Ha! Funny. But just in case a few of the more ignorant slashdotters think you might be on to something, I should point out that you can't sue someone when you modified their work, rather than the other way around. In fact, it's possible that virus writers in general could be sued for copyright infringement because they create derivative works. And if a non-GPL'd virus infected a GPL'd work, the authors of the former might be able to sue to get either the source of the virus released, or have the virus withdrawn. In which case, a virus that was already GPL'd might well be a smart move!:)
Then you're obviously on the wrong site: this is news for nerds, i.e., people who can figure out how to use a URI even if it's not hyperlinked. News for hapless, brain-dead idiots is thataway. (Or even thataway.)
There's one major difference, which I'm surprised that I have to point out to a slashdot audience: fusion releases a whole lot more energy than decomposition and burning. Like, orders of magnitude. So to compare this to the Mr. Fusion unit in BTTF is quite misleading. It may seem odd to use a car analogy in a story about cars, but I'm going to take a stab at it. This is like rolling a log down a hill and claiming that you've invented the Ferrari.:)
Actually, "theft", as most people know it, refers to a whole range of activities, many of which involve copying, and many of which aren't even illegal. For example, the creators of Forbidden Planet stole liberally from Shakespeare (who, himself, frequently stole from others). Nobody complains or thinks there's anything wrong with this, because Shakespeare is long out of copyright. It is, nevertheless, generally referred to as theft.
(Which I guess means that I am, in fact, saying that theft is OK, under some circumstances. Theft from people who have been dead for five centuries, for example.):)
The proposal has already been written. The encoding has already been done. The draft is on its third revision and seems quite stable. I don't see what else is needed except...drumming up support among the "modern user community". Hence my post. (My guess is that Slashdot has more Tengwar fans than the Unicode list.)
Yes, because it's clear that over 10% of the slashdot audience posts on every story. No possibility that one type of story attracts one set of commentators and another attracts a different set. No, that couldn't possibly be the case.
They've got symbols for a love hotel, a horse, and a steaming pile of poo, along with emoticons, and they still haven't accepted the Tengwar draft that's been around since '93? Where are these people's priorities!?
In fact, one of the things that made me worry a little less about the acquisition was the fact that they separated SUSE from Novell. Of course, that could have been the first step towards killing it, but overall, SUSE looked like the only really valuable asset that Novell had, so splitting it off made a lot of sense.
Disclaimer: I mostly like Lua, though I wouldn't say I love it. Like all languages, it has advantages and disadvantages. Lua's strength is embedding, though, and that's where it shines--the only other language that comes close is Tcl, and Lua is cleaner, IMO.
1. I mostly agree with you that ~= for not equals was a mistake. As another poster pointed out, it's a somewhat justifiable mistake, but we had nearly managed to standardize !=. Lua is the first recent language to ignore this near-standard. After 11, below, this is probably my biggest complaint about Lua. 2. BASIC? Really? Dude! Those keywords don't come from BASIC! (In fact, I've never used a version of BASIC that supported any of them--oh, and get off my lawn!) Those come from Algol, probably by way of Pascal or Modula, and they're great, which is why BASIC ripped them off--they're probably the only good part of any flavor of BASIC, because they're not BASIC features.:) 3. I'm not sure what you're on about with "local, let and var" (though I think I disagree), but the rest of your rant (about "==") is inconsistent with your earlier complaint about "~=". Like "!=", "==" has become more-or-less standard, and I'm glad Lua didn't decide to innovate here. 4. What are you on about? "print(2+3)" works just fine, as does "a = {1, 2+3}". 5. Man you're stretching! And again, inconsistent with your point 1. 6. Matter of taste. I think I actually prefer "..", but it's not something I feel strongly about either way. Using "+" for concatenation tends to work better in an OO language with operator overriding. Lua's more of a low-level embedded language. 7. Like, whatever. Is this really worth even discussing? 47 different languages do this 47 different ways, and all of them are fine. 8. tonumber() is consistent with the other coercion functions, and if you really hate typing that much, you should probably find another line of work. I certainly wouldn't want to hire you. People who complain about extra typing are generally the ones who write opaque, cryptic, incomprehensible code with no comments. 9. Oh. My. God! If you ever design a language, I will pray that I am never, ever forced to use it!:) Oh, and "def" doesn't come from Lisp--it's simply short for "define". P.s. if you really want to use just one delimiter everywhere, try Tcl. It's not a bad alternative to Lua if you're looking for an embedded language, and it uses curly braces for everything--even function arguments. P.p.s. those aren't methods, because Lua's not an OO language. Those are functions. (Or procedures, though Lua, like most modern languages, doesn't distinguish between the two.) 10. I don't think I've ever encountered this quirk, so I won't comment, except to say, if you don't like that, don't do it! 11. You only had 10 points on your list, and I'm truly amazed you left out the one biggest issue most people (especially those familiar with C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.) will trip over--one-based arrays! If you're going to rant about Lua, how can you possibly ignore the exasperating one-based arrays? Are you even a programmer?:)
Anyway, Lua's not really competing directly with perl/python/ruby. Its strength is that it's small, fast, and easily embeddable. The ease with which you can call back and forth between Lua and C is what really makes it shine. Some of its quirks seem to be choices made for performance reasons, and I'm willing to live with that. Overall, I like its style and flavor better than tcl, which seems to be its main competition.
They never did! It does not hurt you to not be paid a second time for something you were already paid for! Arguing otherwise simply makes you a greedy pig! Or an idiot. Or both.
The rest of your argument basically boils down to special pleading: oh, games are so expensive to make, so we need to do everything we can to scrape up extra money, even if it's illegal or immoral. You know what? That's crap! If you can't turn a profit, well, sucks to be you, but blaming the second-hand market is bull. Nobody owes you a living. If you don't like being in a high-risk industry, tough titties.
Now, I've got no problem with you guys trying to find ways to scrape in extra dough--as long as you're up-front about it, admit that you're crippling these games, and damaging their potential value to the customer. If the informed customer is still willing to pay, even though your product has less value (because it can't be resold), then you're gold. But lying about it, and trying to blame the customer is a steaming pile of crap. Used games do not hurt you because they're a built-in part of the system you should have accounted for before you even got into it. You're not "stopping the hurt"; you're simply ripping off your customers (and trying to blame them in the process).
CDs and DVDs are just as resiliant as game discs, but movies and music seem to survive the existence of a used market just fine. This whole nonsense idea that software needs special rules because its "special" is BS.
Nor is just digital media that doesn't (necessarily) degrade--my dad used to buy vinyl, take it home, tape it, and then only play the tape, so that the original LP wouldn't wear out. He had albums he'd owned for 10 years and listened to regularly that were still in as good shape as the day he bought them.
In any case, plastic degrades, as does the aluminum layer where the information is stored. CDs and DVDs (and thus, game discs) have an estimated lifespan of around 20 years. That may seem like an eternity to you, but I assure you, it's not.
Honestly, even the CD makers only tried to make sure their stuff couldn't be copied when they installed a root kit on your machine. They didn't try to cripple it to ensure you couldn't exercise your first-sale rights when you got bored of it. Frankly, I have more respect for Sony/BMG than I do for the game companies that are trying to directly screw over their customers with this crap. Yes, I'm saying that this is more evil than rooting someone's machine!
Doesn't matter--they have the rights to copy and they're selling that copy. Therefore, under first sale doctrine, you should have the right to resell that copy. The fact that your copy was made on-demand should be completely irrelevant. If it were an on-demand printing press or CD burner, you'd have the right to resell the book or (physical) CD, even though it was generated on-the-spot. Why would it be different for a file?
In fact, a DVD or BluRay is simply a set of files that have been copied to an intermediate storage medium. What possible reason can you offer for suggesting that the rules are different simply because the storage mechanism is different?
I believe at least one publisher has stated used games are a BIGGER problem for them than piracy
That's what they want people to believe, but, of course, it's pure nonsense. They sold one copy, and one person owns that one copy. The fact that the person who currently owns that one copy is not the original purchaser is irrelevant.
The real problem is that it's hard to make games that have any replay value. Nevertheless, book and movie makers (who almost have it worse) seem to be able to live with the existence of used sales just fine. Curiously, before games, it was musicians who were most likely to freak out when they discovered the existence of the used goods market, despite the fact that music generally has far more replay value than books, movies or games.
But punishing users because the game makers aren't good enough at making games people want to keep is ass-backwards!
One exception (and yes, it's nicely ironic that the Catholics have become just about the only form of Christianity that isn't anti-science) doesn't contradict what Sagan said: "Hardly any major religion..."
(The Anglicans show some signs of sense as well, but as far as I know, they haven't officially accepted evolution, like the Catholics have.)
To find those "first couple of hundred that are any good", you have to pretty much read them all (though you can start by skipping the first couple of hundred, since none of them are any good).
Usually, but not always. If you have a complex maze of nested if/else clauses, with temporary state variables all over the place, sometimes--sometimes--judicious use of goto can actually simplify and clarify the code. It's not common, and it's usually the sort of thing I only notice in my own code after its already gone to production and rewriting it for clarity with a goto would be more work than its worth, but there have been a few simple examples posted in this discussion already.
Which is why the idea of automatically marking it as bad is stupid.
I haven't used goto in over 20 years, but, looking back, there's probably a few cases where I should have--cases where it would have made the code not only more efficient, but clearer.
(Also, in general, I think the RAII pattern is better than try/finally in most--but not all--cases, but that also requires language support.)
So the criticisms are understated because they're making it seem partisan, when it's really just plain ol' corruption (something found on both sides of the aisle)?
I understand how package signing works--I was a Debian developer for many years, and have also built a lot of RPMs.
You obviously didn't read the paper I linked to. Having the uploader sign is good because it gives you accountability, but beyond that, per-package signatures are not only useless, but can actually be counter-productive! Because software has bugs! Which is why Debian doesn't attach the uploader's signature to the packages in its repo, even though it requires each upload to have one. That way, a buggy, insecure package does not have a signature offering a false sense of security. Read the paper.
The rootkit came from BMG--it was released the year they were acquired by Sony, and there is no way something like that went from planning to design to implementation to release in a year at a company the size of BMG. Anyway, at the time, Sony was actively supporting Linux, and the rootkit only affected Windows, so it was obviously an attack on Microsoft, not consumers, and as slashdotters, we should be supporting them for that!
Ok, now give me a second--I just have to unwedge my tongue from my cheek.....:)
(Personally, I still trust Sony more than I trust MS, but only in the sense that some negative numbers are larger than others. I also prefer bubonic plague to ebola.)
Copyright has nothing to do with the fact that Mickey is trademarked--and trademarks don't expire, unless abandoned. Of course, that makes it doubly-stupid that Disney works so hard to keep Steamboat Willie under copyright. The loss of Steamboat Willie would have no effect on their ownership of The Mouse, and next-to-no effect on their bottom line. (Sales and license fees for that particular movie are probably near-nil.)
Probably all of us were raised with the McDonald's Arches. Does that mean we get to own that as well? Your logic seems...peculiar. At best.
p.s. note, I don't disagree with your idea that copyrights should be limited, and much shorter than they are currently. It's the rest of your argument that seems screwy.
p.p.s. for added irony, we should note that Steamboat Willie is based on another work (Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.); yet one more in a long line of cases where Disney feels free to steal the works of others, but will scream bloody murder at any hint of copying of theirs. If it were made today, Steamboat Willie might well have to face a lawsuit to prove that it was a viable parody, and not just a blatant rip-off. Especially if Disney owned Steamboat Bill Jr., and someone else made Steamboat Willie.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what? I'm shocked to find myself saying this--I didn't even think it was possible--but...I think you just insulted Best Buy!
Ha! Funny. But just in case a few of the more ignorant slashdotters think you might be on to something, I should point out that you can't sue someone when you modified their work, rather than the other way around. In fact, it's possible that virus writers in general could be sued for copyright infringement because they create derivative works. And if a non-GPL'd virus infected a GPL'd work, the authors of the former might be able to sue to get either the source of the virus released, or have the virus withdrawn. In which case, a virus that was already GPL'd might well be a smart move! :)
Then you're obviously on the wrong site: this is news for nerds, i.e., people who can figure out how to use a URI even if it's not hyperlinked. News for hapless, brain-dead idiots is thataway. (Or even thataway.)
Now go away and let the grownups talk. :p ;)
There's one major difference, which I'm surprised that I have to point out to a slashdot audience: fusion releases a whole lot more energy than decomposition and burning. Like, orders of magnitude. So to compare this to the Mr. Fusion unit in BTTF is quite misleading. It may seem odd to use a car analogy in a story about cars, but I'm going to take a stab at it. This is like rolling a log down a hill and claiming that you've invented the Ferrari. :)
Actually, "theft", as most people know it, refers to a whole range of activities, many of which involve copying, and many of which aren't even illegal. For example, the creators of Forbidden Planet stole liberally from Shakespeare (who, himself, frequently stole from others). Nobody complains or thinks there's anything wrong with this, because Shakespeare is long out of copyright. It is, nevertheless, generally referred to as theft.
(Which I guess means that I am, in fact, saying that theft is OK, under some circumstances. Theft from people who have been dead for five centuries, for example.) :)
The proposal has already been written. The encoding has already been done. The draft is on its third revision and seems quite stable. I don't see what else is needed except...drumming up support among the "modern user community". Hence my post. (My guess is that Slashdot has more Tengwar fans than the Unicode list.)
Yes, because it's clear that over 10% of the slashdot audience posts on every story. No possibility that one type of story attracts one set of commentators and another attracts a different set. No, that couldn't possibly be the case.
Yeah but can you write a pile of poo in ASCII?
As far as I know, Windows was originally written in ASCII... :)
They've got symbols for a love hotel, a horse, and a steaming pile of poo, along with emoticons, and they still haven't accepted the Tengwar draft that's been around since '93? Where are these people's priorities!?
In fact, one of the things that made me worry a little less about the acquisition was the fact that they separated SUSE from Novell. Of course, that could have been the first step towards killing it, but overall, SUSE looked like the only really valuable asset that Novell had, so splitting it off made a lot of sense.
Disclaimer: I mostly like Lua, though I wouldn't say I love it. Like all languages, it has advantages and disadvantages. Lua's strength is embedding, though, and that's where it shines--the only other language that comes close is Tcl, and Lua is cleaner, IMO.
1. I mostly agree with you that ~= for not equals was a mistake. As another poster pointed out, it's a somewhat justifiable mistake, but we had nearly managed to standardize !=. Lua is the first recent language to ignore this near-standard. After 11, below, this is probably my biggest complaint about Lua. :) :) Oh, and "def" doesn't come from Lisp--it's simply short for "define". P.s. if you really want to use just one delimiter everywhere, try Tcl. It's not a bad alternative to Lua if you're looking for an embedded language, and it uses curly braces for everything--even function arguments. P.p.s. those aren't methods, because Lua's not an OO language. Those are functions. (Or procedures, though Lua, like most modern languages, doesn't distinguish between the two.) :)
2. BASIC? Really? Dude! Those keywords don't come from BASIC! (In fact, I've never used a version of BASIC that supported any of them--oh, and get off my lawn!) Those come from Algol, probably by way of Pascal or Modula, and they're great, which is why BASIC ripped them off--they're probably the only good part of any flavor of BASIC, because they're not BASIC features.
3. I'm not sure what you're on about with "local, let and var" (though I think I disagree), but the rest of your rant (about "==") is inconsistent with your earlier complaint about "~=". Like "!=", "==" has become more-or-less standard, and I'm glad Lua didn't decide to innovate here.
4. What are you on about? "print(2+3)" works just fine, as does "a = {1, 2+3}".
5. Man you're stretching! And again, inconsistent with your point 1.
6. Matter of taste. I think I actually prefer "..", but it's not something I feel strongly about either way. Using "+" for concatenation tends to work better in an OO language with operator overriding. Lua's more of a low-level embedded language.
7. Like, whatever. Is this really worth even discussing? 47 different languages do this 47 different ways, and all of them are fine.
8. tonumber() is consistent with the other coercion functions, and if you really hate typing that much, you should probably find another line of work. I certainly wouldn't want to hire you. People who complain about extra typing are generally the ones who write opaque, cryptic, incomprehensible code with no comments.
9. Oh. My. God! If you ever design a language, I will pray that I am never, ever forced to use it!
10. I don't think I've ever encountered this quirk, so I won't comment, except to say, if you don't like that, don't do it!
11. You only had 10 points on your list, and I'm truly amazed you left out the one biggest issue most people (especially those familiar with C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.) will trip over--one-based arrays! If you're going to rant about Lua, how can you possibly ignore the exasperating one-based arrays? Are you even a programmer?
Anyway, Lua's not really competing directly with perl/python/ruby. Its strength is that it's small, fast, and easily embeddable. The ease with which you can call back and forth between Lua and C is what really makes it shine. Some of its quirks seem to be choices made for performance reasons, and I'm willing to live with that. Overall, I like its style and flavor better than tcl, which seems to be its main competition.
And used games don't affect me anymore.
They never did! It does not hurt you to not be paid a second time for something you were already paid for! Arguing otherwise simply makes you a greedy pig! Or an idiot. Or both.
The rest of your argument basically boils down to special pleading: oh, games are so expensive to make, so we need to do everything we can to scrape up extra money, even if it's illegal or immoral. You know what? That's crap! If you can't turn a profit, well, sucks to be you, but blaming the second-hand market is bull. Nobody owes you a living. If you don't like being in a high-risk industry, tough titties.
Now, I've got no problem with you guys trying to find ways to scrape in extra dough--as long as you're up-front about it, admit that you're crippling these games, and damaging their potential value to the customer. If the informed customer is still willing to pay, even though your product has less value (because it can't be resold), then you're gold. But lying about it, and trying to blame the customer is a steaming pile of crap. Used games do not hurt you because they're a built-in part of the system you should have accounted for before you even got into it. You're not "stopping the hurt"; you're simply ripping off your customers (and trying to blame them in the process).
Other purchases degrade.
CDs and DVDs are just as resiliant as game discs, but movies and music seem to survive the existence of a used market just fine. This whole nonsense idea that software needs special rules because its "special" is BS.
Nor is just digital media that doesn't (necessarily) degrade--my dad used to buy vinyl, take it home, tape it, and then only play the tape, so that the original LP wouldn't wear out. He had albums he'd owned for 10 years and listened to regularly that were still in as good shape as the day he bought them.
In any case, plastic degrades, as does the aluminum layer where the information is stored. CDs and DVDs (and thus, game discs) have an estimated lifespan of around 20 years. That may seem like an eternity to you, but I assure you, it's not.
Honestly, even the CD makers only tried to make sure their stuff couldn't be copied when they installed a root kit on your machine. They didn't try to cripple it to ensure you couldn't exercise your first-sale rights when you got bored of it. Frankly, I have more respect for Sony/BMG than I do for the game companies that are trying to directly screw over their customers with this crap. Yes, I'm saying that this is more evil than rooting someone's machine!
Doesn't matter--they have the rights to copy and they're selling that copy. Therefore, under first sale doctrine, you should have the right to resell that copy. The fact that your copy was made on-demand should be completely irrelevant. If it were an on-demand printing press or CD burner, you'd have the right to resell the book or (physical) CD, even though it was generated on-the-spot. Why would it be different for a file?
In fact, a DVD or BluRay is simply a set of files that have been copied to an intermediate storage medium. What possible reason can you offer for suggesting that the rules are different simply because the storage mechanism is different?
I believe at least one publisher has stated used games are a BIGGER problem for them than piracy
That's what they want people to believe, but, of course, it's pure nonsense. They sold one copy, and one person owns that one copy. The fact that the person who currently owns that one copy is not the original purchaser is irrelevant.
The real problem is that it's hard to make games that have any replay value. Nevertheless, book and movie makers (who almost have it worse) seem to be able to live with the existence of used sales just fine. Curiously, before games, it was musicians who were most likely to freak out when they discovered the existence of the used goods market, despite the fact that music generally has far more replay value than books, movies or games.
But punishing users because the game makers aren't good enough at making games people want to keep is ass-backwards!
One exception (and yes, it's nicely ironic that the Catholics have become just about the only form of Christianity that isn't anti-science) doesn't contradict what Sagan said: "Hardly any major religion..."
(The Anglicans show some signs of sense as well, but as far as I know, they haven't officially accepted evolution, like the Catholics have.)
To find those "first couple of hundred that are any good", you have to pretty much read them all (though you can start by skipping the first couple of hundred, since none of them are any good).
Coding with a "goto" makes code more obfuscated.
Usually, but not always. If you have a complex maze of nested if/else clauses, with temporary state variables all over the place, sometimes--sometimes--judicious use of goto can actually simplify and clarify the code. It's not common, and it's usually the sort of thing I only notice in my own code after its already gone to production and rewriting it for clarity with a goto would be more work than its worth, but there have been a few simple examples posted in this discussion already.
I agree that GOTO has its uses
Which is why the idea of automatically marking it as bad is stupid.
I haven't used goto in over 20 years, but, looking back, there's probably a few cases where I should have--cases where it would have made the code not only more efficient, but clearer.
(Also, in general, I think the RAII pattern is better than try/finally in most--but not all--cases, but that also requires language support.)
So the criticisms are understated because they're making it seem partisan, when it's really just plain ol' corruption (something found on both sides of the aisle)?
I understand how package signing works--I was a Debian developer for many years, and have also built a lot of RPMs.
You obviously didn't read the paper I linked to. Having the uploader sign is good because it gives you accountability, but beyond that, per-package signatures are not only useless, but can actually be counter-productive! Because software has bugs! Which is why Debian doesn't attach the uploader's signature to the packages in its repo, even though it requires each upload to have one. That way, a buggy, insecure package does not have a signature offering a false sense of security. Read the paper.
The rootkit came from BMG--it was released the year they were acquired by Sony, and there is no way something like that went from planning to design to implementation to release in a year at a company the size of BMG. Anyway, at the time, Sony was actively supporting Linux, and the rootkit only affected Windows, so it was obviously an attack on Microsoft, not consumers, and as slashdotters, we should be supporting them for that!
Ok, now give me a second--I just have to unwedge my tongue from my cheek..... :)
(Personally, I still trust Sony more than I trust MS, but only in the sense that some negative numbers are larger than others. I also prefer bubonic plague to ebola.)
I don't think the fact that all the Mayan computers are going to crash this year is quite as big a deal as the Mayans thought! :)
Questionable Content just has a banner; they aren't actually blacked out. More that are blacked out:
More that have a banner like Questionable Content:
Copyright has nothing to do with the fact that Mickey is trademarked--and trademarks don't expire, unless abandoned. Of course, that makes it doubly-stupid that Disney works so hard to keep Steamboat Willie under copyright. The loss of Steamboat Willie would have no effect on their ownership of The Mouse, and next-to-no effect on their bottom line. (Sales and license fees for that particular movie are probably near-nil.)
Probably all of us were raised with the McDonald's Arches. Does that mean we get to own that as well? Your logic seems...peculiar. At best.
p.s. note, I don't disagree with your idea that copyrights should be limited, and much shorter than they are currently. It's the rest of your argument that seems screwy.
p.p.s. for added irony, we should note that Steamboat Willie is based on another work (Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.); yet one more in a long line of cases where Disney feels free to steal the works of others, but will scream bloody murder at any hint of copying of theirs. If it were made today, Steamboat Willie might well have to face a lawsuit to prove that it was a viable parody, and not just a blatant rip-off. Especially if Disney owned Steamboat Bill Jr., and someone else made Steamboat Willie.