Of course.. the difference between Man and Beast, when you get down to it, is being able to think about things frm someone else's point of view, so when you think about it, this shows you something about the mental state of the organised online cheater.
Nice try but no. Thinking about another's point of view does not determine whether or not you are intelligent (or conscious, ect) life, the ability to recognize that think about your own thought processes is a more likely reason. though, in all likelihood it's unlikely that there's a single thing you can point at and say there it is, the difference between man and beast however I do agree with you classification of cheaters as a whole. Why play a game if you're going to cheat?
My post was kind of tongue in cheek. Civ (free or otherwise) is one of my all time favorites. I wish I had, when I was in school, had others with the patience to play a longer game like that. Of course, at the time, there was no Linux, and as far as I know no FreeCiv (I could be wrong,possibly it had been written prior to Linux I'm too lazy to check), and CivNet didn't come out until after I graduated, so multiplayer Civ was restricted to the tabletop game.
You mean the (attempted) destruction of an entire civilization isn't violent?;) Yeah, I know what you mean, not quite the same as splattering other individuals.
I don't want more powerful regular expressions. I want a more powerful pattern-matching syntax, one I can compile down to an opaque object with a bit of syntactic sugar, then use in place of a regex. I want a parser sub-language like SML or parsing primitives like haskell. Regular expressions are now turing complete thanks to perl... great, so move on already, regexes are not the final word in pattern matching
Hmmm, I want, I want, I want. Maybe you try changing to: I'll write, and create your own language.
1) This isn't any easier to read. I've been programming since 1985 and went through more programming languages and idioms than I can recall, and regex is the only system I have attempted to learn and met with complete failure. If regex is to be redesigned (and despite my inability to learn it, I don't think it should be broken), at least make it comprehensible.
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but regular expressions, both in theory and in practice are simple concepts. Perhaps you're in the wrong line of work? I'm betting that you are completely lacking in theory, which is odd, because in my experience the older a coder the more Computer Science they were exposed to, but I'm sure there are exceptions. Go pick up a book on finite state machines, actually you don't even need that, go read the FSA bits of the Dragon book.
I still don't quite get the Lisp and Scheme obsession. Yes, it is certainly novel to be able to have a program recurse on itself and create its own anonymous routines, but the code is nearly unmaintainable and unless you take drastic measures, quite unreadable.
Like most other languages they are only nreadable if you don't know how to read it. Grok a language and reading it isn't difficult.
I prefer functional languages over any others when writing code. Functional languages in general are best suited to situations where you want to be as far away from the details of coding as possible and concentrate soley on the algorithms and Computer Sciencey aspects of what you're doing. At work, I prefer the mixture of Perl, C, and Java, depending on the application, because more people know them (not exactly a good reason) and they tend to work the best on the kind of things I do at work. In general the power of LISP (and other functional languages) just isn't needed at work.
that's a valid opinion, but not everyone shares it. Many of us don't believe in the concept of intellectual property at all. Furthermore, I'm sure that others share the view that the only contract that they feel obliged to stick to is the exchange of money for goods. Once it's in their (your) hands it's theirs to do with what they will. That hardware is certainly your property, they have no right to render it useless. Disable service, yes, disable the hardware, no.
This system will only work if we all respect and obey the Law, even when we disagree with it. Casually ignoring the Law will, without fail, lead to the ultimate collapse of our system from within.
I'll ask you again. Please leave this country immediately, and move someplace where the stability and continued health of society doesn't depend on a respect for the Law.
You apparently do not get the point. The freedom to hold any idea I wish, and be outspoken about it without being asked to leave the country is the reason this government is so flexible. So yes, protection from people like you, who feel that anyone that doesn't hold their views should leave the country have no power over those who are able to think on their own.
That's a gray area. My browser of choice is IE, I want to work in it because it's easiest on my eyes, and never has any problems rendering any websites. I also want to work in Opera, or another non-MS browser, however I tend to do all of my web browsing under Windows, mainly because I prefer IE for practical reasons. Which admittedly (as someone mentioned above) it is really a platform complaint. Technically I was inaccurate, but since I only use Windows for IE (and sometimes games) it means the same to me.
;) Yeah I didn't make that absolutely clear, I really should try Opera under Windows, like I said I like most of the features of Opera, it's only the non-separate process issue that I don't particularly care for, and that's a pretty minor annoyance.
Fortunately, I don't have to do that. The laws of this country were created in such a way as to protect people who aren't sheeplike in beliefs from people like you. I can live in this country and holwd, and speak about ANY belief I want.
and to my constant shame, IE is MY browser of choice. For the most part it is simply the best (god I feel sick), I prefer Opera for the features, but for rendering web pages, IE is it. Maybe if I got off of my ass and started looking into anti-aliasing for X I might feel different. As far as Opera is concerned, I really like it, and have had few problems other than rendering quality, though now that I think about it, Opera under Windows may blow IE away.
No man can choose which laws he'll obey and which ones he'll ignore. To do that is to place yourself above the Law, which destroys the delicate balance under which we all live.
To say, "Simply because it is illegal does not make it immoral or wrong" is to deny the very nature of Law. It is against the Law, and therefore it is wrong. Period.
There are sometimes bad laws. These laws should be changed. We have a system for doing so. But until those laws are changed, they must be obeyed.
In situations where the system completely breaks down, men are justified in engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. In the worst of all circumstances, armed revolution to overthrow the government is justified. If you seriously believe you're in a situation that warrants either of those responses, I'd request that you check yourself into the nearest psych ward and stay there until you're all better.
Sorry, don't buy it. Catch me, try to stop me, or anyone else for that matter. I don't have to try to work within the system if I don't believe IN the system, or even just the methods or time it takes to try and get a bad law removed. For example, oral sex is against the law in many states, including MD, is it wrong to have oral sex, no. Is it against the law, yes. Am I going to abstain until when and if the law is ever revoked when I'm in Maryland, no. It's a bad law, and I will ignore it. The law does not define morality, it does not define right and wrong, it only defines legal and illegal. Right and wrong are part of personal beliefs. You believe that it right and wrong always exactly match legal and illegal, I do not. Period.
nd before you can convince me, you're going to have to do better than yuh-huh. Laws have nothing to do with the value of opinion. There are laws I feel are just and I will choose to follow, and there are those that aren't and I won't. The DMCA is a great example, UCITA is another one. Hiding behind the argument "but it's illegal" means absolutely nothing to me. Simply because it is illegal, does not make it immoral or wrong, it makes it only that, illegal. I'll not feel guilty breaking a law, when my personal code of ethics doesn't forbid the activity.
I don't believe ideas are property, so I'm not advocating theft. I don't care what you believe, and five centuries of tradition and law DOES NOT support the idea that IDEAS are property, and regardless, neither time nor the majority view makes an opinion right.
Judging from your method of argument (here's a hint, name calling doesn't win an argument, it makes you look foolish), I don't think it's likely that any ideas of yours are in danger.
Unlikely, there are fewer above average people than below. The average deviation from the mean for below average is much smaller than above, hence more people fit into that category than above average to balance those above. Obviously you're in the below category, since you don't understand the possesive form of pronouns.
Good. And True. Best part is, they CAN'T license the software on a per seat basis, at least not GPL code (and not to anyone who knows what they're doing), any GPL software they distibute can be copied and can be redistributed.
That's your right to feel that way. Personally I feel that you have no right to try and hoard an idea, so I will reverse-engineer your software if I want it, and I will redistribute it, because I believe in free software.
Uh no. Missing the point. It's GNU/Linux not GNU/Debian. You're comparing the name of a distibution to the name of an operating system. The correct name for the operating system is GNU/Linux, however if you want to shorten it to Linux go ahead, I call Coca-Cola Coke (to name just one of thousands of short versions of proper names), I'm guilty myself of calling GNU/Linux Linux. It's shorter easier and get's the point across. Hell I don't usually make distinctions between distributions either.
I've got news for you, the majority of users (people) are average or below average intelligence, what they call something doesn't matter, and doesn't change what it is.
You're obviously a moron. Once I bought the Tivo all space on it is mine, regardless of whether it's called a 40 hour Tivo or a 140 hour Tivo. You did pay for that space when you bought the machine in the first place.
Actually the age thing is completely fair. Let me explain. As the internet grows the average IQ drops, i.e. the internet gets stupider over time. The same can be said for the subset of the entire population that include say people under 18 (entirely arbitrary). As time goes on moe and more children are attracted to places like/., I'm certainly not saying that all children are immature or ignorant, but the percentages of those who are are much greater than the percentages of adults in the same situation, which is only natural, they're kids of course. So the chance of coming across the kids that do have something worthwhile to contribute decreases over time, due to the growing population of normal kids. So it's definitely fair.
Popular attitude on/. lately, though gladly many have debunked it in the past. So here I go again:
Cheaper: Who cares. Those that can afford it do, those that can't can find other entertainment. No inherent quality here.
Takes less time: Not sure why this is listed as some sort of benefit, what are you going to use the extra time for? Laying around, doing more of the same? Why not do something that takes a long time rather than a few short ones, depending on your personality type, completing one long activity may be more rewarding than multiple short ones which leads me to:
More Rewarding: This is just a crock of shit, which leads me to believe that you are an immature, shallow thinker. The value of a reward is a function of the rewardee, (and to a lesser extent the rewarder), not some arbitrary designation placed by those who feel forced to judge other.
So why don't you live your life, and the people who want to spend time playing the Sims (or anything else) will live theirs and you can keep your meanigless value judgements to yourself.
True, but I'm not arguing that because a certain compiler was used that that compiler writer has a right to name credit. In fact I'm completely against that, that's the same as game companies trying to assume rights to mods you create for games using their tools (*ahem* Bioware). The difference is that the GNU/Linux operating system is confused with the Linux kernel. The two are obviously not the same thing. And you are correct that is the crux of the argument. But it's the attitude of many that trivializes the contribution of GNU to the OS as a whole. Granted you can use either GNU or Linux with other toolsets, and many of us have, but they are both needed to form the operating system that is erroneously known as Linux.
However, IMHO, regardless of what you call it, the system is most accurately described as GNU Linux, and while I agree with RMS in that aspect, I don't agree in arguing semantics. It IS GNU/Linux, you can, however call it what you want, that doesn't change what it is. Make up an entirely new name, it IS STILL GNU/Linux. Stallman is (unfortunately) in my opinion, confusing the transient "name" of something with what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course.. the difference between Man and Beast, when you get down to it, is being able to think about things frm someone else's point of view, so when you think about it, this shows you something about the mental state of the organised online cheater.
Nice try but no. Thinking about another's point of view does not determine whether or not you are intelligent (or conscious, ect) life, the ability to recognize that think about your own thought processes is a more likely reason. though, in all likelihood it's unlikely that there's a single thing you can point at and say there it is, the difference between man and beast however I do agree with you classification of cheaters as a whole. Why play a game if you're going to cheat?
My post was kind of tongue in cheek. Civ (free or otherwise) is one of my all time favorites. I wish I had, when I was in school, had others with the patience to play a longer game like that. Of course, at the time, there was no Linux, and as far as I know no FreeCiv (I could be wrong,possibly it had been written prior to Linux I'm too lazy to check), and CivNet didn't come out until after I graduated, so multiplayer Civ was restricted to the tabletop game.
You mean the (attempted) destruction of an entire civilization isn't violent? ;) Yeah, I know what you mean, not quite the same as splattering other individuals.
I don't want more powerful regular expressions. I want a more powerful pattern-matching syntax, one I can compile down to an opaque object with a bit of syntactic sugar, then use in place of a regex. I want a parser sub-language like SML or parsing primitives like haskell. Regular expressions are now turing complete thanks to perl
Hmmm, I want, I want, I want. Maybe you try changing to: I'll write, and create your own language.
1) This isn't any easier to read. I've been programming since 1985 and went through more programming languages and idioms than I can recall, and regex is the only system I have attempted to learn and met with complete failure. If regex is to be redesigned (and despite my inability to learn it, I don't think it should be broken), at least make it comprehensible.
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but regular expressions, both in theory and in practice are simple concepts. Perhaps you're in the wrong line of work? I'm betting that you are completely lacking in theory, which is odd, because in my experience the older a coder the more Computer Science they were exposed to, but I'm sure there are exceptions. Go pick up a book on finite state machines, actually you don't even need that, go read the FSA bits of the Dragon book.
I still don't quite get the Lisp and Scheme obsession. Yes, it is certainly novel to be able to have a program recurse on itself and create its own anonymous routines, but the code is nearly unmaintainable and unless you take drastic measures, quite unreadable.
Like most other languages they are only nreadable if you don't know how to read it. Grok a language and reading it isn't difficult.
I prefer functional languages over any others when writing code. Functional languages in general are best suited to situations where you want to be as far away from the details of coding as possible and concentrate soley on the algorithms and Computer Sciencey aspects of what you're doing. At work, I prefer the mixture of Perl, C, and Java, depending on the application, because more people know them (not exactly a good reason) and they tend to work the best on the kind of things I do at work. In general the power of LISP (and other functional languages) just isn't needed at work.
that's a valid opinion, but not everyone shares it. Many of us don't believe in the concept of intellectual property at all. Furthermore, I'm sure that others share the view that the only contract that they feel obliged to stick to is the exchange of money for goods. Once it's in their (your) hands it's theirs to do with what they will. That hardware is certainly your property, they have no right to render it useless. Disable service, yes, disable the hardware, no.
This system will only work if we all respect and obey the Law, even when we disagree with it. Casually ignoring the Law will, without fail, lead to the ultimate collapse of our system from within.
I'll ask you again. Please leave this country immediately, and move someplace where the stability and continued health of society doesn't depend on a respect for the Law.
You apparently do not get the point. The freedom to hold any idea I wish, and be outspoken about it without being asked to leave the country is the reason this government is so flexible. So yes, protection from people like you, who feel that anyone that doesn't hold their views should leave the country have no power over those who are able to think on their own.
That's a gray area. My browser of choice is IE, I want to work in it because it's easiest on my eyes, and never has any problems rendering any websites. I also want to work in Opera, or another non-MS browser, however I tend to do all of my web browsing under Windows, mainly because I prefer IE for practical reasons. Which admittedly (as someone mentioned above) it is really a platform complaint. Technically I was inaccurate, but since I only use Windows for IE (and sometimes games) it means the same to me.
;) Yeah I didn't make that absolutely clear, I really should try Opera under Windows, like I said I like most of the features of Opera, it's only the non-separate process issue that I don't particularly care for, and that's a pretty minor annoyance.
Fortunately, I don't have to do that. The laws of this country were created in such a way as to protect people who aren't sheeplike in beliefs from people like you. I can live in this country and holwd, and speak about ANY belief I want.
and to my constant shame, IE is MY browser of choice. For the most part it is simply the best (god I feel sick), I prefer Opera for the features, but for rendering web pages, IE is it. Maybe if I got off of my ass and started looking into anti-aliasing for X I might feel different. As far as Opera is concerned, I really like it, and have had few problems other than rendering quality, though now that I think about it, Opera under Windows may blow IE away.
No man can choose which laws he'll obey and which ones he'll ignore. To do that is to place yourself above the Law, which destroys the delicate balance under which we all live.
To say, "Simply because it is illegal does not make it immoral or wrong" is to deny the very nature of Law. It is against the Law, and therefore it is wrong. Period.
There are sometimes bad laws. These laws should be changed. We have a system for doing so. But until those laws are changed, they must be obeyed.
In situations where the system completely breaks down, men are justified in engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. In the worst of all circumstances, armed revolution to overthrow the government is justified. If you seriously believe you're in a situation that warrants either of those responses, I'd request that you check yourself into the nearest psych ward and stay there until you're all better.
Sorry, don't buy it. Catch me, try to stop me, or anyone else for that matter. I don't have to try to work within the system if I don't believe IN the system, or even just the methods or time it takes to try and get a bad law removed. For example, oral sex is against the law in many states, including MD, is it wrong to have oral sex, no. Is it against the law, yes. Am I going to abstain until when and if the law is ever revoked when I'm in Maryland, no. It's a bad law, and I will ignore it. The law does not define morality, it does not define right and wrong, it only defines legal and illegal. Right and wrong are part of personal beliefs. You believe that it right and wrong always exactly match legal and illegal, I do not. Period.
nd before you can convince me, you're going to have to do better than yuh-huh. Laws have nothing to do with the value of opinion. There are laws I feel are just and I will choose to follow, and there are those that aren't and I won't. The DMCA is a great example, UCITA is another one. Hiding behind the argument "but it's illegal" means absolutely nothing to me. Simply because it is illegal, does not make it immoral or wrong, it makes it only that, illegal. I'll not feel guilty breaking a law, when my personal code of ethics doesn't forbid the activity.
Judging from your method of argument (here's a hint, name calling doesn't win an argument, it makes you look foolish), I don't think it's likely that any ideas of yours are in danger.
Unlikely, there are fewer above average people than below. The average deviation from the mean for below average is much smaller than above, hence more people fit into that category than above average to balance those above. Obviously you're in the below category, since you don't understand the possesive form of pronouns.
Good. And True. Best part is, they CAN'T license the software on a per seat basis, at least not GPL code (and not to anyone who knows what they're doing), any GPL software they distibute can be copied and can be redistributed.
That's your right to feel that way. Personally I feel that you have no right to try and hoard an idea, so I will reverse-engineer your software if I want it, and I will redistribute it, because I believe in free software.
I've got news for you, the majority of users (people) are average or below average intelligence, what they call something doesn't matter, and doesn't change what it is.
You're obviously a moron. Once I bought the Tivo all space on it is mine, regardless of whether it's called a 40 hour Tivo or a 140 hour Tivo. You did pay for that space when you bought the machine in the first place.
Actually the age thing is completely fair. Let me explain. As the internet grows the average IQ drops, i.e. the internet gets stupider over time. The same can be said for the subset of the entire population that include say people under 18 (entirely arbitrary). As time goes on moe and more children are attracted to places like /., I'm certainly not saying that all children are immature or ignorant, but the percentages of those who are are much greater than the percentages of adults in the same situation, which is only natural, they're kids of course. So the chance of coming across the kids that do have something worthwhile to contribute decreases over time, due to the growing population of normal kids. So it's definitely fair.
So what isn't a waste of time?
Cheaper, takes less time, and is more rewarding.
Popular attitude on
Cheaper: Who cares. Those that can afford it do, those that can't can find other entertainment. No inherent quality here.
Takes less time: Not sure why this is listed as some sort of benefit, what are you going to use the extra time for? Laying around, doing more of the same? Why not do something that takes a long time rather than a few short ones, depending on your personality type, completing one long activity may be more rewarding than multiple short ones which leads me to:
More Rewarding: This is just a crock of shit, which leads me to believe that you are an immature, shallow thinker. The value of a reward is a function of the rewardee, (and to a lesser extent the rewarder), not some arbitrary designation placed by those who feel forced to judge other.
So why don't you live your life, and the people who want to spend time playing the Sims (or anything else) will live theirs and you can keep your meanigless value judgements to yourself.
However, IMHO, regardless of what you call it, the system is most accurately described as GNU Linux, and while I agree with RMS in that aspect, I don't agree in arguing semantics. It IS GNU/Linux, you can, however call it what you want, that doesn't change what it is. Make up an entirely new name, it IS STILL GNU/Linux. Stallman is (unfortunately) in my opinion, confusing the transient "name" of something with what it is.
That's not enough for his insatiable ego?
Maybe that should be your clue that it's not about ego.