unlike television, where the crime must be solved by the end of the family hour
Have you thought about what you're (implicitly by your implied criticism] asking for?
Which is it you want, an "episode" that lasts three months? A season that consists of the same 20-ish (or whatever number) episodes it does now, only randomly scattered across the episodes in the order in which they "really occurred"? On every scene change, white text on the bottom of the screen that says "[random time period] later"?
It's like asking for "total realism" in science fiction... you are aware that faster than light travel is, at best, totally unproven and most likely completely impossible? (Save the discussion on the possibility of FTL for sci.physics, please, this is just an example.)
So many fan-boy types ask for things that if they got them, they'd hate even more. I for one am glad the characters aren't making constant references to the amount of time something is taken, and I for one am glad that when they dig through an entire day of garbage in Los Vegas, they show about ten seconds of walking around, followed by the necessary discoveries. Are you seriously asking them to show the five or six hours it might have taken in real life? You feel free to watch it, I can guarantee I wouldn't.
The primary benefit of XML is that as a standardized language, standardized parsers can be made available that are reasonably easy to use.
The primary "oversell" of XML is to extend that claim to cover semantics. Human readability is great and should not be underestimated in some uses, but should not be oversold either.
So let's say you want to write a tool to validate that some Java code conforms to something or other. What's the hardest part of that task, that shouldn't be hard? Parsing the Java code. I mean, it's not like it's impossible for someone skilled enough to even consider writing such a tool in the first place, but it is a legitimate challenge; it's very easy to get 90% correct but that last 10% can be a bitch.
And let's not even talk about trying to parse Perl.
Exposing the AST in XML is not a bad idea; it's a perfect match of the two technologies. You still have semantics to deal with, but we're a ways from being able to standardize those.
Now, as LISP has shown, programming straight to the AST, while it has its advantages, is a historical loser. But that doesn't make exposing it in a standard fashion a Bad Idea. On top of it, you layer a more conventional language... and as strongly as I am defending an XML-exposed AST, I even more strongly believe it would be a stupid, fatal mistake to make that the human-exposed language that one actually programs in. I've worked with a couple of things that only come close (XBL and XUL Templates, where the primary flaw of the latter is that it should be a language and isn't) and a thing that is an XML language (XSLT) and I think it was a grave error on both counts.
Even better if multiple languages could share one standard or at least semi-standard AST; sharing semantics has proven to be a non-starter I think but there's still hope at the syntax level. (.Net shows that trying to share semantics means you end up with five languages that are just different spellings of the same thing, only without the convenient AST in XML to work with.)
This isn't a pointless abstraction, but it is something that will probably only be useful on big projects. I say "probably" because if a language with this capability ever got off the ground, there might be interesting things that could be done that we've not even thought of.
Bureaucracies are a way of slamming everybody to a common standard with reasonable reliability. It is a low, but predictable level of capability, and frankly, that has its uses. It is also easy to set up, and we seem to have some almost instinctual knowlegde of how to set them up.
They aren't optimal in all situations and they are overapplied, but they have their place. I for one wouldn't care to have a criminal justice system that wasn't a bureaucracy; predictability in a legal system is very important. Yes, even when it is wrong... then you at least know something needs to be fixed. To use a Slashdot-type example, at least we know the patent system is broken. If the rulings were more random (at all levels, from the Patent Office to judges), it would be even harder to tell... and ultimately we'd be even worse off and the first order of business would be to establish some consistency! (Consistency is one of those things that you can have contempt for because you're so used to it, you don't realize how important it is; "familiarity breeds contempt". I'd rather have the current system than a random one, and I hate the current system. For instance, a random system would give an even greater advantage to the deep-pocketed company; they could just keep re-trying various suits until the dice came up their way. The system as it is allows some of that, but you'd see even more in a random world.)
The big problem with Bureaucracies is that one of the biggest counter-indications for its use is "managing a creative enterprise", and that's where we hear most of the bitching about it. The problem here, ultimately, isn't truly Bureaucracy itself; it is working as it always does. It is the application of an inappropriate organization system; you always pay for that, no matter what. Unfortunately, all other forms are more expensive (thought of in the proper economic terms, even Anarchy is more expensive; the communication issues necessary to behave in a coordinated fashion become intractable), and like I said, we seem to have some sort of Bureaucracy instinct, so they also have to be learned explicitly, which is another barrier to their use.
But ultimately, "[large bureaucracies evolved] as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent" and "they prevent work and progress which results in 'mediocre talent.'"... when misused, which they probably are a majority of the time.
I don't know if the people using synergy actually know what it means,
If I'm reading the cards correctly (on rather scanty hints), the reason that "synergy" has become such a Dirty Word amoung us realists is that while synergy is a real thing and can have outstanding benefits, in its typical use it is almost always indicates a suicide pact in progress. "Synergy" is typically used as the major reason behind a merger, and "synergy" mergers almost always fail because of the underestimation of both companies of the difficulty in merging cultures.
(Culture is such a soft, fuzzy thing, right, and it couldn't be hard at all to make everything mesh, right? You'd think so, because it's basically impossible to put into words why it is difficult (at least not without it sounding silly or trivial), thus for many people not accostomed to thinking without words it is also impossible to think. Nevertheless, history shows it is so difficult it may border on the impossible for sufficiently large companies.)
AOL + Time Warner is probably one of the biggest examples of this. Sure, on paper the synergy was mind-blowing. In reality, the combined company was completely unable to execute. (In fact, the lack of execution almost completely boggles the mind.)
"Synergy" seems to lead a lot of companies to doom; they see the benefits but fail to see the costs.
On the one hand, the Sims is designed as interactive entertainment from the get go, and (while I don't care for it) it is quite successful at that for a lot of people.
On the other hand... uhhh... on the other hand... uhhh... isn't there always an "other hand"?
(Sometimes the issue really is black and white. Next up on Reality Television, a Quake 3 Tournament where you, the viewer, get to vote on what key Thresh will push next!)
Fear Factor does some controversial stuff, if only controversial to the major networks. There are several shows that they only aired once and won't air again on network TV because it crossed a line (at least according to the VH1 "Inside Fear Factor" show, which was surprisingly informative, I thought). Not quite what you were after, but as close as you'll get.
My point is more subtle than that. There is a sharp cross-over point between "profitable" and "death-spiral". For all the "crap" that the music industry is claimed to put out, you're basically not facing facts if you don't realize that yes, a lot of people like it.
Additionally, music isn't software. Mediocre music is mediocre. Mediocre software crashes.
Once the company dips into unprofitability once (for some time period), for any reason, it's over, and it's pretty clear that the video game industry is running much closer to "the edge" than the music industry. This is probably from another difference between software and music: The amount you will spend on an album, not counting marketing, is basically bounded. The amount you will spend on a game is even less bounded than a movie, and thanks to competition, they are expensive.
It's not that what you say is wrong, it's that the music industry isn't really much like the video game industry; both are entertainment but trying to understand the innards of one in terms of the other is a waste of time. Mediocrity works in a stable environment, but video games are too unstable. (Movies are unstable too, but they make so much more money relative to a video game, and they do not uniformly suck (everybody says they suck, nobody agrees which suck), that they aren't comparable either, even if the finances are somewhat similar.)
Unless EA begins to make high-quality games that move to the top of the pack, they will implode the next time a major recession hits. And judging by their volume-over-creativity track record, this is unlikely.
Actually, you don't even need the economy to cooperate. (For one thing, video games weather bad economies fairly well because while they are expensive, they are the best bang for the buck, bar none, in interactive entertainment, especially if you raid the bargain bin. My score today, a new Baldur's Gate, Dark Alliance labelled $9.99, sold at the counter for $7.41. Cha-ching!)
Once the reputation for mediocrity sets in... Slashdot is on the cutting edge of this here, the public hasn't seen it, but they will... they'll go into a death spiral. With such a staff, they'll have immense expenses. That means they can lose big, and fast. Their response will be to do all the wrong things, lay people off and somehow push the remaining developers even harder, pushing down the quality, and pushing them further into the spiral.
The "correct" answer is to fire half the company or more, and take the coffers to take the time to completely restructure the company until it works again. But that takes work and obvious risk, and so they will take the unobvious certainty of the death spiral.
Unless they get a really charismatic leader, this is how it will go.
In fact, I will go out on a limb and say we're witnessing a second video game collapse. EA will eat half+ the industry and then die. This time, it won't be so permanent because it won't be for supply/demand reasons, but there's a major shakeup coming. It will probably be a good or even great thing for us consumers.
However, if I were to plant this corn and it so happened to contain Monsanto seed (which I realistically have no way of knowing) how could I be legally lible to Monsanto, who I have had no dealing with?
By patent law, which requires no knowledge and all users, not just the designer/seller/original purchaser, incur liability for unlicensed use. (I'm not saying this is moral or ethical, but it is the legal situation.)
Your logic is a complete non-starter. If a person close to you wants to kill you, they don't need a gun. I could hardly list them all off if I tried. So you can toss that category of fatalities out, because it wasn't the gun, it was the person.
Besides, I trust my wife never to gun me down, and should I ever be wrong in that assessment, odds are, I deserved it (given that we're talking low probabilities anyhow).
Now, if you could show that home intruders were routinely turning guns back on their owners, I'd be more impressed. But while I'm sure you can come up with the odd anecdote here or there, the vast bulk of cases goes the other way.
Your argument is a great example of why raw statistics requires intelligent interpretation. I'm not interested in the category of events that matches "my housemate wants to kill me", because the tool doesn't much matter. Drop that category and all you've got left is "Won't you please think of the children?", which is its usual "compelling" and disingenuous self.
Let whoever it is take whatever it is they want,
Your life? Your kids? I'm sorry, you can babble all you want and you can do what you please but I will not predicate my home defense on the "nice criminal" assumption! Seeing it used as a gun control argument boggles my mind.
I bobbled this sentence during editing: "Silicon is not cheap, and don't forget about opportunity cost;" Silicon is not cheap because of opportunity costs. This is largely why more things are migrating to the CPU, and supporting the CPU as much as possible. Silicon is "cheap" but it is put to better use elsewhere, and once the CPU is strong enough to take over, it's cheaper to leave the silicon out than include it, always. So the effect is that silicon isn't cheap, even though on the surface it appears to be. That logic was not clear in my post.
Each use has to be evaluated on its own merits. Silicon is not cheap, and don't forget about opportunity cost; silicon dedicaded to decoding this one image compression scheme could be doing something else useful, like being cache or just plain not existing and not taking up power.
Graphics cards make the grade by being (conservatively) 5 to maybe even 10 years beyond what a general purpose chip could do on its own (and I'm inclined to guess more like 15 years, graphics cards play tons of tricks that a CPU won't ever be able to in order to speed up and a card going full-blast at 1600x1200 is doing a hell of a lot of work), and they are often squeezed for every drop of preformance for hours at a time. Your hypothetical accelerator will only be used in short bursts, for minimal gain per day (if you saved a minute I'd be stunned, unless maybe you're porn-ing), by people who largely wouldn't care if it's a littly bit faster, not like 3D graphics at all. It just doesn't add up while Moore's Law is still essentially in effect. (MHz may have bobbled due to Intel's obsession with it, but the general performance curve, the really interesting part, seems intact yet.)
In addition to the other totally true post, cameras also do not have infinite power. You can help in hardware, but you still have to use power.
Also, money. Since the hardware inside uses custom chips to do the compression (very parallelizable, perfect for hardware help), a new compression mechanism will require a new custom chip. (A general-purpose chip that could do it in any reasonably time period would eat the batteries in one to two pictures by my guesstimate.) If this custom chip isn't off-the-shelf (as I bet the JPG chips are), then that's even more money, and the market is pretty competitive right now.
Give the cameras another four or five years, and maybe you'll see something better than JPG. In the meantime, they simply can't support it economically yet. You could probably build a prototype, but it couldn't sell.
Look, buddy, I am a bona fide, certified product of the American Educatiunal Systam and I happen to knouw that Brazil isn't anywhere near Jakarta, which is a made up place name any ho. It's near Belguim, Bogata, Bolivia, and Boland (a former USSSR member state), and is several letters away form India.
The future is very bright... uhh... because... uhh... umm... I say so!
The fundamental problem with the arguments in this essay is that they all apply now, and so far free games has conspicuously failed to take over. Why will they do so in the future if they haven't now, unless you're going to remove a problem or add an incentive?
It boils down to a proof by assertion.
He nearly exhausts the good games currently existing. I've poked through the Gentoo game categorization which is pretty good, and if there's one open source commercial-level game per section it's a miracle. A lot of stuff in there, even some good stuff, but if they were commercial products they'd be from 1990 or so, often even earlier if you strip the graphics from them and look at gameplay. My wife has been playing Dungeon Keeper again lately, which was released in 1997, and I'm still yet to find anything open that compares to that. (Caveat: I can't get 3D in Linux so VegaStrike may match that level of quality, but I doubt much else does. 3D is even harder that 2D to get right.) So, even when I say "commercial level", I even mean from a while ago.
So far, if anything is going to make open source gaming happen, it's going to take more than the mere power of Open Source. We've had that for a while and there just hasn't been much movement. It takes a concerted attempt to close one's eyes to the obvious to think otherwise; you've got isolated anecdotes in favor of the argument but overwhelming evidence against.
Copyright is a lot of rights. I spoke against those who just want to reflexively abolish the whole lot without thought, not those who have thought about it.
Not that I've got any brilliant alternatives, except diplomatic ones where you get a big coalition together to solve the problem correctly.
Such assumes the existance of a solution that can be implemented by a large coalition but not a small one. I'm not sure what set of solutions exactly that is; a lot of people seem to have some sort of faith they exist but the rational evidence for their existance seems to be lacking.
In the world I live in, things trend rather the other way; large national coalitions suffer from the same exact problems as small personal coalitions, which we call committees and rightly distrust to do anything other than maintain the status quo and protect their existance. Again, the rational evidence that upsizing the committee to international sizes suddenly solves this problem is in rather short supply, whereas evidence that corruption, incompetance, and status-quo-at-all-cost thinking sets in is so abundant it boggles my mind how so many people can so thoroughly ignore it and maintain their faith.
It's irrelevant anyhow. If you didn't sign a contract to keep it secret, they have no grounds to gag you. They can copyright their exact words and can (and probably should*) control the distribution of those words, but copyright does not give them any protection of the facts contained within. And neither does anything else.
For the same reason, when you are accidentally mailed something with one of those "you must delete this immediately if you are not the intended recipient", unless it is actually and literally classified, you have no obligations. It's just to scare people.
The legal system has a ways to go before you can be obligated by an email out of the blue, or a random announcement on a webpage taking rights not granted to them by copyright but implementing no real access control (i.e., attempting to obligate you after you downloaded a page; it might work if you make it a condidion of reading but not just out of the blue, after the fact).
*: Reputation is important. One of the reasons copyright should not be straight-out abolished is its usefulness in making sure that words are correctly attributed and can be quality controlled, a virtue you are so used to you may never even think about until it is gone.
I think you missed on the "reply" button. (I've done that too.) Your post makes no sense as a reply to mine, but it probably makes sense somewhere else.
Sorry, lasing a police helicopter leaves me short on pity. With a $100 laser, not a over the counter $5 helium laser, too. Also lasing aircraft long enough to get caught.
My point though was more about the mentality, which extends beyond this little domain. Ha ha, funny to paint the plane, ha ha, funny to paint the helicopter. What if the fluke occured and it crashed? How would you feel? Why would you take that risk in the first place for a "ha ha"?
If we presume this man's innocence, that's exactly what happened to him.
The law is obligated to do so, and I'd scream bloody murder if it didn't. I, however, am free to draw conclusions based on facts like "he got caught, which means he didn't stop, most likely for at least half an hour". In fact it is irrational for me not to. I wouldn't convict him on that, but it's better that the evidence I get for a lot of other things I just hear about in the news.
The guy is an ass and an idiot. 25 years for playing with people's lives sounds right to me. Sob stories can be saved for the jury.
Where in the constitution does it say that the constitution applies to us citizens only?
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,..., do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Certainly, as stated in the Declaration of Independance we believe that "all men are created equal", and that everyone should have the same freedoms, but people not of the United States of America are not part of the Constitution. Do you seriously think that Section 2, clause 3 discusses taxation of people not in the US? Or discusses Congressional representation of those people?
Sure, it never comes out and says it directly that I can see, but it sure would make those charges of Imperialist America ring true if we actually tried to enforce the Constitution on non-USA citizens!
I'm not sure what "thinking in Python" has to do with it though, you can't do a lot of it in Python either!
You can't even dynamically add methods to PHP classes or dynamically modify the methods on an existing class.
Python does that trivially.
There are no hooks called before and after method calls, etc.
There may not be hooks, but it's trivial to do in Python thanks to the previous point. In 2.4, the decorators can do this on a per-method basis, and to translate an entire class is pretty easy with a metaclass. Personally, I have yet to find a situation where this was useful and I didn't end up factoring it out, but I'm sure they exist. (I also have this problem with metaclasses; I keep solving problems with metaclasses, but I invariably factor them out; the only use I've kept for them so far is in cateloging various features of various classes. But that doesn't mean I think they are useless:-) )
No way to access the syntax tree of a class.
The full syntax tree, well, technically it is accessible but not in any useful way, so I'd say that Python can't do this. Generally, this is considered a bad thing in the community anyhow. I'm currently ambivalent; there are times I want it, but I do have to acknowlegde that also each of the times I've wanted it it would have made my code absolutely impenetrable to most programmers.
Easy in Ruby due to the massive amount of runtime hooks and open classes.
My impression is that other than the block syntax, Ruby and Python are as close to identical as you could hope for, and what one language does, the other has features to make up for. And the syntactic differences are a wash because almost every argument one person proffers in favor of one is considered a counter-argument by the other side. My favorite example: Ruby fan: "Ruby is more concise!" Python fan: "Why yes, yes it is, but that makes it less readable." Who is right? Both of them, really, for different people.
All the incidents can't be like this, some guy playing with his kid. Are they copycat? Did one incident get reported first? Or was there really a rash of people shining lasers at planes more or less simultaneously? Quite a coincidence, that.
I don't quite understand what's going on here.
I do know this, though: This is serious, and the penalty sounds about right to me. 25 years for shining a laser at someone may sound stiff, but how about 25 years for reasonably endangering the lives of about a hundred people? The government is right here, it is no joke when there are people in that plane.
Can you imagine shining your laser at a landing plane and watching it crash? I have a few mottos in life, and one of them is "Never engage in an endeavor where the worst case scenario is complete success"; you just know that's when life will choose to deal you the Royal Flush. I'd say this qualifies. (The canonical example, of course, is Russian Roulette. Do you really want to "win"?) I couldn't live with myself after that.
Slashdot Mirror
Send me email, I'm interested in discussing your editor problem and may or may not be able to help.
unlike television, where the crime must be solved by the end of the family hour
Have you thought about what you're (implicitly by your implied criticism] asking for?
Which is it you want, an "episode" that lasts three months? A season that consists of the same 20-ish (or whatever number) episodes it does now, only randomly scattered across the episodes in the order in which they "really occurred"? On every scene change, white text on the bottom of the screen that says "[random time period] later"?
It's like asking for "total realism" in science fiction... you are aware that faster than light travel is, at best, totally unproven and most likely completely impossible? (Save the discussion on the possibility of FTL for sci.physics, please, this is just an example.)
So many fan-boy types ask for things that if they got them, they'd hate even more. I for one am glad the characters aren't making constant references to the amount of time something is taken, and I for one am glad that when they dig through an entire day of garbage in Los Vegas, they show about ten seconds of walking around, followed by the necessary discoveries. Are you seriously asking them to show the five or six hours it might have taken in real life? You feel free to watch it, I can guarantee I wouldn't.
Actually, this is a potentially good use of XML.
Bear with me.
The primary benefit of XML is that as a standardized language, standardized parsers can be made available that are reasonably easy to use.
The primary "oversell" of XML is to extend that claim to cover semantics. Human readability is great and should not be underestimated in some uses, but should not be oversold either.
So let's say you want to write a tool to validate that some Java code conforms to something or other. What's the hardest part of that task, that shouldn't be hard? Parsing the Java code. I mean, it's not like it's impossible for someone skilled enough to even consider writing such a tool in the first place, but it is a legitimate challenge; it's very easy to get 90% correct but that last 10% can be a bitch.
And let's not even talk about trying to parse Perl.
Exposing the AST in XML is not a bad idea; it's a perfect match of the two technologies. You still have semantics to deal with, but we're a ways from being able to standardize those.
Now, as LISP has shown, programming straight to the AST, while it has its advantages, is a historical loser. But that doesn't make exposing it in a standard fashion a Bad Idea. On top of it, you layer a more conventional language... and as strongly as I am defending an XML-exposed AST, I even more strongly believe it would be a stupid, fatal mistake to make that the human-exposed language that one actually programs in. I've worked with a couple of things that only come close (XBL and XUL Templates, where the primary flaw of the latter is that it should be a language and isn't) and a thing that is an XML language (XSLT) and I think it was a grave error on both counts.
Even better if multiple languages could share one standard or at least semi-standard AST; sharing semantics has proven to be a non-starter I think but there's still hope at the syntax level. (.Net shows that trying to share semantics means you end up with five languages that are just different spellings of the same thing, only without the convenient AST in XML to work with.)
This isn't a pointless abstraction, but it is something that will probably only be useful on big projects. I say "probably" because if a language with this capability ever got off the ground, there might be interesting things that could be done that we've not even thought of.
You're both right.
Bureaucracies are a way of slamming everybody to a common standard with reasonable reliability. It is a low, but predictable level of capability, and frankly, that has its uses. It is also easy to set up, and we seem to have some almost instinctual knowlegde of how to set them up.
They aren't optimal in all situations and they are overapplied, but they have their place. I for one wouldn't care to have a criminal justice system that wasn't a bureaucracy; predictability in a legal system is very important. Yes, even when it is wrong... then you at least know something needs to be fixed. To use a Slashdot-type example, at least we know the patent system is broken. If the rulings were more random (at all levels, from the Patent Office to judges), it would be even harder to tell... and ultimately we'd be even worse off and the first order of business would be to establish some consistency! (Consistency is one of those things that you can have contempt for because you're so used to it, you don't realize how important it is; "familiarity breeds contempt". I'd rather have the current system than a random one, and I hate the current system. For instance, a random system would give an even greater advantage to the deep-pocketed company; they could just keep re-trying various suits until the dice came up their way. The system as it is allows some of that, but you'd see even more in a random world.)
The big problem with Bureaucracies is that one of the biggest counter-indications for its use is "managing a creative enterprise", and that's where we hear most of the bitching about it. The problem here, ultimately, isn't truly Bureaucracy itself; it is working as it always does. It is the application of an inappropriate organization system; you always pay for that, no matter what. Unfortunately, all other forms are more expensive (thought of in the proper economic terms, even Anarchy is more expensive; the communication issues necessary to behave in a coordinated fashion become intractable), and like I said, we seem to have some sort of Bureaucracy instinct, so they also have to be learned explicitly, which is another barrier to their use.
But ultimately, "[large bureaucracies evolved] as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent" and "they prevent work and progress which results in 'mediocre talent.'"... when misused, which they probably are a majority of the time.
I don't know if the people using synergy actually know what it means,
If I'm reading the cards correctly (on rather scanty hints), the reason that "synergy" has become such a Dirty Word amoung us realists is that while synergy is a real thing and can have outstanding benefits, in its typical use it is almost always indicates a suicide pact in progress. "Synergy" is typically used as the major reason behind a merger, and "synergy" mergers almost always fail because of the underestimation of both companies of the difficulty in merging cultures.
(Culture is such a soft, fuzzy thing, right, and it couldn't be hard at all to make everything mesh, right? You'd think so, because it's basically impossible to put into words why it is difficult (at least not without it sounding silly or trivial), thus for many people not accostomed to thinking without words it is also impossible to think. Nevertheless, history shows it is so difficult it may border on the impossible for sufficiently large companies.)
AOL + Time Warner is probably one of the biggest examples of this. Sure, on paper the synergy was mind-blowing. In reality, the combined company was completely unable to execute. (In fact, the lack of execution almost completely boggles the mind.)
"Synergy" seems to lead a lot of companies to doom; they see the benefits but fail to see the costs.
Play the Sims, or watch the Sims?
Play the Sims, or watch the Sims?
On the one hand, the Sims is designed as interactive entertainment from the get go, and (while I don't care for it) it is quite successful at that for a lot of people.
On the other hand... uhhh... on the other hand... uhhh... isn't there always an "other hand"?
(Sometimes the issue really is black and white. Next up on Reality Television, a Quake 3 Tournament where you, the viewer, get to vote on what key Thresh will push next!)
Fear Factor does some controversial stuff, if only controversial to the major networks. There are several shows that they only aired once and won't air again on network TV because it crossed a line (at least according to the VH1 "Inside Fear Factor" show, which was surprisingly informative, I thought). Not quite what you were after, but as close as you'll get.
My point is more subtle than that. There is a sharp cross-over point between "profitable" and "death-spiral". For all the "crap" that the music industry is claimed to put out, you're basically not facing facts if you don't realize that yes, a lot of people like it.
Additionally, music isn't software. Mediocre music is mediocre. Mediocre software crashes.
Once the company dips into unprofitability once (for some time period), for any reason, it's over, and it's pretty clear that the video game industry is running much closer to "the edge" than the music industry. This is probably from another difference between software and music: The amount you will spend on an album, not counting marketing, is basically bounded. The amount you will spend on a game is even less bounded than a movie, and thanks to competition, they are expensive.
It's not that what you say is wrong, it's that the music industry isn't really much like the video game industry; both are entertainment but trying to understand the innards of one in terms of the other is a waste of time. Mediocrity works in a stable environment, but video games are too unstable. (Movies are unstable too, but they make so much more money relative to a video game, and they do not uniformly suck (everybody says they suck, nobody agrees which suck), that they aren't comparable either, even if the finances are somewhat similar.)
Unless EA begins to make high-quality games that move to the top of the pack, they will implode the next time a major recession hits. And judging by their volume-over-creativity track record, this is unlikely.
Actually, you don't even need the economy to cooperate. (For one thing, video games weather bad economies fairly well because while they are expensive, they are the best bang for the buck, bar none, in interactive entertainment, especially if you raid the bargain bin. My score today, a new Baldur's Gate, Dark Alliance labelled $9.99, sold at the counter for $7.41. Cha-ching!)
Once the reputation for mediocrity sets in... Slashdot is on the cutting edge of this here, the public hasn't seen it, but they will... they'll go into a death spiral. With such a staff, they'll have immense expenses. That means they can lose big, and fast. Their response will be to do all the wrong things, lay people off and somehow push the remaining developers even harder, pushing down the quality, and pushing them further into the spiral.
The "correct" answer is to fire half the company or more, and take the coffers to take the time to completely restructure the company until it works again. But that takes work and obvious risk, and so they will take the unobvious certainty of the death spiral.
Unless they get a really charismatic leader, this is how it will go.
In fact, I will go out on a limb and say we're witnessing a second video game collapse. EA will eat half+ the industry and then die. This time, it won't be so permanent because it won't be for supply/demand reasons, but there's a major shakeup coming. It will probably be a good or even great thing for us consumers.
However, if I were to plant this corn and it so happened to contain Monsanto seed (which I realistically have no way of knowing) how could I be legally lible to Monsanto, who I have had no dealing with?
By patent law, which requires no knowledge and all users, not just the designer/seller/original purchaser, incur liability for unlicensed use. (I'm not saying this is moral or ethical, but it is the legal situation.)
Actually, at this point, I'm not sure the "patents bad for genes" rant alone is appropriate; I think, as you alluded to, a healthy dose of ignorance of the law increasingly should be an excuse.
(Like I said in that post, what more is there to say?)
Your logic is a complete non-starter. If a person close to you wants to kill you, they don't need a gun. I could hardly list them all off if I tried. So you can toss that category of fatalities out, because it wasn't the gun, it was the person.
Besides, I trust my wife never to gun me down, and should I ever be wrong in that assessment, odds are, I deserved it (given that we're talking low probabilities anyhow).
Now, if you could show that home intruders were routinely turning guns back on their owners, I'd be more impressed. But while I'm sure you can come up with the odd anecdote here or there, the vast bulk of cases goes the other way.
Your argument is a great example of why raw statistics requires intelligent interpretation. I'm not interested in the category of events that matches "my housemate wants to kill me", because the tool doesn't much matter. Drop that category and all you've got left is "Won't you please think of the children?", which is its usual "compelling" and disingenuous self.
Let whoever it is take whatever it is they want,
Your life? Your kids? I'm sorry, you can babble all you want and you can do what you please but I will not predicate my home defense on the "nice criminal" assumption! Seeing it used as a gun control argument boggles my mind.
I bobbled this sentence during editing: "Silicon is not cheap, and don't forget about opportunity cost;" Silicon is not cheap because of opportunity costs. This is largely why more things are migrating to the CPU, and supporting the CPU as much as possible. Silicon is "cheap" but it is put to better use elsewhere, and once the CPU is strong enough to take over, it's cheaper to leave the silicon out than include it, always. So the effect is that silicon isn't cheap, even though on the surface it appears to be. That logic was not clear in my post.
Each use has to be evaluated on its own merits. Silicon is not cheap, and don't forget about opportunity cost; silicon dedicaded to decoding this one image compression scheme could be doing something else useful, like being cache or just plain not existing and not taking up power.
Graphics cards make the grade by being (conservatively) 5 to maybe even 10 years beyond what a general purpose chip could do on its own (and I'm inclined to guess more like 15 years, graphics cards play tons of tricks that a CPU won't ever be able to in order to speed up and a card going full-blast at 1600x1200 is doing a hell of a lot of work), and they are often squeezed for every drop of preformance for hours at a time. Your hypothetical accelerator will only be used in short bursts, for minimal gain per day (if you saved a minute I'd be stunned, unless maybe you're porn-ing), by people who largely wouldn't care if it's a littly bit faster, not like 3D graphics at all. It just doesn't add up while Moore's Law is still essentially in effect. (MHz may have bobbled due to Intel's obsession with it, but the general performance curve, the really interesting part, seems intact yet.)
In addition to the other totally true post, cameras also do not have infinite power. You can help in hardware, but you still have to use power.
Also, money. Since the hardware inside uses custom chips to do the compression (very parallelizable, perfect for hardware help), a new compression mechanism will require a new custom chip. (A general-purpose chip that could do it in any reasonably time period would eat the batteries in one to two pictures by my guesstimate.) If this custom chip isn't off-the-shelf (as I bet the JPG chips are), then that's even more money, and the market is pretty competitive right now.
Give the cameras another four or five years, and maybe you'll see something better than JPG. In the meantime, they simply can't support it economically yet. You could probably build a prototype, but it couldn't sell.
BitTorrent has said substantial protections built in to the protocols.
Remarkably, you are not the first to think of this problem. (Sarcasm.)
Look, buddy, I am a bona fide, certified product of the American Educatiunal Systam and I happen to knouw that Brazil isn't anywhere near Jakarta, which is a made up place name any ho. It's near Belguim, Bogata, Bolivia, and Boland (a former USSSR member state), and is several letters away form India.
The future is very bright... uhh... because... uhh... umm... I say so!
The fundamental problem with the arguments in this essay is that they all apply now, and so far free games has conspicuously failed to take over. Why will they do so in the future if they haven't now, unless you're going to remove a problem or add an incentive?
It boils down to a proof by assertion.
He nearly exhausts the good games currently existing. I've poked through the Gentoo game categorization which is pretty good, and if there's one open source commercial-level game per section it's a miracle. A lot of stuff in there, even some good stuff, but if they were commercial products they'd be from 1990 or so, often even earlier if you strip the graphics from them and look at gameplay. My wife has been playing Dungeon Keeper again lately, which was released in 1997, and I'm still yet to find anything open that compares to that. (Caveat: I can't get 3D in Linux so VegaStrike may match that level of quality, but I doubt much else does. 3D is even harder that 2D to get right.) So, even when I say "commercial level", I even mean from a while ago.
So far, if anything is going to make open source gaming happen, it's going to take more than the mere power of Open Source. We've had that for a while and there just hasn't been much movement. It takes a concerted attempt to close one's eyes to the obvious to think otherwise; you've got isolated anecdotes in favor of the argument but overwhelming evidence against.
Copyright is a lot of rights. I spoke against those who just want to reflexively abolish the whole lot without thought, not those who have thought about it.
Not that I've got any brilliant alternatives, except diplomatic ones where you get a big coalition together to solve the problem correctly.
Such assumes the existance of a solution that can be implemented by a large coalition but not a small one. I'm not sure what set of solutions exactly that is; a lot of people seem to have some sort of faith they exist but the rational evidence for their existance seems to be lacking.
In the world I live in, things trend rather the other way; large national coalitions suffer from the same exact problems as small personal coalitions, which we call committees and rightly distrust to do anything other than maintain the status quo and protect their existance. Again, the rational evidence that upsizing the committee to international sizes suddenly solves this problem is in rather short supply, whereas evidence that corruption, incompetance, and status-quo-at-all-cost thinking sets in is so abundant it boggles my mind how so many people can so thoroughly ignore it and maintain their faith.
Is it just me, or is this mind-bogglingly stupid?
It's irrelevant anyhow. If you didn't sign a contract to keep it secret, they have no grounds to gag you. They can copyright their exact words and can (and probably should*) control the distribution of those words, but copyright does not give them any protection of the facts contained within. And neither does anything else.
For the same reason, when you are accidentally mailed something with one of those "you must delete this immediately if you are not the intended recipient", unless it is actually and literally classified, you have no obligations. It's just to scare people.
The legal system has a ways to go before you can be obligated by an email out of the blue, or a random announcement on a webpage taking rights not granted to them by copyright but implementing no real access control (i.e., attempting to obligate you after you downloaded a page; it might work if you make it a condidion of reading but not just out of the blue, after the fact).
*: Reputation is important. One of the reasons copyright should not be straight-out abolished is its usefulness in making sure that words are correctly attributed and can be quality controlled, a virtue you are so used to you may never even think about until it is gone.
I think you missed on the "reply" button. (I've done that too.) Your post makes no sense as a reply to mine, but it probably makes sense somewhere else.
Sorry, lasing a police helicopter leaves me short on pity. With a $100 laser, not a over the counter $5 helium laser, too. Also lasing aircraft long enough to get caught.
My point though was more about the mentality, which extends beyond this little domain. Ha ha, funny to paint the plane, ha ha, funny to paint the helicopter. What if the fluke occured and it crashed? How would you feel? Why would you take that risk in the first place for a "ha ha"?
If we presume this man's innocence, that's exactly what happened to him.
The law is obligated to do so, and I'd scream bloody murder if it didn't. I, however, am free to draw conclusions based on facts like "he got caught, which means he didn't stop, most likely for at least half an hour". In fact it is irrational for me not to. I wouldn't convict him on that, but it's better that the evidence I get for a lot of other things I just hear about in the news.
The guy is an ass and an idiot. 25 years for playing with people's lives sounds right to me. Sob stories can be saved for the jury.
Where in the constitution does it say that the constitution applies to us citizens only?
..., do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,
Certainly, as stated in the Declaration of Independance we believe that "all men are created equal", and that everyone should have the same freedoms, but people not of the United States of America are not part of the Constitution. Do you seriously think that Section 2, clause 3 discusses taxation of people not in the US? Or discusses Congressional representation of those people?
Sure, it never comes out and says it directly that I can see, but it sure would make those charges of Imperialist America ring true if we actually tried to enforce the Constitution on non-USA citizens!
Out of order quoting:
:-) )
I'm not sure what "thinking in Python" has to do with it though, you can't do a lot of it in Python either!
You can't even dynamically add methods to PHP classes or dynamically modify the methods on an existing class.
Python does that trivially.
There are no hooks called before and after method calls, etc.
There may not be hooks, but it's trivial to do in Python thanks to the previous point. In 2.4, the decorators can do this on a per-method basis, and to translate an entire class is pretty easy with a metaclass. Personally, I have yet to find a situation where this was useful and I didn't end up factoring it out, but I'm sure they exist. (I also have this problem with metaclasses; I keep solving problems with metaclasses, but I invariably factor them out; the only use I've kept for them so far is in cateloging various features of various classes. But that doesn't mean I think they are useless
No way to access the syntax tree of a class.
The full syntax tree, well, technically it is accessible but not in any useful way, so I'd say that Python can't do this. Generally, this is considered a bad thing in the community anyhow. I'm currently ambivalent; there are times I want it, but I do have to acknowlegde that also each of the times I've wanted it it would have made my code absolutely impenetrable to most programmers.
Easy in Ruby due to the massive amount of runtime hooks and open classes.
My impression is that other than the block syntax, Ruby and Python are as close to identical as you could hope for, and what one language does, the other has features to make up for. And the syntactic differences are a wash because almost every argument one person proffers in favor of one is considered a counter-argument by the other side. My favorite example: Ruby fan: "Ruby is more concise!" Python fan: "Why yes, yes it is, but that makes it less readable." Who is right? Both of them, really, for different people.
Something doesn't add up, and I don't know what.
All the incidents can't be like this, some guy playing with his kid. Are they copycat? Did one incident get reported first? Or was there really a rash of people shining lasers at planes more or less simultaneously? Quite a coincidence, that.
I don't quite understand what's going on here.
I do know this, though: This is serious, and the penalty sounds about right to me. 25 years for shining a laser at someone may sound stiff, but how about 25 years for reasonably endangering the lives of about a hundred people? The government is right here, it is no joke when there are people in that plane.
Can you imagine shining your laser at a landing plane and watching it crash? I have a few mottos in life, and one of them is "Never engage in an endeavor where the worst case scenario is complete success"; you just know that's when life will choose to deal you the Royal Flush. I'd say this qualifies. (The canonical example, of course, is Russian Roulette. Do you really want to "win"?) I couldn't live with myself after that.