It's because it's a tested, re-tested, re-verified and oh yes double-blind checked observation that video games increase violent behavior, in the short term, in the long term, in little kids, in big kids, in young adults, in middle aged people, older people and pensioners.
Except not a single one of these studies have proven that. In fact, they are closer to proving that competition irrespective of violent content, is the main motivator for aggressive, not violent behavior. Holy crap, people who play competitive games (sports, video games, board games, whatever) are sometimes aggressive about their competitiveness. Hmm...perhaps competitive people play competitive games. Considering that the only thing that has been shown is a correlation (to aggressiveness, not violent behavior) claiming that they cause violent behavior is a flat out lie.
So can we now please please grow up and assume that, yes, 40 years of testing the same thing (20 years for video games), with every honest psychologist coming again and again to the same conclusion did not result from a desire to steal your tv/video games ?
If you read what the studies actually say, the honest psychologists never claimed that violent media caused violent behavior, only that there is a correlation. The honest ones also showed that video games are not alone, all violent media has roughly the same effect. Games (video, card, board, sports, etc.) are only different in the existence of competitiveness. When it comes to the violent imagery, they are no different that tv, movies, books, comics, etc. Maybe the reason why we've been testing the same thing for 40 years is because everyone THINKS that they must cause it (because they don't want to take responsibility for raising their own children) and they keep re-testing it because they haven't gotten the answer they want yet. Nah, that couldn't be it.....
Note that the actual study indicated that people are very much affected, specifically made violent, by these video games. What the study mostly claimed is that some types of imagined violence had more of an effect than others (big surprise : convincing violence, preferably with some sort of consequence on a real, human, victim, even if it's just a number on his/her screen, evokes more violence than what amounts to showing a picture of some blood).
Except the study said no such thing. The study actually explicitly stated that the violent content in the games doesn't do anything unless you have specific personality traits that could be affected. Newsflash! If your kid has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, don't let them play a violent game. If your kid is already aggressive, violent and moody, don't let them play a violent game. It has nothing to do with the video game causing anything, it just reinforces a pre-existing issue with the person. Violent games will not cause a perfectly normal person to become a violent person. It just doesn't happen and it's not possible. The study actually stated: "We found — irrespective of violent content — the two highly competitive games produced more aggressive behavior than the two less competitive games." So the factor is competitiveness, not violence. And the result is aggressiveness, not violence. Holy crap, people who play competitive games will become aggressive because they are competitive! I never guessed that! Maybe they want to win or something?
This is THE way to politicize science.
Politics refuses to accept the answer that media (whether it's movies, video games, punk rock, comic books, etc.) is just not as influencing of behavior as they like to believe. People need to be able to blame something other than themselves for the perceived "immorality" of young people today. Every time some new media comes around, it is vilified and eventually proven to not be the cause of all of life's woes like people claim. Your post i
Part of it is public vs private though. With a private company you have the profit motive, they are encouraged for their own survival to find ways not to pay you. They are required, beholden to their shareholders, to make as much profit as possible. A government program does not have this profit motive.
That's not to say I disagree with your other point, that the government has to have the will to get involved with consumer affairs and backup the taxpayer and not the multinational corporation. However one of the most expensive things about healthcare is the emergency room and uninsured people. Someone declares bankruptcy over a medical bill because they are uninsured and the hospital has to eat the cost. They then raise their prices for everyone else to cover it. This is especially true for emergency rooms because it is the most frequent place you find uninsured people. It's also the most expensive way to get treated. A cheap/free public plan that gets everyone covered would result in more people going to family physicians for regular checkups and preventative care. This means that less people have to skate by and get paid for by everyone else anyways. It would mean that hospitals wouldn't need to raise prices to cover the people who can't pay. The result would be lower healthcare costs.
If a private health insurance company fails to cover your health problems, public opinion forces them to change or they go out of business from failing to provide health insurance coverage. If the government fails to cover your health problem, they tell you "tough shit".
Hmm, if that ACTUALLY worked, we wouldn't have the mess that is the current state of health insurance. The reality is if a private health insurance company fails to cover your health problems, then either you are stuck paying for it yourself because switching to a new policy won't pay for a procedure that occurred before you were covered (in the case of finding out your insurance won't cover something after the fact of). If you find out that a procedure you need won't be covered by your insurance company before hand, then you're still screwed because you have a "pre-existing condition" and thus no one will give you a new policy that'll cover it. At least not something you're likely to be able to afford.
As for public opinion, in general most people just take whatever coverage their job gives them and hopes it covers whatever they need. Which means there's no free-market. Health insurance is too important and thus people take whatever they can get that gives them what they think they need as cheap as they can get it. They'll deride, complain, and campaign against an insurance company but the company won't go out of business because people still need to have health insurance, even if the company says "Tough shit".
The difference is a single-payer system that will always cover your health problem versus a profit based company that says "Tough Shit" because you cost them too much.
1) violent tv causes people to act violently, whether we're talking adults or kids, low or high iq,... the smaller the kids, the more pronounced the effect, but there is a definite effect even on 50-year-olds
This isn't settled at all. The best anyone has done is correlate violent media with violence (not causation) which can easily be explained by saying "violent people like violent media". And until someone proves causation, it's the only conclusion that can really be made. If you think this is settled, show evidence.
2) violent computer games are much, much worse than tv, and also cause violent behavior. Including adults
Even less settled than above, several studies have proven that violent video games aren't any worse than other violent media. Surprise, surprise, still no one has proved causation. Millions of people enjoy violent video games and the violent crime rates have gone down. There's a correlation shown between the violent games and aggression, but this doesn't prove anything about violent behavior nor causation. Sorry, try again.
3) the basic principle of communism "to each according to need, from each according to ability" doesn't work. At all. In every conceivable test, everybody finds ways to improve their needs and decrease their abilities... A majority of people will lie to claim more entitlements, in some studies up to 90%.
This one I can agree with, that a majority of people will lie to claim as much as they can. It's a basic human nature to be greedy, and finding people who won't lie for greed is hard to do.
So how can one possibly defend the claim that something like climate science isn't massively influenced by societal pressure ?
On the same note, how can one possibly claim that the detractors to climate science aren't massively influenced by societal pressure? The difference is that the climate science has been repeatably tested over and over. By hundreds of thousands of scientists. Not only that, but it makes sense to an observer of the way things work too.
You're still missing the point. Piracy exists because the pirates provide a better product in many cases. Whether by stripping out the DRM, allowing multiple easy format shifting, or whatnot. No one is rationalizing in this thread, just pointing out the social situations which cause piracy to exist.
When you copy and torrent a program you're ensuring that a company does not see return on money they paid developers.
This is demonstrably false. There are many programs which are as prevalent and make as much as they do due to piracy. Look at Adobe Photoshop. Why do you think Adobe has never sued anyone? Because pirates download and learn how to use the Photoshop software. They go to school for graphic design. Then they enter an industry only really knowing how to use photoshop, so the industry continues to use it. The school buys licenses and teaches Photoshop because that's what the industry uses, and the pirates continue to download and get Photoshop because it's what the industry uses. It's a cycle that makes millions of dollars for Adobe all because of piracy.
You're indirectly getting developers fired and promoting shitty software.
I understand where you get the impression that pirates are getting developers fired, but how does piracy promote shitty software? That just makes no sense.
Anyways, I've gone off topic. The point that's being made is the distinction between theft and copyright infringement. Theft requires the removal of access from the owner. If I copy something, then it is not theft because the original is still accessible by the owner. If you want to call copyright infringement theft, then it should have the same penalties of theft, not the million dollar fines. If it is theft, then treat it like theft. It is not theft, therefore it is not treated like theft. You can call it theft, but you are wrong. Copyright infringement, by definition, is not theft.
A phone number isn't enough to ID a person either. Nor is a street address.
So you're saying that, if someone called you on the phone - their number being shown on caller ID - and told you "we're holding your child hostage at 123 Maple Drive, give us $1million or they die", you would be more than happy for the police to say "sorry, but even though we have a phone number and address, we don't have enough info to ID the criminal"?
After all, there's no locks or passwords on phones. And maybe the home owner likes to leave their house unlocked so anybody to come in and make a call.
Yeap. A phone number and street address are not enough to ID the criminal.
If they broke into a random person's home and used it for their hostage holding (as most criminals will do rather than use their own home) the homeowner should NOT be liable at all for the fact that someone broke in and used their phone number and address for the crime. Now, if the police said that information was not enough to determine the location of the criminal, that would be stupid.
After all, how are the circumstances different if we're talking about copyright infringement instead of hacking websites, stealing credit cards and committing credit card fraud, planning a murder, etc? The evidence is an IP address.
The evidence is always more than just an IP address. Since you need "beyond a reasonable doubt" in a criminal trial, an IP address is even LESS effective there. They use the IP address to get a search warrant and then find evidence on the computer owned by the person in question. Even then, they use more than just an IP address to get the search warrant.
The important part here is the fact that you don't get to have search warrants in a civil trial. The discovery phase is more restricted than the ability of a police officer to get a search warrant.
Hell, even if we limit it to just copyright infringement you're not going to find much support outside of Slashdot. Most people simply don't support you being able to download anything you want for free, regardless of whether or not their creators wanted compensation, and there be not only no consequences but no chance of consequences. Nor are courts going to make such a loophole for you even if it is technically correct from a legal standpoint.
No one is talking about legitimizing copyright infringement. No one is saying it's fine to download anything you want for free. We are all saying that you need to have actual evidence of the person who committed the infringement and the evidence that is being used is not sufficient to identify a person. Innocent people should never be slapped with fines.
I'm confused by this.
I agree that the way they're enforcing, and the extent that they're enforcing IP claims in horrible.
I don't agree, and strongly so, that the price of a CD has anything to do with my rights to steal it. It doesn't matter if they asked $1M USD per disc - that doesn't legitimize your theft.
Regardless whether you believe the price of a CD has anything to do with your rights to "steal" it (ugh, copyright infringement is NOT theft, it's copyright infringement!). It is still, in fact, a reason why piracy exists. And if the music industry, or any other "suffering" from piracy wants to do anything about it, they have to realize that the current prices and lack of value provided for that price is one of the major reasons why piracy exists.
Why should others be allowed to profit off his genius while he and his family would be left unable to share in those revenues? Just because he first shared that speech in a public park? Where's the justice in that?
It's a greater injustice to prevent the free dissemination of a highly culturally relevant and historical event simply because the family of the person involved wishes to make money off it.
Maybe when Oracle immediately stopped all development on OpenSolaris after acquiring Sun? Maybe when Oracle immediately screwed the OpenOffice project (which is why it was forked to LibreOffice)? Oracle and Sun competed in several markets from enterprise servers to RDBMS systems.
It also has had far-reaching consequences for anyone using Java (just ask Apache about Oracle). As someone posted earlier:
You had the problems of excessive vertical integration as well as one direct rival swallowing another. This deal undermined the level of useful diversity in both the enterprise operating systems and RDBMS space. It also impacted a large number of other software projects and led to patent issues. It directly led to collateral damage in a seemingly unrelated market with patent litigation over Java.
Claiming that there is no competitive angle in this is ridiculous.
I don't see the difference. Using the same situation, if your investigation leads to an IP address from which multiple people could possibly have used to commit the crime do you automatically get a search warrant for every possible computer that could have used that IP. It seems a bit excessive if you consider a university server which could have any number of students possibly using it. I'd be ok with a search warrant for the server itself but not individual students, or in the case of a domestic situation the router who owns the IP address, but not the other computers in the house.
I don't think he's disallowing their use, he's disallowing their use as the ONLY basis for probable cause. If your investigation leads to a specific IP address which multiple people could possibly have used to commit the crime, an arrest warrant should not be given for EVERYONE. A search warrant should be given for the end point, but only if the operator will not respond to a subpeona for the logs.
IP Addresses alone are used to definitively identify copyright infringement all the time, frequently it is wrong but has been allowed to go through.
If your resource is throwing upon initialization in C++ then you probably have an exceptional situation that you need to handle. If your resource might throw, then you either put it in a try...catch block or just let it take the program down, depending on what would be better based on the situation that could cause a throw.
If the resource is throwing just for a failure to acquire or some other common case, then you have a badly written library. The overuse of exceptions is something I hate about Java. You should throw only in an exceptional situation, that's why it's called an "exception". Throwing because of a common error (ie. throwing for a failure to open a file) is just stupid.
Native is excellent. Unfortunately, C/C++ has some very bad failings...basically due to pointer arithmetic, but also due to being able to cast pointers to integers and vice versa.
Pointer arithmetic allows extremely efficient and simple code to be written. While pointers in and of themselves can be confusing to someone learning the language, to someone with an understanding of pointers, pointer arithmetic is an essential thing.
FWIW, I consider garbage collection to be almost essential in a decent language, and the conversion of pointers (and pointer arithmetic) mean that it cannot be efficiently done in C/C++ style languages.
Garbage collection requires an extra overhead that C/C++ allows the programmer to avoid by manually managing their own memory. For a low-level systems language it's essential to have the ability to manage your memory yourself, especially when you start talking about embedded systems. FWIW, extremely efficient garbage collection libraries exist for C/C++ which renders your idea of pointer conversion and arithmetic making it impossible. Also, what do you mean by "C/C++ style languages"? Do you mean native languages in general? Languages that allow pointers and memory management? Or just the syntactic style?
The compiler should be able to determine at any point which objects are still "live" (i.e., reachable) and reclaim those that aren't.
Even in managed languages, the compiler cannot figure this out. It's the runtime environment that does. The idea that the compiler could always figure this out is ridiculous. There are definitely many situations where a compiler might be able to do it, but the only way to figure it out would be to run the compiled code with every possible input and trace all the memory, which is not something a compiler should be doing.
Unless you're dealing with high levels of scientific calculations and massive amounts of math, C/C++ will always be better than Fortran. Surprisingly, many math libraries for Fortran are faster than their equivalents in C/C++.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless which side of the Nature vs Nurture debate you fall on, the claim that video games can undo good parenting is just ridiculous.
It's because it's a tested, re-tested, re-verified and oh yes double-blind checked observation that video games increase violent behavior, in the short term, in the long term, in little kids, in big kids, in young adults, in middle aged people, older people and pensioners.
Except not a single one of these studies have proven that. In fact, they are closer to proving that competition irrespective of violent content, is the main motivator for aggressive, not violent behavior. Holy crap, people who play competitive games (sports, video games, board games, whatever) are sometimes aggressive about their competitiveness. Hmm...perhaps competitive people play competitive games. Considering that the only thing that has been shown is a correlation (to aggressiveness, not violent behavior) claiming that they cause violent behavior is a flat out lie.
So can we now please please grow up and assume that, yes, 40 years of testing the same thing (20 years for video games), with every honest psychologist coming again and again to the same conclusion did not result from a desire to steal your tv/video games ?
If you read what the studies actually say, the honest psychologists never claimed that violent media caused violent behavior, only that there is a correlation. The honest ones also showed that video games are not alone, all violent media has roughly the same effect. Games (video, card, board, sports, etc.) are only different in the existence of competitiveness. When it comes to the violent imagery, they are no different that tv, movies, books, comics, etc. Maybe the reason why we've been testing the same thing for 40 years is because everyone THINKS that they must cause it (because they don't want to take responsibility for raising their own children) and they keep re-testing it because they haven't gotten the answer they want yet. Nah, that couldn't be it.....
Note that the actual study indicated that people are very much affected, specifically made violent, by these video games. What the study mostly claimed is that some types of imagined violence had more of an effect than others (big surprise : convincing violence, preferably with some sort of consequence on a real, human, victim, even if it's just a number on his/her screen, evokes more violence than what amounts to showing a picture of some blood).
Except the study said no such thing. The study actually explicitly stated that the violent content in the games doesn't do anything unless you have specific personality traits that could be affected. Newsflash! If your kid has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, don't let them play a violent game. If your kid is already aggressive, violent and moody, don't let them play a violent game. It has nothing to do with the video game causing anything, it just reinforces a pre-existing issue with the person. Violent games will not cause a perfectly normal person to become a violent person. It just doesn't happen and it's not possible. The study actually stated: "We found — irrespective of violent content — the two highly competitive games produced more aggressive behavior than the two less competitive games." So the factor is competitiveness, not violence. And the result is aggressiveness, not violence. Holy crap, people who play competitive games will become aggressive because they are competitive! I never guessed that! Maybe they want to win or something?
This is THE way to politicize science.
Politics refuses to accept the answer that media (whether it's movies, video games, punk rock, comic books, etc.) is just not as influencing of behavior as they like to believe. People need to be able to blame something other than themselves for the perceived "immorality" of young people today. Every time some new media comes around, it is vilified and eventually proven to not be the cause of all of life's woes like people claim. Your post i
Part of it is public vs private though. With a private company you have the profit motive, they are encouraged for their own survival to find ways not to pay you. They are required, beholden to their shareholders, to make as much profit as possible. A government program does not have this profit motive.
That's not to say I disagree with your other point, that the government has to have the will to get involved with consumer affairs and backup the taxpayer and not the multinational corporation. However one of the most expensive things about healthcare is the emergency room and uninsured people. Someone declares bankruptcy over a medical bill because they are uninsured and the hospital has to eat the cost. They then raise their prices for everyone else to cover it. This is especially true for emergency rooms because it is the most frequent place you find uninsured people. It's also the most expensive way to get treated. A cheap/free public plan that gets everyone covered would result in more people going to family physicians for regular checkups and preventative care. This means that less people have to skate by and get paid for by everyone else anyways. It would mean that hospitals wouldn't need to raise prices to cover the people who can't pay. The result would be lower healthcare costs.
If a private health insurance company fails to cover your health problems, public opinion forces them to change or they go out of business from failing to provide health insurance coverage. If the government fails to cover your health problem, they tell you "tough shit".
Hmm, if that ACTUALLY worked, we wouldn't have the mess that is the current state of health insurance. The reality is if a private health insurance company fails to cover your health problems, then either you are stuck paying for it yourself because switching to a new policy won't pay for a procedure that occurred before you were covered (in the case of finding out your insurance won't cover something after the fact of). If you find out that a procedure you need won't be covered by your insurance company before hand, then you're still screwed because you have a "pre-existing condition" and thus no one will give you a new policy that'll cover it. At least not something you're likely to be able to afford.
As for public opinion, in general most people just take whatever coverage their job gives them and hopes it covers whatever they need. Which means there's no free-market. Health insurance is too important and thus people take whatever they can get that gives them what they think they need as cheap as they can get it. They'll deride, complain, and campaign against an insurance company but the company won't go out of business because people still need to have health insurance, even if the company says "Tough shit".
The difference is a single-payer system that will always cover your health problem versus a profit based company that says "Tough Shit" because you cost them too much.
Generally, the hatred most Slashdotters have of the Law and Lawyers is not irrational :)
A few settled psychological facts :
Settled psychological facts? This should be good
1) violent tv causes people to act violently, whether we're talking adults or kids, low or high iq, ... the smaller the kids, the more pronounced the effect, but there is a definite effect even on 50-year-olds
This isn't settled at all. The best anyone has done is correlate violent media with violence (not causation) which can easily be explained by saying "violent people like violent media". And until someone proves causation, it's the only conclusion that can really be made. If you think this is settled, show evidence.
2) violent computer games are much, much worse than tv, and also cause violent behavior. Including adults
Even less settled than above, several studies have proven that violent video games aren't any worse than other violent media. Surprise, surprise, still no one has proved causation. Millions of people enjoy violent video games and the violent crime rates have gone down. There's a correlation shown between the violent games and aggression, but this doesn't prove anything about violent behavior nor causation. Sorry, try again.
3) the basic principle of communism "to each according to need, from each according to ability" doesn't work. At all. In every conceivable test, everybody finds ways to improve their needs and decrease their abilities ... A majority of people will lie to claim more entitlements, in some studies up to 90%.
This one I can agree with, that a majority of people will lie to claim as much as they can. It's a basic human nature to be greedy, and finding people who won't lie for greed is hard to do.
So how can one possibly defend the claim that something like climate science isn't massively influenced by societal pressure ?
On the same note, how can one possibly claim that the detractors to climate science aren't massively influenced by societal pressure? The difference is that the climate science has been repeatably tested over and over. By hundreds of thousands of scientists. Not only that, but it makes sense to an observer of the way things work too.
That is politics based upon implications determined by science.
You're still missing the point. Piracy exists because the pirates provide a better product in many cases. Whether by stripping out the DRM, allowing multiple easy format shifting, or whatnot. No one is rationalizing in this thread, just pointing out the social situations which cause piracy to exist.
When you copy and torrent a program you're ensuring that a company does not see return on money they paid developers.
This is demonstrably false. There are many programs which are as prevalent and make as much as they do due to piracy. Look at Adobe Photoshop. Why do you think Adobe has never sued anyone? Because pirates download and learn how to use the Photoshop software. They go to school for graphic design. Then they enter an industry only really knowing how to use photoshop, so the industry continues to use it. The school buys licenses and teaches Photoshop because that's what the industry uses, and the pirates continue to download and get Photoshop because it's what the industry uses. It's a cycle that makes millions of dollars for Adobe all because of piracy.
You're indirectly getting developers fired and promoting shitty software.
I understand where you get the impression that pirates are getting developers fired, but how does piracy promote shitty software? That just makes no sense.
Anyways, I've gone off topic. The point that's being made is the distinction between theft and copyright infringement. Theft requires the removal of access from the owner. If I copy something, then it is not theft because the original is still accessible by the owner. If you want to call copyright infringement theft, then it should have the same penalties of theft, not the million dollar fines. If it is theft, then treat it like theft. It is not theft, therefore it is not treated like theft. You can call it theft, but you are wrong. Copyright infringement, by definition, is not theft.
A phone number isn't enough to ID a person either. Nor is a street address. So you're saying that, if someone called you on the phone - their number being shown on caller ID - and told you "we're holding your child hostage at 123 Maple Drive, give us $1million or they die", you would be more than happy for the police to say "sorry, but even though we have a phone number and address, we don't have enough info to ID the criminal"?
After all, there's no locks or passwords on phones. And maybe the home owner likes to leave their house unlocked so anybody to come in and make a call.
Yeap. A phone number and street address are not enough to ID the criminal.
If they broke into a random person's home and used it for their hostage holding (as most criminals will do rather than use their own home) the homeowner should NOT be liable at all for the fact that someone broke in and used their phone number and address for the crime. Now, if the police said that information was not enough to determine the location of the criminal, that would be stupid.
After all, how are the circumstances different if we're talking about copyright infringement instead of hacking websites, stealing credit cards and committing credit card fraud, planning a murder, etc? The evidence is an IP address.
The evidence is always more than just an IP address. Since you need "beyond a reasonable doubt" in a criminal trial, an IP address is even LESS effective there. They use the IP address to get a search warrant and then find evidence on the computer owned by the person in question. Even then, they use more than just an IP address to get the search warrant.
The important part here is the fact that you don't get to have search warrants in a civil trial. The discovery phase is more restricted than the ability of a police officer to get a search warrant.
Hell, even if we limit it to just copyright infringement you're not going to find much support outside of Slashdot. Most people simply don't support you being able to download anything you want for free, regardless of whether or not their creators wanted compensation, and there be not only no consequences but no chance of consequences. Nor are courts going to make such a loophole for you even if it is technically correct from a legal standpoint.
No one is talking about legitimizing copyright infringement. No one is saying it's fine to download anything you want for free. We are all saying that you need to have actual evidence of the person who committed the infringement and the evidence that is being used is not sufficient to identify a person. Innocent people should never be slapped with fines.
I'm confused by this. I agree that the way they're enforcing, and the extent that they're enforcing IP claims in horrible. I don't agree, and strongly so, that the price of a CD has anything to do with my rights to steal it. It doesn't matter if they asked $1M USD per disc - that doesn't legitimize your theft.
Regardless whether you believe the price of a CD has anything to do with your rights to "steal" it (ugh, copyright infringement is NOT theft, it's copyright infringement!). It is still, in fact, a reason why piracy exists. And if the music industry, or any other "suffering" from piracy wants to do anything about it, they have to realize that the current prices and lack of value provided for that price is one of the major reasons why piracy exists.
King didn't have to copyright his speeches. But he did.
Except that Copyright is automatic.
Why should others be allowed to profit off his genius while he and his family would be left unable to share in those revenues? Just because he first shared that speech in a public park? Where's the justice in that?
It's a greater injustice to prevent the free dissemination of a highly culturally relevant and historical event simply because the family of the person involved wishes to make money off it.
Unfortunately, the airing of a Presidential debate IS copyrighted. It's a broadcast show which would be copyrighted by the network showing it.
But, be honest, do you really want future generations to judge us by the works that drop out of American Idol?
FTFY. And I'd like them to learn what not to do from American Idol. =)
Newsflash: inheritance laws create an incentive to kill your successful parents.
Oh wait, that argument is just absurd.
Maybe when Oracle immediately stopped all development on OpenSolaris after acquiring Sun? Maybe when Oracle immediately screwed the OpenOffice project (which is why it was forked to LibreOffice)? Oracle and Sun competed in several markets from enterprise servers to RDBMS systems.
It also has had far-reaching consequences for anyone using Java (just ask Apache about Oracle). As someone posted earlier:
You had the problems of excessive vertical integration as well as one direct rival swallowing another. This deal undermined the level of useful diversity in both the enterprise operating systems and RDBMS space. It also impacted a large number of other software projects and led to patent issues. It directly led to collateral damage in a seemingly unrelated market with patent litigation over Java.
Claiming that there is no competitive angle in this is ridiculous.
I don't see the difference. Using the same situation, if your investigation leads to an IP address from which multiple people could possibly have used to commit the crime do you automatically get a search warrant for every possible computer that could have used that IP. It seems a bit excessive if you consider a university server which could have any number of students possibly using it. I'd be ok with a search warrant for the server itself but not individual students, or in the case of a domestic situation the router who owns the IP address, but not the other computers in the house.
I don't think he's disallowing their use, he's disallowing their use as the ONLY basis for probable cause. If your investigation leads to a specific IP address which multiple people could possibly have used to commit the crime, an arrest warrant should not be given for EVERYONE. A search warrant should be given for the end point, but only if the operator will not respond to a subpeona for the logs.
IP Addresses alone are used to definitively identify copyright infringement all the time, frequently it is wrong but has been allowed to go through.
Which means that you have a choice which would be the best language for that situation, which would be different if your situation was different.
If you ever think that your code is 100% free of 0day exploits, then you have no idea what you're talking about.
If your resource is throwing upon initialization in C++ then you probably have an exceptional situation that you need to handle. If your resource might throw, then you either put it in a try...catch block or just let it take the program down, depending on what would be better based on the situation that could cause a throw.
If the resource is throwing just for a failure to acquire or some other common case, then you have a badly written library. The overuse of exceptions is something I hate about Java. You should throw only in an exceptional situation, that's why it's called an "exception". Throwing because of a common error (ie. throwing for a failure to open a file) is just stupid.
Native is excellent. Unfortunately, C/C++ has some very bad failings...basically due to pointer arithmetic, but also due to being able to cast pointers to integers and vice versa.
Pointer arithmetic allows extremely efficient and simple code to be written. While pointers in and of themselves can be confusing to someone learning the language, to someone with an understanding of pointers, pointer arithmetic is an essential thing.
FWIW, I consider garbage collection to be almost essential in a decent language, and the conversion of pointers (and pointer arithmetic) mean that it cannot be efficiently done in C/C++ style languages.
Garbage collection requires an extra overhead that C/C++ allows the programmer to avoid by manually managing their own memory. For a low-level systems language it's essential to have the ability to manage your memory yourself, especially when you start talking about embedded systems. FWIW, extremely efficient garbage collection libraries exist for C/C++ which renders your idea of pointer conversion and arithmetic making it impossible. Also, what do you mean by "C/C++ style languages"? Do you mean native languages in general? Languages that allow pointers and memory management? Or just the syntactic style?
The compiler should be able to determine at any point which objects are still "live" (i.e., reachable) and reclaim those that aren't.
Even in managed languages, the compiler cannot figure this out. It's the runtime environment that does. The idea that the compiler could always figure this out is ridiculous. There are definitely many situations where a compiler might be able to do it, but the only way to figure it out would be to run the compiled code with every possible input and trace all the memory, which is not something a compiler should be doing.
Unless you're dealing with high levels of scientific calculations and massive amounts of math, C/C++ will always be better than Fortran. Surprisingly, many math libraries for Fortran are faster than their equivalents in C/C++.
It should all be multiplayer IMO, but apparently some people like playing machines.
Some people like a good story.....