Far too late to join this conversation, but let me add my $0.02 anyway.
What I miss most in most source code are comments that communicate the architecture and flow of control at the module level. When you get the source code for a project, it's generally a flat list of files. Where do you start? main() is not always the right answer - what's needed is an overall look at the code base and a guide to how it was put together.
Comments in the source rarely address these questions, being more locally oriented as a rule.
As they say at the end of the article, why would I cancel my yahoo accounts? I'll just stop using them.
Yahoo's announcement had a big impact on me. I was actively using seven yahoo email addresses, all accessed via POP, so I never had to use the bogus web interface. I might pay $20 for unlimited email addresses but not for one.
So Yahoo's announcement finally motivated me to receive mail for one of my domains directly on my home box. This is a better solution all around - now when using a webservice I use an individual email address for each of them: ebay.com@mydomain.com, nytimes.com@mydomain.com, etc. This makes writing my mail filters a snap, and allows me to track who is selling my email address to the spammers. (Interesting note: none of these new email addresses have shown up in spam yet. Maybe it was Yahoo selling those addresses all this time.)
Note: since my home box runs on DSL, it's subject to service outages - these are pretty rare, but I still don't want to lose anything. So I've kept my personal email address hosted outside - register.com gives you a single freebie email with each domain (or at least they used to).
The result of all this is that I went from using Yahoo regularly to not using it at all. Bye bye Yahoo. But of course, there's no reason to cancel the email addresses - as the article mentioned at the end.
Maybe the way around DMCA and etc is to create a LLC that operates out of your home, the "work" being to evaluate DVDs, CDs, blah blah whatever you want, copy shit rip CDs software etc... just make sure the LLC has almost no assets. If you are ever SPA'd or sued under the DMCA, just roll over dead, declare the LLC bankrupt, and start a new one...
I agree - what was needed here was for someone to educate the court the same way Touretzky educated the court in the DeCSS case.
Games like the original Balance of Power or Myst, along with the critical accolades they received, make a stronger case for artistic merit than FragFest 99 to the gaming novice.
We are in a bit of a game design and gameplay slump these days, thanks to the complete dominance of graphics. But even when the field matures you can expect that for every "highbrow" game there will be 10 "lowbrow" games that satisfy more visceral urges. This is true for film today - mass market films with reflexive plots, wooden acting, and stereotype dialogue dominate over intelligent, thoughtful art pieces. But that mirrors the general cross-section of the audience, so it's a good thing...
I struggled with this when I was a prof teaching intro courses. I never figured out a good solution. Perhaps one approach might be to just rely on coding tests, in addition to the normal "subject" tests.
The coding tests would specify a problem, the students would get two hours to solve it. No computers, everything handwritten, exam conditions. The problems would have to be relatively simple, and could be taken from the programming assignments. Anyone who has really coded an answer already for an assignment should have no problem. Those people who copied are out of luck.
Yes, and it points out again how important the ACLU is in these times of governmental crackdown. Isn't there a great line in the American President? "Yes, Bob, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. The question is, why aren't you?"
The 3D IMAX screen preserves polarization through reflection; the images are generated by two projectors, each with a polarizing filter 90 degrees out of phase. If two stacked LCD displays are polarized 90 degrees out of phase, then the closer display will completely interfere with the farther display. Thus you will see the closer display through one eye and a blank screen through the other.
On the topic of 3D displays, while I was at GDC I checked out a projected 3D display, just like the IMAX solution. Still expensive. They also had a shutter glasses solution. The game was a skateboard game I forget which. Anyway, this setup was running a very high refresh, since it was on display after all, and I still walked away with an unpleasant twisting feeling in my brain after only five minutes of play.
It was cool while I was playing, but I think it would wreck you to do it steadily for an hour (or two or four...)
Maybe the interactivity has something to do with it - it might be more demanding on your visual system to play an interactive game than to watch a movie. Or to be that close. Or something. But I think usable 3D displays for gaming are still a long way away.
I guess I have to add this: when writing to DirectX, the doc support is tremendous. All in one place, very clear. I'd like a pointer to something similar on the Apple site...
Okay, I will followup. I know this means I am clueless, but on the website I see no place to order a G4 with a 4Ti board. How do you do it?
On the documentation side, the extensions are crucial since they are the only way to access the advanced features of the hardware. I scanned the opengl docs, but I don't see anything on register combiners, etc... can you supply a better pointer? I want to believe, but I can't find it...
Also, do the G4s have an upgrade path to become G5s when the time comes?
I went into an Apple store, got a console window, brought up emacs. Could have ssh'd to my home machine. I love it. But no Mac for me until it has:
G5 CPU - coming soon, so no problem.
A cutting edge GPU. Come on, every developer knows the 4MX got a "4" purely for marketing purposes. Where's the NVidia 4Ti?
Developer support for that GPU. Where is the support for GL extensions documented? Where is the "how to make games look amazing on the Mac" document? Every paper at GDC talked about WGL extensions - that's Windows GL, not Apple. Apple is fumbling badly here. I want to know there will be support for me if I choose to make the Mac my development platform.
If Apple could truly make the Mac a platform for cutting-edge development they would have me, since developing on Windows sucks.
Granted, they seem to actively support Carmack. But what about the rest of us? (BTW, I doubt the Mac would even have a 2/4MX or ATI mobile Radeon if it weren't for Carmack, so thanks, John.)
Thank god this is a recent trend. I think we can safely assume that the reviews of Duke Nuke'em Forever from a couple of years ago are based on actual, solid play of the shipping product.
The problems with transparency are so obviously on the side of the government, that I have to wonder why a smart guy like Brin focuses his energy on the civil libertarians instead.
My guess is it comes down to three issues:
(1) There are actual opponents worth of intellectual combat (such as Barlow) among the civil libertarians, rather than the faceless bureaucracy of the government.
(2) Many people are attacking the lack of transparency in the government, civil libertarians among them, so there is no chance to stand out from the crowd.
(3) Attacking civil libertarians gets much better press.
Okay, I feel better now.
Transparent Society starts with transparent govt
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Brin's stance would be more tenable if there were any evidence that information flow might go both ways. Unfortunately, such evidence does not exist.
The Bush administration is engaged in restricting information flow from the government to the greatest degree in our history as a nation. Records from back to the Reagan-era have been sequestered. You can absolutely forget about seeing anything from Bush senior or Bush junior's administration. Cheney et al are busily stonewalling the General Accounting Office's inquiry into the Energy Task Force - and the GAO's inquiry isn't even substantive, simply a list of who was present.
These issues of sunshine and transparency in our government can and will be fought all the way to the Supreme Court. Thus, only the most absolutely vital of interests will make it that far - and that's assuming the court does not record another 5-4 victory for the conservatives. Even assuming a Supreme Court victory, such a ruling may be construed in the narrowest way possible, and further stalled for reasons of expediency or "national security."
Brin spends his energies attacking the civil libertarians and their "short sighted" views. He devotes space to comment about how "wonderful the civil libertarians must feel when they see the truth and the masses don't." This is the pot calling the kettle black.
If he truly believes his thesis, then he needs to stop assaulting the civil libertarians and devote his energies to getting more sunshine and transparency in government.
His "transparent society" will not start with the masses - that way leads only to the fascist police state. It will start with transparency for government, thus assuring the people that they have a basis for trust when they give up their privacy.
Be prepared to retch when you discover that Led Zeppelin has finally, after thirty years of keeping their music out of commercial hands, sold out to General Motors for a Cadillac commerical.
When was the last time you actually watched Return of the Jedi? Picture this touching scene between Han and Lando before the big battle:
HAN: Look. I want you to take her. I mean it. Take her. You need all the help you can get. She's the fastest ship in the fleet.
LANDO: All right, old buddy. You know, I know what she means to you. I'll take good care of her. She-she won't get a scratch. All right?
HAN (looks at him warmly): Right. I got your promise now. Not a scratch.
LANDO: Look, would you get going, you pirate.
The sound you hear is the audience retching at some of the worst acting ever. I remain an Original Trilogy Fan, but let's face it, many parts of the ROTJ were awful. Best were the scenes on Tatooine and with the Emperor.
The acting in TPM was overall better (still with clunkers: "You think it's this...boy?"), but Lucas really let everyone down with the stupidity of his story and his stereotyping. The Force can be detected with a tricorder count of your mitochondria? Vader can pick up Luke's force from his Tie Fighter but Qui-Gon can walk right past Anakin and not feel a thing? Jedi like Qui-Gon regularly use their Force Powers to try to cheat Jewish junk merchants? Chinese trade officials? Rastafarian natives? Darth Maul - don't make me laugh. With no character development at all he was just a (tough) wandering monster.
Go to LOTR and feel the silence as the AOTC trailer plays. As the Emperor said: "Now you pay the price for your lack of vision."
Same happened when I saw LOTR. Total silence for the AOTC trailer. Though I did hear someone three rows back whisper to his date that it "looked worse than the last one."
What makes you think soldering is different from writing code? I'll tell you what happened - they went down to 36 drops without problems, saved a lot of solder, AND THEN --
The next time there was a sharp shock to the storage facility 80% of the 36-drop solder jobs failed under stress and spilled their oil.
A lesson that had been learned years ago, resulting in the tradition of 48 drops, but unfortunately their's no way to put a comment tot hat effect in a hand-me-down engineering procedure.
Rockefeller's "rewrite the procedure" policy fell afoul of the superior maxim, "if it ain't broke don't fix it," the all-purpose engineering comment.
This fairy tale brought to you by Random Man.
Re:This is about legal technicalities, not princip
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
Yes, mod the parent of this post up. What would be the basis for art as a legal tactic? I want to know.
I consider myself an artist, with programming as my medium. When I consult for a company to integrate foo into their web service, that is commercial programming, like commercial painting. But when I am constructing a massively multiplayer interactive experience, that is artistic programming. I am trying to break through the existing constructs to something new, something that is my own. That is art.
And I have difficulty articulating the rage I feel at those banal greedy fuckwads who want to take away my artistic tools. The only reason we can do anything as programmers is because of the decades of patent-free ideas and expressions contributed to computer science. If software patents had been the name of the game from the get go there would be no Internet, no home computing, and none of the opportunities available to us now.
What if brush-stroke technique was patentable? So only Monet could paint impressionistically, only Seurat could use little dots, only Pollack could throw paint at a canvas. There would be no growth in art, the art world would wither and die.
Don't talk to me about patent expirations. Art grows and develops only when there is an active body of work and active painters, riffing off each other and each others' techniques. Patents put a lock, a brain-death on the exploration that is critical to art.
Touretzky is really on to something with his library of DeCSS scramblers. Not so much for the DeCSS case, but for the larger point that programming and computer science are not like other "patentable" domains. The library of scramblers shows the easy transition from art to code, that art is code, and this for a DeCSS scrambler.
Thank god for people like Lessig, who have the skills and talents to navigate the world of the fuckwads. As a computer artist (in the larger sense), I am busy trying to do art. By the way, there was a hopeful piece in the NYT today: I say "hopeful" only because it is another indicator that the mass-media zeitgeist is slowly waking up to the tragedy of the fuckwads.
Unfortunately, it's hard to avoid despair when the fuckwads control the government. The other day I was walking, thinking of this and other problems, and I thought, there must be some way we could all retaliate against the fuckwads.
Anyway, someone who is a lawyer, please comment on the art as legal defense possibility. I have to get back to making art.
I would love to hear Kent Pittman compare Lisp with the growing interest in quasi-functional languages such as ML and especially OCaml.
These languages give up the s-expression syntax, and thus the powerful Lisp macro facility which people like Paul Graham believe to be critical to high-end Lisp programming.
What they offer in return is static type checking, which has saved me countless hours of bug hunting, and some wonderful mechanisms for abstraction and code clarification: sum types, modules, functors, and exceptions.
I used to do all my work in Lisp/Scheme. And occasionally I miss the simple clarity of the s-expression syntax and the macros. But these days I do everything in OCaml and have been amazed at the ease with which conceptual structures become code.
You know what? Calling, writing a letter to, faxing or emailing your representatives really does have an impact. Call them (you can get the number at congress.org), and when the staffer picks up the phone, say, calmly, that you would like to register an opinion, give your info, and thank them.
Yes, it goes onto a whiteboard with a check mark in the appropriate column. But that is how democracy works. Be calm, tell them your issue (one per call is best), and then do it again the next day.
If you did this every time you posted to slashdot it would definitely have an impact.
The changes to EIV were just too much. Turning Han into a PC action hero and turning Jabba into
a buffoon... useless. But I think the additional effects in EVI
are ok.
Episode I was just a disappointment all around.
Hey kids, the Force is activated by your mitochondria!
Ugh. Hey kids, the Jedi use tricorders to detect the Force! Ugh.
(Let's see... Darth Vader could feel the force in Luke while
chasing him in his Tie Fighter, but Qui-Gon can
walk right past Anakin without getting a tremor?)
Hey kids, the Jedi regularly use their Force powers
to try to cheat poor merchants on backwater planets! Ugh.
Hey kids, the possibly interesting bad guy will get
no lines and no character development. Ugh.
Not to mention a story and a Ben-Hur style chariot race both devoid of interest, and rampant cultural stereotyping.
For me, Jar-Jar was only a minor annoyance
next to these catastrophes.
When I think of how inspiring Star Wars was,
the Phantom Menace just makes me angry.
I think one of the best things you can do is to set up a
custom web page on their local hard drive, and set
the browser to use it as the default home page.
This custom page can be very clear, with helpful
instructions, and contain only the links you tell
them about (Yahoo mail, Google, whatever). Plus you can
put a google search box right there.
Anyway, making a custom web page, stored on the local
hard drive, set as default, will make their experience
much better. You can obviously create a template
to copy over for each person as well, and then
have a main page that lists all their names. This is
for when one computer is shared by many...
It sounds like a great way to give back, thank you!
Slashdot Mirror
Far too late to join this conversation, but let me add my $0.02 anyway.
What I miss most in most source code are comments that communicate the architecture and flow of control at the module level. When you get the source code for a project, it's generally a flat list of files. Where do you start? main() is not always the right answer - what's needed is an overall look at the code base and a guide to how it was put together.
Comments in the source rarely address these questions, being more locally oriented as a rule.
As they say at the end of the article, why would I cancel my yahoo accounts? I'll just stop using them.
Yahoo's announcement had a big impact on me. I was actively using seven yahoo email addresses, all accessed via POP, so I never had to use the bogus web interface. I might pay $20 for unlimited email addresses but not for one.
So Yahoo's announcement finally motivated me to receive mail for one of my domains directly on my home box. This is a better solution all around - now when using a webservice I use an individual email address for each of them: ebay.com@mydomain.com, nytimes.com@mydomain.com, etc. This makes writing my mail filters a snap, and allows me to track who is selling my email address to the spammers. (Interesting note: none of these new email addresses have shown up in spam yet. Maybe it was Yahoo selling those addresses all this time.)
Note: since my home box runs on DSL, it's subject to service outages - these are pretty rare, but I still don't want to lose anything. So I've kept my personal email address hosted outside - register.com gives you a single freebie email with each domain (or at least they used to).
The result of all this is that I went from using Yahoo regularly to not using it at all. Bye bye Yahoo. But of course, there's no reason to cancel the email addresses - as the article mentioned at the end.
Maybe the way around DMCA and etc is to create a LLC that operates out of your home, the "work" being to evaluate DVDs, CDs, blah blah whatever you want, copy shit rip CDs software etc... just make sure the LLC has almost no assets. If you are ever SPA'd or sued under the DMCA, just roll over dead, declare the LLC bankrupt, and start a new one...
Would this work?
I agree - what was needed here was for someone to educate the court the same way Touretzky educated the court in the DeCSS case.
Games like the original Balance of Power or Myst, along with the critical accolades they received, make a stronger case for artistic merit than FragFest 99 to the gaming novice.
We are in a bit of a game design and gameplay slump these days, thanks to the complete dominance of graphics. But even when the field matures you can expect that for every "highbrow" game there will be 10 "lowbrow" games that satisfy more visceral urges. This is true for film today - mass market films with reflexive plots, wooden acting, and stereotype dialogue dominate over intelligent, thoughtful art pieces. But that mirrors the general cross-section of the audience, so it's a good thing...
I struggled with this when I was a prof teaching intro courses. I never figured out a good solution. Perhaps one approach might be to just rely on coding tests, in addition to the normal "subject" tests.
The coding tests would specify a problem, the students would get two hours to solve it. No computers, everything handwritten, exam conditions. The problems would have to be relatively simple, and could be taken from the programming assignments. Anyone who has really coded an answer already for an assignment should have no problem. Those people who copied are out of luck.
For those of you too young to remember Trespasser: The Crate-Stacking Puzzle Game, check out the following links:
Trespasser Hype Review
Trespasser's Start-to-Crate Rating
Yes, and it points out again how important the ACLU is in these times of governmental crackdown. Isn't there a great line in the American President? "Yes, Bob, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. The question is, why aren't you?"
/. article that pushed me over the edge.
Here's the
TeX and LaTeX want to be your friends :)
The 3D IMAX screen preserves polarization through reflection; the images are generated by two projectors, each with a polarizing filter 90 degrees out of phase. If two stacked LCD displays are polarized 90 degrees out of phase, then the closer display will completely interfere with the farther display. Thus you will see the closer display through one eye and a blank screen through the other.
On the topic of 3D displays, while I was at GDC I checked out a projected 3D display, just like the IMAX solution. Still expensive. They also had a shutter glasses solution. The game was a skateboard game I forget which. Anyway, this setup was running a very high refresh, since it was on display after all, and I still walked away with an unpleasant twisting feeling in my brain after only five minutes of play.
It was cool while I was playing, but I think it would wreck you to do it steadily for an hour (or two or four...)
Maybe the interactivity has something to do with it - it might be more demanding on your visual system to play an interactive game than to watch a movie. Or to be that close. Or something. But I think usable 3D displays for gaming are still a long way away.
I guess I have to add this: when writing to DirectX, the doc support is tremendous. All in one place, very clear. I'd like a pointer to something similar on the Apple site...
Okay, I will followup. I know this means I am clueless, but on the website I see no place to order a G4 with a 4Ti board. How do you do it?
On the documentation side, the extensions are crucial since they are the only way to access the advanced features of the hardware. I scanned the opengl docs, but I don't see anything on register combiners, etc... can you supply a better pointer? I want to believe, but I can't find it...
Also, do the G4s have an upgrade path to become G5s when the time comes?
Thanks.
- G5 CPU - coming soon, so no problem.
- A cutting edge GPU. Come on, every developer knows the 4MX got a "4" purely for marketing purposes. Where's the NVidia 4Ti?
- Developer support for that GPU. Where is the support for GL extensions documented? Where is the "how to make games look amazing on the Mac" document? Every paper at GDC talked about WGL extensions - that's Windows GL, not Apple. Apple is fumbling badly here. I want to know there will be support for me if I choose to make the Mac my development platform.
If Apple could truly make the Mac a platform for cutting-edge development they would have me, since developing on Windows sucks.Granted, they seem to actively support Carmack. But what about the rest of us? (BTW, I doubt the Mac would even have a 2/4MX or ATI mobile Radeon if it weren't for Carmack, so thanks, John.)
Thank god this is a recent trend. I think we can safely assume that the reviews of Duke Nuke'em Forever from a couple of years ago are based on actual, solid play of the shipping product.
Now let me add my nasty comments.
The problems with transparency are so obviously on the side of the government, that I have to wonder why a smart guy like Brin focuses his energy on the civil libertarians instead.
My guess is it comes down to three issues:
(1) There are actual opponents worth of intellectual combat (such as Barlow) among the civil libertarians, rather than the faceless bureaucracy of the government.
(2) Many people are attacking the lack of transparency in the government, civil libertarians among them, so there is no chance to stand out from the crowd.
(3) Attacking civil libertarians gets much better press.
Okay, I feel better now.
Brin's stance would be more tenable if there were any evidence that information flow might go both ways. Unfortunately, such evidence does not exist.
The Bush administration is engaged in restricting information flow from the government to the greatest degree in our history as a nation. Records from back to the Reagan-era have been sequestered. You can absolutely forget about seeing anything from Bush senior or Bush junior's administration. Cheney et al are busily stonewalling the General Accounting Office's inquiry into the Energy Task Force - and the GAO's inquiry isn't even substantive, simply a list of who was present.
These issues of sunshine and transparency in our government can and will be fought all the way to the Supreme Court. Thus, only the most absolutely vital of interests will make it that far - and that's assuming the court does not record another 5-4 victory for the conservatives. Even assuming a Supreme Court victory, such a ruling may be construed in the narrowest way possible, and further stalled for reasons of expediency or "national security."
Brin spends his energies attacking the civil libertarians and their "short sighted" views. He devotes space to comment about how "wonderful the civil libertarians must feel when they see the truth and the masses don't." This is the pot calling the kettle black.
If he truly believes his thesis, then he needs to stop assaulting the civil libertarians and devote his energies to getting more sunshine and transparency in government.
His "transparent society" will not start with the masses - that way leads only to the fascist police state. It will start with transparency for government, thus assuring the people that they have a basis for trust when they give up their privacy.
Until that day I'll keep my privacy, thanks.
Yeah, especially since Galaxies will suck compared to Duke Nuke'em Forever . . .
Be prepared to retch when you discover that Led Zeppelin has finally, after thirty years of keeping their music out of commercial hands, sold out to General Motors for a Cadillac commerical.
Story in the NY Times .
Somehow in all those years of listening to "Trampled Under Foot," I never thought they were thinking "Cadillac"...
Ruining your image of the original movies?
When was the last time you actually watched Return of the Jedi? Picture this touching scene between Han and Lando before the big battle:
HAN: Look. I want you to take her. I mean it. Take her. You need all the help you can get. She's the fastest ship in the fleet.
LANDO: All right, old buddy. You know, I know what she means to you. I'll take good care of her. She-she won't get a scratch. All right?
HAN (looks at him warmly): Right. I got your promise now. Not a scratch.
LANDO: Look, would you get going, you pirate.
The sound you hear is the audience retching at some of the worst acting ever. I remain an Original Trilogy Fan, but let's face it, many parts of the ROTJ were awful. Best were the scenes on Tatooine and with the Emperor.
The acting in TPM was overall better (still with clunkers: "You think it's this...boy?"), but Lucas really let everyone down with the stupidity of his story and his stereotyping. The Force can be detected with a tricorder count of your mitochondria? Vader can pick up Luke's force from his Tie Fighter but Qui-Gon can walk right past Anakin and not feel a thing? Jedi like Qui-Gon regularly use their Force Powers to try to cheat Jewish junk merchants? Chinese trade officials? Rastafarian natives? Darth Maul - don't make me laugh. With no character development at all he was just a (tough) wandering monster.
Go to LOTR and feel the silence as the AOTC trailer plays. As the Emperor said: "Now you pay the price for your lack of vision."
Same happened when I saw LOTR. Total silence for the AOTC trailer. Though I did hear someone three rows back whisper to his date that it "looked worse than the last one."
The Spiderman preview, however, got raves.
This comment is too late to be seen, BUT --
What makes you think soldering is different from writing code? I'll tell you what happened - they went down to 36 drops without problems, saved a lot of solder, AND THEN --
The next time there was a sharp shock to the storage facility 80% of the 36-drop solder jobs failed under stress and spilled their oil.
A lesson that had been learned years ago, resulting in the tradition of 48 drops, but unfortunately their's no way to put a comment tot hat effect in a hand-me-down engineering procedure.
Rockefeller's "rewrite the procedure" policy fell afoul of the superior maxim, "if it ain't broke don't fix it," the all-purpose engineering comment.
This fairy tale brought to you by Random Man.
Yes, mod the parent of this post up. What would be the basis for art as a legal tactic? I want to know.
I consider myself an artist, with programming as my medium. When I consult for a company to integrate foo into their web service, that is commercial programming, like commercial painting. But when I am constructing a massively multiplayer interactive experience, that is artistic programming. I am trying to break through the existing constructs to something new, something that is my own. That is art.
And I have difficulty articulating the rage I feel at those banal greedy fuckwads who want to take away my artistic tools. The only reason we can do anything as programmers is because of the decades of patent-free ideas and expressions contributed to computer science. If software patents had been the name of the game from the get go there would be no Internet, no home computing, and none of the opportunities available to us now.
What if brush-stroke technique was patentable? So only Monet could paint impressionistically, only Seurat could use little dots, only Pollack could throw paint at a canvas. There would be no growth in art, the art world would wither and die.
Don't talk to me about patent expirations. Art grows and develops only when there is an active body of work and active painters, riffing off each other and each others' techniques. Patents put a lock, a brain-death on the exploration that is critical to art.
Touretzky is really on to something with his library of DeCSS scramblers. Not so much for the DeCSS case, but for the larger point that programming and computer science are not like other "patentable" domains. The library of scramblers shows the easy transition from art to code, that art is code, and this for a DeCSS scrambler.
Thank god for people like Lessig, who have the skills and talents to navigate the world of the fuckwads. As a computer artist (in the larger sense), I am busy trying to do art. By the way, there was a hopeful piece in the NYT today: I say "hopeful" only because it is another indicator that the mass-media zeitgeist is slowly waking up to the tragedy of the fuckwads.
Unfortunately, it's hard to avoid despair when the fuckwads control the government. The other day I was walking, thinking of this and other problems, and I thought, there must be some way we could all retaliate against the fuckwads.
Anyway, someone who is a lawyer, please comment on the art as legal defense possibility. I have to get back to making art.
I would love to hear Kent Pittman compare Lisp with the growing interest in quasi-functional languages such as ML and especially OCaml.
These languages give up the s-expression syntax, and thus the powerful Lisp macro facility which people like Paul Graham believe to be critical to high-end Lisp programming.
What they offer in return is static type checking, which has saved me countless hours of bug hunting, and some wonderful mechanisms for abstraction and code clarification: sum types, modules, functors, and exceptions.
I used to do all my work in Lisp/Scheme. And occasionally I miss the simple clarity of the s-expression syntax and the macros. But these days I do everything in OCaml and have been amazed at the ease with which conceptual structures become code.
You know what? Calling, writing a letter to, faxing or emailing your representatives really does have an impact. Call them (you can get the number at congress.org), and when the staffer picks up the phone, say, calmly, that you would like to register an opinion, give your info, and thank them.
Yes, it goes onto a whiteboard with a check mark in the appropriate column. But that is how democracy works. Be calm, tell them your issue (one per call is best), and then do it again the next day.
If you did this every time you posted to slashdot it would definitely have an impact.
- Episode IV, Original
- Episode V, Original or Special
- Episode VI, Special
The changes to EIV were just too much. Turning Han into a PC action hero and turning Jabba into a buffoon... useless. But I think the additional effects in EVI are ok.Episode I was just a disappointment all around. Hey kids, the Force is activated by your mitochondria! Ugh. Hey kids, the Jedi use tricorders to detect the Force! Ugh. (Let's see... Darth Vader could feel the force in Luke while chasing him in his Tie Fighter, but Qui-Gon can walk right past Anakin without getting a tremor?) Hey kids, the Jedi regularly use their Force powers to try to cheat poor merchants on backwater planets! Ugh. Hey kids, the possibly interesting bad guy will get no lines and no character development. Ugh.
Not to mention a story and a Ben-Hur style chariot race both devoid of interest, and rampant cultural stereotyping.
For me, Jar-Jar was only a minor annoyance next to these catastrophes.
When I think of how inspiring Star Wars was, the Phantom Menace just makes me angry.
This custom page can be very clear, with helpful instructions, and contain only the links you tell them about (Yahoo mail, Google, whatever). Plus you can put a google search box right there.
Anyway, making a custom web page, stored on the local hard drive, set as default, will make their experience much better. You can obviously create a template to copy over for each person as well, and then have a main page that lists all their names. This is for when one computer is shared by many...
It sounds like a great way to give back, thank you!