I suppose then you can be a fry boy with a writing habit? Don't be silly. There's a large number of publishers out there that manage to get shelf space. And it's an almost entirely different field than software. Open source works because people can still make money from support. How do you offer support for your writing? Are you thinking about some sort of Street Performer's compensation?
I honestly don't get it. Writers don't want a daily grind -- they want to write. If they give a good deal of people some joy, they want a reasonable return so that they can support their family, live in relative comfort, and write more. In the world of software, programmers aren't respected as artists. They don't receive a royalty for the sale of their creations. They're salary workers expected to come in to the workplace like a typical gopher, sit in a cubical, and perform some magical rites over a computer.
It seems to be pretty clearly an entirely different situation... But maybe I'm missing out on something?
ack, i loved the first of the goodkind books but hated the rest of it.
Hrm. Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but I chalk up this series as some of the best fantasy I have ever read. Of particular interest is that Goodkind avoids going for cheap thrills or messy implementations of a formula. So while Jordan turned into a, "Bad guy of the week," tale long ago, Goodkind appears able to keep focus and not resort to just having a war or Richard kill the baddy to resolve every single issue. Each of the books has something different in it and a very solid, real premise. For instance, the first was definitely about the evils of Nationalism and Intense Ethnic Pride (Darken Rahl is easily seen as Hitler); the last was definitely about Communism and the downfall of a society whose people stop doing for themselves. It's a little bit of real world politics, which might be disconcerting to people solely interested in getting away. But the fantasy elements are very strong, the love story is intriguing, the characters so lovable, etc., that it's easy just to ignore the aspects of literature that Goodkind incorporates and focus on the rest of it. If you like literature, you can easily ignore the fantasy elements and focus on the message. And if you're like me and like both, then you're in orgasmic bliss because, here, we have everything.
Shame on Jordan for stretching the whole messs far too wide...
Are you kidding me? Admittedly, the latest ones read like synopses of longer books, rather than books themselves, but it's not because Jordan stretched it. Instead, shame on Jordan for having a story that would take that long and not having the balls and grit to finish it off how it needs to be. After Path of Daggers, I'm extremely reluctant to buy any more in the series. I didn't pay $20 for Robert Jordan's book report on the book that it should have been but wasn't.
Point is, any half-way decent author can tell you that you don't need to (and, indeed, should not) worry about how long your story is -- it has a natural length. At some point, the story'll just be over. It never felt like the series was being stretched. It was that we were progressing through the story -- not at Jordan's pace, not at the reader's pace, but at the story's pace. Which was an immenently attractive feature of the books: here was a story that was being given its due, without the author intruding too much to force pacing or put up framing devices or other rhetoric. This was very good. Even if the series was long, the story was still good, and so I could curb my impatience for answers because the story was comforting. Jordan knows he can't just jump to the end -- there's too much inbetween that needs to be resolved, but he appears to have lost interest in giving the story any credit. That's a shame. Goodkind is doing much better with the Sword of Truth series, which has developed quite nicely and is still written with the interest of telling the story, rather than trying to rush headlong towards the end of it.
Kilborn is pretty good at interviews when the guest is willing to play back. This is worth mentioning not because of your second point, but because of Shatner. Everyone would get a much better impression of Shatner if they saw the Kilborn interviews on The Late Late Show. Really good stuff.
Don't be ridiculous -- Kilborn probably doesn't have the caustic wit that Stewart has, but Kilborn never read scripts at the guest. In my estimation, he's a much better interviewer than Stewart. Stewart has a tendency to cut off his guests to make only slightly amusing jokes about himself. Some of the best interviews I have ever seen, period, have been on The Late Late Show and earlier with The Daily Show. BTW, it's hardly fair to judge a show by the first week of it (the mistake was much easier to make in this case because the show's launch was incredibly smooth). Both shows are very good and aren't in competition for viewers. The Late Late Show is a much more quirky, original show than The Daily Show, which is basically just Weekend Update expanded to a full 30 minutes. Kilborn's show tries to be a different late night talk show: it has far more personality than Conan, Leno, or Letterman, which all use the same format -- Leno's saving grace is Headlines; Letterman is a fantastic host and funny; Conan is occassionally funny, but the jokes are usually too obvious and low to be memorable. So... at least Kilborn's doing something different.
Hanna [was a pioneer] who took animation beyond "moving comics" and made it great.
(Edited, since Barbera is still alive.) Hanna-Barbera did many things. They made great cartoons. Anyone who calls them cliché is missing the fact that they only seem cliché because everyone copied them -- these are the originals. But, for all of that and even on this sad occassion, I will dispute that Hanna-Barbera took animation beyond "moving comics." If you have ever watched Hanna-Barbera cartoons, the animation is of exceptionally low quality. Max Fleischer, Disney, and Warner Brothers took animation beyond "moving comics."
He was still a great pioneer in the industry and with Barbera made some of the greatest contributions to cartoons. I don't believe that Hanna-Barbera contributed much to animation, though, so the credit for that belongs with the other geniuses.
Naturally, I could be wrong. He might of contributed a lot to the field of animation, but it sure doesn't show in the animation of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Even though the XBOX will be backwards compatible with nothing when it is released there will be a much bigger selection of games to choose from compared to the selection when PS2 was released...
Let me translate this to English. You are saying, "Despite the fact that upon launch the PS2 had an entire library of games available from the PS1, the XBox, upon release, will have more games available for it." Great. Care to back that up with any facts? Has Microsoft shown a single playable demo, yet? Or a non-interactive demo? (That's an honest question, not rhetoric. Have they?) Are you really suggesting that the XBox will have more launch titles than the PS2 has games available? Or were you just throwing in the talk of PS1 games to confuse the reader? It's very difficult to determine what you meant because you apparently are being intentionally misleading in your statement. So a few questions:
Do you mean the XBox will have more launch titles than the PS2 had launch titles (i.e., discounting the PS1 games, which you shouldn't have mentioned if this is really what you meant)? Do you have a list of launch titles that you know will be ready by the XBox launch in October (if it makes that date)?
You are saying that the XBox will have more titles than the PS2 had at launch, and not that the PS2 library of games will not outnumber the XBox library at the time of the XBox launch, correct?
Fact is, you have me stumped. Your first paragraph-sentence is so convoluted it appears you're trying to be misleading. Reading it strictly, you are saying, "The XBox will have more launch titles than the PS2 had." Which may or may not be true, but is exactly meanignless: the number and quality of the games available for both systems (well, all three systems) at that time will be what's important, not the number of games available for the XBox compared to the number of games the PS2 had months in advance.
Re:This is a page from the Microsoft trick book
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 1
If I were a shareholder of Microsoft and they just sat around doing nothing to promote their upcoming product (even one that's a few months from release),...
The XBox is not a few months from release. The slated release date is in the fall of this year, around October. That's 7 months. And the buzz is that it very well might slip and hit Christmas or, even, early next year. We're talking 7-12 months, not a few.
... someone just realized a bit late that they're being severely out-marketed.
Marketing should be directed at consumers; making powerplays with distributors two-three quarters from launch is unacceptable. It's one thing to get the word out and get the hype machine started, and it's another to tell consumers to hold on to their cash in a market that suffered loss. I guarantee you that if people held onto their money for a year, PS2 and Nintendo both would start to feel it, and after so long a wait for consumers, if the XBox doesn't fulfill all of the hype? All that MS would have succeeded in doing is damaging the market.
Re:rootness and capabilities
on
New Linux Worm
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· Score: 2
* Security in *nix sucks
I'm hoping that you mean Linux security, since this isn't true at all for many other UNIX OSes. For Linux, I think the security is good enough for what it is, when it is used right. The problem is that many applications and servers don't use it right. POSIX.1e-style capabilities (see Linux-privs - POSIX.1e Capabilities for Linux, http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/linux-privs/) are probably the answer. A more legitimate qualm with the *nix model is that it is coarse-grained. I think at least a handful of UNIX OS's have responded with support for Access Control Lists, which provide more fine-grained file access (see Extended Attributes and Access Control Lists for Linux, http://acl.bestbits.at).
* X Windows sucks
The X Window System catches a lot of criticism, some of it well-deserved. Most of it, however, is purely inane. It works very well, all things considered. Most of the technological deficiencies (i.e., mainly rendering technology) are resolved with modern extensions. Naturally, there are better ways to do it. We could have a much better architecture. But that's all hindsight. What we're looking at is not a transition that would be based on advantages, but on disadvantages. Until the limitations of the X Window System outstrip the convenience of using what's already there and well-supported, we have X. But Xfree86 is good enough for now. There might be alternatives in the future (Berlin, http://www.berlin-consortium.org/).
* the xterm gui-cli interface sucks
I'm stumped. You determine that you need the CLI for some task while you're in the GUI. What better interface can you get than actually getting the CLI in the GUI? (Which is what Xterm does for you.)
* all the shells suck...
They seem to have everything I need and want, and more. Filename completion (with cycling through potential matches), redirection (especially with file descriptors, as in bash), good line editing, conditions and looping, scripting,... Maybe I'm thinking inside the box, but I can't think of anything that I've needed to do that hasn't been made easy (if not trivial) by some shell.
* file system in *nix sucks
Well, it's not as if every UNIX uses the same file system. I don't understand this claim, really. Are you arguing against heirarchical file systems or against the file systems themselves?
* netscape in *nix sucks
It performs very well for me, as do Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) and Konqueror (Konqueuror). There's a lot of hype around Opera (Opera), but I've never tried it. There are particular deficiencies in each of these, of course, but most of them perform the task of web browsing well enough. Not to forget, of course, Lynx (Lynx).
Anyway, there are legitimate issues. Standardized package management on Linux would be nice, ACLs/Capabilities would be nice... And I'm always up for a new Window Manager or Desktop Environment. I use Sawfish/GNOME (Sawfish, http://sawmill.sourceforge.net/; GNOME, http://www.gnome.org/). But, eh, keep complaining: anything that gets me new toys to play with can't be too bad.
Whatever. You're nitpicking the semantics of the analogy and completely ignoring the point: that being that in both cases, you are denying them the rights to the work they own. It doesn't matter if I copy the software without their permission or take every last copy of it. Both are taking something in violation of the owner's wishes and, thus, both are stealing. If you can't see that, you're a bloody waste of otherwise useful atoms. Taking something in violation of the owner's wishes is stealing. That the original remains intact is moot because the entire point of copyright is that the owner owns the (big surprise here) copy rights. What you're arguing is that copyright is wrong, which is short-sighted, selfish, and foolish. If an author does not have his copyrights, he cannot receive adequate compensation to continue producing work. So you're either a fucking moron that doesn't understand that the very meaning of COPYRIGHT is that it gives the author the sole rights to allow/disallow copying or you're a fucking moron who doesn't see that copyright is a good thing. You take your pick.
Now you've gotten yourself in a fix, 007. Here are my suggestions for extricating yourself: the cyanide capsule located in your tooth -- chew it. If that's unappealing, you can apply Usenet tactics and claim that you really were trolling (no, really!). That might not fly, but since we're only a short spell away, you could try to call it an early April Fool's joke...
Speaking of April Fool's, you do realize he was pointing out the date and not the copyright?
Maybe he was one of the people that submitted the story to begin with? I know it's far-fetched, but it's actually possible he wasn't whoring, just posting part of his story submission the eds had neglected...
Except that you're wrong. Colour came after color, the latter being the Latin and the former being the Old French. Of course, which came first is hardly an appropriate benchmark for correctness -- after all, I could argue for "colur" which appeared in the language circa the early 13th century. But that's silly. Neither one is more or less correct. So use whichever floats your boat. Just so long as you understand both are equally "right" and it doesn't make you smarter to dumbly write "colour" thinking it's more correct.
Let's go through this. First, that's not what he said. Not even close to it. He said it's wrong for people to be stealing the work that belongs to others. Are you going to dispute this? Let's say that you rebuilt a classic car, cherrying it out, and were going to sell it. Now I come along and steal it. Is this wrong? Are you going to be upset about it? Are you wrong for wanting to prevent me from stealing it?
Not exactly analogous, you say? Okay. Let's say that you decide you no longer want to sell your car, so you take it off the market. Now you're denying me something I want. Is it then okay for me to steal your car? You're just leaving it around, not driving it...
To spin the desire of the lawful owner of a product to maintain his rights over that product as selfishness and greed is the epitomy of ignorance and stupidity. Stealing someone else's hard work without due compensation is not acceptable, under any conditions. If they're not releasing the software for sale any more, buy it from a second-hand store or through some mail order business with backstock. If none whatsoever are available (and I doubt that), request the company begin to reissue the game. If they don't, you're shit out of luck because you absolutely must respect the will of the creators and owners.
The fact is if you're going to be taking their hard work against their will, then you, my friend, are characteristic of exactly that which you disdainfully attributed to America: you're selfish and you're greedy.
So enjoy stealing someone else's work. Just don't pretend like you're the victim of some corporate conspiracy. 90% of you would be illegally downloading the ROMs for these games even if they were available for purchase. And I know it because outside of the arcade game arena, almost all of the ROMs I've seen floating around are for games that I could easily and legally purchase.
Having the President's electronic correspondence from the White House be part of the public record is a bad thing? Please. This has exactly squat to do with my privacy. Or your privacy. We're not the President, what we say is not part of the Public Record and the FOIA does not apply to things we write. It does apply to Bushy-boy, though, and--dammit if you don't like it but I strongly believe it--this is a Very Good Thing(tm). There's a line, probably, somewhere. But it doesn't impact me where they draw it so long as no President can be using e-mail to circumvent having things be a part of the public record were it snail-mail correspondence. He gives up a lot of rights to be one of the most recognizable people in the world. I wouldn't be expecting a lot of privacy if I were one of the most famous men in the world, using computers that belong to the American People to conduct personal correspondence.
I don't think technical errors in comments indicate that. Maybe 'find . -print > file ; grep string file' illustrates a lack of comfort with the UNIX-way, though. Anyway, people make stupid mistakes in comments all of the time. Whether it be in spelling, grammar, examples, etc., etc. It's more likely proof that caffeine doesn't keep us quite as sharp as we would like to think it does...
... the best view was courtesy of the "useless" 3D instant replay.
Too bad the referees still got it wrong. He clearly didn't have possession of the ball when it broke the plane of the end zone. Note how it shifted between his hands as he basically threw the ball into the end-zone. Admittedly, the ball stayed in bounds and was recovered by the Ravens (not for a touchdown, since you can't purposefully fumble the ball forward for a gain), so it should have been Ravens ball about 4 inches out from the end-zone... So it was probably a non-issue. But there was a great opportunity there: play it from the side and stop it just where the ball breaks the plane, turn the camera back to look straight at him, and you can see the separation between the ball and his hand. I saw it real-time, while EyeVision was turning around the play, and later several times from tape playback.
They should've, BTW, shown some of those hard hits on EyeVision...
Is Linus killing Linux? Bah. What a stupid question. A better question is: can Linus kill Linux? The source code is available, the community is in place. If Linus were running it into the ground, the community could fork off. No one person can kill Linux. It would have to be outright abandoned by an entire group for it to die. And, strangely, I don't see that happening.
They're paper. They're cheap. And, oh yeah, they're disposable. That throws a bit of a wrench into your straight-forward calculation because one person might purchase very many. And if they're distributed in some fashion--like a Happy Meal prize (free brain tumors for the children with a hey-that's-not-beef and hey-that's-no-cheese cheeseburger? The only prize I ever got from McDonalds was a clogged artery)--the numbers aren't so unbelievable.
That's not exactly fair, since MUSHcode is just plain ugly regardless of paradigm (I wasn't even aware it was functional, but I trust you know better than I).
Well, like I said, I don't write it and it's slow, but it's beautiful and elegant. You're right that I forgot the recursive call. My fault.:) Anyway, I was intending to give a brief look at the language (which I fux0red, anyway), not an exposé on it. Monads still beat the hell out of me. Still, pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly don't get it. Writers don't want a daily grind -- they want to write. If they give a good deal of people some joy, they want a reasonable return so that they can support their family, live in relative comfort, and write more. In the world of software, programmers aren't respected as artists. They don't receive a royalty for the sale of their creations. They're salary workers expected to come in to the workplace like a typical gopher, sit in a cubical, and perform some magical rites over a computer.
It seems to be pretty clearly an entirely different situation... But maybe I'm missing out on something?
Hrm. Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but I chalk up this series as some of the best fantasy I have ever read. Of particular interest is that Goodkind avoids going for cheap thrills or messy implementations of a formula. So while Jordan turned into a, "Bad guy of the week," tale long ago, Goodkind appears able to keep focus and not resort to just having a war or Richard kill the baddy to resolve every single issue. Each of the books has something different in it and a very solid, real premise. For instance, the first was definitely about the evils of Nationalism and Intense Ethnic Pride (Darken Rahl is easily seen as Hitler); the last was definitely about Communism and the downfall of a society whose people stop doing for themselves. It's a little bit of real world politics, which might be disconcerting to people solely interested in getting away. But the fantasy elements are very strong, the love story is intriguing, the characters so lovable, etc., that it's easy just to ignore the aspects of literature that Goodkind incorporates and focus on the rest of it. If you like literature, you can easily ignore the fantasy elements and focus on the message. And if you're like me and like both, then you're in orgasmic bliss because, here, we have everything.
Are you kidding me? Admittedly, the latest ones read like synopses of longer books, rather than books themselves, but it's not because Jordan stretched it. Instead, shame on Jordan for having a story that would take that long and not having the balls and grit to finish it off how it needs to be. After Path of Daggers, I'm extremely reluctant to buy any more in the series. I didn't pay $20 for Robert Jordan's book report on the book that it should have been but wasn't.
Point is, any half-way decent author can tell you that you don't need to (and, indeed, should not) worry about how long your story is -- it has a natural length. At some point, the story'll just be over. It never felt like the series was being stretched. It was that we were progressing through the story -- not at Jordan's pace, not at the reader's pace, but at the story's pace. Which was an immenently attractive feature of the books: here was a story that was being given its due, without the author intruding too much to force pacing or put up framing devices or other rhetoric. This was very good. Even if the series was long, the story was still good, and so I could curb my impatience for answers because the story was comforting. Jordan knows he can't just jump to the end -- there's too much inbetween that needs to be resolved, but he appears to have lost interest in giving the story any credit. That's a shame. Goodkind is doing much better with the Sword of Truth series, which has developed quite nicely and is still written with the interest of telling the story, rather than trying to rush headlong towards the end of it.
Why they're using Java Server Pages?
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Kilborn is pretty good at interviews when the guest is willing to play back. This is worth mentioning not because of your second point, but because of Shatner. Everyone would get a much better impression of Shatner if they saw the Kilborn interviews on The Late Late Show. Really good stuff.
Don't be ridiculous -- Kilborn probably doesn't have the caustic wit that Stewart has, but Kilborn never read scripts at the guest. In my estimation, he's a much better interviewer than Stewart. Stewart has a tendency to cut off his guests to make only slightly amusing jokes about himself. Some of the best interviews I have ever seen, period, have been on The Late Late Show and earlier with The Daily Show. BTW, it's hardly fair to judge a show by the first week of it (the mistake was much easier to make in this case because the show's launch was incredibly smooth). Both shows are very good and aren't in competition for viewers. The Late Late Show is a much more quirky, original show than The Daily Show, which is basically just Weekend Update expanded to a full 30 minutes. Kilborn's show tries to be a different late night talk show: it has far more personality than Conan, Leno, or Letterman, which all use the same format -- Leno's saving grace is Headlines; Letterman is a fantastic host and funny; Conan is occassionally funny, but the jokes are usually too obvious and low to be memorable. So... at least Kilborn's doing something different.
(Edited, since Barbera is still alive.) Hanna-Barbera did many things. They made great cartoons. Anyone who calls them cliché is missing the fact that they only seem cliché because everyone copied them -- these are the originals. But, for all of that and even on this sad occassion, I will dispute that Hanna-Barbera took animation beyond "moving comics." If you have ever watched Hanna-Barbera cartoons, the animation is of exceptionally low quality. Max Fleischer, Disney, and Warner Brothers took animation beyond "moving comics."
He was still a great pioneer in the industry and with Barbera made some of the greatest contributions to cartoons. I don't believe that Hanna-Barbera contributed much to animation, though, so the credit for that belongs with the other geniuses.
Naturally, I could be wrong. He might of contributed a lot to the field of animation, but it sure doesn't show in the animation of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Let me translate this to English. You are saying, "Despite the fact that upon launch the PS2 had an entire library of games available from the PS1, the XBox, upon release, will have more games available for it." Great. Care to back that up with any facts? Has Microsoft shown a single playable demo, yet? Or a non-interactive demo? (That's an honest question, not rhetoric. Have they?) Are you really suggesting that the XBox will have more launch titles than the PS2 has games available? Or were you just throwing in the talk of PS1 games to confuse the reader? It's very difficult to determine what you meant because you apparently are being intentionally misleading in your statement. So a few questions:
Fact is, you have me stumped. Your first paragraph-sentence is so convoluted it appears you're trying to be misleading. Reading it strictly, you are saying, "The XBox will have more launch titles than the PS2 had." Which may or may not be true, but is exactly meanignless: the number and quality of the games available for both systems (well, all three systems) at that time will be what's important, not the number of games available for the XBox compared to the number of games the PS2 had months in advance.
The XBox is not a few months from release. The slated release date is in the fall of this year, around October. That's 7 months. And the buzz is that it very well might slip and hit Christmas or, even, early next year. We're talking 7-12 months, not a few.
Marketing should be directed at consumers; making powerplays with distributors two-three quarters from launch is unacceptable. It's one thing to get the word out and get the hype machine started, and it's another to tell consumers to hold on to their cash in a market that suffered loss. I guarantee you that if people held onto their money for a year, PS2 and Nintendo both would start to feel it, and after so long a wait for consumers, if the XBox doesn't fulfill all of the hype? All that MS would have succeeded in doing is damaging the market.
I'm hoping that you mean Linux security, since this isn't true at all for many other UNIX OSes. For Linux, I think the security is good enough for what it is, when it is used right. The problem is that many applications and servers don't use it right. POSIX.1e-style capabilities (see Linux-privs - POSIX.1e Capabilities for Linux, http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/linux-privs/) are probably the answer. A more legitimate qualm with the *nix model is that it is coarse-grained. I think at least a handful of UNIX OS's have responded with support for Access Control Lists, which provide more fine-grained file access (see Extended Attributes and Access Control Lists for Linux, http://acl.bestbits.at).
The X Window System catches a lot of criticism, some of it well-deserved. Most of it, however, is purely inane. It works very well, all things considered. Most of the technological deficiencies (i.e., mainly rendering technology) are resolved with modern extensions. Naturally, there are better ways to do it. We could have a much better architecture. But that's all hindsight. What we're looking at is not a transition that would be based on advantages, but on disadvantages. Until the limitations of the X Window System outstrip the convenience of using what's already there and well-supported, we have X. But Xfree86 is good enough for now. There might be alternatives in the future (Berlin, http://www.berlin-consortium.org/).
I'm stumped. You determine that you need the CLI for some task while you're in the GUI. What better interface can you get than actually getting the CLI in the GUI? (Which is what Xterm does for you.)
They seem to have everything I need and want, and more. Filename completion (with cycling through potential matches), redirection (especially with file descriptors, as in bash), good line editing, conditions and looping, scripting, ... Maybe I'm thinking inside the box, but I can't think of anything that I've needed to do that hasn't been made easy (if not trivial) by some shell.
Well, it's not as if every UNIX uses the same file system. I don't understand this claim, really. Are you arguing against heirarchical file systems or against the file systems themselves?
It performs very well for me, as do Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) and Konqueror (Konqueuror). There's a lot of hype around Opera (Opera), but I've never tried it. There are particular deficiencies in each of these, of course, but most of them perform the task of web browsing well enough. Not to forget, of course, Lynx (Lynx).
Anyway, there are legitimate issues. Standardized package management on Linux would be nice, ACLs/Capabilities would be nice... And I'm always up for a new Window Manager or Desktop Environment. I use Sawfish/GNOME (Sawfish, http://sawmill.sourceforge.net/; GNOME, http://www.gnome.org/). But, eh, keep complaining: anything that gets me new toys to play with can't be too bad.
Whatever. You're nitpicking the semantics of the analogy and completely ignoring the point: that being that in both cases, you are denying them the rights to the work they own. It doesn't matter if I copy the software without their permission or take every last copy of it. Both are taking something in violation of the owner's wishes and, thus, both are stealing. If you can't see that, you're a bloody waste of otherwise useful atoms. Taking something in violation of the owner's wishes is stealing. That the original remains intact is moot because the entire point of copyright is that the owner owns the (big surprise here) copy rights. What you're arguing is that copyright is wrong, which is short-sighted, selfish, and foolish. If an author does not have his copyrights, he cannot receive adequate compensation to continue producing work. So you're either a fucking moron that doesn't understand that the very meaning of COPYRIGHT is that it gives the author the sole rights to allow/disallow copying or you're a fucking moron who doesn't see that copyright is a good thing. You take your pick.
Speaking of April Fool's, you do realize he was pointing out the date and not the copyright?
Maybe he was one of the people that submitted the story to begin with? I know it's far-fetched, but it's actually possible he wasn't whoring, just posting part of his story submission the eds had neglected...
Except that you're wrong. Colour came after color, the latter being the Latin and the former being the Old French. Of course, which came first is hardly an appropriate benchmark for correctness -- after all, I could argue for "colur" which appeared in the language circa the early 13th century. But that's silly. Neither one is more or less correct. So use whichever floats your boat. Just so long as you understand both are equally "right" and it doesn't make you smarter to dumbly write "colour" thinking it's more correct.
Not exactly analogous, you say? Okay. Let's say that you decide you no longer want to sell your car, so you take it off the market. Now you're denying me something I want. Is it then okay for me to steal your car? You're just leaving it around, not driving it...
To spin the desire of the lawful owner of a product to maintain his rights over that product as selfishness and greed is the epitomy of ignorance and stupidity. Stealing someone else's hard work without due compensation is not acceptable, under any conditions. If they're not releasing the software for sale any more, buy it from a second-hand store or through some mail order business with backstock. If none whatsoever are available (and I doubt that), request the company begin to reissue the game. If they don't, you're shit out of luck because you absolutely must respect the will of the creators and owners.
The fact is if you're going to be taking their hard work against their will, then you, my friend, are characteristic of exactly that which you disdainfully attributed to America: you're selfish and you're greedy.
So enjoy stealing someone else's work. Just don't pretend like you're the victim of some corporate conspiracy. 90% of you would be illegally downloading the ROMs for these games even if they were available for purchase. And I know it because outside of the arcade game arena, almost all of the ROMs I've seen floating around are for games that I could easily and legally purchase.
Having the President's electronic correspondence from the White House be part of the public record is a bad thing? Please. This has exactly squat to do with my privacy. Or your privacy. We're not the President, what we say is not part of the Public Record and the FOIA does not apply to things we write. It does apply to Bushy-boy, though, and--dammit if you don't like it but I strongly believe it--this is a Very Good Thing(tm). There's a line, probably, somewhere. But it doesn't impact me where they draw it so long as no President can be using e-mail to circumvent having things be a part of the public record were it snail-mail correspondence. He gives up a lot of rights to be one of the most recognizable people in the world. I wouldn't be expecting a lot of privacy if I were one of the most famous men in the world, using computers that belong to the American People to conduct personal correspondence.
I don't think technical errors in comments indicate that. Maybe 'find . -print > file ; grep string file' illustrates a lack of comfort with the UNIX-way, though. Anyway, people make stupid mistakes in comments all of the time. Whether it be in spelling, grammar, examples, etc., etc. It's more likely proof that caffeine doesn't keep us quite as sharp as we would like to think it does...
Don't be ridiculous. It was upper-class preppies can't wassup. One of them wasn't even white.
Too bad the referees still got it wrong. He clearly didn't have possession of the ball when it broke the plane of the end zone. Note how it shifted between his hands as he basically threw the ball into the end-zone. Admittedly, the ball stayed in bounds and was recovered by the Ravens (not for a touchdown, since you can't purposefully fumble the ball forward for a gain), so it should have been Ravens ball about 4 inches out from the end-zone... So it was probably a non-issue. But there was a great opportunity there: play it from the side and stop it just where the ball breaks the plane, turn the camera back to look straight at him, and you can see the separation between the ball and his hand. I saw it real-time, while EyeVision was turning around the play, and later several times from tape playback.
They should've, BTW, shown some of those hard hits on EyeVision...
Is Linus killing Linux? Bah. What a stupid question. A better question is: can Linus kill Linux? The source code is available, the community is in place. If Linus were running it into the ground, the community could fork off. No one person can kill Linux. It would have to be outright abandoned by an entire group for it to die. And, strangely, I don't see that happening.
They're paper. They're cheap. And, oh yeah, they're disposable. That throws a bit of a wrench into your straight-forward calculation because one person might purchase very many. And if they're distributed in some fashion--like a Happy Meal prize (free brain tumors for the children with a hey-that's-not-beef and hey-that's-no-cheese cheeseburger? The only prize I ever got from McDonalds was a clogged artery)--the numbers aren't so unbelievable.
That's not true. printf() returns an int. Casting it to void is more correct than silently throwing away the return value.
Good for you. That's a matter of style. The program is not more or less beautiful or elegant because of it.
But, point taken on 1. My oversight.
That's not exactly fair, since MUSHcode is just plain ugly regardless of paradigm (I wasn't even aware it was functional, but I trust you know better than I).
Well, like I said, I don't write it and it's slow, but it's beautiful and elegant. You're right that I forgot the recursive call. My fault. :) Anyway, I was intending to give a brief look at the language (which I fux0red, anyway), not an exposé on it. Monads still beat the hell out of me. Still, pretty.