If you did, you'd see that he has a perfectly valid point about how the effect of non-Free licenses, combined with minified (and therefore effectively unreadable) code

No. Free Software wants JavaScript to be readable, and understandable. This is a valid point, regardless of the language and the availability of the source code.

We cannot make readable C from a decompilation, mostly because of different compilers and different optimization levels. We can decompile Java and C#/VB.NET because there is one and only one VM or IL definition.

JavaScript minification is only about renaming variables. I can tell you there is only one thing in the way of understanding JavaScript minification. Two, if you include a generic text editor's lack of "replace word only" functionality.

You have to read the de-minified version, just like any other code. You have to read, or if your language is not the same as the author's, translate, the variable names, just like the original source code.

JavaScript as it runs in your browser is exactly the same as it runs interpreted, compiled, or in any other fashion. You have the freedom to block it, you have the freedom to modify it (GreaseMonky is just one of many), you have the freedom to read it, save it, or do whatever else you want. If it executes on your machine, I think the FSF would support any measure of scrutiny you wish to apply before, during, or after executing.

I have read "free" software source code, and found it no more intelligible than minified JavaScript. Some no more readable than a disassembly.

If you are going to object to minified JS, you also have to object to any code which is difficult to comprehend, and then you place a subjective quality on what is truly free. Firefox, to me, is no longer free software. I debugged just the installer for a bug report on ReactOS, and found piles of code which was misleading, in the most complimentary term. I offered to make a change to Doom, which took me 3 times as long as I thought, and ultimately failed to achieve, because the seemingly readable code was slightly obfuscated by the build process.

Either source code is enough, or it has to be readable. If we say readable, we have to define the least common denominator who should be able to read it. If we do that, it becomes a subjective criterion, and probably a moving target.

So here we are, at a crossroads. If a project produces the source code needed to build a complete, binary-perfect copy of their executable(s), but it was run through the C pre-processor, or C++ pre-processor, is that enough? It compiles, it builds with the version of tools the provider used... if you discount the pre-processor, it is effectively the original source code provided to the compiler. Is that enough?

JavaScript is what is provided to the interpreter - minified or not. Is that enough?

I say it is, and I disagree 100% with the FSF on this point. Named variables are nice, but they can be interpreted by the usage, if you are going to read the code.

If you are going to take an ideological stance and say "I don't understand this, therefore it is not enough", you are going to have to establish an objective baseline. I can understand optimized assembly, and some pure hex - is that free enough?

This is the opinion of someone who believes that source is provided for everything that executes, or is interpreted. Surely to fuck if you wrote a compiler, you can understand this. If you wrote an interpreter it is easier to understand.

If you don't understand anything else, think of JavaScript like Spanish. Lots of people understand it, most people don't. In this case, you don't. You are provided all instructions in Spanish. Is it more difficult to understand the instructions if given in Spanish? Of course. But I don't see the objection. Especially if you allow C programs written with Spanish, or French, or any other foreign language to be classified as free.

Let us support the FSF in making all software English only. Or we could just say GFY.

If you do it your way, it's slower. Most people with a phone have it on already, with no locking. If you do it the way people who use payment apps do it, it can be a lot faster.

You could argue that this method is a lot slower: stare at the cashier, wait for the total, dig in your purse to find stray bills, decide you don't have enough cash, find a checkbook, hand the blank to the cashier so the register prints it, enter the amount and balance your checkbook.

Yes people do it that way, but most people avoid it if possible. Have your method of payment ready when it's time to pay, no matter what system you use.

You're worse than those people on infomercials who can't figure out how to change a light bulb, or get frustrated because they use every product in their house the wrong way. Don't be incompetent. And if you're going to argue against something, be realistic. Exaggeration of the sort found in infomercials is at best disingenuous, and more like outright falsification/

I understand you take exception to this generalization because of your experience. Do you think you are representative of the granny population? Or are you an exception to the generalization?

Any blanket statement will have outliers, including this one, and I find it odd to find replies like these modded up - I'd rather see actual stats on how many grannies are tech savvy rather than a single anecdote with 3 people who also have mod points agreeing.

I have, and gave up. I used to remember the details, but the installer alone was ridiculous. I tried debugging it for ReactOS, and it turned out to be a simple resource/image issue. Maybe things are better now, but I refuse to take a look.

I remember finding functions, only to see unused code in abandoned folders and not knowing which was actually part of the project. Not just a few, I estimated maybe 25% of the source distribution was dead code.

The build chain, considering that the UI is written in XUL, requires a full build of XUL, followed by the actual browser build.

Maybe things have improved, but I'm not going anywhere near it now. You could not pay me to alter a spelling mistake and build the result.

I'm no particle physicist, but i can generalize.

It would mean that we have a preliminary report on an unfinished experiment. Or more specifically, an experiment not intended to explore this subject has not ruled out the possibility.

What this actually means to us is that experiments intended to find this result have not been proven useless already, and they could be conducted using the existing ALPHA setup. ALPHA appears to be the most successful anti-particle creation mechanism, making it the obvious place to do such experiments.

Our current understanding has been proven to a high precision, leaving a very small window in which to be wrong in some amount.

It could mean that the weak equivalence principle is wrong. That's what you're really looking for. But what would that mean? It would mean the same as any other question - that our understanding needs to be refined and/or adjusted.

If antimatter falls upwards? Whoah, you are jumping into science fiction territory. We have strong evidence that the weak equivalence principle is correct. Someone smart would have to invent another principle which explains the newly discovered F value, and then hypothesize on what that means. Multiple people would have multiple hypotheses. It could mean anything, or nothing, at this point.

TL;DR - don't de-fund us.

A launch T-Pain would be proud of. Pitch perfect.

Did we make that joke last time? I didn't read the thread.

Missed the point completely.

If I use code without a license attached, whether it works or not, I could at any time be sued for that use, in most of the world thanks to the Berne Convention. Not frivolously sued, as in an overly litigious society. I mean properly and rightfully sued because I violated someone's copyright.

This has nothing to do with whether the code works, whether it is fit for purpose, or whether it is warranted. This is just about the use of the code. Code with no license is a unusable because I can be sued by the copyright owner just for having used it. It is a liability because I am very likely to lose.

If you own Dell stock and you claim that limiting ownership undermines your share value, then GO SUE THE FUCKING COMPANY.

Either you do, or you don't, and either you can or you can't. Plenty of companies have made millions, or billions, before someone actually sued them and got a court order for them to stop their shenanigans.

No one here gives a shit until someone who actually has standing to sue does so, with a valid, comprehensible, lucid argument that stands up in a legal argument. If you don't, or you can't, no one here cares.

Did you miss the part where Marissa Mayer took actual measurements of remote employee connection and realized they weren't working as much as they claimed, and gave them an ultimatum to work at the office or not work for Yahoo?

Maybe you missed the part about all of the acquisitions Yahoo made recently. I don't know the details, but acquisitions usually mean layoffs in some form or another. I'm sure there are some news stories to go dig up about all of the layoffs as a result of Yahoo mergers you could dig up to support your accusation.

Did you miss the part about 14% of Yahoo's hires being ex-employees begging for their jobs back? I don't know if that's a big number, but it seems larger than I expected.

Your bet makes no sense given that a new President and CEO is in charge. New CEOs tend to make big changes, and then either fail spectacularly, or not fail spectacularly. Either way, change is afoot. If you want to accuse an established company, with an established CEO, as being greedy at the expense of older employees, I'm completely behind you. That seems to happen a lot.

But it also makes the news, when the sort of age discrimination you accuse Yahoo of actually happens. No betting needed. Just go research it, post some links, and know what the hell you're talking about rather than projecting on every industry member you can find. Otherwise you're just another asshole farting on the internet. Polite society demands I not even acknowledge your ejaculation, but the internet is not polite society.

Am I the only one who has a problem with extrapolating like this?

You obviously don't have a problem with extrapolating like that. Even thought you say you do, you either don't or don't realize you didn't.

If you believe that Warg feels okay about making digital copies of intellectual property, it is not a stretch to think he has no moral qualms about making copies of other protected data. I can buy that. I don't, but I can suspend disbelief and at least accept it.

On the other hand, if you want to say that making *copies* of intellectual property, keeping the original intact, is the same as stealing, you are functionally mentally handicapped. I don't mean that as an insult, I mean you should either get diagnosed or stop posting your opinion on the internet.

If you want to assert that copying data is the same as physically invading a human being's body against someone's will, potentially implanting either a disease or an unwanted life, you are completely insane. Stop posting, stop talking to people, and check yourself into the nearest mental hospital. For the good of everyone you are likely to come into contact with.

If you think it is even remotely close to ending person's life on this plane of existence, you are psychotic, and need mental help immediately.

Think about it. Stealing my credit card information from my computer, which is really annoying but something I can live through, is the same as murder? Stealing my complete identity is the same as killing me? Physically invading my home and removing my property is the same as rape, or murder? I can take a weekend off from endless forms, phone calls, paperwork, installing home security systems, and financial tracking, and go to Cancun, which I can't do if I'm dead.

It it nothing like

saying that if you've shoplifted, you're also a rapist and murderer in the making for sure.

.

Stealing is often seen as a victimless crime, because the "big corporation" absorbs the cost. Everyone who shops there absorbs the cost of either prosecution or the loss, not the company. But it's easy to lose that, and I'm not willing to assert that "sticking it to the man" is the same as raping or murdering.

I may have no qualms about stealing data from your computer, where everything is digital and depending on the jury likely refutable. I posit that as an hypothetical. But you can be damned sure that I will not rape or murder anyone, where the physical evidence is likely to put me away for a long time. I know the difference, and I am certain Warg knew this.

The only difference is whether he left that knowledge behind. And it's not a rape trial, nor a murder trial, so that is irrelevant. Nor is it stealing. It's illegal access, in the digital world, where everything is made of bits. Much more believable.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say the right answer is probably two. But let's wait and see what comes out at the trial.

Either you take a wild guess, or you wait. You took the guess and told everyone else to wait, almost like you thought you were imparting some digging sarcasm.

I don't know anything about the Swedish prosecution. Oh wait, actually I do remember accusations of Sweden acting like a lapdog for either the USA or its Copyright Cartel.

Oh shit, there's a cable, Stockholm 09-141, which explicitly says to prosecute TPB owners, and implicitly has a quid pro quo on the special 301 list, which is to say, do what we ask and you wont be on it.

Sweden has been accused of external influence in Assange's trials. It has been accused of meddling in RIAA affairs, despite the Swedish Prosecution Authority explicitly being separate from both courts and police, and implicitly from other governments.

Given your conditions, I'm going with option 1. Just a wild guess - but you're right, let's wait for the results.

I know Slashdot likes to confuse us with it's

His, hers, its. They are already possessive. The possessive apostrophe, like "Ray's Hot Dogs", is not necessary.

Did you mean proofreading like editors do? There are no editors. There are copy/paste monkeys who decide that something should appear as a story on one of the various main pages. And people who don't know where apostrophes go.

I seem to have meandered a bit. Java was slow initially because of stupid programmers. It is faster now, but still bogged down in places by the overhead of overloaded method calls as a solution to default parameters.

Using a different method in examples, and not the Builder pattern either, may allow the average Java program less bulky, and depending on what is being done maybe faster than C++.

I am blaming the language *and* its practitioners for perpetuating Java's slowness, and the worst thing we could do to children is teach them something which does not translate well to other languages.

In other words, indoctrinating young programs to overload chaining or builder patterns when something with a lot less overhead exists (default parameters), sets them off in the wrong direction.

Hopefully that clarifies. I had an off-line argument about this where I realized I was not as clear as I could have been. Of course it was with a C# academic, not a Java person.

When Java first took off, and the web was made of Java content executed via plugin, Java was written by idiots who concatenated strings instead of using string builders, and similar abuses of common sense through ignorance and teaching materials that focused on results rather than good practice. Executables outside of plugins suffered the same deficiencies, although they were probably attempting loftier goals, and the performance was... what is the opposite of magnified, because it was slower than a sloth taking a crap?

This lasted a number of years, even as the Java interpreter became stable and work was made to increase its performance. Idiot coders learned or abandoned Java, and the runtime made even the remaining idiots look better, if not "good".

If you don't find this comment amusing, you either lack historical perspective, are a Java programmer, or should consult a medical professional to be diagnosed for your deficiency in some manner or other.

Security problems these days seem to be focused on the browser plugin, rather than locally executing native apps, so the security comments mostly don't apply. Visiting a random internet web page and allowing it to execute poorly sand-boxed arbitrary code is a bit like licking random strangers' genitals. In case that interests you, let me state that it should not be done as a general practice, and you should consult a medical professional.

I have read Java for over a decade, and I have coded in Java for 3 years or so. Having experience with x86 ASM (AT&T and MASM), K&R C, ANSI C, GWBasic, Turbo Pascal, C++ (VC 5-2010, gcc 2.x - 3.x, mingw), VB 5-6, C#, VB.NET, Python, Powershell, JavaScript (advanced, not your normal getElementById().Blink() shit) and several other introductions, I can say this:

Java examples in the real world and in most printed books are the most incestuous, groupthink-y, overly-architected piles of verbosity I have ever had the displeasure to read. I completely understand the need for default parameters, dependency injection, constructor and method chaining, and all kinds of modern best practice.

But I have never seen another language embrace the overbearance of best practice teachings without implementing some balance of solution soundness. Java examples and implementations (open source of course, because I have read them) seem to abound with overloaded methods under 5 lines of code, which initialize another parameter to call another overload. Now you have multiple functions to unit test, multiple code paths, multiple exception sources, and unless you are brainwashed in the spirit of Java, comprehension of the complete workings are complicated by scrolling off-screen with essentially purpose-free function declarations, whitespace between functions, and an essentially functional programming paradigm split over several different methods to give the appearance of flexibility, OOP, and conscious design.

It reads to me like someone wrote that no method should ever take more than one additional parameter that you were not already given, and coherence be damned. I would much rather see a single method with 5 non-optional parameters than 5 overloads which calculate and pass one new parameter each time.

The Java paradigm seems to be calculating things within the overloaded methods is preferable to factoring out these into unrelated functions. In a truly sane, OOP world, those calculations would be a part of the object, or if sufficiently general would be part of the object's base object.

In fact, the Java approach seems to be the Builder design pattern, which I have not seen adopted as frequently as it should be. Obligatory link here.

As sensible as the Builder pattern seems to be, I think it would still require a number of extra Set/Get property methods, which are function calls. Maybe Java has optimized this, but if you don't adopt it optimization can't help you. And the chained method calling slows down the operation of the program as the runtime tries to do slow things quickly.

Groupthink and ignorance are the only things that make Java slow. They just seem to be more common in Java. I assume that is because it is easier to shoot yourself in the foot with a compiled language, or the runtime supports other options for an interpreted language.

If the educational materials were burned and re-written, Java would have a number of things on its side. My point is, without sufficient education, they will still produce output slower than expected performance.

The sword guy, who had a personal expectation of privacy, but didn't have a legal expectation of privacy. Sarten-X was replying to this, which is clearly incorrect: "The IRS is using it in a legal sense, and they are wrong here. From a practical sense, one should not expect email to be confidential. From a legal aspect we should have that expectation."

Legally, you would not have that expectation, and the link illustrates why. And you probably would have a personal expectation unless you really understand how SMTP operates "under the hood".

You send mail to your provider to relay to someone else, and expect to have privacy. Since the hardware where your data resides is property of the provider, it's essentially their house, not yours. Since this thread is about expectation of privacy, it seems relevant to me. Putting your personal information outside of your personal domain removes your legal expectation of privacy, even if your personal expectation is that the contents of your account are private. You don't even have standing to object, so the question of constitutionality does not even come up.

The article, however, is about the ACLU wanting the IRS to apply the Sixth Circuit ruling to the IRS policies operating outside the Sixth District. In fact, it can continue to ignore the ruling in the Sixth District and just take the chance that if it comes to an actual court case it will lose.

It may convict enough people before someone fights back and it gets fined that it is worth it to risk. If the provider cites Warshak, IRS just falls back on a warrant. An ignorant or acute provider would let themselves be compelled. The acute provider would then inform you and let you fight your own legal battle, which you might lose through incompetence or ignorance on your representation's part.

The ignorant provider would let you find out on your own that:

1) this was illegal
2) the evidence should be suppressed
3) you should file your own lawsuit against the IRS
4) The IRS punishment should go beyond just suppressing your e-mails

The IRS is under no obligation to apply Sixth District rulings outside of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and the ACLU has no way to make the IRS do so. If a provider is not compelled to give up your e-mails, then Warshak v. US doesn't even apply, and the IRS doesn't need a warrant to conduct a constitutional "search".

So the link is maybe 5% relevant, in case that helps. But it was interesting.