If by "socialism", you mean having the kind of lifestyle that the citizens of France, Norway, Britain, Holland, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy enjoy, then I am a socialist.

So they could have started then... and as a member of the right, I WISH THEY WOULD HAVE. Not because the open partisanship would have cost them votes, because I don't think it would have given how reviled the right had become by 2006, but because we need an open an honest government. However, neither party wants that, they both want a closed, powerful government even if it means they take turns owning the keys.

Neither ideology's policies have really been tried! 41 of the 100 senators can kill any bill. The result is a debilitating inability to pass legislation in order to respond to circumstances. Any legislation that does manage to pass does so only after its supporters remove any half-objectionable policy provisions and load the bill up with bribes for each of the 10 opposition-party senators who have to vote for it. Neither party can reform anything this way. With nobody at the controls of the ship of state, it's little wonder our civil society has decayed. What little governance remaining comes in the form of increasingly brazen executive action, and that's deeply unhealthy for any democracy.

Eliminate the filibuster. Let whichever party is in control actually govern, and give that party a fair shot at improving our lot.

Now, as a liberal, I feel that conservative and libertarian policies would be disastrous, but I'd rather endure them for a few years so that voters would see how awful they are. Having seen what conservatism really means, voters would put progressives into office and keep them there, where they could do some good.

Frankly, I wish the Republicans had invoked the "nuclear option" a few years ago. In that world, without the filibuster, the Democrats would have been able to pass another New Deal and actually start the work of healing the country.

They really are past their sell-by date, and the few who have principles (Kucinich comes to mind) need to put some respectful distance between the rest of the chumps, endorse Nader (or someone like him) and start work on a progressive, thinking version of the Tea Party.

And split the liberal ticket so that conservatives win? No, thanks. A third party is not the right approach in any country in which Duverger's Law applies.

The proper venue to drag the Democratic party, kicking and screaming, in a more progressive direction is the primary. We don't need a party filled with Kucinich clones. Instead, we need to fill the Democratic Party with Kucinich clones. Only the latter has a chance in hell of working.

Bullshit. This false equivalence between the parties is fueled by conservative media outlets, and it's designed to frustrate voters so they skip the polls entirely, allowing the vote be dominated by the right-wing base.

If you want to see the difference between the parties, just compare the Bush keys to the legislation that was passed by the House over the past two years. A lot of that didn't make it into law, but that's because of Republicans filibustering in the Senate, not Democratic malfeasance.

It really takes a special kind of stupidity to think "they're all the same" after 2000-2008. The Democrats aren't perfect, but by god, at least they don't yearn for a return to serfdom.

Ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, running as non-root, it's a PITA to get into directories without the read and execute bits set. Gconf doing that is very rude, and it should definitely stop. Have you filed a bug?

Firefox stores the vast majority of its configuration information in user profiles, not in the registry. It also uses its own COM system internally, not the one provided by Windows.

1) it is actually a highly organised structure of settings that if you took the time to understand it actually makes finding stuff very easy.

The real problem is that the registry's organization is that it:

1. Has too much hierarchy (what the hell is CurrentControlSet and why is it separate from the configuration for Windows?)
2. Leads to very, very long registry paths that are impossible to speak or write, and that make everyone's eyes glaze over.
3. Is inconsistent between system-wide and user-specific hierarchies
4. Not documented or explained very well.

In short, the registry's ontology is massively overengineered, which makes it imposing, opaque, and inconvenient. In practice, a shallow hierarchy with shorter paths would have worked much better; gconf is better in this respect.

Only the owning user can enter that directory, all others lose and go mad.

Erm, what's wrong with "chmod og-rwx somedir/"? Any decent backup program should be able to deal with directories with unfriendly permissions.

Oh, lest I forget: making registry typed was a bad decision. Plain text is a lot easier to manipulate and a lot more consistent for developers and administrators. Is storing "1" really much worse than storing (DWORD)1? (The former is actually smaller if it's NULL-terminated!)

I really don't think storing simple strings in the registry would have hurt performance much either: the registry is explicitly intended for small, infrequently changing pieces of information. The serialization and unserialization aren't really much of a problem, and Microsoft could have provided convenience functions. If the registry were loosely typed, it'd be lot easier to expose it as an ordinary writeable and mountable* filesystem. As it is, the best you can do is read-only because there's no way to tell what type a key should have when it's written. You have to provide special juju for writing keys because of the typing nonsense.

I've seen a lot of configuration bugs in both the Windows and Unix worlds. I've never seen one caused by loose typing of Unix configuration information, and I've seen a lot of pain caused by strong typing of Windows configuration information.

* Yes, Windows can mount arbitrary filesystems in arbitrary places in its name heirarchy. Few people use this facility; personally, I keep everything under C:\ just like a Unix system.

The registry isn't bad because it's stored in binary form, or because it's heirarchical, or because it supports transactions, or because it has ACLs. These are good (or at least acceptable) things.

The registry is bad because it's global and forces a lot of configuration to be global as well. For example, COM components are registered globally, so only one DLL can be associatded with a class ID at a time. That's why you can only have one version of Internet Explorer installed on the same machine. Yes, users have their own registry subtress, but not every key can be configured under the user-specific heirarchy. Even a user-specific key can only have one value at a time for a given user. Unix systems, on the other hand, use environment variables to hold (or point to) configuration information, which results in a lot more flexibility.

Because registry values are global, application developers only consider the case of running one program at a time. If you want, say, two copies of Outlook, each with different settings, you'll need two separate users. A lot of programs don't even support multiple concurrent instances, which is maddening.

Another maddening side effect of the registry being global is that it's not possible to have the equivalent of NFS-mounted home directories under Windows. Say you have a domain user foo\bar on machines A and B. It's natural to want them to have the same %USERPROFILE% (read $HOME) on a fileserver somewhere, and on Unix, that works just fine. But under Windows, when the user logs into machine A, the system will lock ntuser.dat (the file containing the registry), which prevents the user logging in under machine B. Application-specific configuration files that are locked only during actual changes don't have this problem.

The global nature of the registry also makes it difficult to maintain application configuration: if you want to isolate the configuration information used by a program, you're essentially reduced to looking at procmon output and seeing what registry keys it touches. While in principle programs should limit themselves to storing information under HKLU\Software\Blah\..., in practice, they scatter stuff all over the registry, especially when they register COM stuff. You can't keep just, say, Word's configuration under version control.

When people say they hate the registry, what they mean is that they hate that Windows is not very well-modularized. Isolating one application's registry configuration is like removing one egg from an omelet.

A better model would have been to have application-specific registries, searched according to a PATH-like environment variable. In this scheme, when the system needed to, say, look up a COM class ID, it would just search each registry in sequence until it found the right one. Applications would simply store their configuration and registration information in their own registry, making management easy.

But like most Windows brain damage, this scheme wouldn't have worked on a 386SX with 4MB of RAM in 1995, which means it can't possibly be changed in 2010. As we all know, design decisions are irrevecorable and eternal (and I'm only half-joking).

Your comment is just a concatenation of conservative talking points. Wages and jobs have not declined in major western powers such as France and Germany which still retain functional governments based on real social contracts. Shame on you for believing the free trade propaganda.

Since when does policy affect voting?

You realize that Murdoch, who owns News Corporation and Fox News, controls most of Britain's media, including Sky Television, The Times [of London], The Sun, and News of the World. If you want to vomit, look at some of Murdoch's holdings outside the US.

Why would Cameron, a deeply conservative aristocrat, care one bit about what the riff-raff can do with his supporter's "intellectual property"? The British have caught the plague that began on my side of the Atlantic: kleptocrats compose a huge part of government, and they've been on a crusade against egalitarianism since the 1980s. Everything done by conservatives in power is aimed at enriching the already rich and reducing everyone else to desperate peasants. They yearn for a return to the Gilded Age or worse. If a conservative creates policy that benefits the people at large, he's done it by accident. Academic rationales and appeals to the public, however erudite or reasonable they might appear, are just meaningless words put together by consultants who specialize in creating talking points that promote a particular narrative among a particular audience. These statements are tools with a particular purpose, not sincere attempts to explain the genesis of an action and demonstrate its worth.

Knowing this, you must consider every action taken by a conservative through the lens of their ultimate goal. If Cameron says he wants to revise copyright law to foster creativity, don't take him at his word. Ask yourself, "In what way will these modifications enrich powerful backers? What loopholes exist? What narrative is the government trying to push? What does it prepare the population to accept? How can the change under consideration be used to hurt the opposition? Where are the lies? Where is the selective truth?"

Finally, consider the most important question of all: "Will the net effect of this action be to enrich the wealthy?" The answer will invariably be "yes".

You made your point. In context, "Java" clearly and unambiguously refers to the entire ecosystem. Give it up.