The are very proprietory, usually only work on Windows, and don't work & play well with others.
I tend to think that any version control system that only works on Windows must be a toy. Microsoft makes one such toy system - "Visual Source Safe" which loses data and is shunned by Microsoft themselves.
ClearCase is probably the leading system - expensive, powerful, and high-maintenance. Perforce is popular. Bitkeeper seems to be the rising star. CVS is free, reliable and low-maintenance, with some annoying limitations. Subversion and Arch are too new to trust. I'd vote for CVS unless there were strong reasons to do otherwise.
As far as proprietary goes, you shouldn't generally expect the repository files to be usefully readable. Rather, you should have a checkout or export script that pulls out a current tree and history data.
As an excersize, remove GNU glibc from your (GNU/)Linux system and reboot. If that doesn't make clear the fallacy of your argument, then I suspect nothing ever will.
That may not be the best example of why GNU deserve to slap their name on Linux. Have you read these comments by glibc maintainer Ulrich Drepper? Here's a quote:
This $&%$& [RMS] demands everything to be labeled in a way which credits him and he does not stop before making completely wrong statements like "its variant". I find this completely unacceptable and can assure everybody that I consider none of the code I contributed to glibc (which is quite a lot) to be as part of the GNU project and so a major part of what Stallman claims credit for is simply going away.
I don't see how armed people would have fought the nazi regime, when that regime was supported by a majority of those people of that time.
It's a complex question, and I don't claim to have the answer; only to have some perspective. The Waco incident in the US illustrates one kind of outcome. Superficially, the Branch Davidians lost that battle. But in a deeper sense, they may have won. The deaths drew a lot of critical attention to the aggressive approach of the ATF agents. I've read that the ATF is trying very hard not to repeat this incident. If the Branch Davidians had been unarmed, I would probably never have heard of them. They would be arrested without incident and living in prison somewhere. And the government would have gone on to arrest more religious wackos of various kinds.
So it's possible that armed resistance by Jewish families would have raised awareness of how serious a move the government was making. People are not inclined to see oppression when the oppressed are quietly cooperating.
What makes this unlikely, however, is that the government did not show their intentions early on, or provide clear opportunities for defiance. For example, compulsory registration seems to have been a common tactic. Would anyone shoot a government official over being made to fill out a form? But if not then, when does one fight back?
Exactly. I was hoping Jango would play an ambiguous role - maybe the Jedi would hire him and his kid to do something they couldn't. He was almost the only cool character in the movie, and his relationship to his cloned "son" added depth. I guess he was created almost by accident, in an attempt to "explain" where Boba came from - "genealogy" as Katz puts it.
I agree with the article, but I don't think the lack of Han was the whole problem. Similar analyses could be made of Obi-wan and Darth Vader. (I refer, of course, to the originals). To put it more generally, the characters in AOTC all sucked. The article implies that the original movie was a healthy mix of ingredients, while AOTC is imbalanced with too much "Jedi" and not enough "Scoundrel". However I don't accept that the "Jedi" of AOTC is equivalent to the "Jedi" of Star Wars. Nor is Dooku an adequate substitute for Darth Vader.
Of course, fans of AOTC will answer any such objections with the "structural defense" - the claim that the movie somehow had to be that way to fit into the bigger picture.
You're an optimist, aren't you? Don't expect the "industry" to fight this battle for you. So far they've given no sign of caring. The law won't hurt them. People will continue to buy new hardware to replace old, and if a few dollars are added to the purchase price by this protection, nobody will notice. Better yet, a few years down the road the government will probably declare the older, non-compliant hardware illegal, which give the industry another spurt of sales.
The electronics industries interests are not the same as yours.
As for customer outrage - where's the outrage over Macrovision? Where's the outrage over SCMS, which effectively killed consumer DAT?
It's fun to claim that they can't do things like this because of unintended consequences, but actually they're smart enough to separate the intended from the unintended. They will inconvenience us; they will not inconvenience themselves. They will infuriate us; they won't infuriate the majority. They will cripple hobbyist use of computers without hurting professional use.
Yes, I think a successful government needs a steady flow of the right kind of criminals. The ideal criminals would be middle class, so they'd have property to seize - they'd be relatively nonviolent, so it would be pretty safe to process them, they should have no unity or code of honor, and yet they should be networked - thus investigators can leverage one arrest to product more with minimal effort. They should be harmless to the general populace. And their crime should involve tiny, hard-to-see objects, to justify lots of intrusion and searching.
Now witchcraft met these criteria pretty well, but seems to have fallen into disfavor. The drug war is the current staple crop, but it looks like IP infringers will be a highly desirable addition.
The content creators will do whatever they can to control their content (remember, THEY own it, WE do not... we purchase a right to enjoy the content which until recently was able to be shifted into various formats).
This is the key belief which places you on the side of the ??AA. You believe in ownership of information, even after it's published. I do not, our founding fathers did not, and our Constitution reflects this.
Our western idea of ownership comes from Locke - he who mixes his labor with nature owns the product. Ownership does not expire after some set period of time. Legal ownership is simply the legal recognition of a natural principle. Copyright, in contrast, is a completely artificial construct, created for utilitiarian reasons. It does not reflect a fundamental right; rather it was created to promote the Sciences and Useful Arts. Copyrights are constitutionally mandated to be for a limited time.
Copyrights are not property, and nobody can own a song or an idea.
Does Windows have Daemons? I thought they were immortal entities. How could an immortal entity live in a Universe that comes to an end every few weeks at best?
Maybe (relatively) long-running processes on Windows should be called Aengels.
(Yes, I know Microsoft uses the beige Microsoftian term "services".)
I haven't had time to read mandolin's comment yet, but since it's causing quite a stir I thought a few preliminary remarks would be in order. It's 2:00 a.m. and I'm lying on my back wedged between a dumpster and the back wall of the pub with a stray dog licking my face, which is eerily illuminated by my 486 notebook standing sideways. It's too early to tell if mandolin is a supporter or detractor of Wolfram, or if he has some altogether different axe to grind. One thing's for sure, though: posters in this thread will be arguing the question for minutes to come.
That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units.
--Vice Admiral Henry Giffin
Certainly the application was to blame, but if a large number of computers crashed due to data received over the network from one crashing computer, the OS used is probably not robust enough for this application.
First of all, Obi-Wan and the rest of the Jedi ARE heroes that cen perform super-human feats. They can use the force, which means that they have premonition of danger and can manipulate people's minds.
So why should they ever bother getting out of their armchairs and racing around in spaceships? Why not 1) sense the danger and 2) manipulate relevant minds to defuse the danger? Because, as I'm sure you know, all such fictional powers must be limited if the story is to be interesting. Even AOTC recognizes some limitation in the form of a collective force-myopia among the Jedi brought about by an imbalance in the force.
I think we're discussing a subjective preference. I prefer protagonists like those in Star Wars - essentially human beings. You prefer or at least like protagonists amply endowed with superhuman powers, ala Superman.
In A New Hope, Luke and Leia weren't Jedi, at the time they were just regular people.
Agreed. But you seem to imply that since the protagonists of AOTC are (inevitably) Jedi they must (inevitably) act like Superman. I disagree with the inevitability of both those things. The makers of AOTC had a great deal of freedom. Rather than emphasizing familiar characters and tying up loose ends, they could have penned a completely fresh story with only tangential connection to the rest of the "series". As for the second idea, in Star Wars Obi-Wan is a Jedi and the portrayal of his powers is restrained and tasteful.
Remember, in later movies, as Luke became a Jedi he was able to do super-human feats like lifting things up with his mind and causing himself to fall into a ventinlation shaft and not die after falling a great distance.
I don't think any of the sequels measure up to the original. I think that the scenes you mention cheapened the Jedi knight, who was at core a Zen Buddhist. One aspect of the problem, but by no means its heart, is the inability of the writers to think through the plot implications of increased superpowers. The viewer is frequently left with the question "Why didn't $HERO just use $POWER?".
Anikin is supposed to be moody and whiny and all around unlikable. After all, he is falling into the dark side.
For some reason, "whiny" is not an adjective I'd apply to Darth Vader, and Anakin remains unconvincing as a proto-Darth. Here's how I'd imagine a young Darth Vader: disciplined, precocious, tough and idealistic. He would have a fiery temper, but it wouldn't express itself in the childish tirades of Anakin. He would hold himself and others to unrealistically high standards. And obviously, he would be a fairly big guy. Only a few inches of Darth Vader can be accounted fro by boots and helmet. Anakin comes up short in more ways than one.
Those who view it as inferior to the first trilogy are looking at Those three throught the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia.
I seriously considered that possibility. Then I downloaded the script of Star Wars (aka "the first movie") and read it through. My reading confirmed my impression that it is far superior to AOTC. A few differences:
Qi-Gong jumping out the window to grab a flying vehicle immediately set the tone of a very unrealistic movie in which the heroes would perform superhuman feats. And sure enough, the characters go through a lot of stuff that would surely have killed or maimed them, like jumping out of an aircraft in flight. In Star Wars, I think the closest thing is Luke and Leia swinging across the shaft. That was risky but believable.
Anakin is just too moody, unstable and immature to be trusted with any independent assignment, let alone guarding a crucial politician. I wouldn't let this guy wash my car - it would probably end up in Tijuana. This lessens both the credibility of the movie and the ability to connect with the character. Luke had the same traits to a lesser degree, but he was not deliberately entrusted with much responsibility.
Darth Vader was one of the best villains in any movie. The subsequent Star Wars movies have failed to come up with anyone nearly as impressive.
Star Wars is the story of a young guy from a boring hick town, a strange old desert rat with a zen-like calm, and a cocky smuggler who inadvertently take on the Death Star. AOTC is about a group of powerful, privileged and respected people who ward off a possible challenge to their privileged position.
I could write a lot more, but I think the movies are deeply different. Certainly there are some aspects that remain the same, and to that extent your remark about rose-colored glasses could be true. But on the whole, AOTC is a very inferior movie.
And this "individualistic" attitude is exactly why we are getting our asses kicked. However, it's important to have a clearly defined mission for any lobbying organization - it's foolish to assume that all "geeks" have the same agenda in all areas. I see your point there.
P.S. If you can't compete with the foreigners, it's time to get a new job.
Having seen the process up close, I disagree. The H1B program is used to replace normal employees with folks who are frightened for their jobs, will work long hours, and are a bit cheaper to boot. The key factor in the H1B is that it's very hard for the employee to leave the company and seek other employment in the US. If this factor were eliminated, if H1B's were converted to general work visas, the anger of computer professionals towards the H1B program would largely dissipate. Which is irrelevant, because companies would no longer be interested in the program.
Applying free-market thinking to a transaction in which one party is legally crippled is a mistake. There's a trend for national economic barriers to be porous to corporations but opaque to individuals. Calling such a barrier "free trade" is misleading.
As soon as I saw the name "GeekPAC" I shuddered. It seems like geeks are cursed with an utter lack of communication skills - which means that they have never really observed how communication works. The name "GeekPAC" does not connote a benevolent, respectable organization speaking for computer professionals or users. Imagine if the NRA were called "GunPAC" or "GatPAC" or "PAC'n heat". The message is obviously targeted for internal consumption, and the founders seem unable to look at themselves from the viewpoint of a normal person.
Plotkin is right - the scheme of spraying small amounts of money around randomly is not going to work. As he points out, the winning strategy is deterrence - we make an example of one legislator, and thereby get the attention of the rest.
Ever watch a movie and find yourself wanting the bad guy to win, just because the good guy was such an ass? That's how I'm starting to feel about this "geeks vs. entertainment industry" war. I think I first felt this when geeks were protesting something (maybe the Microsoft EULA?) and a few of them showed up in Star Wars costumes. Naturally, that's what the media covered. This "GeekPAC" looks like a great way to shoot ourselves in the foot more publicly and more expensively than usual. These guys are about as competent to wage a political battle as the average lobbyist would be to admin a farm of web servers.
The core idea is sound, of course. If computing is going to survive, we have to start paying tribute to Congress. It's that simple. Doctors pay $700 a year to the AMA, essentially to ward of legislation that would destroy their profession.
I hope that the inevitable humiliating failure of this "GeekPAC" will not discourage geeks from seeking political representation.
That's an average tax rate of 12.9% on gross income. When's the last time anyone who isn't on WIC paid only 12.9% federal tax on their gross income after deductions?
They aren't paying 12.9% on income after deductions. They are paying roughly 35% on income after deductions. There is no difference between an individual and a corporation in this respect - business expenses are deducted from income before computing tax liability. Far from a loophole, this is one of the most basic ideas of tax law.
But it's not as simple as private sector vs. public sector. Each dollar a corporation earns carries news about the market and shifts the company's focus. Maybe it is more effective for an Oracle salesman to spend his time schmoozing government bureaucrats, looking for the "weakest link" who is easily confused, than to contact hundreds of small business and propose Oracle-based solutions for their IT needs. But such actions have an effect on the larger economy. Every dollar spent by government has the incremental effect of refocusing industry from consumer/industry needs to government needs.
So, who's more "technically excellent" than oracle?
I like Oracle's relational database product, and work with it a lot. However, I'm not sure what proportion of Oracle's income comes from this solid and useful product, and how much from various things like "Oracle financials" and "Oracle Web Adapter". Oracle seems to have hit on a clever trick. They make a product which geeks respect - the RDBMS. Then they put up flashy and confusing ads claiming to be "UNBREAKABLE" and give the average idiot an extremely vague idea of what they sell. Then they pounce on a decision-making idiot and load him up with their less-useful software. The idiot knows that "9/10 e-businesses run on Oracle" but doesn't know that the statistic refers to the RDBMS and only the RDBMS.
So technical excellence is part of the equation, but confusion is a big part also. I suspect that when Oracle makes a huge sale, they are selling piles of licenses for non-RDBMS software that will never be implemented by the customer.
Leaving aside your miscalculated numbers, which others have addressed, your argument boils down to "you lost some money and you gained some money, so shut up." But this is not the end of the matter. Our current system of massive taxation and wealth transfer means that people are divided into two groups: those who spend more than they get back, and those who get more than they spend. Some public services, like road maintenance, can be assigned a market value because they are performed by private industry in some places. Others, like defence, are nearly impossible to value correctly. But this does not mean all taxes and expenditure should be regarded as an opaque ball of mud that can only be praised or condemned as a whole.
Wow, Eric, sounds like the geeks get the most welfare of all! Why do you think they complain so much?
This idea is wrong in several ways. Welfare is aid given without expectation of return. It was originally an emergency stipend to cushion the impact of disasters until the stricken family could find their feet again. Paying an engineer to develop a defense component is not done to benefit the engineer, but to benefit the payer - ultimately the DOD which hopes to gain a military advantage. It is not welfare.
Defense spending is hardly confined to computer-related fields. I would not take the media's wide-eyed stories about "technology" as factual with regard to spending. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that a dollar spent on defense is more likely to be spent on computer programmers than is a dollar spent in other sectors, computer programmers are not automatically geeks. Many are simply obedient workers who toil for eight hours on a Windows machine and go home to watch football on TV. I suspect that the proportion of geeks in defense industries is lower than outside, because defense contractors are not famous for being flexible, modern and fun places to work.
Of course it could be counterargued that by hiring programmers, any kind of programmers, the defense industry puts upward pressure on the programmer employment market, benefitting programmers outside the industry.
Lastly, ignoring all of the above, the idea that one should be glad of a massively top-heavy and wasteful government because one's particular profession receives disproportionate benefit is a bad, cynical one whose widespread adoption drives the growth and increasing unresponsiveness of the modern state.
Slashdot could replicate its community onto AOL in a heartbeat (well assuming that AOL can run perl....)
AOL can run anything they want, including Perl, on their computers. They will not let a subscriber run anything, including Perl on their computers, however. I'm not sure in what sense you think "Slashdot could replicate its community onto AOL". Not without AOL's permission, which would not be granted.
A universal network was probably inevitable. The exact kind of network we got was mostly luck, and could have turned out much worse. It is a content-neutral network with the intelligence at the endpoints, and it is a peer-to-peer network in which all hosts are basically the same, including routers. Neither of these decisions was inevitable, and neither one would be made by AOL or Microsoft or anyone else trying to build an empire of passive consumers.
I don't take this as a strong argument for increased government spending, however. I think we are simply very lucky to have the internet as it is.
I agree, but I think conspicuously rich individuals like Gates are kind of a red herring. The truly rich are corporations, not people. And the people who own the corporations, while often comfortable, are not mega-rich. Whenever we hear of a despicable action by a large corporation, it's not the random caprice of some ultra-rich guy. It's the careful determined choice of professional managers working in the corporation's interest. And behind that, less visible, are vast numbers of middle class people keeping an eye on their investments and ready to sell if the earnings are down or something. They are the "silent majority" who quietly vote for everything that is loudly condemned on slashdot.
Government and corporations are closely linked. Canadian oil company Talisman has been accused of aiding human rights violations. Governments have killed, imprisoned and displaced a lot of people for religious, ideological, racial or simply tactical reasons, and continue to do so. But increasingly they also commit these acts to benefit corporations.
When Sklyarov was imprisoned, his captors were government employees acting on the orders of a publicly traded corporation. This is the template for the near future, and whether one blames "big government" (libertarian view) or "evil greedy corporations" (leftist view) doesn't matter - the decision-makers have less than zero interest in what we think. And that's because the silent majority, who elects the politicians and owns the stocks, wants it that way. They do think that a Russian hacker who broke Adobe's e-book encryption and boasted about it deserves to go to jail. And we have no more chance of changing their view than vegans, solar-power extremists, anti-car activists or the Amish have of propogating their odd ideas to the mainstream.
Your boss (again, speaking generally) was born in $BIGHOUSE with $BIGNUM in a trustfund. And the way the trend is going, increasingly only thouse born into that group are allowed to benefit.
My boss, generally speaking, has been a corporate manager from the same socio-economic tier as me. I haven't run across too many independently wealthy people working at corporations. If you're talking about small businesses, most of the ones I've worked for were started with savings and a lot of pain and risk. People with $BIGNUM in a trustfund don't generally start businesses, as I see it, other than frivolous, doomed businesses like trendy restaurants or something.
The idea of a very wealthy boss seems premodern. The modern capitalist system separates management (being a boss) from ownership (being wealthy).
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to think that any version control system that only works on Windows must be a toy. Microsoft makes one such toy system - "Visual Source Safe" which loses data and is shunned by Microsoft themselves.
ClearCase is probably the leading system - expensive, powerful, and high-maintenance. Perforce is popular. Bitkeeper seems to be the rising star. CVS is free, reliable and low-maintenance, with some annoying limitations. Subversion and Arch are too new to trust. I'd vote for CVS unless there were strong reasons to do otherwise.
As far as proprietary goes, you shouldn't generally expect the repository files to be usefully readable. Rather, you should have a checkout or export script that pulls out a current tree and history data.
That may not be the best example of why GNU deserve to slap their name on Linux. Have you read these comments by glibc maintainer Ulrich Drepper? Here's a quote:
It's a complex question, and I don't claim to have the answer; only to have some perspective. The Waco incident in the US illustrates one kind of outcome. Superficially, the Branch Davidians lost that battle. But in a deeper sense, they may have won. The deaths drew a lot of critical attention to the aggressive approach of the ATF agents. I've read that the ATF is trying very hard not to repeat this incident. If the Branch Davidians had been unarmed, I would probably never have heard of them. They would be arrested without incident and living in prison somewhere. And the government would have gone on to arrest more religious wackos of various kinds.
So it's possible that armed resistance by Jewish families would have raised awareness of how serious a move the government was making. People are not inclined to see oppression when the oppressed are quietly cooperating.
What makes this unlikely, however, is that the government did not show their intentions early on, or provide clear opportunities for defiance. For example, compulsory registration seems to have been a common tactic. Would anyone shoot a government official over being made to fill out a form? But if not then, when does one fight back?
Exactly. I was hoping Jango would play an ambiguous role - maybe the Jedi
would hire him and his kid to do something they couldn't. He was almost the only cool character in the movie, and his relationship to his cloned "son" added depth. I guess he was created almost by accident, in an attempt to "explain" where Boba came from - "genealogy" as Katz puts it.
I agree with the article, but I don't think the lack of Han was the whole problem. Similar analyses could be made of Obi-wan and Darth Vader. (I refer, of course, to the originals). To put it more generally, the characters in AOTC all sucked. The article implies that the original movie was a healthy mix of ingredients, while AOTC is imbalanced with too much "Jedi" and not enough "Scoundrel". However I don't accept that the "Jedi" of AOTC is equivalent to the "Jedi" of Star Wars. Nor is Dooku an adequate substitute for Darth Vader.
Of course, fans of AOTC will answer any such objections with the "structural defense" - the claim that the movie somehow had to be that way to fit into the bigger picture.
You're an optimist, aren't you? Don't expect the "industry" to fight this battle for you. So far they've given no sign of caring. The law won't hurt them. People will continue to buy new hardware to replace old, and if a few dollars are added to the purchase price by this protection, nobody will notice. Better yet, a few years down the road the government will probably declare the older, non-compliant hardware illegal, which give the industry another spurt of sales.
The electronics industries interests are not the same as yours.
As for customer outrage - where's the outrage over Macrovision? Where's the outrage over SCMS, which effectively killed consumer DAT?
It's fun to claim that they can't do things like this because of unintended consequences, but actually they're smart enough to separate the intended from the unintended. They will inconvenience us; they will not inconvenience themselves. They will infuriate us; they won't infuriate the majority. They will cripple hobbyist use of computers without hurting professional use.
Yes, I think a successful government needs a steady flow of the right kind of criminals. The ideal criminals would be middle class, so they'd have property to seize - they'd be relatively nonviolent, so it would be pretty safe to process them, they should have no unity or code of honor, and yet they should be networked - thus investigators can leverage one arrest to product more with minimal effort. They should be harmless to the general populace. And their crime should involve tiny, hard-to-see objects, to justify lots of intrusion and searching.
Now witchcraft met these criteria pretty well, but seems to have fallen into disfavor. The drug war is the current staple crop, but it looks like IP infringers will be a highly desirable addition.
This is the key belief which places you on the side of the ??AA. You believe in ownership of information, even after it's published. I do not, our founding fathers did not, and our Constitution reflects this.
Our western idea of ownership comes from Locke - he who mixes his labor with nature owns the product. Ownership does not expire after some set period of time. Legal ownership is simply the legal recognition of a natural principle. Copyright, in contrast, is a completely artificial construct, created for utilitiarian reasons. It does not reflect a fundamental right; rather it was created to promote the Sciences and Useful Arts. Copyrights are constitutionally mandated to be for a limited time.
Copyrights are not property, and nobody can own a song or an idea.
If you have not done so, I recommend you read Thomas Jefferson's oft-quoted letter.
Not to mention the American flag. Shouldn't we be using a flag that's owned by a corporation so each part of the government would have to license it?
Does Windows have Daemons? I thought they were immortal entities. How could an immortal entity live in a Universe that comes to an end every few weeks at best?
Maybe (relatively) long-running processes on Windows should be called Aengels.
(Yes, I know Microsoft uses the beige Microsoftian term "services".)
I haven't had time to read mandolin's comment yet, but since it's causing quite a stir I thought a few preliminary remarks would be in order. It's 2:00 a.m. and I'm lying on my back wedged between a dumpster and the back wall of the pub with a stray dog licking my face, which is eerily illuminated by my 486 notebook standing sideways. It's too early to tell if mandolin is a supporter or detractor of Wolfram, or if he has some altogether different axe to grind. One thing's for sure, though: posters in this thread will be arguing the question for minutes to come.
Certainly the application was to blame, but if a large number of computers crashed due to data received over the network from one crashing computer, the OS used is probably not robust enough for this application.
So why should they ever bother getting out of their armchairs and racing around in spaceships? Why not 1) sense the danger and 2) manipulate relevant minds to defuse the danger? Because, as I'm sure you know, all such fictional powers must be limited if the story is to be interesting. Even AOTC recognizes some limitation in the form of a collective force-myopia among the Jedi brought about by an imbalance in the force.
I think we're discussing a subjective preference. I prefer protagonists like those in Star Wars - essentially human beings. You prefer or at least like protagonists amply endowed with superhuman powers, ala Superman.
Agreed. But you seem to imply that since the protagonists of AOTC are (inevitably) Jedi they must (inevitably) act like Superman. I disagree with the inevitability of both those things. The makers of AOTC had a great deal of freedom. Rather than emphasizing familiar characters and tying up loose ends, they could have penned a completely fresh story with only tangential connection to the rest of the "series". As for the second idea, in Star Wars Obi-Wan is a Jedi and the portrayal of his powers is restrained and tasteful.
I don't think any of the sequels measure up to the original. I think that the scenes you mention cheapened the Jedi knight, who was at core a Zen Buddhist. One aspect of the problem, but by no means its heart, is the inability of the writers to think through the plot implications of increased superpowers. The viewer is frequently left with the question "Why didn't $HERO just use $POWER?".
For some reason, "whiny" is not an adjective I'd apply to Darth Vader, and Anakin remains unconvincing as a proto-Darth. Here's how I'd imagine a young Darth Vader: disciplined, precocious, tough and idealistic. He would have a fiery temper, but it wouldn't express itself in the childish tirades of Anakin. He would hold himself and others to unrealistically high standards. And obviously, he would be a fairly big guy. Only a few inches of Darth Vader can be accounted fro by boots and helmet. Anakin comes up short in more ways than one.
I seriously considered that possibility. Then I downloaded the script of Star Wars (aka "the first movie") and read it through. My reading confirmed my impression that it is far superior to AOTC. A few differences:
the tone of a very unrealistic movie in which the heroes would perform superhuman feats. And sure enough, the characters go through a lot of stuff that would surely have killed or maimed them, like jumping out of an aircraft in flight. In Star Wars, I think the closest thing is Luke and Leia swinging across the shaft. That was risky but believable.
I could write a lot more, but I think the movies are deeply different. Certainly there are some aspects that remain the same, and to that extent your remark about rose-colored glasses could be true. But on the whole, AOTC is a very inferior movie.
SQL> ROLLBACK;
Rollback complete.
Having seen the process up close, I disagree. The H1B program is used to replace normal employees with folks who are frightened for their jobs, will work long hours, and are a bit cheaper to boot. The key factor in the H1B is that it's very hard for the employee to leave the company and seek other employment in the US. If this factor were eliminated, if H1B's were converted to general work visas, the anger of computer professionals towards the H1B program would largely dissipate. Which is irrelevant, because companies would no longer be interested in the program.
Applying free-market thinking to a transaction in which one party is legally crippled is a mistake. There's a trend for national economic barriers to be porous to corporations but opaque to individuals. Calling such a barrier "free trade" is misleading.
As soon as I saw the name "GeekPAC" I shuddered. It seems like geeks are cursed with an utter lack of communication skills - which means that they have never really observed how communication works. The name "GeekPAC" does not connote a benevolent, respectable organization speaking for computer professionals or users. Imagine if the NRA were called "GunPAC" or "GatPAC" or "PAC'n heat". The message is obviously targeted for internal consumption, and the founders seem unable to look at themselves from the viewpoint of a normal person.
Plotkin is right - the scheme of spraying small amounts of money around randomly is not going to work. As he points out, the winning strategy is deterrence - we make an example of one legislator, and thereby get the attention of the rest.
Ever watch a movie and find yourself wanting the bad guy to win, just because the good guy was such an ass? That's how I'm starting to feel about this "geeks vs. entertainment industry" war. I think I first felt this when geeks were protesting something (maybe the Microsoft EULA?) and a few of them showed up in Star Wars costumes. Naturally, that's what the media covered. This "GeekPAC" looks like a great way to shoot ourselves in the foot more publicly and more expensively than usual. These guys are about as competent to wage a political battle as the average lobbyist would be to admin a farm of web servers.
The core idea is sound, of course. If computing is going to survive, we have to start paying tribute to Congress. It's that simple. Doctors pay $700 a year to the AMA, essentially to ward of legislation that would destroy their profession.
I hope that the inevitable humiliating failure of this "GeekPAC" will not discourage geeks from seeking political representation.
They aren't paying 12.9% on income after deductions. They are paying roughly 35% on income after deductions. There is no difference between an individual and a corporation in this respect - business expenses are deducted from income before computing tax liability. Far from a loophole, this is one of the most basic ideas of tax law.
But it's not as simple as private sector vs. public sector. Each dollar a corporation earns carries news about the market and shifts the company's focus. Maybe it is more effective for an Oracle salesman to spend his time schmoozing government bureaucrats, looking for the "weakest link" who is easily confused, than to contact hundreds of small business and propose Oracle-based solutions for their IT needs. But such actions have an effect on the larger economy. Every dollar spent by government has the incremental effect of refocusing industry from consumer/industry needs to government needs.
I like Oracle's relational database product, and work with it a lot. However, I'm not sure what proportion of Oracle's income comes from this solid and useful product, and how much from various things like "Oracle financials" and "Oracle Web Adapter". Oracle seems to have hit on a clever trick. They make a product which geeks respect - the RDBMS. Then they put up flashy and confusing ads claiming to be "UNBREAKABLE" and give the average idiot an extremely vague idea of what they sell. Then they pounce on a decision-making idiot and load him up with their less-useful software. The idiot knows that "9/10 e-businesses run on Oracle" but doesn't know that the statistic refers to the RDBMS and only the RDBMS.
So technical excellence is part of the equation, but confusion is a big part also. I suspect that when Oracle makes a huge sale, they are selling piles of licenses for non-RDBMS software that will never be implemented by the customer.
This idea is wrong in several ways. Welfare is aid given without expectation of return. It was originally an emergency stipend to cushion the impact of disasters until the stricken family could find their feet again. Paying an engineer to develop a defense component is not done to benefit the engineer, but to benefit the payer - ultimately the DOD which hopes to gain a military advantage. It is not welfare.
Defense spending is hardly confined to computer-related fields. I would not take the media's wide-eyed stories about "technology" as factual with regard to spending. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that a dollar spent on defense is more likely to be spent on computer programmers than is a dollar spent in other sectors, computer programmers are not automatically geeks. Many are simply obedient workers who toil for eight hours on a Windows machine and go home to watch football on TV. I suspect that the proportion of geeks in defense industries is lower than outside, because defense contractors are not famous for being flexible, modern and fun places to work.
Of course it could be counterargued that by hiring programmers, any kind of programmers, the defense industry puts upward pressure on the programmer employment market, benefitting programmers outside the industry.
Lastly, ignoring all of the above, the idea that one should be glad of a massively top-heavy and wasteful government because one's particular profession receives disproportionate benefit is a bad, cynical one whose widespread adoption drives the growth and increasing unresponsiveness of the modern state.
AOL can run anything they want, including Perl, on their computers. They will not let a subscriber run anything, including Perl on their computers, however. I'm not sure in what sense you think "Slashdot could replicate its community onto AOL". Not without AOL's permission, which would not be granted.
A universal network was probably inevitable. The exact kind of network we got was mostly luck, and could have turned out much worse. It is a content-neutral network with the intelligence at the endpoints, and it is a peer-to-peer network in which all hosts are basically the same, including routers. Neither of these decisions was inevitable, and neither one would be made by AOL or Microsoft or anyone else trying to build an empire of passive consumers.
I don't take this as a strong argument for increased government spending, however. I think we are simply very lucky to have the internet as it is.
I agree, but I think conspicuously rich individuals like Gates are kind of a red herring. The truly rich are corporations, not people. And the people who own the corporations, while often comfortable, are not mega-rich. Whenever we hear of a despicable action by a large corporation, it's not the random caprice of some ultra-rich guy. It's the careful determined choice of professional managers working in the corporation's interest. And behind that, less visible, are vast numbers of middle class people keeping an eye on their investments and ready to sell if the earnings are down or something. They are the "silent majority" who quietly vote for everything that is loudly condemned on slashdot.
Government and corporations are closely linked. Canadian oil company Talisman has been accused of aiding human rights violations. Governments have killed, imprisoned and displaced a lot of people for religious, ideological, racial or simply tactical reasons, and continue to do so. But increasingly they also commit these acts to benefit corporations.
When Sklyarov was imprisoned, his captors were government employees acting on the orders of a publicly traded corporation. This is the template for the near future, and whether one blames "big government" (libertarian view) or "evil greedy corporations" (leftist view) doesn't matter - the decision-makers have less than zero interest in what we think. And that's because the silent majority, who elects the politicians and owns the stocks, wants it that way. They do think that a Russian hacker who broke Adobe's e-book encryption and boasted about it deserves to go to jail. And we have no more chance of changing their view than vegans, solar-power extremists, anti-car activists or the Amish have of propogating their odd ideas to the mainstream.
A familiar opposition, actually. "Burn the books and read the Book." --Ayatollah Khomeini in The Satanic Verses (from memory).
My boss, generally speaking, has been a corporate manager from the same socio-economic tier as me. I haven't run across too many independently wealthy people working at corporations. If you're talking about small businesses, most of the ones I've worked for were started with savings and a lot of pain and risk. People with $BIGNUM in a trustfund don't generally start businesses, as I see it, other than frivolous, doomed businesses like trendy restaurants or something.
The idea of a very wealthy boss seems premodern. The modern capitalist system separates management (being a boss) from ownership (being wealthy).