There is a region in Jupiter's atmosphere with reasonable temperatures and pressures (room temperature, 10 atm), and gravity there is not too different from Earth either. There may well be life in those regions, and flying/floating is all it would and could do.
What you're thinking about is what you'd get if you took a rocky planet like Earth, maintained an earth-like atmosphere, and just increased its mass to match Jupiter's; such planets simply are not going to exist.
I do find the media witch hunts despicable, and I think media have little credibility or integrity left.
Nevertheless, I disagree that this kind of behavior should be illegal. Quite to the contrary, I think anybody should be free to record and republish any interaction that is not clearly personal: store clerk advice, talks at conventions, etc., anything and anybody that offers services to the public should be fair game. I think society would be a whole lot better off if we shine light on how businesses and organizations behave.
many of the articles posted by Mr. Dawson are so obviously (left-)biased,
"Biased" relative to what?
And what is "biased" about criticizing the administration for imprisonment without due process, for violating privacy rights, for funneling billions to their buddies in industry without any oversight or review, for torture, and for lying in order to get us into a war?
Maybe the problem is that you're so right wing and so politically narrow minded that even moderate opinions seem "left-biased" to you.
However, one cannot force another to spend *his* money, or more precisely to spend it for him, in ways that you and everyone else might think is better for him without trampling the notions of self determination, pursuit of happiness, and freedom
One can, and one does. This is just like compelling people to fund and serve in the military. If we're attacked, then the individually optimal thing is to run away and let the other citizens fight. The only way of defending ourselves is to compel everybody to assume individual costs and risks to work towards common defense.
I agree with you that pure and basic research are worthy activities, but I do not support spending the public money (i.e. taxes) on these activities, however noble they may be, because they do not fall within the strict responsibilities of limited government.
They fall exactly within the strict responsibilities of limited government. Research, like defense, education, and infrastructure is a "public good" ("good" as in "thing that is bought and sold", not "good" as in "not bad"), and the purpose of limited government is the creation of public goods because there is no other way of creating them.
MERL published a lot of papers, but that doesn't mean that they were doing research what was actually useful for anybody. The state of academic computer science is actually rather depressing, with lots of stuff being reinvented, meaningless variations of known techniques being published, and faulty mathematics being widely used.
The Diamond Touch table itself is symptomatic, since MERL didn't invent the concept either, and since it seems pretty clear that such a device does not have a significant market at this point.
However, I would say that safe languages, in the end, have the effect of keeping you, the developer, away from the hardware. If you code in a safe language, you are denying yourself access to the CPU instructions, registers and memory of your hardware platform,
A safe language doesn't mean absence of unsafe features, it means that, unless the task actually requires it, you can stay entirely in the safe subset of the language, and that if you use unsafe features, their use is lexically apparent.
which is a good thing if you're ignorant of such things, but in the end can keep you from writing the most optimal or fastest code on the platform.
You are absolutely right that I am ignorant of such things: after 25 years of C and assembly language programming and lots and lots of benchmarking and optimization, I have no idea what kind of C code will actually run fast on a particular compiler/CPU combo anymore because it's pretty much impossible to predict given the wide variety of compilers and architectures that exist. People who think they can are too inexperienced to know better.
That's why the correct strategy is to leave the low-level optimization to a compiler (preferably a JIT) and CPU-specific hand-crafted libraries, and to use a language that makes it easy to focus on high-level optimizations like good data structures.
C is exactly the opposite: C compilers can't do many obvious optimizations due to C's semantics, and creating good data structures in C is a royal pain.
So I'm sure you'll be willing to revise your opinion when the conservative-packed Supreme Court grants cert to this case and hands down the inevitable 5-4 finding in favor of the plaintiffs?
No, my opinion doesn't change: the meaning of the Second Amendment is clear. Whether the Supreme Court will change nearly two centuries of tradition because of NRA lobbying and campaign contributions remains to be seen. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
The ACLU has no problem disagreeing with case law all the way up to and including rulings from the Supreme Court, when it suits their purposes. Miller is just a convenient exception for them.
Quite right: this is a fight they don't need to pick, since there really are more important issues.
So, you're walking on a dissipative surface. That's roughly like, oh, walking through deep mud or water. Well, given how many people are obese, the energy consumption part of it may be a good thing.
The bad thing is that man didn't evolve for this. We evolved for walking on springy surfaces and the occasional hard surface. This may cause a lot of biomechanical problems in the long run.
Of course, it's also inefficient: it probably costs a lot more more to manufacture and maintain the machinery than it will ever generate in power.
"Then it would have said"-type arguments are bogus. It says what it says, and says clearly that the Constitution guarantees that "the people" have a right to bear arms for the purpose of maintaining a well regulated militia, not for duck hunting, personal safety, or gun collection.
That's not just my opinion, that's what the Supreme Court and lower courts have consistently interpreted the Constitution to mean.
The Cocoa API is based on the OpenStep API, which has a full open specification.
"Based on" is not sufficient to create an independent, binary-compatible implementation. And, when all is said and done, there is probably a lot more reengineered documentation about Windows than there is documentation about OS X.
No, it's not a "zero sum game". NASA probably gets more money overall if they take on manned projects, but they still end up cutting science projects. So, technically, it's not a zero sum game, but science still loses when projects like a manned mission to Mars appear.
Things like garbage collection, which have been added to Objective-C 2.0, are not critical to a good development platform, are mostly there for noobs IMHO
I use a Mac, and I think I have managed to crash just about every piece of software Apple ships: the Finder, Dashboard, Keynote, Address Book, Mail, the kernel, System Preferences, Safari, etc. Evidently, Apple must be populated by noobs that simply can't produce software in Objective C that at least gracefully recovers from errors without data loss.
Of course, I don't blame them: I can't either, and I frankly doubt you can.
OpenStep/Cocoa and Objective-C are as rock-solid as the UNIX that it runs upon.
You mean that unless you spend many man-years for testing each release, you get software that is full of buffer overflows, data corruption, and crashes? Yes, I quite agree.
The critical part of a development environment which must be there from day one is the development model and philosophy of the platform.
The philosophy of Objective C has been to provide a stripped down version of Smalltalk with easy interfacing to native code. It was a nice idea but a flawed execution, and it hasn't been updated or fixed in the last 20 years.
Objective-C will never be strictly typed, and while this lets people get into trouble at runtime,
The issue is not that Objective C is dynamically typed, the issue is that it is an inherently unsafe language. Smalltalk, for example, is dynamically typed, yet Smalltalk is safe.
The problems we often cite with C and ObjC are really ergonomic
Yes, of course, that's all type systems are about: preventing stupid human mistakes. You know, the kinds of mistakes that cause most of the security holes, crashes, and data corruption that we experience day-to-day on our computers. If programmers were perfect, we wouldn't need type systems.
If you built an OS that mandated third party devs
I didn't say anything about "mandating". Objective C could be a safe language with an explicitly unsafe C subset that is there when you need it (kind of like Mono). Instead, Objective C is a language that is, quite unnecessarily, unsafe throughout.
I personally think this whole "safe language" business is some sort of connector conspiracy
No, it's a conspiracy by users who are tired of buffer overflows and crashes. I use a Macintosh and Apple's own applications crash and hang regularly. (The fact that Microsoft is attempting to use C# to dominate the industry is unrelated to the fact that C# is a well-designed, safe language.)
Why don't we all just go back to LISP?
Mostly because Lisp isn't widely used and doesn't fit well with what mainstream programmers know.
The obvious choice for Apple would be to make an aggressive move to Smalltalk, which Objective C programmers should feel comfortable with and which easily integrates with existing Objective C libraries. It would also be a big improvement on XCode and AppleScript. They can probably pick up a Smalltalk vendor cheap.
For context: Mac OS X 10.5 will not feature a managed or "safe" ObjC
And that is precisely why Objective C and GNU Step are bad choices for Linux, which is what all of this is about.
No, I don't remember that. NYC has been the home of the wealthy and powerful for a long time. NYC may have been more libertine, but politically, conservative forces have been quite strong in NYC as well.
The early reputation of objective c of being slow was result of his support/use of the first garbage collectors that where at that time indeed very slow... not sure whats your take of that
Objective C has never used garbage collection until now, and Objective C has had one of the fastest method dispatches of any dynamic object-oriented language. The issue with Objective C has always been its lack of runtime safety, which is even worse than C. For example, nothing checks that the argument types for method calls are consistent across compilation units.
but, Python with C extensions (for compute intensive code)? Its in another very different league
Actually, Python with C extensions is not all that different from Objective C: it's a high level language (Python) integrated with a low-level language (C), just like Objective C is a high level language (Smalltalk subset) integrated with a low-level language (C). The main difference is that the high level language is more cleanly separated in Python/C than in Objective-C. (Python also gives you the option of closer integration with Pyrex.)
probably Squeak or Oberon 2 are closer to fulfill the (object system + runtime safety + garbage collection) than Python + C
Unfortunately, neither Squeak nor Oberon 2 are as practical or well-integrated. And I think Python is actually a nicer language and maturing technically (new object system, Pyrex, ctype, etc.).
One more thing: Apple has explained what the enhancements for Objective C 2.0 are: modern garbage collection, syntax enhancements, runtime performance improvements, and 64-bit support. There is nothing in there about improving runtime safety. So, it's reasonable to assume that the only improvements to runtime safety that is in Objective C 2.0 are those related to garbage collection.
If you have more information, maybe instead of name calling, you can share that with the rest of us.
I suppose you don't know jack about Objective-C 2.0
Only what has been publicly released, which indicates that Objective C 2.0 includes garbage collection but remains backwards compatible; that would make it an unsafe language.
If Objective C 2.0 turns out to be a safe language and if someone creates an open source implementation, then it's a reasonable consideration. But if Objective C 2.0 turns out to be a safe language, then Etoile and Cocoa would have to be reengineered from the ground up to take advantage of that.
I do hope Apple will fix Objective C and make it a safe language, because then we'd really have a decent alternative to C and C++. However, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Do yourself a favor and download the docs when OS X 10.5 is released. Or better yet, get a ADC Select license and study it.
Of course, I will look at it when OS X 10.5 comes out; however, as long as Objective C 2.0 remains a proprietary language that only exists on Macintosh, that's more of an academic exercise.
Aside from their outright hypocrisy on the Second Amendment,
Why? Because they don't bother about it? Why should they? There are lots of other people who do already.
I'm in more danger from them and the constitutional rights they profess to protect
You may well be, but so what? If you want perfect safety, go live in a fascist state. Living in a free society carries a certain amount of risk.
All things considered, I prefer less criminals on the streets,
So does everybody.
and crime being more dangerous to the criminal, than the victim.
The purpose of the Second Amendment is a well-regulated militia. So, yes, by all means, you should have a gun at home together with ammunition, both of which should be locked and sealed except for militia training exercises or in case of an emergency. If you take out that gun in the street during peace time, you should be thrown in jail. And, yes, mandatory, state-level militia service, as well as state-level decisions as to whether to send their militias into federal wars, would do this country a whole lot of good.
The scanning by the police is OK, the retention of the data shouldn't be; the police have no justification in keeping any information about the movements of people who are not subjects to an investigation.
but lately the courts haven't seemed to mind as long as they sell it as protecting families from perverts and drunks
The Nazis were elected, you know. Why do you think people voted for them? Do you think the Germans woke up and said "let's elect a genocidal maniac and start WWII, that would be fun?" No, they elected a government that promised law and order by doing away with all those silly legal restrictions that protected "only the criminals", to protect people from "perverts and drunks", and to run a government based on Christian values and family values (their campaign promises; sound familiar?).
To protect us from a government spiraling out of control in that way, we have strict rules for the protection of innocent citizens, and we have the principle "innocent until proven guilty". The way governments like to try to get around those protections recently is to tinker with the latter principle, but someone should not be deprive of his rights without due process of the law.
Objective C is 1980's technology: it's a clever and useful extension of C, and its dynamic binding and typing are still convenient, but it's lacking garbage collection and runtime safety. Apple is addressing the garbage collection issue in Leopard, but there is still no runtime safety.
Why does runtime safety matter? It matters because it makes software more robust and more secure. Without it, an error in a plugin or application can cause not only a crash, but also silent data corruption or data loss. Mac, Windows, and Linux achieve reasonable robustness only through extensive and costly testing, and crashes and data corruption still occur regularly on all three platforms.
Of course, everybody still uses a lot of unsafe libraries, but Windows and Linux are moving away from it. On Linux, new code is increasingly written in languages like Python and Mono. In particular, a combo like Python with C extensions gives you an Objective-C-like object system (from Python) with C performance for compute intensive code, plus garbage collection and runtime safety.
It isn't moral to take advantage of such problems, but it should be legal. Why? Because making it illegal allows the operators of those machines to avoid responsibility for keeping the machines in good working order. In the case where the incorrect payout is caused by someone's tampering, then the person doing the tampering should be responsible for the entire damages.
As an ATM customer, I also don't count the money. First, I take out at least $300 at a time, and I'm not going to count that in public. Second, whatever the mistake, even if I happen to notice, I'm not going to waste time going through a pointless discussion with the bank anyway only to be potentially accused of lying or fraud; if the bank regularly makes mistakes that cost me too much money, I switch banks.
Doesn't BitTorrent do the same thing? I don't see how this is any different.
No it doesn't do the same thing. Bittorrent is used by many people for many different kinds of content at many different times. The fact that two machines talk tells you nothing. And the content is usually not software anyway.
This is completely different. Let's say a Microsoft IIS beta comes out and they distribute it with this. I make my machine part of the network and I get a lot of connections. For each of those IP addresses, there's a good chance that they are running a previous beta release and that they are going to upgrade to the current release. If there's a security problem in one of those two releases, I get a juicy list of potential attack targets hand-delivered.
But I hate wild speculation and bullshit a lot more.
There is no "wild speculation"; the idea is simply stupid.
Just because FOX employs idiots it doesn't give you license to question journalism itself.
It's a free country and I can question whatever I like.
Even more important to a functioning democracy is a free press.
Of course we need a free press. What we don't need is the kind of career journalists that work at places like Fox and the New York Times and whose job is a conflict of interest in itself.
And, no, places like the New York Times do not employ idiots, which makes it all the worse that their motivation is not unbiased communication of news.
If it's not, the author of that article should be kept as far away from writing software as possible; he epitomizes the attitude that so frequently gets C++ programmers into trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a region in Jupiter's atmosphere with reasonable temperatures and pressures (room temperature, 10 atm), and gravity there is not too different from Earth either. There may well be life in those regions, and flying/floating is all it would and could do.
What you're thinking about is what you'd get if you took a rocky planet like Earth, maintained an earth-like atmosphere, and just increased its mass to match Jupiter's; such planets simply are not going to exist.
I do find the media witch hunts despicable, and I think media have little credibility or integrity left.
Nevertheless, I disagree that this kind of behavior should be illegal. Quite to the contrary, I think anybody should be free to record and republish any interaction that is not clearly personal: store clerk advice, talks at conventions, etc., anything and anybody that offers services to the public should be fair game. I think society would be a whole lot better off if we shine light on how businesses and organizations behave.
People like these need to be exposed:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mjMRgT5o-Ig
And do you want to throw these people in jail?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dtBU0fNk3qE
many of the articles posted by Mr. Dawson are so obviously (left-)biased,
"Biased" relative to what?
And what is "biased" about criticizing the administration for imprisonment without due process, for violating privacy rights, for funneling billions to their buddies in industry without any oversight or review, for torture, and for lying in order to get us into a war?
Maybe the problem is that you're so right wing and so politically narrow minded that even moderate opinions seem "left-biased" to you.
However, one cannot force another to spend *his* money, or more precisely to spend it for him, in ways that you and everyone else might think is better for him without trampling the notions of self determination, pursuit of happiness, and freedom
One can, and one does. This is just like compelling people to fund and serve in the military. If we're attacked, then the individually optimal thing is to run away and let the other citizens fight. The only way of defending ourselves is to compel everybody to assume individual costs and risks to work towards common defense.
I agree with you that pure and basic research are worthy activities, but I do not support spending the public money (i.e. taxes) on these activities, however noble they may be, because they do not fall within the strict responsibilities of limited government.
They fall exactly within the strict responsibilities of limited government. Research, like defense, education, and infrastructure is a "public good" ("good" as in "thing that is bought and sold", not "good" as in "not bad"), and the purpose of limited government is the creation of public goods because there is no other way of creating them.
MERL published a lot of papers, but that doesn't mean that they were doing research what was actually useful for anybody. The state of academic computer science is actually rather depressing, with lots of stuff being reinvented, meaningless variations of known techniques being published, and faulty mathematics being widely used.
The Diamond Touch table itself is symptomatic, since MERL didn't invent the concept either, and since it seems pretty clear that such a device does not have a significant market at this point.
understood as to why Futurama never really took off to the mainstream as Simpsons did
What fraction of Americans do you think are going to get "aleph-1-plex" or jokes about Hawking?
However, I would say that safe languages, in the end, have the effect of keeping you, the developer, away from the hardware. If you code in a safe language, you are denying yourself access to the CPU instructions, registers and memory of your hardware platform,
A safe language doesn't mean absence of unsafe features, it means that, unless the task actually requires it, you can stay entirely in the safe subset of the language, and that if you use unsafe features, their use is lexically apparent.
which is a good thing if you're ignorant of such things, but in the end can keep you from writing the most optimal or fastest code on the platform.
You are absolutely right that I am ignorant of such things: after 25 years of C and assembly language programming and lots and lots of benchmarking and optimization, I have no idea what kind of C code will actually run fast on a particular compiler/CPU combo anymore because it's pretty much impossible to predict given the wide variety of compilers and architectures that exist. People who think they can are too inexperienced to know better.
That's why the correct strategy is to leave the low-level optimization to a compiler (preferably a JIT) and CPU-specific hand-crafted libraries, and to use a language that makes it easy to focus on high-level optimizations like good data structures.
C is exactly the opposite: C compilers can't do many obvious optimizations due to C's semantics, and creating good data structures in C is a royal pain.
So I'm sure you'll be willing to revise your opinion when the conservative-packed Supreme Court grants cert to this case and hands down the inevitable 5-4 finding in favor of the plaintiffs?
No, my opinion doesn't change: the meaning of the Second Amendment is clear. Whether the Supreme Court will change nearly two centuries of tradition because of NRA lobbying and campaign contributions remains to be seen. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
The ACLU has no problem disagreeing with case law all the way up to and including rulings from the Supreme Court, when it suits their purposes. Miller is just a convenient exception for them.
Quite right: this is a fight they don't need to pick, since there really are more important issues.
So, you're walking on a dissipative surface. That's roughly like, oh, walking through deep mud or water. Well, given how many people are obese, the energy consumption part of it may be a good thing.
The bad thing is that man didn't evolve for this. We evolved for walking on springy surfaces and the occasional hard surface. This may cause a lot of biomechanical problems in the long run.
Of course, it's also inefficient: it probably costs a lot more more to manufacture and maintain the machinery than it will ever generate in power.
"Then it would have said"-type arguments are bogus. It says what it says, and says clearly that the Constitution guarantees that "the people" have a right to bear arms for the purpose of maintaining a well regulated militia, not for duck hunting, personal safety, or gun collection.
That's not just my opinion, that's what the Supreme Court and lower courts have consistently interpreted the Constitution to mean.
The Cocoa API is based on the OpenStep API, which has a full open specification.
"Based on" is not sufficient to create an independent, binary-compatible implementation. And, when all is said and done, there is probably a lot more reengineered documentation about Windows than there is documentation about OS X.
No, it's not a "zero sum game". NASA probably gets more money overall if they take on manned projects, but they still end up cutting science projects. So, technically, it's not a zero sum game, but science still loses when projects like a manned mission to Mars appear.
Things like garbage collection, which have been added to Objective-C 2.0, are not critical to a good development platform, are mostly there for noobs IMHO
I use a Mac, and I think I have managed to crash just about every piece of software Apple ships: the Finder, Dashboard, Keynote, Address Book, Mail, the kernel, System Preferences, Safari, etc. Evidently, Apple must be populated by noobs that simply can't produce software in Objective C that at least gracefully recovers from errors without data loss.
Of course, I don't blame them: I can't either, and I frankly doubt you can.
OpenStep/Cocoa and Objective-C are as rock-solid as the UNIX that it runs upon.
You mean that unless you spend many man-years for testing each release, you get software that is full of buffer overflows, data corruption, and crashes? Yes, I quite agree.
The critical part of a development environment which must be there from day one is the development model and philosophy of the platform.
The philosophy of Objective C has been to provide a stripped down version of Smalltalk with easy interfacing to native code. It was a nice idea but a flawed execution, and it hasn't been updated or fixed in the last 20 years.
Objective-C will never be strictly typed, and while this lets people get into trouble at runtime,
The issue is not that Objective C is dynamically typed, the issue is that it is an inherently unsafe language. Smalltalk, for example, is dynamically typed, yet Smalltalk is safe.
The problems we often cite with C and ObjC are really ergonomic
Yes, of course, that's all type systems are about: preventing stupid human mistakes. You know, the kinds of mistakes that cause most of the security holes, crashes, and data corruption that we experience day-to-day on our computers. If programmers were perfect, we wouldn't need type systems.
If you built an OS that mandated third party devs
I didn't say anything about "mandating". Objective C could be a safe language with an explicitly unsafe C subset that is there when you need it (kind of like Mono). Instead, Objective C is a language that is, quite unnecessarily, unsafe throughout.
I personally think this whole "safe language" business is some sort of connector conspiracy
No, it's a conspiracy by users who are tired of buffer overflows and crashes. I use a Macintosh and Apple's own applications crash and hang regularly. (The fact that Microsoft is attempting to use C# to dominate the industry is unrelated to the fact that C# is a well-designed, safe language.)
Why don't we all just go back to LISP?
Mostly because Lisp isn't widely used and doesn't fit well with what mainstream programmers know.
The obvious choice for Apple would be to make an aggressive move to Smalltalk, which Objective C programmers should feel comfortable with and which easily integrates with existing Objective C libraries. It would also be a big improvement on XCode and AppleScript. They can probably pick up a Smalltalk vendor cheap.
For context: Mac OS X 10.5 will not feature a managed or "safe" ObjC
And that is precisely why Objective C and GNU Step are bad choices for Linux, which is what all of this is about.
No, I don't remember that. NYC has been the home of the wealthy and powerful for a long time. NYC may have been more libertine, but politically, conservative forces have been quite strong in NYC as well.
The early reputation of objective c of being slow was result of his support/use of the first garbage collectors that where at that time indeed very slow... not sure whats your take of that
Objective C has never used garbage collection until now, and Objective C has had one of the fastest method dispatches of any dynamic object-oriented language. The issue with Objective C has always been its lack of runtime safety, which is even worse than C. For example, nothing checks that the argument types for method calls are consistent across compilation units.
but, Python with C extensions (for compute intensive code)? Its in another very different league
Actually, Python with C extensions is not all that different from Objective C: it's a high level language (Python) integrated with a low-level language (C), just like Objective C is a high level language (Smalltalk subset) integrated with a low-level language (C). The main difference is that the high level language is more cleanly separated in Python/C than in Objective-C. (Python also gives you the option of closer integration with Pyrex.)
probably Squeak or Oberon 2 are closer to fulfill the (object system + runtime safety + garbage collection) than Python + C
Unfortunately, neither Squeak nor Oberon 2 are as practical or well-integrated. And I think Python is actually a nicer language and maturing technically (new object system, Pyrex, ctype, etc.).
One more thing: Apple has explained what the enhancements for Objective C 2.0 are: modern garbage collection, syntax enhancements, runtime performance improvements, and 64-bit support. There is nothing in there about improving runtime safety. So, it's reasonable to assume that the only improvements to runtime safety that is in Objective C 2.0 are those related to garbage collection.
If you have more information, maybe instead of name calling, you can share that with the rest of us.
I suppose you don't know jack about Objective-C 2.0
Only what has been publicly released, which indicates that Objective C 2.0 includes garbage collection but remains backwards compatible; that would make it an unsafe language.
If Objective C 2.0 turns out to be a safe language and if someone creates an open source implementation, then it's a reasonable consideration. But if Objective C 2.0 turns out to be a safe language, then Etoile and Cocoa would have to be reengineered from the ground up to take advantage of that.
I do hope Apple will fix Objective C and make it a safe language, because then we'd really have a decent alternative to C and C++. However, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Do yourself a favor and download the docs when OS X 10.5 is released. Or better yet, get a ADC Select license and study it.
Of course, I will look at it when OS X 10.5 comes out; however, as long as Objective C 2.0 remains a proprietary language that only exists on Macintosh, that's more of an academic exercise.
Aside from their outright hypocrisy on the Second Amendment,
Why? Because they don't bother about it? Why should they? There are lots of other people who do already.
I'm in more danger from them and the constitutional rights they profess to protect
You may well be, but so what? If you want perfect safety, go live in a fascist state. Living in a free society carries a certain amount of risk.
All things considered, I prefer less criminals on the streets,
So does everybody.
and crime being more dangerous to the criminal, than the victim.
The purpose of the Second Amendment is a well-regulated militia. So, yes, by all means, you should have a gun at home together with ammunition, both of which should be locked and sealed except for militia training exercises or in case of an emergency. If you take out that gun in the street during peace time, you should be thrown in jail. And, yes, mandatory, state-level militia service, as well as state-level decisions as to whether to send their militias into federal wars, would do this country a whole lot of good.
The scanning by the police is OK, the retention of the data shouldn't be; the police have no justification in keeping any information about the movements of people who are not subjects to an investigation.
but lately the courts haven't seemed to mind as long as they sell it as protecting families from perverts and drunks
The Nazis were elected, you know. Why do you think people voted for them? Do you think the Germans woke up and said "let's elect a genocidal maniac and start WWII, that would be fun?" No, they elected a government that promised law and order by doing away with all those silly legal restrictions that protected "only the criminals", to protect people from "perverts and drunks", and to run a government based on Christian values and family values (their campaign promises; sound familiar?).
To protect us from a government spiraling out of control in that way, we have strict rules for the protection of innocent citizens, and we have the principle "innocent until proven guilty". The way governments like to try to get around those protections recently is to tinker with the latter principle, but someone should not be deprive of his rights without due process of the law.
Objective C is 1980's technology: it's a clever and useful extension of C, and its dynamic binding and typing are still convenient, but it's lacking garbage collection and runtime safety. Apple is addressing the garbage collection issue in Leopard, but there is still no runtime safety.
Why does runtime safety matter? It matters because it makes software more robust and more secure. Without it, an error in a plugin or application can cause not only a crash, but also silent data corruption or data loss. Mac, Windows, and Linux achieve reasonable robustness only through extensive and costly testing, and crashes and data corruption still occur regularly on all three platforms.
Of course, everybody still uses a lot of unsafe libraries, but Windows and Linux are moving away from it. On Linux, new code is increasingly written in languages like Python and Mono. In particular, a combo like Python with C extensions gives you an Objective-C-like object system (from Python) with C performance for compute intensive code, plus garbage collection and runtime safety.
It isn't moral to take advantage of such problems, but it should be legal. Why? Because making it illegal allows the operators of those machines to avoid responsibility for keeping the machines in good working order. In the case where the incorrect payout is caused by someone's tampering, then the person doing the tampering should be responsible for the entire damages.
As an ATM customer, I also don't count the money. First, I take out at least $300 at a time, and I'm not going to count that in public. Second, whatever the mistake, even if I happen to notice, I'm not going to waste time going through a pointless discussion with the bank anyway only to be potentially accused of lying or fraud; if the bank regularly makes mistakes that cost me too much money, I switch banks.
Doesn't BitTorrent do the same thing? I don't see how this is any different.
No it doesn't do the same thing. Bittorrent is used by many people for many different kinds of content at many different times. The fact that two machines talk tells you nothing. And the content is usually not software anyway.
This is completely different. Let's say a Microsoft IIS beta comes out and they distribute it with this. I make my machine part of the network and I get a lot of connections. For each of those IP addresses, there's a good chance that they are running a previous beta release and that they are going to upgrade to the current release. If there's a security problem in one of those two releases, I get a juicy list of potential attack targets hand-delivered.
But I hate wild speculation and bullshit a lot more.
There is no "wild speculation"; the idea is simply stupid.
Just because FOX employs idiots it doesn't give you license to question journalism itself.
It's a free country and I can question whatever I like.
Even more important to a functioning democracy is a free press.
Of course we need a free press. What we don't need is the kind of career journalists that work at places like Fox and the New York Times and whose job is a conflict of interest in itself.
And, no, places like the New York Times do not employ idiots, which makes it all the worse that their motivation is not unbiased communication of news.
If it's not, the author of that article should be kept as far away from writing software as possible; he epitomizes the attitude that so frequently gets C++ programmers into trouble.