Doesn't it suck, playing a game where they put more effort into stopping some people from having fun than making it fun for the rest of the people?
Soul-bound!? Tell me you wouldn't have busted a gut laughing at that pathetic answer before you started playing.
The answer is a game that's fun at any level. Then literally let people create any character they want and pick their stats/level/etc. Top-level munchkins will run off to the top-level-munchkin dungeon letting people who picked differently play unmolested, and in any fashion they want.
Then if someone writes a bot, what of it? You can just give yourself as much XP, or gold, as they got, and keep up. Or laugh at them for missing the best content in the game in their rush for power-leveling their collection of numbers. Yay!
Munchkins wouldn't bother playing, they'd see that they couldn't be the best, or cause anyone any grief, and they'd go away.
They wouldn't need any of this if they'd do two things.
1) Play the game on the server - don't let the client cheat. (Quake-style multiplayer - you press shoot, it checks for ammo)
2) Don't make the game so pathetic that it can be played by a bot.
If your game consists primarily of people grinding, they'll want to write a bot. If it consists mainly of chatting with friends while exploring, they won't.
Instead, rather than actually attempting any infrastructure fixes they find it easier to load your PC with a rootkit that can do anything they want. They could do this without the rootkit, and it doesn't really stop anything as proxy-cheats still work, but they'll never do it as long as people like you are so willing to bend over and take anything, in the name of 'It haz to be that way, cheaters! l0l!'
I'll pick up the slack. It's a two-bit game for people who like playing with menus. Select attack, watch, select another attack, watch. Snooze!
It's a game for people whose sole interest in character development is picking a name and color-coordinating their loot. (Tied with most MMOs on this one.)
The absolute crap of a game that has people standing around, trying to claim a "spawned" monster is literally indescribable.
How about having monsters appear where people aren't? Pft. It's a joke that didn't get its dose of funny.
So it's an accurate economy, but not a good one for a game.
They need to let you craft things of real use, and build demand into the game.
In theory, not every being in the game world is going to be running around killing monsters, they'll be gardening and such. This unseen majority should be a far bigger force in the game economy than players, or the world would have already shifted to not value the crap PCs used to make and they'd be making something else.
In other words, if the players really are such a big part of the economy, then it should be very unstable. Craft 50 things and ruin the market for them.
No, politicians aren't bribed. Of course not. They just get kickbacks, election donations, cushy jobs afterwards, offer and receive no-bid contracts, etc.
We'd all be scandalized to see a politician being bribed, as if a few thousand in person-to-person cash is worse than billion-dollar contracts getting awarded without bids.
When I said 'the moment you draw it', I was meaning you to be Ford, or the creator of the logo in question. I wasn't very clear, but I was trying to discuss how two people can come to have their own copyright on an identical work if they both created it independently.
As such, while logos are copyrighted (most are complex enough to warrant such initially) the copyright isn't the tool used to prevent similar works, the trademark is.
How does it work, when you draw something copyrightable and later apply to trademark it as your logo? Does the trademark application grant people the right to use your logo (in reference to your product) that the copyright would otherwise restrict? Otherwise while you'd be allowed to use Ford's trademarks appropriately, you wouldn't be able to duplicate them and as such, this would be somewhat hollow.
Almost. The logo is copyrighted the moment you draw it, and does not lose that status when trademarked.
Ditto any concept drawings of the car, or any image they make of it.
However, they can't use copyright to prevent similar logos or designs, because when you draw a similar thing it's yours. Copyright merely means you can't copy mine. However trademark law covers something that even looks similar, in the same area of business, so it's the only relevant issue.
If the law somehow allows the racially motivated violence, it shouldn't get in the way of your right to self defense.
This would require people looking at what was around them and making their own decisions on issues like war and killing that are today the domain of the government. I might not find Iraq to be a war worth fighting, but I might find racial-hatred groups in the south to be. If enough people valued a free society where people weren't targeted for the color of their skin, there'd be an effective force to stop the KKK.
If you're using photos for advertising purposes, that's largely true. If Starbucks takes a picture of me holding one of their cups and uses it for an ad campaign, with a caption purporting to be my words, or even just implied product happiness, that would need a model license. The advertising angle implies that I chose to make this claim, that's what you can't do without my permission.
But, for almost all other purposes, no model release is required for "editorial" use. Essentially, if it's a factual photo not implying for instance that I like starbucks, merely that I am holding a cup, I can't do anything about it.
If I follow you around on the street and bothered you it may be harassment, etc, but simply taking your picture, even if you most definitely do not want your photo taken, is not a problem. Even if I want to publish it for money. (assuming a place with no reasonable expectation of privacy - changing rooms, private homes with blinds closed, etc)
Perhaps. But if you're a boss and you specifically overrule one of your employees in their area of specialty and (if you have a reason at all) don't share your reason, you're a bad boss. There's this idea with some people that if a CEO said it, it must be gold. Like the idea that if a blogger said it, it's wrong. Really, it's that CEO's who handle employees badly stink as CEOs, no matter what else they might be good at.
Your tech employees are there because supposedly they're better at tech than you. If that's not true, hire someone else.
Telling employees to train in something is different than overriding their decisions and making them feel powerless to really do their job.
I don't know what you think bloggers want, checks from Fox news?
The ones I know merely want their right to report things they see, and to not have to reveal sources in cases reporters wouldn't. Those are human rights. If I go somewhere and could journal about it, I should be able to make the journal public.
That's all "blogging" is.
Some people might also like the idea of being more like old-school reporters, but that's not something everyone wants.
Well, anyways, if CES bans bloggers over this they'll 1) be powerless to stop third-party reporting anyways and 2) miss the sites that people really read. Sure, Gizmodo may be banned, as would a guy who took a crap on the carpet, but to ban everyone with assholes...
The point is that bloggers aren't all alike, nor are the "professional media". Everyone in here ragging on this guy says exactly the same thing, "If bloggers want...", which totally misses that multiple bloggers could have multiple motives.
Seriously, you wouldn't invite the Weekly World News, or the National Enquirer. You might also want to leave out 4chan, Gizmodo, and Howard Stern. These groups cross all categories. They have only one thing in common - they have a strange sense of humor and need you less than you need them. This is the group you should watch.
I wonder what their policy will be on CEOs who blog?
I wasn't very clear. I'm not pushing the idea that the universe just spontaneously appeared, or not directly. I'm showing how it's functionally equivalent to your more-complex idea in that they both require some spontaneous creation (or perpetual existence) and thus it's fundamentally the same argument. As such, the longer one seems weaker.
This is because I don't see that it's stranger for the universe to create itself or have always existed than for a creator to create itself or have always existed and then create the universe. Your idea has a totally consistent universe (cause and effect) but only by positing a larger containing universe that does not have this property around our own. So ultimately cause and effect wouldn't be absolute in your example either.
Besides, you know you're far into philosophy here. That's really what I was getting at. That because of the lack of testability and predictive claims this wasn't any kind of theory, or is wrong. It's about the unknowable so it can't be a theory though it can be a fine idea.
I think that wild crazy question have great value. That uneducated people should feel free to ask what they want. I don't mind a religious person for asking questions, or having opinions. Asking if we'd ever go to the moon sounded like a stupid thing a hundred years ago. But there's a difference between innocent and uneducated attempts to learn, and thinking that just because a view is honestly held that it has any validity or deserves to be treated as a reasoned opinion from someone who has examined the evidence.
I'm not criticizing C though (much). I'm calling it a chainsaw.
As evidence I'm presenting some tiny snippets of near pseudo-code and low and behold we discover they aren't safe as is, and that I've made a few mistakes. I think I'm proving my point - pay attention to where your fingers are.
And I don't think it's simply a matter of thinking of the machine architecture, strncpy could copy n bytes, or n-1 and null-terminate the nth. Its name says it works on strings, and strings are null-terminated. I'd expect something that didn't null-terminate to be called memcpy... It reads as a string, but writes like an array of chars.
I do agree about C being a good teaching language. Rubber chainsaws (C in a classroom setting) are great because people don't get by with fragile code that happens to run anyways as C is hard to write infinite-monkey style, forcing you to think about your goal.
I totally laud C, and ASM, as the reasons I'm an insightful developer and debugger. Having manually tracked everything I respect how much work the VM is doing. I Understand the computational complexity of built-in types like associative arrays, so I use them carefully. Not just in big-O notation, but in the failure modes of various algorithms (sorting ordered vs unordered lists, etc) or at least that they have them . All sorts are not created equal, though you'd think so if you started coding in Ruby or Python and had never needed to look under the hood.
But. I appreciate being able to code tired and not lose fingers. Especially as I rarely need the bare metal in mundane programming tasks like syadmin scripts and writing web apps.
You misread my statement about platform dependence. I specially meant people who assume an int is 32b, don't test this assumption or any others, and have it fail when one of a million variables change. Such as the version of compiler, what was in memory before, etc. It's easy to fail to write portable C, though I will agree that this is usually not C's fault.
Nothing new, but it's interesting to see the Microsoft employees and MVPs going from reciting elaborate justifications for EULAs to "It's not policy for MS employees to comment on legal matters" when their points were challenged.
Is it a crime to knowingly give false legal advice for your own direct profit? If you commit an illegal action unknowingly but then refuse to investigate the legality of that when challenged, is that seen as willful ignorance?
Microsoft employees were being shown the error of their ways, encouraged to investigate the related laws or consult with MS's legal staff and refute these claims, and they refused, continuing to push the EULA theory. Going so far as to directly tell a customer that running Vista in a VM is a violation.
You're still missing the point. A chainsaw can be safely used by a skilled logger, but it has many pointy gotchas, as does falling trees, etc.
Yes, if I was an active C coder and knew the spec I'd have made less mistakes. If I was careful and concerned I could write better code.
But how about all the C coders out there who aren't careful? Who don't know the spec like the back of their hand? They're playing with chainsaws. That's all I was saying. If active C programmers came with a quality guarantee this wouldn't be such a problem, but for every spec-head there are two that don't know the difference between (*p)++ and *p++, to great calamity.
These people should be programming in Python or something where they'd be happier, as would their coworkers.
There's nothing wrong with C, except that all forms of declaration and assignment are subtly different and you need to very clear to keep them straight, manually.
Personally I'd expect char x[5] = "abcdefghi" to write the full null-terminated string into the space of a 5-byte string. I find it counter-intuitive that the language that allows you to write beyond the end of an array has different behavior during an initialization. Seems like a gotcha. One you no-doubt navigate blindfolded through experience, but still a gotcha.
I started in Applesoft basic, briefly, then used ASM on a 65c02, and then in Pascal, then very thankfully to C and some x86 ASM, and then on.
Take five years away from C and see if you remember the little things - not about null terminators, but which routines add them and which don't, etc. Does strcpy copy the null-terminator? Does strncpy if the string is longer than n characters? This isn't "programming", this is API trivia.
Anyways, your comment is a further example... I posted a pesudo-codish for-loop illustrating the initialization, check, and self increment. There are easier ways for strings, as you list:
while (*ptr++) {} but they don't generalize to arrays that aren't null-terminated or where you wish to walk backwards, etc.
And then with all the different ways to allocate space, assign strings, set nulls, you still don't think it's full of gotchas? Maybe gotchas that you learn when working in it, but if you just picked up K&R and started coding you'd turn out bad code. Worse, semi-stable bad code that works but only until you change compiler, platforms, etc.
The point is that my Ruby example was one line of setup, one of code. It did what you couldn't do well in less than ten lines of C, and risking at least a few security flaws or fatal bugs. If my Ruby failed it would print a nice exception. If the C fails it'll silently overwrite some other variable or die in another hard to find way.
It's funny that you nitpicked over my unintended bugs, the ones I assumed people would see as pseudo-code, and totally missed my point about having to manually write code to do this at all. More code leads to more bugs, it's that simple.
That's okay when you're putting in the time anyways to make sure your filesystem, memory manager, etc, work properly. When you're trying to write a quick UI-heavy end-user utility it's not so good. 98%+ of programs aren't memory managers, database engines, or graphics-intensive games...
I dislike the ProCD case because it brought "justice" despite the law. Justice wasn't. For all the the defendant knew about the intended restrictions, ProCD by my reckoning knew they didn't have the right to enforce those restrictions. Rather than handing the case to them the judge should have told them to stop selling through retail if they didn't like the way it works. To throw a bone to one party the judge overturned centuries of precedent in sales and contracts.
The issue of having to return software if you don't like the EULA seems even fishier than EULAs in general. Software companies are suggesting that they get to sell products via retail with hidden restrictions, and if I don't like those restrictions the onus is on me to drive back to the store at my own expense and trade the product for one with different hidden restrictions?
If I ran a retail store I'd be in trouble if I sold products but in the box instead was only a coupon for free delivery of the product, provided you jump through a few hoops and sign this contract here... I don't see how it's different just because it's software.
Thankfully, I think ProCD case is significantly anti-business that it shouldn't last. This isn't a law that just hurts the little guy - potentially any business that buys retail software is bound to a contract that their lawyers didn't read and management didn't accept? That sounds bogus. I imagine it'll finally fall over when the financial tables are turned and someone tries to uphold a EULA on IBM, Boeing, Shell Oil, etc.
Sure, in the past some torture happened. Especially on the battlefield. Yes.
But torture used to be something we *as a people* didn't do. If you asked people, torture was what happened in German death camps, Japanese POW camps, etc. We made a fairly good effort to, as a team, play above board. Those of ours who tortured were censured for it.
But now there are specific torture camps where we send non-combatants for years. Even when they aren't our citizens or captured in battle. (Maher Arar, etc)
More than just a battle-field aberration, or the work of a rogue commander, this is now a direct executive order. Torture is now a USA policy!
The rest of the world has a slightly lower opinion of us than they did post WW2.
As for the 2nd amendment, I mean that it clearly says "right to bear arms shall not be infringed". It could say "Recognizing that ponies are kewl, the right to bear arms..." and not matter. The important clause is "shall not". Anti-gun advocates twist this to try to say that because they don't see a need for a militia that all of a sudden the 'shall not' isn't binding.
The world changes. Rules need to change too. Sure. But breaking the existing ones to pretend they cover new scenarios is disgusting. If torture is allowable, let's not reread the definition of 'people' to be, people who aren't in our protected class, but let's write a whole new torture amendment spelling out exactly when we think it's justified, not on who. Spell it out, admit it conflicts instead of reinterpreting the old.
imho, if you play word games with the constitution you're a lying cheat. And a liar who cheats his whole country seems a lot like a traitor.
Look at it this way. If we'd jumped from 2001/9/11 straight to 2008/01/01 we'd be shocked by the dollar, the world view of the USA, and the big-brother attitude of our country and the legal abuses related. If Dubya had just thrown our money, respect, and right of law away we'd be bloody mad and call him a traitor. So he and a few like him have done it slowly, with lies and doublespeak, and that's not traitorous despite where we are?
I'm "jumping" topics to Bush here, but that's because he openly lies so much. WMDs, no torture policy, etc. Next to him all the activist SC judges pale, especially because with his signing notes he styles himself above their power anyways.
So yes, in general lying about the constitution for your own gain rather than admitting what it does say and working for open honest change strikes me as treason. Less flashy than a gunpowder plot, but more damaging in the end. Especially when it comes from people like SC judges and the president who should know better.
You got me. I advocated the language for general use, so I must brush my teeth with it.
95% of most OSes could be written in Ruby* though, or Python, etc, without much of a slowdown. That'd give you a lot more resources to pour into making sure your network and filesystem code are solid.
* If by OS you mean GNU/Linux, or all of MS Windows. If you only mean the kernel it'd be less.
I'd probably write much of the part that needed to be C in a higher-level language first anyways. I could prototype my filesystem code long before optimizing it for speed. And having a reference implementation in an easy-to-debug language would make testing the C implementation easier.
The universe is here, I think you'd agree. Well, there too.
That means it had to get here. That's pretty safe.
So you have to admit that it seems strange things could just appear, but that it seems less odd if less things appear, all else being equal.
You say that something spontaneously appeared and made everything else. That posits that something that still come from nothing, but instead of a bunch of matter, that first thing in a supreme being capable of creating a universe.
You're claiming that making rocks is too difficult for the universe to manage so it needed a creator, but that making the creator (much harder than a few rocks) was possible.
My claim is one step, requires a single deduction from current events, and has very little predictive power.
Your claim is two steps, requires deduction, and assumption about the type of things that can spontaneously appear, but still has little predictive power.
There are two ideas on the table, mine shorted, yours longer. They both attempt to describe the same current scenario. Neither offers and predictive power, so neither are theories. Further, yours relies on more assumptions about the nature of creators and universes that I don't think you have.
So, if you aren't claiming divine guidance (and I'd like to see it) you'll have to admit that the nature of a creator (who chooses to use its abilities to remain hidden, obviously) seems untestable.
At that the longer idea, with untestable assumptions, seems weaker.
And my claim is a bit tautological - we're here, that must have happened...
It's funny, I didn't want to belabor my point by making the for-loop too long. I could have hoisted the strlen out but the number of expressions I was having to write to match a.each {} expression was getting out of hand.
I think I proved my point inadvertently as well. C is too complex to use safely as a psuedo-code language.:)
char x[5] = "foo" char x[5] = "longer string"
The first is bad form because the second would still compile. It'd probably be zero-terminated, but stomping on your other variables.
Nope, just tested that. It's limited to the declared length, but it's not zero-terminated.
Anyways, that's C - tons of little gotchas, most of which are somewhat platform dependent.
Torture/treason doesn't seem like a huge leap from the discussion of the supreme court finding against a strict constitutional reading. It's constitutional ambiguities, like the meaning of 'people', that people use to justify torture.
As for the history, yes torture has always existed. But in WW2 the USA had a lot of opportunities to torture POWs or kill them like the Japanese and Germans did, but mostly took a higher road. Now torture is specially allowed by order of the president and the government is shipping people overseas to undergo said torture.
It's not even as if we're talking about battle-field torture where you can say that 1) you'd have shot the guy anyways and 2) he might know something of tactical use. This is plain on-going break-your-mind torture, used on subjects that are hardly high-priority information sources.
If nothing else, this is a bad precedent because we don't have any grounds to complain when our soldiers get tortured.
Treason is a word that conjures images of spies handing over nuclear secrets, but I think a weakening of our values is pretty damaging. Considering it's done for political gain, it's a total corrupt sell-out of everyone else...
It's like the second amendment. It's perfectly clear what's intended. If you want to make an argument that times have changed, consider amending the amendment, don't invent lies about what it means. If the constitution was meant to extend protection only to citizens, it would have used the word 'citizens', and landed immigrants would be on their best behavior. But that's not what it said, because that's not that it meant.
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Won't that make it easier to prove they have WMDs when we need their oil? He already got burned by not checking that...
Doesn't it suck, playing a game where they put more effort into stopping some people from having fun than making it fun for the rest of the people?
Soul-bound!? Tell me you wouldn't have busted a gut laughing at that pathetic answer before you started playing.
The answer is a game that's fun at any level. Then literally let people create any character they want and pick their stats/level/etc. Top-level munchkins will run off to the top-level-munchkin dungeon letting people who picked differently play unmolested, and in any fashion they want.
Then if someone writes a bot, what of it? You can just give yourself as much XP, or gold, as they got, and keep up. Or laugh at them for missing the best content in the game in their rush for power-leveling their collection of numbers. Yay!
Munchkins wouldn't bother playing, they'd see that they couldn't be the best, or cause anyone any grief, and they'd go away.
They wouldn't need any of this if they'd do two things.
1) Play the game on the server - don't let the client cheat. (Quake-style multiplayer - you press shoot, it checks for ammo)
2) Don't make the game so pathetic that it can be played by a bot.
If your game consists primarily of people grinding, they'll want to write a bot. If it consists mainly of chatting with friends while exploring, they won't.
Instead, rather than actually attempting any infrastructure fixes they find it easier to load your PC with a rootkit that can do anything they want. They could do this without the rootkit, and it doesn't really stop anything as proxy-cheats still work, but they'll never do it as long as people like you are so willing to bend over and take anything, in the name of 'It haz to be that way, cheaters! l0l!'
I'll pick up the slack. It's a two-bit game for people who like playing with menus. Select attack, watch, select another attack, watch. Snooze!
It's a game for people whose sole interest in character development is picking a name and color-coordinating their loot. (Tied with most MMOs on this one.)
The absolute crap of a game that has people standing around, trying to claim a "spawned" monster is literally indescribable.
How about having monsters appear where people aren't? Pft. It's a joke that didn't get its dose of funny.
So it's an accurate economy, but not a good one for a game.
They need to let you craft things of real use, and build demand into the game.
In theory, not every being in the game world is going to be running around killing monsters, they'll be gardening and such. This unseen majority should be a far bigger force in the game economy than players, or the world would have already shifted to not value the crap PCs used to make and they'd be making something else.
In other words, if the players really are such a big part of the economy, then it should be very unstable. Craft 50 things and ruin the market for them.
As opposed to thinking federal law should trump individual rights?
It's a fairly consistent plank on the small-government platform. States are smaller than countries.
No, politicians aren't bribed. Of course not. They just get kickbacks, election donations, cushy jobs afterwards, offer and receive no-bid contracts, etc.
We'd all be scandalized to see a politician being bribed, as if a few thousand in person-to-person cash is worse than billion-dollar contracts getting awarded without bids.
When I said 'the moment you draw it', I was meaning you to be Ford, or the creator of the logo in question. I wasn't very clear, but I was trying to discuss how two people can come to have their own copyright on an identical work if they both created it independently.
As such, while logos are copyrighted (most are complex enough to warrant such initially) the copyright isn't the tool used to prevent similar works, the trademark is.
How does it work, when you draw something copyrightable and later apply to trademark it as your logo? Does the trademark application grant people the right to use your logo (in reference to your product) that the copyright would otherwise restrict? Otherwise while you'd be allowed to use Ford's trademarks appropriately, you wouldn't be able to duplicate them and as such, this would be somewhat hollow.
Almost. The logo is copyrighted the moment you draw it, and does not lose that status when trademarked.
Ditto any concept drawings of the car, or any image they make of it.
However, they can't use copyright to prevent similar logos or designs, because when you draw a similar thing it's yours. Copyright merely means you can't copy mine. However trademark law covers something that even looks similar, in the same area of business, so it's the only relevant issue.
If the law somehow allows the racially motivated violence, it shouldn't get in the way of your right to self defense.
This would require people looking at what was around them and making their own decisions on issues like war and killing that are today the domain of the government. I might not find Iraq to be a war worth fighting, but I might find racial-hatred groups in the south to be. If enough people valued a free society where people weren't targeted for the color of their skin, there'd be an effective force to stop the KKK.
People wearing sheets make good targets.
If you're using photos for advertising purposes, that's largely true. If Starbucks takes a picture of me holding one of their cups and uses it for an ad campaign, with a caption purporting to be my words, or even just implied product happiness, that would need a model license. The advertising angle implies that I chose to make this claim, that's what you can't do without my permission.
But, for almost all other purposes, no model release is required for "editorial" use. Essentially, if it's a factual photo not implying for instance that I like starbucks, merely that I am holding a cup, I can't do anything about it.
If I follow you around on the street and bothered you it may be harassment, etc, but simply taking your picture, even if you most definitely do not want your photo taken, is not a problem. Even if I want to publish it for money. (assuming a place with no reasonable expectation of privacy - changing rooms, private homes with blinds closed, etc)
So you mean that it isn't compatible, but the server can be tweaked to make it work anyways?
Perhaps. But if you're a boss and you specifically overrule one of your employees in their area of specialty and (if you have a reason at all) don't share your reason, you're a bad boss. There's this idea with some people that if a CEO said it, it must be gold. Like the idea that if a blogger said it, it's wrong. Really, it's that CEO's who handle employees badly stink as CEOs, no matter what else they might be good at.
Your tech employees are there because supposedly they're better at tech than you. If that's not true, hire someone else.
Telling employees to train in something is different than overriding their decisions and making them feel powerless to really do their job.
I don't know what you think bloggers want, checks from Fox news?
The ones I know merely want their right to report things they see, and to not have to reveal sources in cases reporters wouldn't. Those are human rights. If I go somewhere and could journal about it, I should be able to make the journal public.
That's all "blogging" is.
Some people might also like the idea of being more like old-school reporters, but that's not something everyone wants.
Well, anyways, if CES bans bloggers over this they'll 1) be powerless to stop third-party reporting anyways and 2) miss the sites that people really read. Sure, Gizmodo may be banned, as would a guy who took a crap on the carpet, but to ban everyone with assholes...
The point is that bloggers aren't all alike, nor are the "professional media". Everyone in here ragging on this guy says exactly the same thing, "If bloggers want...", which totally misses that multiple bloggers could have multiple motives.
Seriously, you wouldn't invite the Weekly World News, or the National Enquirer. You might also want to leave out 4chan, Gizmodo, and Howard Stern. These groups cross all categories. They have only one thing in common - they have a strange sense of humor and need you less than you need them. This is the group you should watch.
I wonder what their policy will be on CEOs who blog?
I wasn't very clear. I'm not pushing the idea that the universe just spontaneously appeared, or not directly. I'm showing how it's functionally equivalent to your more-complex idea in that they both require some spontaneous creation (or perpetual existence) and thus it's fundamentally the same argument. As such, the longer one seems weaker.
This is because I don't see that it's stranger for the universe to create itself or have always existed than for a creator to create itself or have always existed and then create the universe. Your idea has a totally consistent universe (cause and effect) but only by positing a larger containing universe that does not have this property around our own. So ultimately cause and effect wouldn't be absolute in your example either.
Besides, you know you're far into philosophy here. That's really what I was getting at. That because of the lack of testability and predictive claims this wasn't any kind of theory, or is wrong. It's about the unknowable so it can't be a theory though it can be a fine idea.
I think that wild crazy question have great value. That uneducated people should feel free to ask what they want. I don't mind a religious person for asking questions, or having opinions. Asking if we'd ever go to the moon sounded like a stupid thing a hundred years ago. But there's a difference between innocent and uneducated attempts to learn, and thinking that just because a view is honestly held that it has any validity or deserves to be treated as a reasoned opinion from someone who has examined the evidence.
I'm not criticizing C though (much). I'm calling it a chainsaw.
As evidence I'm presenting some tiny snippets of near pseudo-code and low and behold we discover they aren't safe as is, and that I've made a few mistakes. I think I'm proving my point - pay attention to where your fingers are.
And I don't think it's simply a matter of thinking of the machine architecture, strncpy could copy n bytes, or n-1 and null-terminate the nth. Its name says it works on strings, and strings are null-terminated. I'd expect something that didn't null-terminate to be called memcpy... It reads as a string, but writes like an array of chars.
I do agree about C being a good teaching language. Rubber chainsaws (C in a classroom setting) are great because people don't get by with fragile code that happens to run anyways as C is hard to write infinite-monkey style, forcing you to think about your goal.
I totally laud C, and ASM, as the reasons I'm an insightful developer and debugger. Having manually tracked everything I respect how much work the VM is doing. I Understand the computational complexity of built-in types like associative arrays, so I use them carefully. Not just in big-O notation, but in the failure modes of various algorithms (sorting ordered vs unordered lists, etc) or at least that they have them . All sorts are not created equal, though you'd think so if you started coding in Ruby or Python and had never needed to look under the hood.
But. I appreciate being able to code tired and not lose fingers. Especially as I rarely need the bare metal in mundane programming tasks like syadmin scripts and writing web apps.
You misread my statement about platform dependence. I specially meant people who assume an int is 32b, don't test this assumption or any others, and have it fail when one of a million variables change. Such as the version of compiler, what was in memory before, etc. It's easy to fail to write portable C, though I will agree that this is usually not C's fault.
Here's a a EULA thread at Microsoft's forums.
Nothing new, but it's interesting to see the Microsoft employees and MVPs going from reciting elaborate justifications for EULAs to "It's not policy for MS employees to comment on legal matters" when their points were challenged.
Is it a crime to knowingly give false legal advice for your own direct profit? If you commit an illegal action unknowingly but then refuse to investigate the legality of that when challenged, is that seen as willful ignorance?
Microsoft employees were being shown the error of their ways, encouraged to investigate the related laws or consult with MS's legal staff and refute these claims, and they refused, continuing to push the EULA theory. Going so far as to directly tell a customer that running Vista in a VM is a violation.
You're still missing the point. A chainsaw can be safely used by a skilled logger, but it has many pointy gotchas, as does falling trees, etc.
Yes, if I was an active C coder and knew the spec I'd have made less mistakes. If I was careful and concerned I could write better code.
But how about all the C coders out there who aren't careful? Who don't know the spec like the back of their hand? They're playing with chainsaws. That's all I was saying. If active C programmers came with a quality guarantee this wouldn't be such a problem, but for every spec-head there are two that don't know the difference between (*p)++ and *p++, to great calamity.
These people should be programming in Python or something where they'd be happier, as would their coworkers.
There's nothing wrong with C, except that all forms of declaration and assignment are subtly different and you need to very clear to keep them straight, manually.
Personally I'd expect char x[5] = "abcdefghi" to write the full null-terminated string into the space of a 5-byte string. I find it counter-intuitive that the language that allows you to write beyond the end of an array has different behavior during an initialization. Seems like a gotcha. One you no-doubt navigate blindfolded through experience, but still a gotcha.
Take five years away from C and see if you remember the little things - not about null terminators, but which routines add them and which don't, etc. Does strcpy copy the null-terminator? Does strncpy if the string is longer than n characters? This isn't "programming", this is API trivia.
Anyways, your comment is a further example... I posted a pesudo-codish for-loop illustrating the initialization, check, and self increment. There are easier ways for strings, as you list: while (*ptr++) {} but they don't generalize to arrays that aren't null-terminated or where you wish to walk backwards, etc.
And then with all the different ways to allocate space, assign strings, set nulls, you still don't think it's full of gotchas? Maybe gotchas that you learn when working in it, but if you just picked up K&R and started coding you'd turn out bad code. Worse, semi-stable bad code that works but only until you change compiler, platforms, etc.
The point is that my Ruby example was one line of setup, one of code. It did what you couldn't do well in less than ten lines of C, and risking at least a few security flaws or fatal bugs. If my Ruby failed it would print a nice exception. If the C fails it'll silently overwrite some other variable or die in another hard to find way.
It's funny that you nitpicked over my unintended bugs, the ones I assumed people would see as pseudo-code, and totally missed my point about having to manually write code to do this at all. More code leads to more bugs, it's that simple.
That's okay when you're putting in the time anyways to make sure your filesystem, memory manager, etc, work properly. When you're trying to write a quick UI-heavy end-user utility it's not so good. 98%+ of programs aren't memory managers, database engines, or graphics-intensive games...
Ditto on the EFF...
I dislike the ProCD case because it brought "justice" despite the law. Justice wasn't. For all the the defendant knew about the intended restrictions, ProCD by my reckoning knew they didn't have the right to enforce those restrictions. Rather than handing the case to them the judge should have told them to stop selling through retail if they didn't like the way it works. To throw a bone to one party the judge overturned centuries of precedent in sales and contracts.
The issue of having to return software if you don't like the EULA seems even fishier than EULAs in general. Software companies are suggesting that they get to sell products via retail with hidden restrictions, and if I don't like those restrictions the onus is on me to drive back to the store at my own expense and trade the product for one with different hidden restrictions?
If I ran a retail store I'd be in trouble if I sold products but in the box instead was only a coupon for free delivery of the product, provided you jump through a few hoops and sign this contract here... I don't see how it's different just because it's software.
Thankfully, I think ProCD case is significantly anti-business that it shouldn't last. This isn't a law that just hurts the little guy - potentially any business that buys retail software is bound to a contract that their lawyers didn't read and management didn't accept? That sounds bogus. I imagine it'll finally fall over when the financial tables are turned and someone tries to uphold a EULA on IBM, Boeing, Shell Oil, etc.
Sure, in the past some torture happened. Especially on the battlefield. Yes.
..." and not matter. The important clause is "shall not". Anti-gun advocates twist this to try to say that because they don't see a need for a militia that all of a sudden the 'shall not' isn't binding.
But torture used to be something we *as a people* didn't do. If you asked people, torture was what happened in German death camps, Japanese POW camps, etc. We made a fairly good effort to, as a team, play above board. Those of ours who tortured were censured for it.
But now there are specific torture camps where we send non-combatants for years. Even when they aren't our citizens or captured in battle. (Maher Arar, etc)
More than just a battle-field aberration, or the work of a rogue commander, this is now a direct executive order. Torture is now a USA policy!
The rest of the world has a slightly lower opinion of us than they did post WW2.
As for the 2nd amendment, I mean that it clearly says "right to bear arms shall not be infringed". It could say "Recognizing that ponies are kewl, the right to bear arms
The world changes. Rules need to change too. Sure. But breaking the existing ones to pretend they cover new scenarios is disgusting. If torture is allowable, let's not reread the definition of 'people' to be, people who aren't in our protected class, but let's write a whole new torture amendment spelling out exactly when we think it's justified, not on who. Spell it out, admit it conflicts instead of reinterpreting the old.
imho, if you play word games with the constitution you're a lying cheat. And a liar who cheats his whole country seems a lot like a traitor.
Look at it this way. If we'd jumped from 2001/9/11 straight to 2008/01/01 we'd be shocked by the dollar, the world view of the USA, and the big-brother attitude of our country and the legal abuses related. If Dubya had just thrown our money, respect, and right of law away we'd be bloody mad and call him a traitor. So he and a few like him have done it slowly, with lies and doublespeak, and that's not traitorous despite where we are?
I'm "jumping" topics to Bush here, but that's because he openly lies so much. WMDs, no torture policy, etc. Next to him all the activist SC judges pale, especially because with his signing notes he styles himself above their power anyways.
So yes, in general lying about the constitution for your own gain rather than admitting what it does say and working for open honest change strikes me as treason. Less flashy than a gunpowder plot, but more damaging in the end. Especially when it comes from people like SC judges and the president who should know better.
You got me. I advocated the language for general use, so I must brush my teeth with it.
95% of most OSes could be written in Ruby* though, or Python, etc, without much of a slowdown. That'd give you a lot more resources to pour into making sure your network and filesystem code are solid.
* If by OS you mean GNU/Linux, or all of MS Windows. If you only mean the kernel it'd be less.
I'd probably write much of the part that needed to be C in a higher-level language first anyways. I could prototype my filesystem code long before optimizing it for speed. And having a reference implementation in an easy-to-debug language would make testing the C implementation easier.
But requires no extraordinary steps.
The universe is here, I think you'd agree. Well, there too.
That means it had to get here. That's pretty safe.
So you have to admit that it seems strange things could just appear, but that it seems less odd if less things appear, all else being equal.
You say that something spontaneously appeared and made everything else. That posits that something that still come from nothing, but instead of a bunch of matter, that first thing in a supreme being capable of creating a universe.
You're claiming that making rocks is too difficult for the universe to manage so it needed a creator, but that making the creator (much harder than a few rocks) was possible.
My claim is one step, requires a single deduction from current events, and has very little predictive power.
Your claim is two steps, requires deduction, and assumption about the type of things that can spontaneously appear, but still has little predictive power.
There are two ideas on the table, mine shorted, yours longer. They both attempt to describe the same current scenario. Neither offers and predictive power, so neither are theories. Further, yours relies on more assumptions about the nature of creators and universes that I don't think you have.
So, if you aren't claiming divine guidance (and I'd like to see it) you'll have to admit that the nature of a creator (who chooses to use its abilities to remain hidden, obviously) seems untestable.
At that the longer idea, with untestable assumptions, seems weaker.
And my claim is a bit tautological - we're here, that must have happened...
It's funny, I didn't want to belabor my point by making the for-loop too long. I could have hoisted the strlen out but the number of expressions I was having to write to match a .each {} expression was getting out of hand.
:)
I think I proved my point inadvertently as well. C is too complex to use safely as a psuedo-code language.
char x[5] = "foo"
char x[5] = "longer string"
The first is bad form because the second would still compile. It'd probably be zero-terminated, but stomping on your other variables.
Nope, just tested that. It's limited to the declared length, but it's not zero-terminated.
Anyways, that's C - tons of little gotchas, most of which are somewhat platform dependent.
Torture/treason doesn't seem like a huge leap from the discussion of the supreme court finding against a strict constitutional reading. It's constitutional ambiguities, like the meaning of 'people', that people use to justify torture.
As for the history, yes torture has always existed. But in WW2 the USA had a lot of opportunities to torture POWs or kill them like the Japanese and Germans did, but mostly took a higher road. Now torture is specially allowed by order of the president and the government is shipping people overseas to undergo said torture.
It's not even as if we're talking about battle-field torture where you can say that 1) you'd have shot the guy anyways and 2) he might know something of tactical use. This is plain on-going break-your-mind torture, used on subjects that are hardly high-priority information sources.
If nothing else, this is a bad precedent because we don't have any grounds to complain when our soldiers get tortured.
Treason is a word that conjures images of spies handing over nuclear secrets, but I think a weakening of our values is pretty damaging. Considering it's done for political gain, it's a total corrupt sell-out of everyone else...
It's like the second amendment. It's perfectly clear what's intended. If you want to make an argument that times have changed, consider amending the amendment, don't invent lies about what it means. If the constitution was meant to extend protection only to citizens, it would have used the word 'citizens', and landed immigrants would be on their best behavior. But that's not what it said, because that's not that it meant.