The problems that you mention, both concerning storage space and flexibility of the data model are what XML databases are attempting to solve.
Listing the problems in opposition to the solutions does not make for a good arguement
I still don't see what problems the "XML" databases are themselves intended to solve.
It's reasonable to point out obstacles in the way of a course of action when there is so little on the "benefit" side of the equation to make the cost worthwhile.
Maybe there is a mathematically elegant hierarchical representation for data, but XML isn't it. My vote would be for s-expressions.
Oddly, the WTO is a step beyond democratic: it operates only by complete concensus among members - a bit like a Quaker meeting.
Yeah, right. A bit like an evil Quaker meeting. When the Quaker method works it's because a group of people gather to seek out God's will/the right thing to do/the truth, in humility.
Don't confuse this with a group of wealthy countries (or rather, the bought and paid for pet governments of wealthy corporations), seeking a way to consolidate their power.
And if the USA or UK (to name but two of the said governments) stand up for legitimate protest, how come they have f**k all to say about Turkey's human rights record? I think you'll find that governments have no real problem with surrendering the rights of people in general.
Nah. They just detected a 50kg "Bastardino". These hardly ever interact with matter, but when they do you want to get out of the f**king way.
Creating a sensitive and expensive instrument to detect such exotic particles is just asking for trouble in my opinion;)
Eventually software will become more abstract itself, so that you can do Runtime Application Developement, or rather be able to develope your application while its running, just pause a component or two, change em and then unpause them, no restarting the application.
You can do this in Python. Slightly beside the point, I know. But actually there is the same trade-off between dynamically and statically compiled software.
The usual reason to accept the slower execution is a faster development cycle. I'm not sure the same tradeoff is such a good idea for an OS - most people run applications a lot more often than they hack the kernel.
OK, we largely agree. If you break a law, you have to take the consequences, and if it's a bad law, history will probably vindicate you. It may not be much comfort if that doesn't happen until after your execution or 20 year jail sentence. My advice would always be to try to get away with it.
I assumed I was replying to an American. I am deeply sorry!
However, I think unconstitutional laws are considered never to have been law once they are judged as such. But don't ask me, I just heard it somewhere.
And I wouldn't say that the law provides an exact definition of your rights. The human right to free speech (including expression as code) is IMO an absolute even in countries whose laws don't currently recognise it. But that's me nitpicking.
Maybe we should just stamp "Parental Guidance Recommended in permanent ink on each child's forehead when they're born -- include a bar code and removing it would probably be a violation of the [DMCA].
Hmm. Maybe you should patent that idea. There's prior art in Revelation, but it should still get past the US patent office.
I agree, in principle, that the anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA are wrong.. but they are currently law. That is my point. My point is that Sony is NOT 'stretching' the meaning of the DMCA in order to enforce this. IT's within their rights.
Hmm. It's only probably current law because it hasn't been tested for whether it's constitutional yet. And only in the US. AiboPet guy should set up a site hosted in Germany, or maybe Russia:-)
"Probably they can get away with it because of the way the law currently stands" != "within their rights", IMO.
.. that doesn't mean you can break laws in order to achieve it (even if they are bad laws)
Oh deary, deary me. WTF was your war of Independence all about then? Start paying the UK a couple of hundred years of back taxes if you want to take that attitude - we could do with the cash:-)
Why did they make the Bin Laden poster at all?
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I ask this with respect, so please excuse my ignorance.
They're muslims right? So they are forbidden to make images of people. Or have the rules changed since the days when muslim art was all beautiful calligraphy and geometry?
Even if modern muslims tolerate neutral representations of people, making posters of people to glorify them is surely very close to idolatry, no?
Not that I have ANY doubts at all about the hypocrisy of any murderer claiming to be doing god's work - that goes without saying. But maybe
all those who sympathise with OBL should take a step back and look at what they are supporting: certainly not Islam.
Well, for a start there will be more software jobs outside the US:-)
But if you work on any software or hardware that gets around the state-mandated usage-restrictions, don't plan any trips to California, eh?
Oh, and hardware will probably get more expensive because of the demand for unrestricted sound cards etc.
There might be a good side - if Windows starts refusing to run on the 'illegal' hardware, then it might just be the last push needed to make some users switch to a better OS.
considering how fast Britain adopts policy created in the US, I wouldn't be so smug.
you can bet your ass corporation will push this in Britain. I would be surprised if there not doing so right now under some other guise.
Nah, no point. Our film industry doesn't make enough money to make it a big lobbying point.
Besides, we just don't suck up to big money the way the average American does. Our sinister legislation usually gets proposed to give more powers to the state, not corporations. I'm not saying that's any better, mind you.
I don't want to get into a huge long reply to this, because I'm at work.
Short reply: it depends heavily on your definitions. If you think shallowly about it, then "good" is what you like and "evil" is what you don't like. Obviously that's relative.
If you think deeply about it, then you can establish what you mean by "evil" in a way that is conducive to discussion, even with with people whose ideas of right and wrong behaviour are different from your own.
M Scott Peck's definition/explanation of evil is one such starting point.
Evil is not the opposite of good anyway. Bad is the opposite of good. Evil is just one extreme form of a psychological defect typified by pride, lying and inability to accept criticism or dissent.
Whether someone's wrong-doing results from being evil, or from some other cause (e.g. ignorance or drunkenness) is another matter.
To suggest that there is no such thing as right or wrong or at the other extreme to insist that one's own cultural standards embody absolute right - both are due to shallow thinking.
Let's just say that rational beings able to agree on a goal in a given situation can agree on right and wrong ways to go about it.
Small transactions like tips to buskers, purchase of street newspapers and so on will become too inconvenient. Many of the small ways that people can scrape a living, with more or less dignity, will disappear.
Nobody will be able to buy or sell ANYTHING without it being monitored and tracked by people I just don't trust.
And remember, it would only be a matter of time before the government made barter, anonymous transactions or any other attempt to live outside the controlled economy illegal.
Finally, there are some who might want to make changes to Microtest code themselves (say the company goes out business, or is bought by a parent firm with lousy tech support, or are late in providing a patch, or their manuals are crap, etc.) You might argue that they can do this even now, but they wont be able to share their improvements with anyone else for fear of being sued by Xstore for IP violations. These people are also hurt.
Nah. Xstore couldn't sue because they don't own the code. Not complying with the GPL license didn't gain Microtest any exclusive rights to the code. So Xstore has no such rights either. Perhaps Xstore could sue someone from Microtest for fraud if they were sold bogus rights to someone else's code.
I may be wrong, but whatever kind of matter (or anti-matter) you drop in a black hole, once it passes the event horizon it has no identity other than its mass and charge, as far as an observer outside can tell.
Suppose on their way to the singularity a proton and anti-proton meet. Bang! Gone in a flash of gamma radiation. But the gamma can't get out, so its total energy (equal to the mass of the P+ and P-) still counts towards the hole's mass.
And the singularity itself isn't really matter at all. It can have a charge, but if you smash a positive one and a negative one together, you just get a big neutral one.
Someone tell me if I'm just spouting - I'm not a physicist, just a SF enthusiast.
Thanks for confirming it. One thing about this that I'm not sure I understand is where you say it emits radiation.
One definitive concept about black holes is that nothing can escape from past the event horizon including light and other radiation.
Yeah, but that means a small black hole is likely to swallow one of those pairs of temporary particles the vacuum keeps making (for a time inversely proportional to their energy, or something). If it does, the other one has nobody to annihilate with and may well escape if it's outside the event horizon.
Since the energy for these new particles has to come from somewhere, the black hole loses mass.
Fucked if I can understand it! But that's the explanation for folks without the deep maths to really understand it.
Still, if the Earth were a black hole we'd definitely be dead, and that I think is the worry some people have expressed.
Whether global at the top of the screen, or one-per-window, menu bars are a really horrible idea.
They take up screen space all the time, and you have to go away from the place where you are working (the window contents) to go and look for the command you want.
I prefer context menus every time, even (maybe especially) for my root window, rather than a task bar and "start menu" arrangement borrowed from Windows.
The only justification for menu bars is as a reminder for newbies that there are menus. People not used to clicking the right mouse button to get a menu might otherwise assume your application doesn't do much.
I already hate the Disney brand; the tedious, samey, recycled characters and plots that appear in each movie they make; the plastic crapola merchandise made in sweatshops by near-slave labour; the horror that is Disney World.
So, I can't boycott them much because my real revulsion for everything Disney already prevents me from buying their crap, even for my kids.
I know this isn't doing much, but I thought I'd just take this opportunity to say what I think of Disney quite apart from this lastest unsurprising news. Thank you.
Now, as to what you can do about it - forget boycotting Disney. They've maybe been involved in setting this abomination in motion, but they are not going to lift a finger to stop it even if they get enormous bad publicity. They'll just do an Adobe - step back once the damage is done.
I'm on the safe side of the Atlantic, so all I can suggest is: Fight this one with civil disobedience. It looks unenforcable, so just carry on using Free software and give the bastards the finger.
Now divide that by 1 billion (that's trillion for you in Britain if I am not mistaken).
Indeed you are. It's the other way round. Our old-style billions were your trillions.
However, I think hardly anyone insists on that usage any more. Our billions are now the same as yours. If in doubt call it 10^9
PS: Slashdot guys! Let us use superscript and subscript tags! (or MathML:-)
My 8-year-old son is reasonably happy using Debian Linux (mostly he uses the GIMP and plays the crappy games. Yes, they are crappy. But he likes them.)
He uses the menus, he understands directories, he has no problem with logging in or remembering his password (although I don't think he changes it ever). He's not a genius, although of course I think he is.
What he doesn't need to do is read any man pages. When was the last time you needed to, to work in a GUI application?
He couldn't *administer* the system. But for fuck's sake, it's not *that* hard! I do it, and I'm not exactly a genius either. Any bright 13 year old could do it. Anyone who claims there is no-one at their local school who could is saying something pretty negative about the intelligence of folk in their town, or the quality of education there.
If I seem to be ranting, sorry. It's not directed at SlamMan, or his grandmother. (And for the record, I am well impressed if his grandma has the savvy to admin a Windows box. Respect!)
I quite like ROX as a file manager, but then I used to quite like RISCOS. It's a matter of taste I suppose.
If you use Debian (or Mandrake, possibly) then your menus get kept up to date with all your installed software. Once you get used to it, desktop icons and so on just look like so much clutter. Again, a matter of taste.
Cynicism apart (and I have to agree that I don't trust any particular government to do anything properly), there is no reason why not.
Note #1: The EU (for example) don't have to "do a better job than private industry". They just have to fund the research. Private industry would do the research, for profit. They just wouldn't "own" the results.
Note #2: At the moment, pharmaceutical companies spend millions on research that might never result in a successful product. They take a gamble with each new drug. Why would they "drop research" when it would have become a *more reliable* source of income?
Note #3: A fucking huge amount of tax ends up being spent on expensive patented medical technology anyway. The money that allegedly provides the only incentive for pharmaceutical research doesn't just appear from nowhere.
Here's a question for you - is it wiser to spend the money once and get the results cheaply for ever or let someone else own the research and pay a monopoly-controlled high price for at least the next 17 years?
I mind my taxes being spent unwisely just as much as you do. I just think public research for the public domain is better value for money than lining the pockets of a few giant corporations.
Countries that can club together to fund necessary research will thrive, (and so will everyone else of course). The EU is easily big enough to do this. The ones with a national health service will save a fortune on non-patented drugs.
Obviously if private drug profits are enough to fund patented research then the savings on drug costs would be enough to fund public research.
Pharmaceutical companies will make money from research services and drugs manufacture (work) instead of IP ownership and licensing (blackmail).
No joy to the corporatists, but *they* can die in the streets for all I care:-)
Red Hat is the most well-known, and probably mostly for that reason the one most often chosen when companies want to dabble in Linux.
But this is f*king IBM! They don't need to follow the pack and they can pick what they want from the best features of each distro. Expect apt to be in there somewhere...
Slashdot Mirror
It's reasonable to point out obstacles in the way of a course of action when there is so little on the "benefit" side of the equation to make the cost worthwhile.
Maybe there is a mathematically elegant hierarchical representation for data, but XML isn't it. My vote would be for s-expressions.
Don't confuse this with a group of wealthy countries (or rather, the bought and paid for pet governments of wealthy corporations), seeking a way to consolidate their power.
And if the USA or UK (to name but two of the said governments) stand up for legitimate protest, how come they have f**k all to say about Turkey's human rights record? I think you'll find that governments have no real problem with surrendering the rights of people in general.
Too angry to post coherently, sorry.
Just an irrational and uneducated guess.
The usual reason to accept the slower execution is a faster development cycle. I'm not sure the same tradeoff is such a good idea for an OS - most people run applications a lot more often than they hack the kernel.
I assumed I was replying to an American. I am deeply sorry!
However, I think unconstitutional laws are considered never to have been law once they are judged as such. But don't ask me, I just heard it somewhere.
And I wouldn't say that the law provides an exact definition of your rights. The human right to free speech (including expression as code) is IMO an absolute even in countries whose laws don't currently recognise it. But that's me nitpicking.
surashudotto
ni otaku ga nai ka?
tawa keru na!
(sorry, had to be done. Although maybe not so badly)
"Probably they can get away with it because of the way the law currently stands" != "within their rights", IMO.
Oh deary, deary me. WTF was your war of Independence all about then? Start paying the UK a couple of hundred years of back taxes if you want to take that attitude - we could do with the cashI ask this with respect, so please excuse my ignorance.
They're muslims right? So they are forbidden to make images of people. Or have the rules changed since the days when muslim art was all beautiful calligraphy and geometry?
Even if modern muslims tolerate neutral representations of people, making posters of people to glorify them is surely very close to idolatry, no?
Not that I have ANY doubts at all about the hypocrisy of any murderer claiming to be doing god's work - that goes without saying. But maybe
all those who sympathise with OBL should take a step back and look at what they are supporting: certainly not Islam.
Well, for a start there will be more software jobs outside the US :-)
But if you work on any software or hardware that gets around the state-mandated usage-restrictions, don't plan any trips to California, eh?
Oh, and hardware will probably get more expensive because of the demand for unrestricted sound cards etc.
There might be a good side - if Windows starts refusing to run on the 'illegal' hardware, then it might just be the last push needed to make some users switch to a better OS.
The last sentence is the punchline though, even on its own. It would fit in practically any context where I work :-)
Nah, no point. Our film industry doesn't make enough money to make it a big lobbying point.
Besides, we just don't suck up to big money the way the average American does. Our sinister legislation usually gets proposed to give more powers to the state, not corporations. I'm not saying that's any better, mind you.
I don't want to get into a huge long reply to this, because I'm at work.
Short reply: it depends heavily on your definitions. If you think shallowly about it, then "good" is what you like and "evil" is what you don't like. Obviously that's relative.
If you think deeply about it, then you can establish what you mean by "evil" in a way that is conducive to discussion, even with with people whose ideas of right and wrong behaviour are different from your own.
M Scott Peck's definition/explanation of evil is one such starting point.
Evil is not the opposite of good anyway. Bad is the opposite of good. Evil is just one extreme form of a psychological defect typified by pride, lying and inability to accept criticism or dissent.
Whether someone's wrong-doing results from being evil, or from some other cause (e.g. ignorance or drunkenness) is another matter.
To suggest that there is no such thing as right or wrong or at the other extreme to insist that one's own cultural standards embody absolute right - both are due to shallow thinking.
Let's just say that rational beings able to agree on a goal in a given situation can agree on right and wrong ways to go about it.
And remember, it would only be a matter of time before the government made barter, anonymous transactions or any other attempt to live outside the controlled economy illegal.
Nah. Xstore couldn't sue because they don't own the code. Not complying with the GPL license didn't gain Microtest any exclusive rights to the code. So Xstore has no such rights either. Perhaps Xstore could sue someone from Microtest for fraud if they were sold bogus rights to someone else's code.
Suppose on their way to the singularity a proton and anti-proton meet. Bang! Gone in a flash of gamma radiation. But the gamma can't get out, so its total energy (equal to the mass of the P+ and P-) still counts towards the hole's mass.
And the singularity itself isn't really matter at all. It can have a charge, but if you smash a positive one and a negative one together, you just get a big neutral one.
Someone tell me if I'm just spouting - I'm not a physicist, just a SF enthusiast.
Since the energy for these new particles has to come from somewhere, the black hole loses mass. Fucked if I can understand it! But that's the explanation for folks without the deep maths to really understand it. Still, if the Earth were a black hole we'd definitely be dead, and that I think is the worry some people have expressed.
Whether global at the top of the screen, or one-per-window, menu bars are a really horrible idea.
They take up screen space all the time, and you have to go away from the place where you are working (the window contents) to go and look for the command you want.
I prefer context menus every time, even (maybe especially) for my root window, rather than a task bar and "start menu" arrangement borrowed from Windows.
The only justification for menu bars is as a reminder for newbies that there are menus. People not used to clicking the right mouse button to get a menu might otherwise assume your application doesn't do much.
I already hate the Disney brand; the tedious, samey, recycled characters and plots that appear in each movie they make; the plastic crapola merchandise made in sweatshops by near-slave labour; the horror that is Disney World.
So, I can't boycott them much because my real revulsion for everything Disney already prevents me from buying their crap, even for my kids.
I know this isn't doing much, but I thought I'd just take this opportunity to say what I think of Disney quite apart from this lastest unsurprising news. Thank you.
Now, as to what you can do about it - forget boycotting Disney. They've maybe been involved in setting this abomination in motion, but they are not going to lift a finger to stop it even if they get enormous bad publicity. They'll just do an Adobe - step back once the damage is done.
I'm on the safe side of the Atlantic, so all I can suggest is: Fight this one with civil disobedience. It looks unenforcable, so just carry on using Free software and give the bastards the finger.
Indeed you are. It's the other way round. Our old-style billions were your trillions. However, I think hardly anyone insists on that usage any more. Our billions are now the same as yours. If in doubt call it 10^9
PS: Slashdot guys! Let us use superscript and subscript tags! (or MathML :-)
Hmm.
My 8-year-old son is reasonably happy using Debian Linux (mostly he uses the GIMP and plays the crappy games. Yes, they are crappy. But he likes them.)
He uses the menus, he understands directories, he has no problem with logging in or remembering his password (although I don't think he changes it ever). He's not a genius, although of course I think he is.
What he doesn't need to do is read any man pages. When was the last time you needed to, to work in a GUI application?
He couldn't *administer* the system. But for fuck's sake, it's not *that* hard! I do it, and I'm not exactly a genius either. Any bright 13 year old could do it. Anyone who claims there is no-one at their local school who could is saying something pretty negative about the intelligence of folk in their town, or the quality of education there.
If I seem to be ranting, sorry. It's not directed at SlamMan, or his grandmother. (And for the record, I am well impressed if his grandma has the savvy to admin a Windows box. Respect!)
I quite like ROX as a file manager, but then I used to quite like RISCOS. It's a matter of taste I suppose.
If you use Debian (or Mandrake, possibly) then your menus get kept up to date with all your installed software. Once you get used to it, desktop icons and so on just look like so much clutter. Again, a matter of taste.
Cynicism apart (and I have to agree that I don't trust any particular government to do anything properly), there is no reason why not.
Note #1: The EU (for example) don't have to "do a better job than private industry". They just have to fund the research. Private industry would do the research, for profit. They just wouldn't "own" the results.
Note #2: At the moment, pharmaceutical companies spend millions on research that might never result in a successful product. They take a gamble with each new drug. Why would they "drop research" when it would have become a *more reliable* source of income?
Note #3: A fucking huge amount of tax ends up being spent on expensive patented medical technology anyway. The money that allegedly provides the only incentive for pharmaceutical research doesn't just appear from nowhere.
Here's a question for you - is it wiser to spend the money once and get the results cheaply for ever or let someone else own the research and pay a monopoly-controlled high price for at least the next 17 years?
I mind my taxes being spent unwisely just as much as you do. I just think public research for the public domain is better value for money than lining the pockets of a few giant corporations.
Or...
:-)
Countries that can club together to fund necessary research will thrive, (and so will everyone else of course). The EU is easily big enough to do this. The ones with a national health service will save a fortune on non-patented drugs.
Obviously if private drug profits are enough to fund patented research then the savings on drug costs would be enough to fund public research.
Pharmaceutical companies will make money from research services and drugs manufacture (work) instead of IP ownership and licensing (blackmail).
No joy to the corporatists, but *they* can die in the streets for all I care
Debian, obviously :)
Red Hat is the most well-known, and probably mostly for that reason the one most often chosen when companies want to dabble in Linux.
But this is f*king IBM! They don't need to follow the pack and they can pick what they want from the best features of each distro. Expect apt to be in there somewhere...