Bugs and security breaches do not cause any more CO2 emission than bug-free code, so I do not really see your point in bringing them up. The other differences in development are pretty minor, since PHP derives its programming model from C.
The same people who did not bother to state that the bailout money should not be used to pay bonuses, buy private jets, or pay for any number of other luxuries that many of these companies spent tax dollars on.
This is "loss" the same way that the RIAA "loses" money when you download your music. In other words, they define the word differently than everyone else, but do not mention their different definition in an effort to confuse you.
"The Patriot Act is intended to focus on groups of people organizing to carry out a planned action. It doesn't do anything for single crazy acting on their own."
Except that intelligence agencies and the FBI were already aware that Osama Bin Laden was planning something big, that members of his group had been traveling under false identities, and that at least two of them were in the United States prior to the attack. The President had been sent a memo that there was a very high likelihood that Osama Bin Laden's men would hijack airplanes as part of an attack on the United States.
Lack of intelligence gathering authority was not the problem. The problem was that a new administration was in power, and that administration was too busy firing people from the previous administration to bother listening to the warnings coming from the experts.
"is it only terrorism if the perpetrator is Muslim?"
It is only terrorism if you are fighting against the United States, our interests, or our allies and their interests. If you are fighting against a government we would be happy to see leave, you are a heroic freedom fighter; if you are fighting against a government we do not particularly care about, it is just a civil war. As soon as you start fighting against any US interest -- even the interests of private corporations -- you are a terrorist regardless of what color your skin is or what religion you practice.
Case in point: nobody is calling any of the parties to the war in Congo terrorists, even though they are brutally raping, maiming, and killing civilians. That is just a civil war, as far as the media is concerned. Now, when warlords in Afghanistan shoot at US soldiers, they are not simply an enemy army -- they are terrorists. They are terrorists because they are shooting at Americans. When they were shooting at Russians, they were freedom fighters. If they were shooting at each other, it would be a civil war.
Slashdot Mirror
"wouldn't a judge have to throw out such evidence as its method of gathering is a clear end-run around the Constitution?"
In theory, sure, the courts would have to uphold our constitutional rights. In practice, the courts ruled that the government can use information collected by corporations, and congress created laws to prevent that behavior (a rare display of backbone). The courts also ruled that email stored on a third party system is not subject to 4th amendment protections.
"However, it also means it would be possible to use "linux" at ten different jobs and have ten completely different experiences."
Which is exactly why the FSF's philosophy on calling it "GNU/Linux" has some merit -- "Linux" as a catch-all term for operating systems that use a Linux kernel causes massive confusion. I happen to use Fedora, but I still frequently get questions about Ubuntu, many of them completely unanswerable for someone who is not an Ubuntu user (e.g. things related to configuration, packages, etc.). This is why I prefer to use the name of the distro, which is less ambiguous.
"A big advantage of Microsoft products is that they CAN'T be changed by everyone and a user's experience with, for example, Windows 7 will be damn near the same anywhere they go."
In reality, though, most Linux users spend little time hacking their system, or if they do they are only hacking one particular package, so the situation is exactly what you described: Fedora 12 will be nearly identical everywhere you go (except a possibly different window manager/desktop environment).
"we have the presence of US companies, services, and products in China, which is beneficial both economically and (in the long run) socially and politically."
Beneficial socially and politically? Funny, the presence of US corporations has not done much for the citizens of Saudi Arabia, who continue to be persecuted by their government. What reason is there to think that the Chinese will magically see better lives just because US corporations happen to operate in China? Particularly since those corporations are doing absolutely nothing to buck the censorship or monitoring efforts.
Sure, the Chinese economy has grown very rapidly in recent years, but do not confuse "high GDP" or "more corporations" with "better lives for the people."
When time(2) turns 68, that will be newsworthy.
"A physical book has a sort of built-in DRM!"
I would not refer to it as DRM since there is nothing digital about it and nothing is being "managed."
"If you give it away, you can't read it anymore."
Yes, but that has nothing to do with DRM. With an ebook, you are not really "giving it away," you are giving a copy of the book to someone, and that does not deprive you of the book; this is equally true of a paper book. What restriction technologies are used for in this case is to deceive the user into thinking that they are giving away their book to a friend, which is not at all what they are doing.
"Isn't that kind of thing also part of the intention of DRM?"
I would say that it goes even further than that. As far as I can tell, the publishers are using DRM not just to keep us all dependent on them, but to increase that dependence. Restriction technologies can do a lot more than just prevent copying, and publishers have indicated in the past that they are planning to use DRM to overcome certain "problems."
For example, textbook publishers hate the idea of used book sales, and they are even more worried about it than they are about filesharing. Some time ago, the NY Times ran an article about this issue, and about how publishers try to thwart such sales. The obvious stuff, like changing around problem sets and refusing to sell older editions of the books, was all covered, but then they started discussing some future plans, which included the possibility of creating ebooks that can only be accessed for a limited period of time.
From where I sit, DRM is about ensuring that a certain group of rich and powerful members of society can remain rich and powerful.
I hope they do, it would serve as a great lesson about the patent system.
No, I will continue my anti-patent stance, thanks. I hope these suits result in a massive reform of the patent system, but I have a feeling I will be disappointed.
On September 10, 2001, the intelligence agencies knew that Osama bin Laden's men were in the country, that they were going to participate in a major attack, and that they were planning to use airplanes in the attack. The people who could have done something about it were not assuming that everyone who got on an airplane wanted to get off of it alive; after decades of dealing with suicide bombers in the middle east, why would anyone assume that bin Laden's men were hoping to survive their own attack?
The only difference between then and now is that these days, the government pretends to be working to keep us safe, and the people expect that fantasy to be maintained for them. People who remain calm and think for a few moments see right through most of it, but most of the population does not bother to think and just go on assuming that when their government says "this will keep you safe" it will really keep them safe.
"the iPod took the concept and made it popular for the people."
Which "concept" would you be referring to here? If it is the "concept" of portable music, no, Apple did nothing to bring that to the people. The "concept" of portable digital music was also not introduced to the masses by the iPod, nor was the concept of more than 72 minutes of portable music. Really, as with most Apple products, the only innovation to speak of was the advertising.
"Mp3 players were just another tech until the iPod came along - it wasn't the first, or even the best, but it was certainly the one that changed the portable music world."
No, the iPod just happens to be a highly popular and recognizable portable music player. MP3 players were "just another tech" until P2P filesharing brought millions upon millions of MP3 encoded songs into the picture, which is the only reason there was ever a market for the iPod to dominate. Very few people want to take the time to rip enough CDs to justify the expense of an iPod, or even to avoid the inconvenience of carrying a CD player and some CDs around, a fact that is as true now as it was in 1997 when the first portable MP3 players were sold. Portable CD players remain profitable on the mass market, mainly because they are so inexpensive and so many people still have larger CD collections than MP3 libraries.
As for the "gigantic runaway success" of the iTunes store, it was hardly the first such success, it is just the longest running. mp3.com was just as successful, considering the number of users and the smaller market size at that time. As I noted above, the only innovation or revolution to speak of here is the advertising.
Perhaps that is because so much of their funding came after they agreed to do things for the corporations that were offering to sponsor them? Like, say, agreeing that they would produce a system that could run Windows? As the AC noted, a $100 laptop is not at all impossible to produce, you just need to have modest hardware.
Well the OLPC can be used as an eBook reader, and from a technology standpoint possessing just a handful of the machines could mean unprecedented access to books for a school. Of course, this is assuming that the books are available, in a libre format, in the language that is being used at the school, which leaves few books available even for schools in developed nations.
In my opinion, what is killing the OLPC program is not that it was misguided from the start, but that it must fight a tidal wave of people whose interests run counter to the entire concept. American and European corporations see the developing world as a fresh market, with fresh business opportunities, but the OLPC project seeks to raise the standard of education without making the schools dependent on developed nations (in the long run). That is the root of the problem: the very capital and technical expertise that would be needed to jump start the project comes from people and corporations who stand to gain less if the project succeeds in its primary goal.
Microsoft was already caught seek to turn the OLPC project into a vehicle for entering third world schools and ensuring that they have a market in those countries. I wonder how many other companies had internal memos detailing which aspects of the project ran counter to their goals and how they could try to manipulate the project into compliance.
If using GPL software is so dangerous for business, why are so many companies running Linux in production environments? These are some of the most successful companies in the world, and they have been using Linux for a while -- where are the problems that you seem so sure would ensue from such a situation? If you remain close minded about the GPL, you will be missing out on a lot of high quality software...
I had an uncle working for MetLife in the early 90s; had he and his team not put in many months of work back then, the Y2K bug would have left millions of insurance claims unpayable, from business insurance to health plans. On any given day, thousands upon thousands of insurance transactions are processed automatically by a computer, which would have rejected everything as invalid because the claim dates would have appeared to be before the policies were opened.
/. will probably wind up working on fixing the problem long before it causes catastrophes, and we will be pretty old on January 1, 2038. I am also pretty sure that people like you will be saying, "There was never really a problem" for many years afterward, and someone like me will probably have to reply with a story about a relative who solved the problem before the press started running stories about the end of the world.
People who think Y2K was not a big deal were either children when the problem was solved or never really understood the problem to begin with. Y2K38 is the next big date/time bug to deal with; many people here on
What this chapter completely misses is that the emergency spending on Y2K fixes was just the tail end of a long effort of companies updating their software. Journalists were not talking about the Y2K bug in 1991, but plenty of programmers were already aware of it and already working on solutions to the problem. By the time the story got interesting -- as the year 2000 approached -- the problem had been mostly solved without any prodding from the media or pushing from the president. This whole situation was compounded by the fact that most people, including the journalists covering the story, had no understanding of how computers stored dates, and the fact that companies whose products had nothing to do with the Y2K bug were advertising their software as "Y2K compliant," and everyone wound up thinking that there was impending doom.
For the record, the Y2K bug did actually threaten critical computer systems, many of which were mainframes installed decades earlier, but those systems were fixed long before the story ever ran on the news.
Perhaps Richard Stallman's argument applies here: copyrights are out of date, and the entire concept needs to be rethought. Stallman argues that copyrights were originally an industrial regulation, created in an age where one required industrial grade equipment to efficiently copy creative works. Personal computers and the Internet have changed the situation, since individuals routinely possess both the equipment and knowledge of how to efficiently copy information. The very concept of a copyright needs to be updated to reflect new technologies.
Of course, the people who stand to lose money from a revamped copyright system also happen to be the people with the most influence over the government, which is why instead we keep seeing laws passed that try to disguise reality and make us all think that nothing has really changed with regard to creative works (e.g. the DMCA).
Part of the issue is the culture surrounding C and C++ code: there is a demand for backward compatibility. The C++ standards committee is very wary of breaking compatibility with previous editions of the standard, notwithstanding the breakage that compiler writers introduce. Thus, we are left with antiquated and frankly dangerous features that should not be used, but which novices wind up using anyway.
Strings are a perfect example. The C++ standard defines a string type that is decent enough and fixes a lot of problems associated with C-style strings. However, because of the demand for backward compatibility, C-style strings remain in the language, remain in use in parts of the library, and continue to wreak havoc on C++ programs.
I am not saying that the backward compatibility is a back thing -- in fact, I appreciate it very much, given the large body of old but useful code out there -- but I cannot deny that it creates problems. What I am saying is that I can see why someone would develop a new language to replace C++ instead of just writing a C++ library, given that there are a lot of people who write new code using these out of date features, thus creating a stream of horror stories about C++.
"ever read someone's c++ code? has it been a good experience?"
Sure, when the code is written by someone who really knows how to use C++. Ever read bad PHP code? Bad Java code? I have seen programmers do things like this:
int int1, int2, int3, int4, int6, int7;
No, that is neither a joke nor an exaggeration, and the missing number is deliberate. This is a declaration I saw on a recent project. This kind of poor coding is language agnostic, and it is entirely irrelevant whether someone is using C++, PHP, or even a language like Haskell (bad Haskell code is worse than that worst C++ code I have ever seen -- if you use a functional language, get it right!).
On the other hand, I have seen some maintainable C++ code, with appropriate and useful comments, well thought out classes and class relationships, and expert use of the STL. I once worked on a project with C++ code that dated back to the early 90s, and had been continuous updated to support new features and needs, to make use of the STL (yes, this can be written into old code without causing a disaster), and so support systems that did not even exist when the code was originally written.
Don't blame the language, blame programmers who never learned about good programming practices. Blame computer science programs that give people degrees they do not deserve. Blame an industry that will hire anyone who can write a hello world program and then assume that they are capable of writing a maintainable system with millions of lines of code. The best programming language in the world will not solve the problem of poor programmers and poor coding practices.
"OK, let's say AJAX didn't exist for a moment."
In other words, look at how things were done back in the 90s.
"People would have to refresh their browsers to display/submit forms,"
Why would you need to refresh your browser to submit a form? You enter your form data, and you hit the submit button, and everything is good to go. No muss, no fuss, and no need to send request after request to your server -- two are sufficient (one to get the form, one to submit the form). Considering that a lot of website use does not even involve form submission, you can save even more -- one request per page is entirely sufficient.
"which would require Apache/PHP to serve a *full web page* for every form displayed and submitted."
Serving a full web page is not a terrible strain; in fact, for static content, it can be highly efficient. A while back, Slashdot ran a story about the servers that run Slashdot itself; the majority were serving static content that was pregenerated and refreshed every so often, and only those users who absolutely required dynamic content (such as those submitting a comment) would be served by the dynamic server. I have seen many websites that are linked to from Slashdot switch to static content just to handle the load (a tactic that is successful in some cases).
"This in itself causes a load on servers, before dynamic content is even considered."
Load which is unavoidable even with AJAX. The AJAX code itself must be sent, at the very least, as well as the various UI elements and CSS that are necessary with AJAX -- all of which is still being served like a static page. This is not factoring in any dynamic content that is sent along with that code, which is almost always present, and all this has to happen before any of the AJAX code actually does anything.
You might say that the AJAX code reduces the overall overhead, because it lowers the amount of dynamic content that must be generated. This might be true in a few cases, particularly those where the data is constantly being fed and where there is only one page of interest (think stock market data), but I would be very wary of any assertion that AJAX lowers overhead on a website like Facebook, where the users frequently browse to different pages (different profiles) and where various AJAX applications follow them around (instant messenger, etc.).
"If anything, AJAX *lowers* server load."
The funny thing is that in most cases where I have heard of AJAX causing a significantly lower overhead, the problem has been the use of HTTP itself -- other protocols are inherently more efficient for those tasks. AJAX makes web pages look nicer (in some cases) and feel more like desktop applications, but I would not claim that it reduces server loads except in a few niche cases.
What you said might have been true 10 years ago, before all this AJAX code. When you have millions of users pumping out AJAX requests, your middleware is going to wind up working a lot harder, and the database is still doing all the things it was doing back in the 90s.
"What about the environmental impact of the extra time required to write the same functionality in C++?"
Should be about equal to the environment impact of maintaining the PHP language itself; in fact, it is likely to be less than that, since there would be no need to maintain the actual interpreter, but only duplicate some functionality. This is really a one-off, and the libraries could be reused by thousands of enterprises.
Bugs and security breaches do not cause any more CO2 emission than bug-free code, so I do not really see your point in bringing them up. The other differences in development are pretty minor, since PHP derives its programming model from C.
The same people who did not bother to state that the bailout money should not be used to pay bonuses, buy private jets, or pay for any number of other luxuries that many of these companies spent tax dollars on.
This is "loss" the same way that the RIAA "loses" money when you download your music. In other words, they define the word differently than everyone else, but do not mention their different definition in an effort to confuse you.
Exactly what I was thinking. Of course, Chase should know that "crowdsourcing" is not guaranteed to yield the results that they were hoping for.
"The Patriot Act is intended to focus on groups of people organizing to carry out a planned action. It doesn't do anything for single crazy acting on their own."
Except that intelligence agencies and the FBI were already aware that Osama Bin Laden was planning something big, that members of his group had been traveling under false identities, and that at least two of them were in the United States prior to the attack. The President had been sent a memo that there was a very high likelihood that Osama Bin Laden's men would hijack airplanes as part of an attack on the United States.
Lack of intelligence gathering authority was not the problem. The problem was that a new administration was in power, and that administration was too busy firing people from the previous administration to bother listening to the warnings coming from the experts.
"is it only terrorism if the perpetrator is Muslim?"
It is only terrorism if you are fighting against the United States, our interests, or our allies and their interests. If you are fighting against a government we would be happy to see leave, you are a heroic freedom fighter; if you are fighting against a government we do not particularly care about, it is just a civil war. As soon as you start fighting against any US interest -- even the interests of private corporations -- you are a terrorist regardless of what color your skin is or what religion you practice.
Case in point: nobody is calling any of the parties to the war in Congo terrorists, even though they are brutally raping, maiming, and killing civilians. That is just a civil war, as far as the media is concerned. Now, when warlords in Afghanistan shoot at US soldiers, they are not simply an enemy army -- they are terrorists. They are terrorists because they are shooting at Americans. When they were shooting at Russians, they were freedom fighters. If they were shooting at each other, it would be a civil war.
They just maintain an illusion of privacy, that's all.