By the sound of the crew.com debacle, they may only side with corporations and not with individuals, for instance.
Much as I hate corporations trampling on the little guy, this doesn't seem to be the case with crew.com.
As far as I can tell, someone registered 50+ domain names, and had no particular plans for using them himself. In the case of crew.com, he had also created the subdomain j.crew.com. Both these sites pointed at J. Crew's web site. So he certainly knew of their existance and in the case of j.crew.com was deliberately using their name. He also seemed to be asking for a "non-trivial" amount of money to let them have the domain. This seems a pretty clear case of cybersquatting to me. If it had been someone using the site to give details of his "crew"s activities then it would be different, but in this case it seems understandable.
I have to wonder though: What do the artist's contracts look like? Do they have to split these tips with their labels because they are revenues generated from jointly produced work?
There's no proof that you are paying them for the albums that have been produced on their current label. You might only like their earlier stuff on a different label, or, in theory, you might be paying them for the enjoyment that you got out of seeing them live before they ever released anything. So I don't see how their current record label has any claim to the money. If you were tipping for a particular album, then things would probably be different.
He stated that the improvements were the result of nothing beyond science, so I asked him to consider three things that were also funding the improvements, and then stated quite clearly that it was up to the reader to consider whether or not the gains were worth the cost (without adding any opinion of my own).
If you are critical of someone's solution to a problem when you have no alternative to offer you ARE pulling a power game
Where was the solution that he was offering? I wasn't chalenging a solution I was chalenging his view of the facts, and I'm reasonably sure that I presented my view of the facts in the original post. Where is your solution then? What is the problem who's solution I have attacked?
You hope to leave the reader with the implied idea that "Of course, being far superior I could easily come up with a better answer", and THAT is a power game.
How do you know what I was hoping for? I was hoping for people to chalenge the points that were raised, not my supposed attempts at world domination.
I have no interest in trying to feel superior to him (or to you). I have no idea who any of you are, and care nothing of what any of you think of me personally. I made no personal attacks, nor made no claims as to his beliefs of aims. These things are power games. Trying to belittle the post by attacking the poster. However, I do care about the truth, and felt that it would be useful to offer (what I believe to be) a more balanced view of progress.
If you wish to chalenge any of my points, then feel free, but don't waste time attacking me. This thread is not about whether I am a power mad maniac. It is about whether science is benefitting the world. Please try to keep the discussion to that next time.
The system that he was (or at least sounded like he was) talking about was one where the improvements came from technology, and nothing extra was being expended. By your definition all systems are closed systems. The natural resources that are being used up to fuel our great new world were not mentioned in his description of of the system, so certainly seem to be external to it to me.
This is a Yin and Yang world: any good solution has an element of bad that goes along with it, any bad solution has an element of good that goes with it. There are no perfect solutions. You don't seem to recognize that.
I think you ought to try re-reading my post. The exact point that I was stating was that there are no perfect solutions, and to claim otherwise is dangerous. The statement You may consider that this is a price worth paying was meant to indicate exactly that, that there are benefits and many people believe that the improvements outweigh the damage. I did not state whether I believe this is the case or not. You seem to have jumped to a conclusion. I was merely pointing out that to make the decision whether it is good or not you need to realise what the downside is.
Criticism is easy; talk is cheap. If you have a better way, show everyone. Don't talk,DO.... Until then you are just spouting 'eco slogans' in the hope of being able to seize political power you don't deserve.
Sorry. I have never got this if you haven't got the answer, don't ask the question mentality. I have no desire, or made any claim, to seize any power, deserved or otherwise (where did that claim come from?). I was just stating facts (are you disputing them? Don't believe that the oil is being used up?). Raising awareness allows others to make up their own minds. Why do facts have to come with opinions/solutions?
I don't remember stating anywhere in my post that I think that I have a better way, or that the current way is bad, just that it was not as black and white good as the poster was making out.
One farmer at the beginning of this century could feed about forty. One farmer now can feed ten times that many. What allowed this miraculous development? Technology! Fertilizers, improved equipment, better processing and distribution systems (though not to those ucky third-world folks, I concede) and the like.
And all in a closed system.
Closed? So the atmosphere isn't getting polluted by the distibution of this? Oil reserves aren't getting used up? Rainforests aren't getting torn down by ranchers supplying beef to McDonalds?
These improvements are being achieved at the cost of natural resources. You may consider that this is a price worth paying, but it's certainly not a closed system.
What about if the original author decides to rerelease on budget/compilation? There have been plenty of "classic" games ported to the PlayStation (eg. Atari VCS, R-Type).
If there is a rerelease of the original, does it then stop being Abandonware? Will he take it off his site?
It seems from the article that no-one has actually bothered approaching the publishers about this. From quotes that I have read from various developers/publishers, most seem to be quite happy to let people release old games into public domain, as long as they are polite enough to ask first.
Many would probably be interested in seeing the response to these being made available, as they could see which old title it is worth rereleasing/porting.
You're acting like current application-level C++ code on Windows can easily ported to Linux.
The last few projects that I worked on in C++ on Windows compiled and ran (almost) first time on Unix. The trick is not to be tempted to the dark side by putting any MFC in your business code. The (very thin) front ends were all written in VB, to make sure that we were not tempted to slip any UI code into the business logic.
I suspect that doing the same thing in C# would not be as easy.
>> Most times, if you are civil to the cops, they will be civil to you.
Probably true, but from my experience they certainly aren't when it comes to potentially volatile crowd control (political rallies, football matches - in Europe anyway, don't know about US). People are treated as the enemy, just for being there. They act in a very aggressive way, and tend not to ask politely for things.
At football matches I have had plastic water bottles confiscated (and been threatened with being thrown out when I complained), seen people tear gassed for singing in a pub, had guns pointed in my face when trying to leave the ground after a match had finished, seen people arrested for trying to swap scarves with opposition fans etc,
At political rallies I have seen people batton charged for chanting political slogans.
Non of these incidents were the result of criminal behaviour, and the police were certainly not polite.
I think in the case of this article, he was certainly acting in very stupid way if he didn't want to be detained (although I'm not convinced that being an ass is neccessarily an arrestable offence) but there are plenty of cases where people have been detained in these kind of situations when they have acted perfectly reasonably. Don't assume that the police are all nice civil people, and only arrest those who are 'asking for it'.
True, the headline is misleading, but it passed through the commons at 8pm on Wed(26th), with a grand total of 30 MPs and no vote (as far as I can tell from Hansard).
It is now only waiting for Royal Assent (and I can't see the Queen deciding to throw it out). It will almost certainly become law before November.
Have you noticed how many skinheads are there in London?
Skinheads? Is it a crime to have your hair cut short now? It's exactly this sort of mindless stereotyping that has led to the other great piece of civil-liberties bashing legislation this month, The Football (Disorder) Bill.
The government (with collusion from the mainstream media) is doing a great job of frightening the general public with scare stories for a few months and then bringing in heavy handed legislation to "fix" the problem, talking another chunk of civil liberties with it.
I'm not trying to claim that racism doesn't happen, but that not all skinheads are racist or all racists skinheads. In the same way that (back on topic) not all people who have a very good reason for using encryption, or who are unable to decrypt it for the authorities, are criminals.
Don't go playing into their broad-brush stereotyping.
As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. So if you believe in something, you're too biased to talk about it? I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. I don't accept it at face value, but nor do I just ignore. I appologise about the maps. The OS map that I have for the area DOES have it on. The map that I had with me when I posted didn't (and I'm sure that the ones that I had with me last time that I was up there didn't either). Sorry.
It's a site produced by British political comedian Mark Thomas, who presents a "humourous political documentary" program on UK tv.
I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.
I can't remember the last time I even thought about putting a global variable in a C program.
You can't even have them in Java, and there aren't pointers (well there are Reference objects now, but I've never felt the urge to use them).
However, the point that I was trying to make was that from the little bit of functional programming that I've had a play with, I seem to be able to achieve pretty much the same style with C. It seems to be more of a design issue rather than a specific language thing.
In a similar way, when I had to go back to C programming a few years ago, I still designed my system in an OO way, and coded it to be as OO as possible (data all in structures, accessed only through certain functions etc). It involved being very disciplined in the way that I used the language, but it was still just about possible. Of course, it is a lot easier to do proper OO systems in C++ or Java, and it's probably a lot easier to do proper functional programs in Haskall or Scheme, but it's not the language that makes the methodoligy, and I'm still trying to find a good overview of what makes the *principal* of functional programming so much better than anything else. It's got to be more than no pointers and no globals (hasn't it?).
And if proof *is* all about not having side effects by not having global variables, then I'm pretty sure that I can proove my C code.
If what you are wanting to achieve is a function that acts on a variable number of elements then you can (in Java) do foo({a,b,c})
If you are talking about something like a checkAllValid which would take a variable number of fields, then (again in Java) you could do
checkAllValid(Field[] fields)
Or have I missed the point?
I'm not trying to be negative about functional progamming, I've just as yet never seen any concrete evidence that it has any fundamental advantages over non-functional languages.
I'm well aware of that - I've done exactly what I described in C++. My point wasn't about ML (or any other functional language) vs. imperative languages, but rather, strong typing (which C++ has) vs. weak.
However, the entire thread(Why Functional Matters) is about the advantage of functional v non-functional. So that's probably a bit off topic.
That's funny. I don't see where I or anyone else claimed that a language would 'stop all errors'. A technique need not stop all errors to be worthwhile. The fact that perfection is impossible is no excuse not to seek improvements
What else did Tom7's "Everyone who's used ML can attest to this fact: once your programs typecheck, they Just Work. " mean then?
As for your example of reversing x & y in the parameters to the point constructor: Good point, but if you've spent enough time dealing with geometry, the (x, y, z) ordering of coordinates is instinctive, and thus you're far less likely to make this mistake than to confuse (x, y, width, height) with (x, width, y, height). And if you want to 'transpose' a graphic (which is what reversing x & y would do), well, why not encapsulate that functionality into a method on your graphic class? That way you only have to get it right once, then never think about it again
Again, none of this has to do with functional programming, or why "Everyone who's used ML can attest to this fact: once your programs typecheck, they Just Work. ". It is just "If you write your programs correctly, they just work."
Does the same proof not work for the C function unsigned long fib(unsigned long x) { if (x==0 || x==1) { return 1; } else { return fib(x-1)+fib(x-2); }
}
?
I am trying to understand what is meant to be so good about functional programming, but so far everything that I've seen seems to be possible in either procedural or OO languages, if the programmer is careful.
You can achieve the same in C++/Java by creating a point class. But in either case, creating the (x,y) pair as (y,x) is still possible. I don't see how a language can guarantee to stop all errors. It doesn't know what you are trying to achieve. If what you were trying to do was flip the graphic by reversing x and y, then the language won't know that, and won't flag up an error if you fail to do this in you function.
Slashdot Mirror
By the sound of the crew.com debacle, they may only side with corporations and not with individuals, for instance.
Much as I hate corporations trampling on the little guy, this doesn't seem to be the case with crew.com.
As far as I can tell, someone registered 50+ domain names, and had no particular plans for using them himself. In the case of crew.com, he had also created the subdomain j.crew.com. Both these sites pointed at J. Crew's web site. So he certainly knew of their existance and in the case of j.crew.com was deliberately using their name. He also seemed to be asking for a "non-trivial" amount of money to let them have the domain. This seems a pretty clear case of cybersquatting to me. If it had been someone using the site to give details of his "crew"s activities then it would be different, but in this case it seems understandable.
I have to wonder though: What do the artist's contracts look like? Do they have to split these tips with their labels because they are revenues generated from jointly produced work?
There's no proof that you are paying them for the albums that have been produced on their current label. You might only like their earlier stuff on a different label, or, in theory, you might be paying them for the enjoyment that you got out of seeing them live before they ever released anything. So I don't see how their current record label has any claim to the money. If you were tipping for a particular album, then things would probably be different.
Do you now understand the If you don't have the answers, don't ask the question mentality?
No. Personally I find Socratic irony quite a useful method for discussion. You might want to consider looking it up.
Of course it has a downside
Not according to the original post.
He stated that the improvements were the result of nothing beyond science, so I asked him to consider three things that were also funding the improvements, and then stated quite clearly that it was up to the reader to consider whether or not the gains were worth the cost (without adding any opinion of my own).
If you are critical of someone's solution to a problem when you have no alternative to offer you ARE pulling a power game
Where was the solution that he was offering? I wasn't chalenging a solution I was chalenging his view of the facts, and I'm reasonably sure that I presented my view of the facts in the original post. Where is your solution then? What is the problem who's solution I have attacked?
You hope to leave the reader with the implied idea that "Of course, being far superior I could easily come up with a better answer", and THAT is a power game.
How do you know what I was hoping for? I was hoping for people to chalenge the points that were raised, not my supposed attempts at world domination. I have no interest in trying to feel superior to him (or to you). I have no idea who any of you are, and care nothing of what any of you think of me personally. I made no personal attacks, nor made no claims as to his beliefs of aims. These things are power games. Trying to belittle the post by attacking the poster. However, I do care about the truth, and felt that it would be useful to offer (what I believe to be) a more balanced view of progress.
If you wish to chalenge any of my points, then feel free, but don't waste time attacking me. This thread is not about whether I am a power mad maniac. It is about whether science is benefitting the world. Please try to keep the discussion to that next time.
The system that he was (or at least sounded like he was) talking about was one where the improvements came from technology, and nothing extra was being expended. By your definition all systems are closed systems. The natural resources that are being used up to fuel our great new world were not mentioned in his description of of the system, so certainly seem to be external to it to me.
... Until then you are just spouting 'eco slogans' in the hope of being able to seize political power you don't deserve.
This is a Yin and Yang world: any good solution has an element of bad that goes along with it, any bad solution has an element of good that goes with it. There are no perfect solutions. You don't seem to recognize that.
I think you ought to try re-reading my post. The exact point that I was stating was that there are no perfect solutions, and to claim otherwise is dangerous. The statement You may consider that this is a price worth paying was meant to indicate exactly that, that there are benefits and many people believe that the improvements outweigh the damage. I did not state whether I believe this is the case or not. You seem to have jumped to a conclusion. I was merely pointing out that to make the decision whether it is good or not you need to realise what the downside is.
Criticism is easy; talk is cheap. If you have a better way, show everyone. Don't talk,DO.
Sorry. I have never got this if you haven't got the answer, don't ask the question mentality. I have no desire, or made any claim, to seize any power, deserved or otherwise (where did that claim come from?). I was just stating facts (are you disputing them? Don't believe that the oil is being used up?). Raising awareness allows others to make up their own minds. Why do facts have to come with opinions/solutions?
I don't remember stating anywhere in my post that I think that I have a better way, or that the current way is bad, just that it was not as black and white good as the poster was making out.
One farmer at the beginning of this century could feed about forty. One farmer now can feed ten times that many. What allowed this miraculous development? Technology! Fertilizers, improved equipment, better processing and distribution systems (though not to those ucky third-world folks, I concede) and the like.
And all in a closed system.
Closed? So the atmosphere isn't getting polluted by the distibution of this? Oil reserves aren't getting used up? Rainforests aren't getting torn down by ranchers supplying beef to McDonalds?
These improvements are being achieved at the cost of natural resources. You may consider that this is a price worth paying, but it's certainly not a closed system.
What about if the original author decides to rerelease on budget/compilation? There have been plenty of "classic" games ported to the PlayStation (eg. Atari VCS, R-Type).
If there is a rerelease of the original, does it then stop being Abandonware? Will he take it off his site?
It seems from the article that no-one has actually bothered approaching the publishers about this. From quotes that I have read from various developers/publishers, most seem to be quite happy to let people release old games into public domain, as long as they are polite enough to ask first.
Many would probably be interested in seeing the response to these being made available, as they could see which old title it is worth rereleasing/porting.
You're acting like current application-level C++ code on Windows can easily ported to Linux.
The last few projects that I worked on in C++ on Windows compiled and ran (almost) first time on Unix. The trick is not to be tempted to the dark side by putting any MFC in your business code. The (very thin) front ends were all written in VB, to make sure that we were not tempted to slip any UI code into the business logic.
I suspect that doing the same thing in C# would not be as easy.
>> Most times, if you are civil to the cops, they will be civil to you.
Probably true, but from my experience they certainly aren't when it comes to potentially volatile crowd control (political rallies, football matches - in Europe anyway, don't know about US). People are treated as the enemy, just for being there. They act in a very aggressive way, and tend not to ask politely for things.
At football matches I have had plastic water bottles confiscated (and been threatened with being thrown out when I complained), seen people tear gassed for singing in a pub, had guns pointed in my face when trying to leave the ground after a match had finished, seen people arrested for trying to swap scarves with opposition fans etc,
At political rallies I have seen people batton charged for chanting political slogans.
Non of these incidents were the result of criminal behaviour, and the police were certainly not polite.
I think in the case of this article, he was certainly acting in very stupid way if he didn't want to be detained (although I'm not convinced that being an ass is neccessarily an arrestable offence) but there are plenty of cases where people have been detained in these kind of situations when they have acted perfectly reasonably. Don't assume that the police are all nice civil people, and only arrest those who are 'asking for it'.
What a good idea. The government is destroying your country, so rather than stay and defend it, you just let them have it.
True, the headline is misleading, but it passed through the commons at 8pm on Wed(26th), with a grand total of 30 MPs and no vote (as far as I can tell from Hansard).
It is now only waiting for Royal Assent (and I can't see the Queen deciding to throw it out). It will almost certainly become law before November.
Have you noticed how many skinheads are there in London?
Skinheads? Is it a crime to have your hair cut short now? It's exactly this sort of mindless stereotyping that has led to the other great piece of civil-liberties bashing legislation this month, The Football (Disorder) Bill.
The government (with collusion from the mainstream media) is doing a great job of frightening the general public with scare stories for a few months and then bringing in heavy handed legislation to "fix" the problem, talking another chunk of civil liberties with it.
I'm not trying to claim that racism doesn't happen, but that not all skinheads are racist or all racists skinheads. In the same way that (back on topic) not all people who have a very good reason for using encryption, or who are unable to decrypt it for the authorities, are criminals.
Don't go playing into their broad-brush stereotyping.
As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. So if you believe in something, you're too biased to talk about it? I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. I don't accept it at face value, but nor do I just ignore. I appologise about the maps. The OS map that I have for the area DOES have it on. The map that I had with me when I posted didn't (and I'm sure that the ones that I had with me last time that I was up there didn't either). Sorry.
If you want to read more about Menwith Hill (the UK site for Echelon) try http://www.menwithhill.com.
It's a site produced by British political comedian Mark Thomas, who presents a "humourous political documentary" program on UK tv.
I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.
I can't remember the last time I even thought about putting a global variable in a C program.
You can't even have them in Java, and there aren't pointers (well there are Reference objects now, but I've never felt the urge to use them).
However, the point that I was trying to make was that from the little bit of functional programming that I've had a play with, I seem to be able to achieve pretty much the same style with C. It seems to be more of a design issue rather than a specific language thing.
In a similar way, when I had to go back to C programming a few years ago, I still designed my system in an OO way, and coded it to be as OO as possible (data all in structures, accessed only through certain functions etc). It involved being very disciplined in the way that I used the language, but it was still just about possible. Of course, it is a lot easier to do proper OO systems in C++ or Java, and it's probably a lot easier to do proper functional programs in Haskall or Scheme, but it's not the language that makes the methodoligy, and I'm still trying to find a good overview of what makes the *principal* of functional programming so much better than anything else. It's got to be more than no pointers and no globals (hasn't it?).
And if proof *is* all about not having side effects by not having global variables, then I'm pretty sure that I can proove my C code.
Can you give any examples?
If what you are wanting to achieve is a function that acts on a variable number of elements then you can (in Java) do foo({a,b,c})
If you are talking about something like a checkAllValid which would take a variable number of fields, then (again in Java) you could do
checkAllValid(Field[] fields)
Or have I missed the point?
I'm not trying to be negative about functional progamming, I've just as yet never seen any concrete evidence that it has any fundamental advantages over non-functional languages.
I'm well aware of that - I've done exactly what I described in C++. My point wasn't about ML (or any other functional language) vs. imperative languages, but rather, strong typing (which C++ has) vs. weak.
However, the entire thread(Why Functional Matters) is about the advantage of functional v non-functional. So that's probably a bit off topic.
That's funny. I don't see where I or anyone else claimed that a language would 'stop all errors'. A technique need not stop all errors to be worthwhile. The fact that perfection is impossible is no excuse not to seek improvements
What else did Tom7's "Everyone who's used ML can attest to this fact: once your programs typecheck, they Just Work. " mean then?
As for your example of reversing x & y in the parameters to the point constructor: Good point, but if you've spent enough time dealing with geometry, the (x, y, z) ordering of coordinates is instinctive, and thus you're far less likely to make this mistake than to confuse (x, y, width, height) with (x, width, y, height). And if you want to 'transpose' a graphic (which is what reversing x & y would do), well, why not encapsulate that functionality into a method on your graphic class? That way you only have to get it right once, then never think about it again
Again, none of this has to do with functional programming, or why "Everyone who's used ML can attest to this fact: once your programs typecheck, they Just Work. ". It is just "If you write your programs correctly, they just work."
What side effects does
unsigned long fact(unsigned long x)
{
if (x==0 || x==1)
{
return x;
}
else
{
return x*fact(x-1);
}
}
have?
Does the same proof not work for the C function
unsigned long fib(unsigned long x)
{
if (x==0 || x==1)
{
return 1;
}
else
{
return fib(x-1)+fib(x-2);
}
}
?
I am trying to understand what is meant to be so good about functional programming, but so far everything that I've seen seems to be possible in either procedural or OO languages, if the programmer is careful.
is this any clearer than return 1+2+3+4; and return 1*2*3*4?
You can achieve the same in C++/Java by creating a point class. But in either case, creating the (x,y) pair as (y,x) is still possible. I don't see how a language can guarantee to stop all errors. It doesn't know what you are trying to achieve. If what you were trying to do was flip the graphic by reversing x and y, then the language won't know that, and won't flag up an error if you fail to do this in you function.
try mycgiserver. They seem to be free.