I agree with this:The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Triumph of the Trivial. It is certainly happening more in the UK too.
And I wouldn't limit it to TV either: it seems to me that more and more column inches are given over to trivia.
Just when everything is picking up in my favourite Welsh/Dorset reality sitcom, this happens:Chocolate and Vodka :: Have some Lamington: "http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_trackback/111808"
I ask you, who writes the plot lines for this? Too unpredictable to be plausible!!
Lisp Quotes: "Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what someone else already knew.
- Peter Landin"
"Most software platforms are a rehash of older platforms, with a new buzzword -- Keith
UrBlog: "If only I could be working in a dynamic language such as Smalltalk or Python"
From UrBlog via Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants
And Smalltalk folks will shake their heads and wonder when people will finally get a clue.
Must try Gemstone some time. I'm certainly enjoyting my programming play time right now - relearning Smalltlak, seeing what has changed after all this time. I hope my play application might actually get some real use, but if used at work it will have to be re-written in something else ......
Who said this, and is it correct:? :The Independent Weekly: With trembling fingers: "'It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.'"
Any "discussion" about this topic is bound to be fun:Spotted in Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants
And adding a Smalltalk perspective should make it funner Will Alan represent Cincom Smalltalk or Cincom as a whole?
Spotted in Bill Clementson's blog quotes from Paull Graham's Hackers and Painters, including this:
"A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that's not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler." P22
There are two conflicting forces driving software development. The first force tries to help developers by giving them the tools and environments that let them do anything they need to do to solve the problem at hand. They give the programmer the freedom to create whatever solutions they deem necessary.
......
Do restrictions in the environment help? I believe that they only help a little and usually cause more harm than it's worth. They increase finger typing, hinder productivity, slow down development, increase refactoring efforts, and decrease code readability
Good thinking, as usual, from Dan:
Software That Lasts 200 Years
One thing I have been struck by recently, is how many times we reinvent the wheel ; we produce a new platform, in a new technology ( including hardware/OD platform), with a new interface. However, to the application the new features are not that great - perhaps there are a few new things, just enough to warrant a re-write.
But surely, there is enough demand for new software that we can still employ our current developers and perhaps more. Of course, they might be specialists in other areas who can develop on the longer lasting platforms.
In this paper by Daniel Friedman:mex.pdf (application/pdf Object) he quotes Jon Rossie :
Programming languages are the box outside of which most programmers, architects and managers cannot think.
I guess this includes me !!! Or maybe included me.....
I hadn't seen these before ( must have been prior to my taking another look at Smalltalk):
"Kent Beck (Mr XP) said (at ESUG 1999 in Ghent) that, 'I program at a third of my Smalltalk speed in Java.'
Bran Selic (RealTime UML guru, built the tool that is now the RT part of Rational Rose) said (at UML 2000 in York) that, 'I was sorry to see Smalltalk lose out to Java because Smalltalk was the only language in which I noticed a real difference in my productivity'."
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: Experts say Smalltalk is better:
I know one of these gentlemen - I must get his latest thoughts on the matter......
Ted's last paragraph is interesting on a few counts: is the LISP community too fragmented? Is the Smalltalk community split between Smalltalk and Squeak? Also, I'd love to know Ted's take on where Python sits in this ? Can't the Python community (or Ruby, ....) push computer science forwards?
And here is the Paul Graham article referred to: Beating the Averages: "Another unusual thing about this software was that it was written primarily in a programming language called Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then had been used mostly in universities and research labs. Lisp gave us a great advantage over competitors using less powerful languages."
Here is the quote I referred to earlier:: ONLamp.com: The Pragmatic Programmers Interview: "Ultimately, it comes down to ease of expression. If I can express myself in code at a level closer to the problem domain, then I'm going to be more effective, and my code is likely to be easier to maintain and extend. Paul Graham makes a big deal out of the way Lisp helped him while building the software that became Yahoo Stores, and he's right. These languages, applied properly, are a strategic advantage. I know some companies are using them with great success. And you know -- they're keeping quiet about it."
I will dig out the refernce, but I saw a blog entry a while back talking about how vaiuos small companies are using certain languages as a competitive example, and they are keeping quiet about it !! I remember it cited Paul Graham's LISP implementation of Yahoo stores(note find pointer to his essay).
Here James Robertson points to a very important application ofthe experiments I have been doing:Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: How dynamic is dynamic?: "I can't imagine trying to manage a server without this capability. This blog hasn't been taken down in months, but I've made major changes to the underlying code base. How? By making use of the facility keith mentions, that's how."
This is an advantage I hadn't thought of before - my thoughts were on much smaller timespan benefits for client apps. Coolll!!
OK, this lunchtimes experiment was Python. Created a class and produced an instance, then modified the class by adding a method - the instance did not have this method available. However, a new instance with the new class did.
I have no idea whether ths old class and its instances stay around, disappear with gabage collection etc.
I'm doing some experiments on changing classes at runtime without affecting existing instances.
With Smalltalk ( at least with Visualworks) this was a breeze: added the code for a variable, accepted it and, hey presto, any inspector open on an instance got a new variable field set to nil.
Even tried Lisp, which I haven't used for $%$ years. Why ? 'Cos you can do anything in Lisp can't you, especially this dynamics stuff? Well, I tried CLISP first, and guess what ? A redefinition to add a new slot invalidated existing instances ( or so the message said). Not taking no for an answer I accessed an old instance and crashed the whole environment.
Now it has to be said that, from the docs I have read, I wasn't sure what the behaviour should have been. Finally, I found a doc which seemed to be adamant that it should have worked. So I tried the free version of Franz' Allegro Lisp..... and it worked.
What next? Well, what can other languages such as Python and Java do in this regard? Also try to be more scientific with Lisp and Smalltalk: add/remove variables, add/remove methods, add/remove supportable etc.
A bit dated but I thought htis was interestingLSlashdot | Creating Applications with Mozilla: "Lisp was just procedural, while XML is more like logic programming."
Discuss(20 marks)
Spotted in Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog
This is the trend of the future, by-passing the big publishers
Croquet: A Collaboration Architecture
Takes about a 90 minutes, but I felt it was worth the effort!
Many people have quoed this excellent piece:Escapable Logic
But the section which leapt out at me was the 2nd Eisenhower quote about the military-industrial complex. Surely this influence is a major factor in Iraq.
I wish Dave would take the time to clarify what the facts are. Given the way this farce was announced, muttered about, rescued, it is hardly surprising that there is some confusion.
I'd like to see a sober setting out of the facts that show why the end of the service had to be announced, before a rescue package could be put together.
Another fact of importance would be,"when did the users get informed that they were being hosted by Dave, rather than Userland?" I think this escaped a lot of people.
Dave's latest salvoes:
Re: So Yale doesn't feel totally out there, Harvard Law School also took took a shot at me during the flamefest. Their comment about RSS is pretty nutty (it's a format, not software, it can't be licensed under GPL). They say they got their facts from Wired, so they're just passing on what they heard. I guess that's an okay excuse. Anyway, thousands of people weren't stranded and we got all the sites back on the air within a week. It would be nice if they published that part too.
Cool; not sure when it would be used, but cool nonetheless!!
SourceForge.net: Project Info - Jatha - Java LISP library
This looks interesting:PLT Scheme
I don't know the details of LISP vs. Scheme but they look similar enough that the DrScheme with tutorial sounds like a good way to get started in this general area.
Let me know if I'm wrong !
This may be written up somewhere but here are my entries in the Bottomfeeder Blog Poster plugin settings:
What a guy !! Grady Booch on developerWorks : Blogs: "However, I think, as does Simon, that Keith misses the point when he distinguishes DSLs as something totally different from the UML. The last thing the world needs is yet another (non-open standard) programming model or language injected in an already complex space. Our experience has shown that domain-specific design and architectural patterns specified can (and should be) expressed in the very same language that one may use on a whiteboard or napkin, namely, the UML. "
I find myself in agreement with the following points:developerWorks : Blogs:
My position is that the creation of domain specific languages that do not seamlessly support the ability to transform information along the refinement scale are not helpful to us. So, for example, a component designer that is a stand alone tool unconnected to the class designer that provides the next logical level of refinement (classes being used to construct components) is a pot hole in the road from concept to actual implementation. Now, this is not as I have said to indicate that domain specific languages are bad, just that many of us in this industry love to create new languages be they graphical, textual or conceptual. We have to beware of the tendency to build these disjoint languages that force the user to keep stopping and jumping across another gap.
My summary: present different views to different users, but in a way which keeps transformations (including mental ones) easy (e.g. all views based on common metamodel)
Now, does the UML help us in this? Well, actually as it stands no, it has many pot holes all of it’s own! But, one way to look at the UML is a pre-existing set of domain specific languages, with at least small and well understood gaps between them. For example most everyone is familiar with the class model, the component model, the state machine model – all of these can be treated as sub-languages, and have been successfully applied in projects.
My summary: common set of concepts which can be tailored
Now, the danger is then to say that the UML is enough surely for any problem (got a hammer here – anyone got a nail?). Well therein lies a big, big hole waiting for the unwary. The UML is a general purpose language, like English and as such can be vague in a particular domain, so we have created specific usages of the English language for engineering or science, even standardized the meanings of terms for defining specifications (RFC 2119). In this regard it is clear that the UML needs to have particular usage patterns documented as sub-languages, or domain specific usage.
But then, there are simply concepts in use today that do not map well to any UML sub-language or usage pattern. Well, the OMG has already thought of that and provided the Meta-Object Facility (MOF) which is the underlying language used to construct the UML – making MOF a domain specific language for constructing domain specific languages? Here at IBM the open source Eclipse Modeling Framework implements the MOF specification and provides both run time capabilities and tools for defining new modeling languages (and you can see examples in the XML Schema Tooling on eclipse.org).
My summary: UML can be extended, and if that isn't enough then new dialects based on MOF can be built. Still the transformation gap is small.
Anyone seen a scenario mapped out in the two approaches? When the terms and concepts seem so slippery a practical example always helps.
The DSL, MDA, UML thing again... | Lambda the Ultimate
Can you have one metamodel across differnet domains that, nonetheless can be tailored? If you do, can the transformation be small variations on one another ? Can we ever expect them to be totally automated? (no) What is a domain anyway : industry, level of abstraction?
This seems to be one of those arguments where the terms involved remain unresolved and ambiguous (at least to me)
BBC NEWS | UK | High Court move over police chief
Apart from the details of this case, how do we come by such badly written laws here in the UK? Why do we write a law which apparently gives the Home Secretary the power to suspend a Chief Constable, but for some reason this has to be actinide through some other body such as the local Police Authority ?
Either we let local areas have authority or we don't. If we want to allow the case where the Home Secretary can ride rough-shod over this pretense at autonomy, then he should do the dismissing and inform the Police Authority.
This is a horrible fudge of a law, and I am glad it is coming back to irritate the politicians who regularly enact Laws with so little principle behind them. Actually, I hope it does more than irritate them!!
Via David Buck: Russell Beattie Notebook - Rampaging Computer Science
I certainly felt this way about J2EE!!
I was at one of these tals ; very good it was too:tim.oreilly.com -- Various Things I've Written: Tim's Archive
What am I thinking of? Forgot to Blog about my cycling epic!
Last Sunday, 20th June, I and 26,999 other "cyclists" bowled out of London on a nice sunny Sunday. We were about an hour late starting due to our transport , but also because of the huge queue to get the start/finish card stamped.
Cycling as a team proved almost impossible, but other tthan that and buses actually wanting to use the bus lane everything was fine.
Out in the country everything was lovely except hills on narrow lanes where most people got off to walk and blocked the road completely.
My legs got tired at about 40 miles - took a break and also sorted out why my new Camelbak water carrier was giving out so little water(kink in pipe).
At about 50 miles you hit the only real hill on the course, but it is nasty - again the road is quite narrow, so most people walk. The experts ( and people with proper clips on their pedals) are determined to cycle up; with a lot of tired people this is a recipe for disater. Oh, and it started raining big time, and Brighton being by the sea, the wind was cold.
The next 4 miles to the sea front were awful: rain, wind, large roads where the police bunch the cyclists up to let them cross - it took over an hour to do this.
By the end, I was really cold - my teamates looked even worse and were shaking.
Then we got a lift back to Winchester.
So, for next year, I'm looking for a cycling challenge which is far less crowded : any ideas ?
WebMink: "(Yes, you're reading that correctly. A man named Kafka has been deployed to field questions about a prison where the criminals are only vaguely charged with crimes, can't speak to lawyers and likely will never get out.)"
Deltoid : When Think Tanks Attack: " And the Albion Monitor writes:
[Citizens for a Sound Economy] is just one of several tax-exempt orgs that have divided over $750,000 from Microsoft and waxed in outrage over the proposed breakup of the software giant. Other beneficiaries include the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, and about a dozen more obscure names such as Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Small Business Survival Committee, the Independent Institute, Americans for Technology Leadership, and the Association for Competitive Technology.
Together the groups wage a disinformation campaign almost identical to the attempt to debunk global warming waged by Big Oil that we described in a 404 report two years ago. The strategy requires discrediting Microsoft critics while building a sham Â?grassrootsÂ? movement in support of the corporation.
"
Folks should be free to fund what they like, but who is sponsoring whom should be transparent, to avoid conflicts of interest.
1st European Lisp and Scheme Workshop: "Sheng-Chuan Wu, 'Lisp for Service Oriented Architecture Programs'"
Worth further sytudy - a quick scan shows many intersting points, but I'd lie a bit more detail.
George, I believe you. But your administration faces an uphill battle to convince folks that, whilst it was done without written orders, it was not done in an environmnent which pushed getting intelligence above nearly all else.
I find myself wondering about LISP as well as Preston:Preston L. Bannister ? Finding Lisp.
But I'm not sure how he squares these two paragraphs:
I should have thought the ADA environment probably used features such as LISP macros etc. ; how do Java and XML help there?
Comments: "JF, you're repeating an incorrect fact about the avoidability of the outage, and it's pretty disrespectful to put the word in quotes, do you think I'm lying? You're pretty gutless about that, if you think I'm lying, say so, and say why, and tell us who you are and how you know. Anonymous personal condemnations are worthless. How can we condemn you when we don't know who you are, except that you're a coward.
posted by Dave Winer at 03:05:05 AM on June 22, 2004 "
Please don't do this. And point to where a clarification of the real reason for the outage is then. Thanks
This is fantastic:BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Private craft makes space history, but then the BC article follwos up with this comment: "When the X-prize is won, it could open up the skies to future tourist trips to the edge of space for those bored of the usual beach holiday."
Well, it sure could, but is this a sign of out times? Did Christopher Columbus sell Ferdinand and Isabbella on his epic voyage, with tourism? No! They wanted to make money from spices!!
How about: "SpaceShipOne ushers in a new pantheon of reality TV show!"? Now we're talking!!
FT.com / Comment & analysis / Editorial comment:"The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger."
michaelw.net In defense of Dave: "Anyway, my friend and I quickly realized that we had developed an excellent litmus test for software engineers and program managers at Microsoft.
This principle can easily be extended to other areas too. The people who bitch and moan are just doing you the favor of self-identifying as people you won't waste cycles on in the future. The fools who listen to the bitchers are self-identifying as fools."
If Dave doesn't listen to some of the "bitching and moaning" and learn for the future, then he is missing out. And any "friend" that encourages him to ignore such comments is no friend at all.
GROKLAW: "Any business that would rather use a license like this than the GPL just isn't thinking clearly. "
Scripting News: 6/18/2004: "After years of service, actually decades, I feel I have earned the benefit of the doubt. "
"it's a rare thing when people consider your feelings"
Dave, this is what you are missing - people are hurt at how little you thought of them!
Yes, I think some of the ranting is much over done, BUT ....
You have only partially done the right thing. Now is a good time to stand up and say that you realise that you could have done this better (and saved lots of people, including yourself a lot of heartache). You just didn't think it thru, and now you blame the ranters, look reproachfully at your friends ( many of whom HAVE gone out on a limb for you) and say nothing about your own actions.
Here is the entry that Ted refers to:Philip Greenspun's Weblog:
Read the comments - some great stuff there. In fact, I should have read it before my previous post!
The idea of collaboration had not occurred to me (I wonder if there is so much of that in the UK?) Also, the idea that you could get a day's school education done in less time, thereby having more time to do other stuff is also interesting.
The comment about "oh, they were English (home schooled) children, that is why they were polite" made me smile. Call me jaundiced, but I think that the English middle calss fixation on manners ( maketh man) is definitely eroding!
This is indeed a wonderful thing for any parent to hear:Ted Leung: Home Schooling
I admire parents who can do home schooling - I'm sure the concentration, planning and time would just overwhelm us. On the other hand, I would worry slightly about the longer term social aspects - I'm not saying that the child is isolated from society, but they have a different view. Is this a problem? To some extent it depends on how you view life: do you need to be equipped to deal with the dirty tricks people will throw at you, or does your child have self-confidence and ability to shape life around them?
GROKLAW: "'With growing numbers of businesses turning to Linux, its pros and cons are fair game for debate. But cynically manufacturing confusion isn't debating. Even Microsoft didn't like the way this report turned out, though it indirectly helped subsidize it. A company spokesman called the study, 'an unhelpful distraction from what matters most -- providing the best technology for our customers.''"
Hope they stick to that themselves of course; please fight it out on technology - not spin, paying others to produce crooked reports etc.
This look encouraging; people of various political leanings are all saying enough is enough. Chris Nolan is right - this is beyond politics:Chris Nolan - Politics from Left to Right: Paging Hannah Arendt
I am not qualified to assess Paul Graham's comments about the advantages of Lisp. For instance, what about Lisp and database access, which I have discussed elsewhere. But his point about the risk aversion of people in LargeCos is great:Revenge of the Nerds: "This is the kind of possibility that the pointy-haired boss doesn't even want to think about. And so most of them don't. Because, you know, when it comes down to it, the pointy-haired boss doesn't mind if his company gets their ass kicked, so long as no one can prove it's his fault. The safest plan for him personally is to stick close to the center of the herd.
Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe this approach is 'industry best practice.' Its purpose is to shield the pointy-haired boss from responsibility: if he chooses something that is 'industry best practice,' and the company loses, he can't be blamed. He didn't choose, the industry did."
It is generaly assumed that innovation fuels growth, but this implies risk. But which risks should you take and which should you minimise? If you have an established development shop, then the technicalities of a new product might be viewed as sufficient risks without adding a new language to the mix. On the other hand, shouldn't the company fund some sort of research project so that net time around the new language is not an unknown ? Otherwise you end up like the Knight from the cartoon going into battle, not having talked to the machine gun salesman.
Passion, entrepreneurship, and the rebirth of local economies: " It's trying to put responsibility where responsibility can be, in fact, applied--grassroots. Let me tell you what I've done in my life.
I was so disgusted by what I saw, that when Ernest Schumacher published Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered in 1973, I went ballistic. I said, this guy is telling us the truth about what development is! And I wanted to follow him. I wanted to look at alternative development. What can we do that makes sense?
And so I left Italy, I left my agency. Initially I went to Africa, to Stellenbosch University in Cape Province, and then I went to Australia. And I researched anything that was a caring, intelligent way of helping people help themselves. And I came up with the most radical thing. I could not find anything as radical as what I've done."
All via Crossroads Dispatches
Enterprise Facilitation:Ernesto's Story
I feel the same way about top-down initiatives in big companies !!
And isn't Open Source collaborative development similar ? A large number of people get to contribute how they want, when they want, with real passion born out of free-will, other than compulsion.
See my next post for a bit more. It has ben a long time since a web contact has instantly seemed so right. Ricardo Semler and his philosophy of giving employees their heads was similar.
So why do we have these big organisations working in such a "command economy" fashion?
Yet more people that they interviewed are pointing out flaws in the arguments:GROKLAW
More on this exciting revelation:History of soccer. How football came to Brazil
In May [1989], at Moscow State University, Reagan said that mankind is emerging "like a chrysalis" from the economy of the Industrial Revolution and is entering the information age, the economy of the mind. "The key is freedom -- freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication." (via Crossroads Dispatches)
Great points about being a leader, but we live at a time, when so many freedoms are under threat. Just because they are not physical , the threat to free speech, building on others' ideas etc. are a burden being imposed on us and future generations,...by stealth.
I miscued on this one, thinking the single responsibility meant that multiple organs had the same responsibility, but in fact, the point is that some organs have multiple responsibilities. I assume that this is to do with evolution tending to find resourse-lite "solutions".
And amen to this: "The problem with BigDesignUpFront is that it relies too much on the intelligence of the designers." The designers are intelligent that this sort of behaviour impreses the boss!!
Via the European Smalltalk User Group:Moose
Works for Smalltalk, C/C++, Java, Ada apparently. Will be giving it a try later .....
Living just up the road from Southampton ( and it being the home of the nearest Premier League club), Simon Phipp's revelation was of great interest:Southampton-Brazil Football Link
And now we re-import Brazilian Soccer Skills Classes for our children!!
Prof. Tanenbaum delivers more damaging blows:Rebuttal to Ken Brown
The sponsors of the book should demand their money back.
brianstorms weblog: An Offer I Couldn't Refuse. Brian gets his blog published in a newspaper.
My Aunt lives in San Diego - time to ask her to snag a copy.
An excellent, comprehensive view of how to use wxPython:The Farm: The Tucows Developers' Hangout :: Exploring wxPython: The stdout/stderr Window and MessageDialogs
This really is (for its scope) the best resource I have seen; the table showing the eresults of various options is great.
ONLamp.com: Inside Mitch Kapor's World [Jun. 03, 2004]
Many intetresting comments, including: The dual-licensing model that's been used successfully by a number of open source projects such as MySQL and Sleepycat for their implementation of Berkeley DB is gaining a huge amount of currency and popularity. We identified that from the very outset as being promising.
Not a new article: Being Popular
Found it via: O'Reilly ONLamp:Paul Graham on Hacking
LJBook (Turn your blog into a PDF Book)
Not that mine is worth printing, but a Blogger version, please ?
Groklaw doesn't like Schwartz statement, like ESR's rebuttal, and wonders if the bad mouthing of Red Hat[ammended]Open Source is part of Sun's settlement with Microsoft:GROKLAW
On the other hand Simon Phipps says that this is not based on any new interview with Schwartz, that ESR was fed a provocative line by eWeek and hence he came out fighting (as only he can):Webmink's take
So there is probably an element of the tech. press stoking things up during a slow news day. But there were enough ambiguous/worrying statements in the first eWeek interview to make Sun vulnerable to this sort of thing.
I think a reasonable response to ESR by Sun, plus any clarifications they wish to make with hindsight would be a good move here.
I think most people realise that we have a software community using a variety of business models - the bold (therefore newsworthy) but unhelpful arguments like all "Open Source is bad/communist/starving my children/blahblah" or "I'm more Open Source than you" doesn't help anyone.
AMMENDMENT: As Simon points out in the comments, the Sun's questions about Red Hat weren't criticisms of Open Source. I'd really love to know what they all really meant though!
In addition to publishing a note from someone who did some background research on Linux source vs Unix ( and found no correlation, Eric Raymond and Newsforge are winding in some heavy hits.
If someone did pay for this book to be written, they'll be asking for their money back.
I see what he is saying, but I think it is wrong. Maybe I am too wedded to the idea of "do onto others, as you would have them do unto you" - and yes it applies across religions.
Is going in front of a judge first, somehow sanitising what follows ? What verifiable facts could be presented to such a judge? When a judge of a foreign country has a similar power over coalition captives ?
This is indeed a slippery moral slope, and we are accelerating.....
Now it is gathering momentum:Slashdot | Oracle To Finish Linux Makeover This Year
They might beat IBM to it ; weren't they aiming for end of 2005 ?
