If you use this software to create any compositions or musical/graphical materials, you hereby grant M.I.T. the nonexclusive right to use any such materials for any purpose, and to allow others to do the same, without any accounting to you.
I read this as "all music composed using these tools enters public domain".
I don't think this is a good thing. Philosophically I don't like licenses for tools to attempt control over what YOU make with these tools.
I think it is unwise to go through all sorts of unnatural steps to have your own child, ignoring what Mother Nature decreed.
Boggle.
"what Mother Nature decreed"???
That diabetic over there -- why doesn't he just die quietly, like Mother Nature decreed? Going through all sorts of unnatural insulin injections...
And this guy -- Mother Nature told him that he will not be able to see clearly, so instead of cooperating he -- oh, horrors -- is inserting pieces of plastic into his eyes. How unnatural of him!
Oh, that baby's born with a congenital heart defect? Well, Mother Nature's attitude to him is obvious. No, no surgery to fix it, that would be unnatural and disrespectful to Mother Nature...
I think the point is that broadband could do with more killer apps. Currently companies are unwilling to let their content loose on the net due to piracy concerns, whereas if there was a pervasive, fairly reliable DRM system, a lot more companies would make use of broadband, which in turn would make people more likely to buy it.
LOL. Are you saying that more you make broadband look like TV, the better it will be?
The point of broadband for many, many people is not the (potential) ability to watch pay-per-view movies on their computers as a lot of Hollywood idiots seem to believe. The point of broadband is an always-on connection which doesn't tie up a phone line and which allows people to quickly load image-heavy websites and do things like send digital pictures of kids to grandmas.
Water and electricity are commonly billed on a usage basis -- you pay $X per gallon of water, you pay $Y per megawatt of electricity. This causes certain actions, such as conservation of water and electricity, which are beneficial as these are limited resources.
Hogwash.
Let's sort out terminology first. Bandwidth is the diameter of the pipe that bits flow through. It is NOT the amount of bits.
If we accept this definition, then I would agree with you. People should pay more for more bandwidth -- and they do! An OC-3 line costs more than a T-1 line which costs more than a DSL line which costs more than a dial-up service. The more bandwidth you want, the more you have to pay for it.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's what you meant. When you said "bandwidth" you really meant "amount of data". You are arguing that paying per megabyte of data flowing through the 'net connection is a good idea.
And why?
Data is not a limited resource. Besides, it's often my data (and if not, in 99% of the cases it's not ISP's data anyway).
Moreover, your analogy to water and electricity is basically flawed. If I use water or electricity, it must come from somewhere, be produced by someone. The more water I use, the more expenses the water company has (which it recoups by sending me a water bill). Not so with internet connections. The expenses of my ISP do NOT depend on whether today I received a single short email or downloaded the RedHat ISO set.
Yes, over long term and over large number of users, an ISP definitely cares what's the average data throughput of its users is. But it really only matters when buying and installing capacity. There are little *usage* expenses once the capacity is in place.
I think a more appropriate analogy would be phone service. I pay a fixed monthly fee and for it I get unlimited local calls. It doesn't matter if I spend six hours each day on the phone or don't touch it at all. I feel that charging for net access should follow the same model.
Also, make sure your 'individualization' is 'on'. Some 'spyware' programs advise you to turn it off, but it is a critical component to your DRM licensing decryption protocols.
"Individualization" is just double-speak for allowing Windows Media Player to assign you a GUID (Global Unique ID) and send information to third parties (MS and such) about what you've been doing with your Media Player.
So not only this works on just Windows. Not only you get just DRM-encumbered files. Not only you have to deal with multiple different licenses for different songs. But you also have to agree to them tracking the music you listen to...
Thanks, I think I'll pass.
Actually, I'll put it in more clear term. I'll stay the hell away from this.
To my mind, there were only 1 problem with big brother: The information was not universal. That is, only the government had access. If the general public had access to the same data, it would have been OK. ie. The problem was not that the govenernment had too much data, it was that it did not share it.
Yeah, the David Brin's idea of a Transparent Society.
I don't see how having my personal information available to everyone, not just the government, is better or not Big Brother.
So if a nosy neighbor of mine can find out how often I buy condoms that's a good thing? Just because I can find out how much beer he buys in a week?
I don't want to live in an aquarium. And putting that aquarium out into the street instead of keeping it in an authorized-access-only place doesn't really help here.
No, technically you violated the copyright which is distinct from stealing as far as the law is concerned.
If you really want to get technical about the current US law, then yes, the current US law does not call it stealing. However, theft also has a broader, non-legally-technical, useage. The following is a snippet of Roman law:
6. It is theft, not only when anyone takes away a thing belonging to another, in order to appropriate it, but generally when anyone deals with the property of another contrary to the wishes of its owner. (Gai. iii. 195; D. xlvii. 2. 54. pr.; The Institutes of Justinian, pg. 403.)
Well, let's get technical then.
I know of no legal system anywhere in the world which technically classifies copyright infringement as theft. So, no, it's not only "current" and not only "US" law. Shouldn't it tell you something?
And funny that you should mention Roman law. Under Roman law the concept of intellectual proprety did not exist. There was no copyright (and no patents, and no trademarks, either). Think Roman senators would call a public performance of a song to which the song author did not consent a theft?
So, why cant we just admit that none of us are lawers in a courtroom, just people posting on a web site, and let normal useage of words go?
Because that's not the normal usage of the words. Just as using the word "piracy" ro refer to unauthorized copying is not normal, traditional usage. It is a (successful) attempt by copyright holders to frame the issue in emotionally-sensitive terms.
What do you think sounds better: "Stealing is wrong" or "Depriving a corporation of potential revenue is wrong"?
And if you are wondering why "theft" is the wrong term to use, I'll tell you. When you steal something from someone, that someone no longer has the use of that item. He lost it. He had it and doesn't have it any more.
Compare it to copyright infringement. The copyright holder actually doesn't lose anything in the sense of having less than what he used to have. In a commercial setting he loses some chance potential revenue, and in a non-commercial setting not even that.
That's the reason why "theft" and "copyright infringement" are different things and should be named differently.
Isn't it a little weird for an essential component of this device (the OS) to be made by their primary competitor? That sounds like a moronic business decision to me.
Microsoft is no more a competitor to them than it it is a competitor to Dell.
For the last time, this box IS NOT A CONSOLE. It is just a PC, a locked-down PC running Windows.
There are going to be no games developed specifically for it and only for it. ANY WINDOWS GAME WILL RUN ON IT.
If I buy this console, and a friend buys it too, we can't trade games?
No, you can't trade games.
Do I even "own" the games I pay for?
No, but I can make a good argument you don't own the games you buy shrink-wrapped in a store either...
What happens when the console breaks down and I want to replace it? Did all my games vanish with it? Phantom, indeed!
All games live on the company's servers. You are essentially buying a license to stream games to your "console". The local hard drive is just a big cache. So if you replace your hardware, all your games are still there, nothing happened to them.
However, a more interesting question is what happens to the games you "bought" when the company goes belly-up and it's servers disappear...
To stop counterfeit bills, not to stop anonymous cash transactions. You honestly think someone is going to setup a database and link all of the bills against your CITIZEN.USER_PK1 unique ID number just to make sure you can't be anonymous?
Why, yes, I do.
This would be called "helping the fight against money laundering by drug dealers and terrorists".
If each banknote got a cheaply readable unique ID (as opposed to the current serial numbers which are NOT cheaply readable) I would expect banks to keep a database of which bills were issued to which person and which bills came into which account. Law enforcement organizations would absolutely LOVE such a database. IRS would too, by the way.
Just think how juicy would data mining this database could be.
No, it's not good enough to trace your can of soda purchases. Your corner convenience store doesn't accept large bills, anyway. But it's good enough to trace significant chunks of cash moving around.
I work for Transport for London (Transport Authority in London, UK, duh), and, after 9/11 my boss asked me to print out a huge map of the city and put a little sticky label over every "potential terrorist target". Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament, the big wheel thing, ministry of defence, big office blocks, army barracks, more palaces.... After three hours I was running out of sticky labels and was very scared.
This seems like a simple exercise in paranoia to me.
A "potential terrorist target"? Hell, why not label every single building in London? Somehow I don't think you had sharp well-defined criteria of what makes something a potential target.
Suicide bombers in Israel like to blow up shops, cafes and bus stops. Chechen separatists in Moscow blew up the entrance line to an open-air rock concert. Etc., etc.
To give a trivial example, why did you include military barracks as potential targets? They don't look all that appealing to terrorists -- high security to start with, plus blowing up civilians is better for terror purposes. (note: I am speaking about military barracks in home countries. Abroad, they are a frequent target -- see bombing of US compounds in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia).
Scaring yourself silly is pretty easy to do, terrorists or no terrorists...
Let's assume that you download "Back That Thing Up" by Master P off Kaazaa. However, you do not own nor have you ever owned the album in which this song was originally distributed (I.E. you never purchased it). You just stole something.
I did? How interesting. So let's say I have a conscience crisis, so I go to the nearest police station and surrender myself, pleading guilty to the copying of that song. Will I be charged with theft? No? Ever stopped to think why not?
This is very simple. A song is something tangible.
Mmmm... you need to get your terminology in order. A song is precisely something intangible. Tangible things are basically those that you can touch. Information (and a song is just a kind of informations) ain't it.
A pirate obtains this CDROM and then rips the song off it and encodes it in a different format, such as MP3.
A pirate? Ripping the song and reencoding it in a different format is perfectly legal.
This is stealing. The theif has not infringed upon copyrights. He didn't use the beat contained in the song to make his own, nor did he steal the lyrics for a different work of art that he claimed was his. No. He STOLE A SONG.
You are so confused. You are entitled to your own opinion, of course, but the current legal system in the USA (and the rest of the world) does not call this "stealing". It calls this "copyright infringement".
I'll even give you a hint on the difference between stealing and copyright infringement. When you steal something from its rightful owner, the owner loses it. He no longer has the thing you stole.
Now when I copy a song off the 'net, did the copyright owner lose the song? Well, no. Did he lose his rights over that song? No, too. What did he lose, then? All he lost was a potential sale to me, an abstract possibility of revenue. Now, that hardly qualifies as stealing, and that's why it isn't called theft.
Not quite. The best analogy I can think of off the top of my head is drugs. You don't target the users, you target the dealers. Once the supply is removed then the users are out as well. It's far easier to go after the one person who supplies 10 or 20.
Ah, yes. That's a good analogy. To continue it, I expect the RIAA's war against P2P networks to be just as successful as the government's war against drugs.
It sounds like you're hinting at the fact that since a substantial amount of people are going to get away with doing unlawful things anyway, we just shouldn't have laws against those things?
Why, yes.
I am not the original poster, but if you find that a law is broken by a significant part of the population, there's probably something wrong with that law.
It is illegal to obtain copyrighted material from sources that are not authorized to distribute it - especially knowingly, but knowledge of the illegal act is not neccassary.
Like hell it is.
Distributing copyrighted content is illegal, you are guilty of copyright infringement in this case (note, not theft). If you *knowingly* obtain copyrighted content from an unauthorized source, you may be guilty of contributory copyright infringement.
But as far as I know obtaining copyrighted material without knowing that the source is illegal is perfectly OK. If you think otherwise, quote some law.
If you have a human expressing a problem to a computer in an elegant, concise and clear manner, you are in the "user" space and therefore I recommend natural language, as you do.
Um, well, no. I never said I accepted the natural language as being the best for this situation, prefering not to jump into this morass. But since it was brought up...
I have strong doubts that natural spoken language is the appropriate way to deal with computers. It has its place as a user interface, mostly for short imperative commands. On the other hand it's really bad for very common situations like editing text.
But we are not talking about user interface anyway. We are talking about programming, which is quite different. Programs are complex structures. I need to be able to visualize some of that structure, follow some links, tweak this part, move that chunk to another place, change this interface because it's no longer functional enough... I don't want to do this through natural language. It's too ambiguous, too imprecise, too much oriented towards a linear flow of words.
In any case, I disagree that If you have a human expressing a problem to a computer in an elegant, concise and clear manner, you are in the "user" space. Most programming is done to solve some problem. Maybe the problem is to make a parser or optimize a compiler -- it doesn't matter. You still have a problem and you need a solution for it -- preferably elegant, concise, and clear. There is nothing "user" about it.
And when you are making new devices to do entirely new domains of things -- why, the same thing applies. These new devices must be structured to reflect the structure of the problems/solutions they are designed to deal with. In this case you might talk to a computer in its language because luckily it so happens that the hardware was designed to understand the language the solution would be formulated in. But never should the language be dictated by hardware.
And I think that will always hold true. In order to make a computer work at its best, speak to it in a language it understands.
I disagree. Human time is more valuable than hardware and as time goes by it will become much, much more valuable.
The proper language for a professional to use is not the one which his current hardware is optimized for. The proper language is the one which fits the nature of his problem and which allows him to formulate the solution to this problem in an elegant, concise, and clear manner.
But a higher level scripting language should be as close to english (or another human language) as possible
No. That's conceptually wrong.
A (programming) language should make it easy to construct solutions for problems it has been designed to solve. Natural languages, such as English, are good for certain sets of problems and quite bad for other sets of problems.
Would you like to replace math notation with sentences in English?
Slashdot Mirror
HyperScore comes with an interesting license:
If you use this software to create any compositions or musical/graphical materials, you hereby grant M.I.T. the nonexclusive right to use any such materials for any purpose, and to allow others to do the same, without any accounting to you.
I read this as "all music composed using these tools enters public domain".
I don't think this is a good thing. Philosophically I don't like licenses for tools to attempt control over what YOU make with these tools.
I think it is unwise to go through all sorts of unnatural steps to have your own child, ignoring what Mother Nature decreed.
Boggle.
"what Mother Nature decreed"???
That diabetic over there -- why doesn't he just die quietly, like Mother Nature decreed? Going through all sorts of unnatural insulin injections...
And this guy -- Mother Nature told him that he will not be able to see clearly, so instead of cooperating he -- oh, horrors -- is inserting pieces of plastic into his eyes. How unnatural of him!
Oh, that baby's born with a congenital heart defect? Well, Mother Nature's attitude to him is obvious. No, no surgery to fix it, that would be unnatural and disrespectful to Mother Nature...
I think the point is that broadband could do with more killer apps. Currently companies are unwilling to let their content loose on the net due to piracy concerns, whereas if there was a pervasive, fairly reliable DRM system, a lot more companies would make use of broadband, which in turn would make people more likely to buy it.
LOL. Are you saying that more you make broadband look like TV, the better it will be?
The point of broadband for many, many people is not the (potential) ability to watch pay-per-view movies on their computers as a lot of Hollywood idiots seem to believe. The point of broadband is an always-on connection which doesn't tie up a phone line and which allows people to quickly load image-heavy websites and do things like send digital pictures of kids to grandmas.
Water, electricity... bandwidth?
Water and electricity are commonly billed on a usage basis -- you pay $X per gallon of water, you pay $Y per megawatt of electricity. This causes certain actions, such as conservation of water and electricity, which are beneficial as these are limited resources.
Hogwash.
Let's sort out terminology first. Bandwidth is the diameter of the pipe that bits flow through. It is NOT the amount of bits.
If we accept this definition, then I would agree with you. People should pay more for more bandwidth -- and they do! An OC-3 line costs more than a T-1 line which costs more than a DSL line which costs more than a dial-up service. The more bandwidth you want, the more you have to pay for it.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's what you meant. When you said "bandwidth" you really meant "amount of data". You are arguing that paying per megabyte of data flowing through the 'net connection is a good idea.
And why?
Data is not a limited resource. Besides, it's often my data (and if not, in 99% of the cases it's not ISP's data anyway).
Moreover, your analogy to water and electricity is basically flawed. If I use water or electricity, it must come from somewhere, be produced by someone. The more water I use, the more expenses the water company has (which it recoups by sending me a water bill). Not so with internet connections. The expenses of my ISP do NOT depend on whether today I received a single short email or downloaded the RedHat ISO set.
Yes, over long term and over large number of users, an ISP definitely cares what's the average data throughput of its users is. But it really only matters when buying and installing capacity. There are little *usage* expenses once the capacity is in place.
I think a more appropriate analogy would be phone service. I pay a fixed monthly fee and for it I get unlimited local calls. It doesn't matter if I spend six hours each day on the phone or don't touch it at all. I feel that charging for net access should follow the same model.
Just bring a Knoppix CD with you whenever you go to a public access sytem (assuming they don't lock down the CD-ROM drive).
Won't help you against hardware loggers.
Do you really check that the keyboard cable plugs directly into the keyboard socket on the motherboard on each public machine that you use?
From the buymusic.com site:
Also, make sure your 'individualization' is 'on'. Some 'spyware' programs advise you to turn it off, but it is a critical component to your DRM licensing decryption protocols.
"Individualization" is just double-speak for allowing Windows Media Player to assign you a GUID (Global Unique ID) and send information to third parties (MS and such) about what you've been doing with your Media Player.
So not only this works on just Windows. Not only you get just DRM-encumbered files. Not only you have to deal with multiple different licenses for different songs. But you also have to agree to them tracking the music you listen to...
Thanks, I think I'll pass.
Actually, I'll put it in more clear term. I'll stay the hell away from this.
To my mind, there were only 1 problem with big brother:
The information was not universal. That is, only the government had access. If the general public had access to the same data, it would have been OK. ie. The problem was not that the govenernment had too much data, it was that it did not share it.
Yeah, the David Brin's idea of a Transparent Society.
I don't see how having my personal information available to everyone, not just the government, is better or not Big Brother.
So if a nosy neighbor of mine can find out how often I buy condoms that's a good thing? Just because I can find out how much beer he buys in a week?
I don't want to live in an aquarium. And putting that aquarium out into the street instead of keeping it in an authorized-access-only place doesn't really help here.
No, technically you violated the copyright which is distinct from stealing as far as the law is concerned.
If you really want to get technical about the current US law, then yes, the current US law does not call it stealing. However, theft also has a broader, non-legally-technical, useage. The following is a snippet of Roman law:
6. It is theft, not only when anyone takes away a thing belonging to another, in order to appropriate it, but generally when anyone deals with the property of another contrary to the wishes of its owner. (Gai. iii. 195; D. xlvii. 2. 54. pr.; The Institutes of Justinian, pg. 403.)
Well, let's get technical then.
I know of no legal system anywhere in the world which technically classifies copyright infringement as theft. So, no, it's not only "current" and not only "US" law. Shouldn't it tell you something?
And funny that you should mention Roman law. Under Roman law the concept of intellectual proprety did not exist. There was no copyright (and no patents, and no trademarks, either). Think Roman senators would call a public performance of a song to which the song author did not consent a theft?
So, why cant we just admit that none of us are lawers in a courtroom, just people posting on a web site, and let normal useage of words go?
Because that's not the normal usage of the words. Just as using the word "piracy" ro refer to unauthorized copying is not normal, traditional usage. It is a (successful) attempt by copyright holders to frame the issue in emotionally-sensitive terms.
What do you think sounds better: "Stealing is wrong" or "Depriving a corporation of potential revenue is wrong"?
And if you are wondering why "theft" is the wrong term to use, I'll tell you. When you steal something from someone, that someone no longer has the use of that item. He lost it. He had it and doesn't have it any more.
Compare it to copyright infringement. The copyright holder actually doesn't lose anything in the sense of having less than what he used to have. In a commercial setting he loses some chance potential revenue, and in a non-commercial setting not even that.
That's the reason why "theft" and "copyright infringement" are different things and should be named differently.
I just resolved today that I *am* going to get around to writing my own email client after the bloody thing stopped working...
Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Isn't it a little weird for an essential component of this device (the OS) to be made by their primary competitor? That sounds like a moronic business decision to me.
Microsoft is no more a competitor to them than it it is a competitor to Dell.
For the last time, this box IS NOT A CONSOLE. It is just a PC, a locked-down PC running Windows.
There are going to be no games developed specifically for it and only for it. ANY WINDOWS GAME WILL RUN ON IT.
Sigh...
If I buy this console, and a friend buys it too, we can't trade games?
No, you can't trade games.
Do I even "own" the games I pay for?
No, but I can make a good argument you don't own the games you buy shrink-wrapped in a store either...
What happens when the console breaks down and I want to replace it? Did all my games vanish with it? Phantom, indeed!
All games live on the company's servers. You are essentially buying a license to stream games to your "console". The local hard drive is just a big cache. So if you replace your hardware, all your games are still there, nothing happened to them.
However, a more interesting question is what happens to the games you "bought" when the company goes belly-up and it's servers disappear...
What's the point?
If development for it is exactly the same as the PC, why develop games for this console?
You don't understand. This isn't a console. It's just a locked-down PC, period. Any game that runs on Windows will run on it.
They don't want people to develop specifically for it. They just want licenses for standard plain-vanilla PC games.
Why are they running Windows? In all seriousness, why not Linux or something else?
The point of this box is to play games.
How many games are available for Windows? How many games are available for Linux?
Geez...
To stop counterfeit bills, not to stop anonymous cash transactions. You honestly think someone is going to setup a database and link all of the bills against your CITIZEN.USER_PK1 unique ID number just to make sure you can't be anonymous?
Why, yes, I do.
This would be called "helping the fight against money laundering by drug dealers and terrorists".
If each banknote got a cheaply readable unique ID (as opposed to the current serial numbers which are NOT cheaply readable) I would expect banks to keep a database of which bills were issued to which person and which bills came into which account. Law enforcement organizations would absolutely LOVE such a database. IRS would too, by the way.
Just think how juicy would data mining this database could be.
No, it's not good enough to trace your can of soda purchases. Your corner convenience store doesn't accept large bills, anyway. But it's good enough to trace significant chunks of cash moving around.
I work for Transport for London (Transport Authority in London, UK, duh), and, after 9/11 my boss asked me to print out a huge map of the city and put a little sticky label over every "potential terrorist target". Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament, the big wheel thing, ministry of defence, big office blocks, army barracks, more palaces....
After three hours I was running out of sticky labels and was very scared.
This seems like a simple exercise in paranoia to me.
A "potential terrorist target"? Hell, why not label every single building in London? Somehow I don't think you had sharp well-defined criteria of what makes something a potential target.
Suicide bombers in Israel like to blow up shops, cafes and bus stops. Chechen separatists in Moscow blew up the entrance line to an open-air rock concert. Etc., etc.
To give a trivial example, why did you include military barracks as potential targets? They don't look all that appealing to terrorists -- high security to start with, plus blowing up civilians is better for terror purposes. (note: I am speaking about military barracks in home countries. Abroad, they are a frequent target -- see bombing of US compounds in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia).
Scaring yourself silly is pretty easy to do, terrorists or no terrorists...
or reproduces copies or phonorecords of such a performance from an unauthorized fixation
:-)
The great majority of songs on the 'net are from and *authorized* fixation.
This section seems to deal with the distribution of bootleg recordings. Sorry, try again.
Let's assume that you download "Back That Thing Up" by Master P off Kaazaa. However, you do not own nor have you ever owned the album in which this song was originally distributed (I.E. you never purchased it). You just stole something.
I did? How interesting. So let's say I have a conscience crisis, so I go to the nearest police station and surrender myself, pleading guilty to the copying of that song. Will I be charged with theft? No? Ever stopped to think why not?
This is very simple. A song is something tangible.
Mmmm... you need to get your terminology in order. A song is precisely something intangible. Tangible things are basically those that you can touch. Information (and a song is just a kind of informations) ain't it.
A pirate obtains this CDROM and then rips the song off it and encodes it in a different format, such as MP3.
A pirate? Ripping the song and reencoding it in a different format is perfectly legal.
This is stealing. The theif has not infringed upon copyrights. He didn't use the beat contained in the song to make his own, nor did he steal the lyrics for a different work of art that he claimed was his. No. He STOLE A SONG.
You are so confused. You are entitled to your own opinion, of course, but the current legal system in the USA (and the rest of the world) does not call this "stealing". It calls this "copyright infringement".
I'll even give you a hint on the difference between stealing and copyright infringement. When you steal something from its rightful owner, the owner loses it. He no longer has the thing you stole.
Now when I copy a song off the 'net, did the copyright owner lose the song? Well, no. Did he lose his rights over that song? No, too. What did he lose, then? All he lost was a potential sale to me, an abstract possibility of revenue. Now, that hardly qualifies as stealing, and that's why it isn't called theft.
Not quite. The best analogy I can think of off the top of my head is drugs. You don't target the users, you target the dealers. Once the supply is removed then the users are out as well. It's far easier to go after the one person who supplies 10 or 20.
Ah, yes. That's a good analogy. To continue it, I expect the RIAA's war against P2P networks to be just as successful as the government's war against drugs.
It sounds like you're hinting at the fact that since a substantial amount of people are going to get away with doing unlawful things anyway, we just shouldn't have laws against those things?
Why, yes.
I am not the original poster, but if you find that a law is broken by a significant part of the population, there's probably something wrong with that law.
It is illegal to obtain copyrighted material from sources that are not authorized to distribute it - especially knowingly, but knowledge of the illegal act is not neccassary.
Like hell it is.
Distributing copyrighted content is illegal, you are guilty of copyright infringement in this case (note, not theft). If you *knowingly* obtain copyrighted content from an unauthorized source, you may be guilty of contributory copyright infringement.
But as far as I know obtaining copyrighted material without knowing that the source is illegal is perfectly OK. If you think otherwise, quote some law.
This will make tons of money for lawyers, but I am unaware of any industry which recovered from a slump by suing its own consumers...
Still, dinosaurs thrashing around in death agony can be dangerous.
If you have a human expressing a problem to a computer in an elegant, concise and clear manner, you are in the "user" space and therefore I recommend natural language, as you do.
Um, well, no. I never said I accepted the natural language as being the best for this situation, prefering not to jump into this morass. But since it was brought up...
I have strong doubts that natural spoken language is the appropriate way to deal with computers. It has its place as a user interface, mostly for short imperative commands. On the other hand it's really bad for very common situations like editing text.
But we are not talking about user interface anyway. We are talking about programming, which is quite different. Programs are complex structures. I need to be able to visualize some of that structure, follow some links, tweak this part, move that chunk to another place, change this interface because it's no longer functional enough... I don't want to do this through natural language. It's too ambiguous, too imprecise, too much oriented towards a linear flow of words.
In any case, I disagree that If you have a human expressing a problem to a computer in an elegant, concise and clear manner, you are in the "user" space. Most programming is done to solve some problem. Maybe the problem is to make a parser or optimize a compiler -- it doesn't matter. You still have a problem and you need a solution for it -- preferably elegant, concise, and clear. There is nothing "user" about it.
And when you are making new devices to do entirely new domains of things -- why, the same thing applies. These new devices must be structured to reflect the structure of the problems/solutions they are designed to deal with. In this case you might talk to a computer in its language because luckily it so happens that the hardware was designed to understand the language the solution would be formulated in. But never should the language be dictated by hardware.
And I think that will always hold true. In order to make a computer work at its best, speak to it in a language it understands.
I disagree. Human time is more valuable than hardware and as time goes by it will become much, much more valuable.
The proper language for a professional to use is not the one which his current hardware is optimized for. The proper language is the one which fits the nature of his problem and which allows him to formulate the solution to this problem in an elegant, concise, and clear manner.
Yes! This is a perfect way of sharing the goatse links!!
But a higher level scripting language should be as close to english (or another human language) as possible
No. That's conceptually wrong.
A (programming) language should make it easy to construct solutions for problems it has been designed to solve. Natural languages, such as English, are good for certain sets of problems and quite bad for other sets of problems.
Would you like to replace math notation with sentences in English?