Oh my. Whatever shall we do? Someone out there thinks Linux is bad and open source is bad.
Doesn't he know that Windows is worse?
Wow, he is so wrong, he is really stupid. Maybe Micro$oft is bribing him.
We should all post lots of messages on how wrong he is, so everyone who regularly reads slashdot.org will understand that Linux is good and open source is good and Windows is bad and this person is stupid. How else would they know?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...between those, we're looking at what? 40% of the total? Maybe 30%? It's a big chunk, but that's not the main difference.
Promotion does not benefit the end user in any way. It just sticks stuff in your face whether you want it or not. It's a hostile act and if I can avoid paying for it, I will.
Promotion is often a much larger cost than production, too. When things are freely available on the internet, people find the good ones whether someone's spending lots of money pushing them or not. "Promotion" costs, like "distribution" costs, are really control costs. If you give up control, these things take care of themselves.
The internet is as much a more responsive and convenient a distribution system than retail CDs as email is a faster and convenient a way of sending messages than paper mail. With the support of the producers, it would be as convenient as radio with more choice than retail CDs.
So now we're down to production cost. No agents, no "label", no printer, no retailer, nothing. Production costs, hand it off to a fan site, and it's in everybody's home who wants it.
Add in the ability for anybody, anywhere to donate money in various automated, convenient ways, and there's your advantage.
If people are willing to make the donations, they'd only have to pay about 5-20% what they'd pay for CDs. That is the advantage of buskware. More money for producers, less money out of the users' pockets, no money for parasitic middlemen. Everybody who counts is happy, and the others can go do some honest work.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
the cost of music IS real world cost. Tape costs money, studio time costs money, rehearsal space costs money, FOOD costs money.
These are fixed investments producing unlimited copies of music. It is a fundamentally different situation than an investment producing transient performed music which can only be heard by a limited audience. It demands a fundamentally different income model.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Maybe a name more like "Ransom Protocol" would be more appropriate, or "Communal Purchase Protocol".
The Street Performer Protocol has little relation to the operating procedure of street performers (a.k.a. buskers): a price is set and must be matched. Have you ever seen a busker with a sign, "I'm only playing the first half of this song, if there isn't $10 in my hat by the end of the first half, I won't play the second half."? It doesn't fit the analogy at all.
I think it is a badly flawed variant of mass market busking (not to suggest that the idea was derived from it, just that MMB is the more general term).
The flaws?
Well, how do you set the price? You know donations are going to drop right off once one the price is reached; when you explain it in terms of influencing this one single producer, people will think of it in those terms and look for the minimum donation they can get away with (and who knows what price you'll set for the next piece? better to hold some back against future increase). So when you set a target, you also set a limit.
What if you're a runaway success? You can't raise your price and not expect your customers to feel betrayed.
What if your sequel isn't as well-received as the first book, even though it pays well enough that you'd like to keep going? You can't lower the price when you see it's not going to be met, or people won't take you seriously at all.
IMHO, it's far better to just let people pay what they will. If you want to make noises about giving up on the project because you're making too little money, fine, but don't try to set a price target/limit before release. Only someone like Stephen King, who has such a loyal following that he can predict demand, can get away with this kind of thing.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
In then end though, I end up paying the band, the sound person, security, the hall, etc out of my own pocket.
There's your problem. You're talking about a very limited distribution medium (how far does sound carry?) with a real-world cost.
In that situation, you need a certain minimum average donation, and that's what kills the profit model.
There is no motive for the people to donate more. They gain no advantage by encouraging voluntary admission shows if they pay more at each one. If they were willing to pay $30 for the show, they'd rather it be required and not have to fight for elbow-space with the riffraff that crowds in for free. It is against their interests to subsidize the admission of people who pay less.
There is also the problem that there is only one opportunity to donate. If you have a copy of a song, listen to it often, and the option to pay is always there, you are a lot more likely to decide it's worth paying for at a time when you are able to donate.
Paying voluntary admission is "social donation", people pay because they are in a public place and feel obligated to demonstrate that they're not freeloaders. Naturally, they look at it as a problem in how little they can get away with spending (hmm... what's the recommended minimum?).
It's different when you're paying for freely distributed (whether legally or not) music in private and at your own convenience. Then you stop thinking "how little can I get away with spending" and start thinking "how much do I want to spend on keeping this band around"?
Whether this will work out remains to be seen...
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
This idea should work for more than just music.
on
The Virtual Tip Jar
·
· Score: 4
In short, the reason you donate is that it sends a message to the world that there is money to be had in making something you like. You aren't donating primarily to support one specific producer, but to reward, and thus encourage, the behavior of making such products and releasing them for free distribution.
The key to making it work is for each buskware producer to give full public disclosure of how much money they receive, with as much information about which product it was for as is available. This is the payoff for the donor, as other people can look at this and think "Hey! He's making money at it, I should try, too!" (conversely, they are discouraged from following the example of people who don't make an adequate profit).
Music is something of a special case, as most music isn't tailored to a particular audience, and people generally don't seem to prefer that it is, but at the very least you are encouraging musicians to believe that they can distribute their music freely, without signing on with a big label.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
This is what I cooked up to chop the '//' comment off of a line C++ code (taking into account the possibility of '/**/' comments and quoted strings).
sub line_comment{
#Now to handle comments [evil chuckle]...
$_[0]=~/((?:[^'"\/]+|(?:\'(?:\\'|[^'])*\')|(?:\"(? :\\"|[^"])*\")|(?:\/[^\/]))+)(\/\/.+)?/o ;
return ($1, $2);
}
Now, I probably should have used the "/x" modifier and formatted this with comments, but there's just something about regex matching that makes any effort toward improving readability seem wrong.
I do this sort of thing all the time.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Still, I do believe that Python spoils its users with the world's friendliest syntax.
I wish I'd taken another look at Python before writing Cugar. I just realized that, working from memory, I used "sub" for function definition instead of "def". Sloppy. I'll probably change that to match Python (I doubt there are more than a dozen people using Cugar right now, so it shouldn't cause problems).
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I always use hard tabs. In fact, I require them in cugar. Indenting one space further than the previous line means a continuation of a previous line. Indenting more than one space is an error, because it could be misinterpreted as a tab. This forces consistent indentation on all cugar users.
Different people prefer indentations between 2 and 6 spaces (I like 3), why not let them choose? You can always change the tab stops in your editor.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
that one design flaw (making whitespace significant) has kept me from wanting to touch it. It would be okay for the compiler to generate a warning for incorrectly-indented code, but to generate incorrect code instead is simply inexcusable.
I think this is a common poor analysis that reads the situation backwards. In reality, code is almost always indented "correctly" according to what the programmer intended, errors arising from incorrect indentation are generally due to the programmer failing to insert the braces in the correct positions, and thus don't exist in a language like Python. So "to generate incorrect code" due to a formatting error is simply an impossibility, unlike in C.
Whitespace formatting is instantly visible, that's why people indent their code even when it's insignificant. Braces, OTOH, are very hard to keep track of. When the whitespace isn't used by the compiler, that means you're using one technique to give this information to a human reader (including yourself), and another to give the information to the compiler: a sure recipe for errors.
How often have you seen C bugs due to missed semicolons and braces? Part of this
if(x==y)
doxeqy();
Then you realize you had to do more for that condition:
Sure, they're goofy mistakes, people make them all the time! Human minds are terrible at diligence tasks (when they have to remember to do something and nobody is reminding them to do it). Of course you're going to forget to put in braces sometimes! Why not design the language so your first impression is always right?
In practice nobody ever fobs up a Python script with something like:
if a=b:
if c=d: do_aeqb_and_ceqd1()
do_aeqb_and_ceqd2()
It's immediately apparent from the indentation that the second function call is in the "if a=b" block, not the "if c=d" block.
However, I do think that pushing Python as a teaching language is a terrible mistake. Since it does things like treat "=" as comparison in conditionals and assignment in statements, as well as the whole whitespace formatting thing, it totally spoils you for writing in things like C and Perl. Even experienced C programmers often forget things like semicolons and mix up comparison and assignment, people moving from Python to C just have a terrible time.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
What do people cling to C's hideous syntax when they write a new language? Not only is it, IMHO, a bad syntax choice, but it messes you up when you go to learn it and you expect things to work like they did in C.
I wrote a C/C++ preprocessor that lets you use Python-style whitespace-significant code, called Cugar to escape the ugliness of C. I just don't understand why people keep pushing back toward it.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It's great, I usually run about 10 virtual screens and it doesn't use up any screen real-estate on any of them. My Netscape window is sized right up to 1024X768, and wmx doesn't take any of it for junk it decides I need.
Just the thing for running a 16 copies of gvim (Graphical VI iMproved, for those who don't know), 10 xterms and having a half-dozen Netscape windows open on a 14" monitor (yeah, I'm a cheapskate, honestly I don't see much need for a bigger one with this setup). It is truly the ultimate development environment.
My one nitpick: I've got to get around to hacking on it a bit so when I start up a full-screen sized window, I don't have to manually center it so the tab is offscreen. Luckily, the source is small and quite hackable, so it should be fairly easy. I might also get rid of some of the shaped window stuff I'm sure is slowing it down a bit.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
If you want everybody in a company to be doing what B.G. Roller at the top wants, you need a hierarchy of middle management to keep an eye on everybody and see what they are doing.
Don't forget that a corporation has the purpose of gathering all profit to one point. This requires that hierarchy of watchdogs to make sure all the profit keeps flowing uphill. People steal. Most of them, given the chance, will skim from the profits (or worse yet, fake crises and steal directly from the investment capital).
This is the diseconomy of scale: the cost of policing the workforce, then policing the police, etc. The larger the scale, the taller the pyramid, the higher the police:worker ratio.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
All the more reason to leave the planet. There's no practical end to the uranium and deuterium easily available in the solar system.
We aren't even seriously exploiting the potential for fission generation on this planet. We could generate electricity so cheaply it wouldn't even be worth metering the stuff for household use. Instead, we tie up the process with absurd amounts of red tape, make policies based on a layman's understanding of nuclear fission (i.e. a healthy mix of voodoo and pure nonsense), and don't let our engineers get any real practice building nuclear reactors, then complain that it's not as cheap as it they claimed it could be.
Humans aren't reaching for the stars, they're being squeezed out among them. Exponential population growth reaches any fixed limit eventually, and while we could probably support over a trillion humans on this planet, fights for breathing space would limit the population long before that.
Seriously, though, wood?! That isn't even an actually relevant commodity, just a sentimental hang-up and a building-material and fuel of desperation for the outcastes of the world economy. As well talk about the disturbingly short supply of draft-horses.
As for oil, we've got plenty left (assuming that there even is a limited supply; we just seem to keep finding more the harder we look and now there's a serious theory floating around that it is a natural geological occurance like rocks and is in no way a "fossil fuel" nor is it, in any practical sense, finite), and we just use it out of laziness. We'll have no trouble switching to alternate energy sources and synthesizing what we need if we're pushed to it.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Of course, you can sue anyone for anything, and of course, you can be punished for suing someone for something utterly baseless. The number of lawyers who get disbarred is just more evidence of how you don't need any justification to initiate a lawsuit.
Those of us who have been plaintiffs know that it's already hard enough to win a judgement when you are totally in the right.
If you look a bit harder, you realize the reason for that is that being totally in the right is often only one relatively minor playing piece. It's usually enough to tip the balance when both sides can hire nearly equally good lawyers and have equally suitable clients (a client who is a talented deceiver is worth a whole team of $1000/hour lawyers), and occasionally there's enough evidence that only an incompetent lawyer could lose. However, the law is so absurdly complicated and poorly worded that often a good lawyer can bring up any number of technicalities and inexplicable precedents which only an equally good lawyer can counter. If you throw a jury into the mix (an average group of people with typically weak logic and ignorance of the law, who are then told to put aside their common sense and decide purely on legal issues), there's no telling what will happen; they aren't even held accountable for their decision.
It seems to me that it is quite common for both corporations and individuals to threaten lawsuits that have no real legal basis, and not unheard-of for them to win despite this. The cure is not to make it harder and more dangerous to sue (as you seem to be protesting the suggestion of such), but to simplify and clarify the whole body of law and let lawyers argue the uncertainty of the facts rather than the uncertainty of the laws. Of course, this isn't going to happen any time soon.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
On the other hand, if the website was directly profitting from those pictures (i.e. selling the pictures themselves) I think they could be in trouble (I don't think that happened though).
That has nothing to do with anything. The basic criterion for fair use of a portion of a copyrighted product is that the sample is sufficiently small that it doesn't serve as a replacement for the product it is taken from.
This would seem to suggest that these websites have no right to copy the entire picture. However, the pictures in question haven't been treated as products by Apple, but rather as speech. They use them to tell the world what their product looks like, not to sell for profit as a product on their own. That makes any sort of copyright protection practically impossible to enforce.
Copyright protection is based on commercial value. Basically, you can only sue someone for your losses. If you try to sue someone for distributing publicity shots that are publicly available from your website, you'll probably end up paying their legal costs for malicious litigation.
While, technically, any copyright violation like this is a tort, when no damage is done to the commercial value of the copyrighted work itself, successful litigation is impossible (this is part of why the GPL is legally questionable; since the copyright holder doesn't gain any unique profit to himself, it could be argued that no damage could be caused and thus no grounds for financial restitution could ever be found due to noncompliance with GPL terms, so anything under the GPL is effectively in the public domain).
So this could perhaps be called "back door" fair use: it is allowed because copyright was never designed to protect this kind of thing, so the mechanisms of enforcement don't work, not because specific exceptions for it were written into copyright law.
(IANAL)
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
What's the number one most hated thing about Lisp? Five million parentheses per line. Compare Forth, with zero parentheses per line (unless you want to write comments).
Postfix is great. It simplifies everything into a sequence of simple actions. Push number, push number, add top 2 numbers on stack; as Chuck Moore says, it's so simple it should be taught to kids after counting and before long division. It is programming the way real computers work, basically the world's best macro processor for assembly language.
Forth is known for encouraging highly compact and efficient code, because it's basically super assembly language. Lisp is known for encouraging "elegant" inefficient code, because its design is not based on the way computers work at all, but rather on the lambda calculus, a theoretical construct of expression simplification. Even working things like numbers into the lambda calculus involves hideous kludges. Writing efficient code in Lisp means using the theoretically kludged in (but computationally simple and efficient) imperative features and C-style looping constructs, and thereby losing any reason you had for touching Lisp in the first place.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I can understand "celebrating and memorializing his life", if you're a big fan of his work, but most of what I see here is a collection of "curlish comments".
Most of the on-topic posts here can be summed up as one of:
1) This is sad.
2) Obi Wan was struck down, and has become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
3) He hated Star Wars, stop calling him Obi Wan!
4) He also acted in Bridge on the River Kwai.
5) This isn't News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters.
Just the kind of crap you'd expect from/. when there's nothing technical to discuss. Nobody is going to write a worthy memorial here, and nobody's going to put up any information you can't find with google in 3 minutes. Just gossip, bad jokes, and arguments over whether this should have been posted in the first place.
He just has too little relevance to the general population of/. to be worth mentioning. 98% of slashdotters said "Who? Oh, Obi Wan." You think he would have wanted to be remembered that way?
Besides, it's not as if we wouldn't have heard of this except on/. , it's all over the news. That's why this is "News for Nerds", it's supposed to be stuff you won't hear every 20 minutes on CNN.
In summary: lousy discussion topic, news we heard anyway. What makes a worse/. story?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I, actually, am not saddened by his death. Many thousands of people die every day, and I'm not particularly moved by the passing of some guy who once participated in making a product I liked. Probably dozens of such people die every day. Unlike many of the people dying every day, this one had a good full life. What more can you ask for than to be rich and famous and live to a ripe old age? (well, I'm sure many of us would like to become the immortal overlord of all the universe, but probably only one of us will)
There are a lot of good stories that get passed up, but this one goes up so we can wallow in the death of a stranger? Now that makes me sad.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
IMHO, going after Napster was wrong, because it isn't Napster that was sharing the copyrighted files, they only provide a service which happens to be used for illegal purposes often.
But Sega is suing the actual people who are illegally copying their copyrighted materials. This is unquestionably within their legal rights. As a business, it is right and proper that they should keep others from making unauthorized copies. You can argue that they aren't making any money from it now, but who is to say that they won't be selling legal copies of game ROMs in the near future? Whoever owns the Intellivision system now did just that fairly recently.
However, regardless of what is right for them to do, the copyright protection of older ROMs is clearly not supplying a significant motivation for them to create new materials (which is why we're supposed to be tolerating copyright in the first place). I think we should all speak out loudly and often in favor of shortening copyright terms to 5 years. If a copyrighted product isn't going to pay enough to justify its production within 5 years, it isn't going to be made for profit (in other words, nobody makes a game or movie because they'll be able to sell it in a "classic collection" ten years later). When copyrights were first made they had a short term: I think around 20 years or so. Since then, publishing moves much, much faster, though constant lobbying from the publishing industries have increased the term by an absurd amount (of course they're always going to want more! who turns away profits? that doesn't mean it's good for the rest of us). Most profits from video games are made in the first few weeks after release, ditto for movies, and even most novels probably pass their peak sales within a year of their release.
It managed to creep up slowly, because it's hard to raise a passionate public opposition to a 10% increase in copyright term. In the past, very few people were capable of making copies, and most of them had a vested interest in longer copyright terms. Well, now we are just beginning to all be able to make perfect copies, and most of us have a vested interest in shorter terms. Now, a five-year old movie, book, or game is a historical artifact and a part of our cultural heritage that should be free to share and preserve, just like a 200-year old book or painting.
I think if we make a loud enough noise about it (not here, of course), we can stir up widespread support.
Businesses should be expected to follow their own best interests. However, the voting public should also follow their own best interests, and limit intellectual property for their own benefit.
And, of course, all of these arguments go double for software. Nobody will decide not to write software just because it'll go into the public domain in 5 years.
OT question: does anyone know the basis for merchandising monopolies? How the heck does copyright on videos featuring a certain purple dinosaur translate to a monopoly on stuffed purple dinosaurs that look similar to the one in the video?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Slashdot Mirror
NT stands for No Turnips
There are no turnips in this post.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Oh my. Whatever shall we do? Someone out there thinks Linux is bad and open source is bad.
Doesn't he know that Windows is worse?
Wow, he is so wrong, he is really stupid. Maybe Micro$oft is bribing him.
We should all post lots of messages on how wrong he is, so everyone who regularly reads slashdot.org will understand that Linux is good and open source is good and Windows is bad and this person is stupid. How else would they know?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...between those, we're looking at what? 40% of the total? Maybe 30%? It's a big chunk, but that's not the main difference.
Promotion does not benefit the end user in any way. It just sticks stuff in your face whether you want it or not. It's a hostile act and if I can avoid paying for it, I will.
Promotion is often a much larger cost than production, too. When things are freely available on the internet, people find the good ones whether someone's spending lots of money pushing them or not. "Promotion" costs, like "distribution" costs, are really control costs. If you give up control, these things take care of themselves.
The internet is as much a more responsive and convenient a distribution system than retail CDs as email is a faster and convenient a way of sending messages than paper mail. With the support of the producers, it would be as convenient as radio with more choice than retail CDs.
So now we're down to production cost. No agents, no "label", no printer, no retailer, nothing. Production costs, hand it off to a fan site, and it's in everybody's home who wants it.
Add in the ability for anybody, anywhere to donate money in various automated, convenient ways, and there's your advantage.
If people are willing to make the donations, they'd only have to pay about 5-20% what they'd pay for CDs. That is the advantage of buskware. More money for producers, less money out of the users' pockets, no money for parasitic middlemen. Everybody who counts is happy, and the others can go do some honest work.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Donating not only supports the producers things you like, enabling them to produce more, it encourages others to produce things you like in the hopes of getting your future donations.
the cost of music IS real world cost. Tape costs money, studio time costs money, rehearsal space costs money, FOOD costs money.
These are fixed investments producing unlimited copies of music. It is a fundamentally different situation than an investment producing transient performed music which can only be heard by a limited audience. It demands a fundamentally different income model.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Maybe a name more like "Ransom Protocol" would be more appropriate, or "Communal Purchase Protocol".
The Street Performer Protocol has little relation to the operating procedure of street performers (a.k.a. buskers): a price is set and must be matched. Have you ever seen a busker with a sign, "I'm only playing the first half of this song, if there isn't $10 in my hat by the end of the first half, I won't play the second half."? It doesn't fit the analogy at all.
I think it is a badly flawed variant of mass market busking (not to suggest that the idea was derived from it, just that MMB is the more general term).
The flaws?
Well, how do you set the price? You know donations are going to drop right off once one the price is reached; when you explain it in terms of influencing this one single producer, people will think of it in those terms and look for the minimum donation they can get away with (and who knows what price you'll set for the next piece? better to hold some back against future increase). So when you set a target, you also set a limit.
What if you're a runaway success? You can't raise your price and not expect your customers to feel betrayed.
What if your sequel isn't as well-received as the first book, even though it pays well enough that you'd like to keep going? You can't lower the price when you see it's not going to be met, or people won't take you seriously at all.
IMHO, it's far better to just let people pay what they will. If you want to make noises about giving up on the project because you're making too little money, fine, but don't try to set a price target/limit before release. Only someone like Stephen King, who has such a loyal following that he can predict demand, can get away with this kind of thing.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
In then end though, I end up paying the band, the sound person, security, the hall, etc out of my own pocket.
There's your problem. You're talking about a very limited distribution medium (how far does sound carry?) with a real-world cost.
In that situation, you need a certain minimum average donation, and that's what kills the profit model.
There is no motive for the people to donate more. They gain no advantage by encouraging voluntary admission shows if they pay more at each one. If they were willing to pay $30 for the show, they'd rather it be required and not have to fight for elbow-space with the riffraff that crowds in for free. It is against their interests to subsidize the admission of people who pay less.
There is also the problem that there is only one opportunity to donate. If you have a copy of a song, listen to it often, and the option to pay is always there, you are a lot more likely to decide it's worth paying for at a time when you are able to donate.
Paying voluntary admission is "social donation", people pay because they are in a public place and feel obligated to demonstrate that they're not freeloaders. Naturally, they look at it as a problem in how little they can get away with spending (hmm... what's the recommended minimum?).
It's different when you're paying for freely distributed (whether legally or not) music in private and at your own convenience. Then you stop thinking "how little can I get away with spending" and start thinking "how much do I want to spend on keeping this band around"?
Whether this will work out remains to be seen...
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I wrote an essay on why I think this is a viable economic model for all IP based on the self-interest of the donor. Personally, I like to call the general concept "mass-market busking" and any such freely-redistributable product "buskware".
In short, the reason you donate is that it sends a message to the world that there is money to be had in making something you like. You aren't donating primarily to support one specific producer, but to reward, and thus encourage, the behavior of making such products and releasing them for free distribution.
The key to making it work is for each buskware producer to give full public disclosure of how much money they receive, with as much information about which product it was for as is available. This is the payoff for the donor, as other people can look at this and think "Hey! He's making money at it, I should try, too!" (conversely, they are discouraged from following the example of people who don't make an adequate profit).
Music is something of a special case, as most music isn't tailored to a particular audience, and people generally don't seem to prefer that it is, but at the very least you are encouraging musicians to believe that they can distribute their music freely, without signing on with a big label.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
This is what I cooked up to chop the '//' comment off of a line C++ code (taking into account the possibility of '/**/' comments and quoted strings).
? :\\"|[^"])*\")|(?:\/[^\/]))+)(\/\/.+)?/o ;
sub line_comment{
#Now to handle comments [evil chuckle]...
$_[0]=~/((?:[^'"\/]+|(?:\'(?:\\'|[^'])*\')|(?:\"(
return ($1, $2);
}
Now, I probably should have used the "/x" modifier and formatted this with comments, but there's just something about regex matching that makes any effort toward improving readability seem wrong.
I do this sort of thing all the time.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
It was not put there to save you from embarassment.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Not combinatorial DNA-in-a-vat survival-of-the-correctest computing, DNA framework construction of molecular computers that work like silicon ones.
THWAPP!!
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I have far more karma than a turnip should have.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
True enough. I haven't used Python in a while.
Still, I do believe that Python spoils its users with the world's friendliest syntax.
I wish I'd taken another look at Python before writing Cugar. I just realized that, working from memory, I used "sub" for function definition instead of "def". Sloppy. I'll probably change that to match Python (I doubt there are more than a dozen people using Cugar right now, so it shouldn't cause problems).
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I always use hard tabs. In fact, I require them in cugar. Indenting one space further than the previous line means a continuation of a previous line. Indenting more than one space is an error, because it could be misinterpreted as a tab. This forces consistent indentation on all cugar users.
Different people prefer indentations between 2 and 6 spaces (I like 3), why not let them choose? You can always change the tab stops in your editor.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
"Microsoft write a stupid Java clone"
So "C#" should be pronounced, "See Microsoft write a stupid Java clone"
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
that one design flaw (making whitespace significant) has kept me from wanting to touch it. It would be okay for the compiler to generate a warning for incorrectly-indented code, but to generate incorrect code instead is simply inexcusable.
/*d'oh!*/
I think this is a common poor analysis that reads the situation backwards. In reality, code is almost always indented "correctly" according to what the programmer intended, errors arising from incorrect indentation are generally due to the programmer failing to insert the braces in the correct positions, and thus don't exist in a language like Python. So "to generate incorrect code" due to a formatting error is simply an impossibility, unlike in C.
Whitespace formatting is instantly visible, that's why people indent their code even when it's insignificant. Braces, OTOH, are very hard to keep track of. When the whitespace isn't used by the compiler, that means you're using one technique to give this information to a human reader (including yourself), and another to give the information to the compiler: a sure recipe for errors.
How often have you seen C bugs due to missed semicolons and braces? Part of this
if(x==y)
doxeqy();
Then you realize you had to do more for that condition:
if(x==y)
doxeqy();
doyeqx();
Whoops! It looks okay, but of course it's not.
Or how about this classic mistake?
if(x==y)
if(t==u){
doxyandtu();
doxyandtu2();
doxyandtu3();
}
else{
donotxy();
}
Hmm... looks okay, compiles fine...
Sure, they're goofy mistakes, people make them all the time! Human minds are terrible at diligence tasks (when they have to remember to do something and nobody is reminding them to do it). Of course you're going to forget to put in braces sometimes! Why not design the language so your first impression is always right?
In practice nobody ever fobs up a Python script with something like:
if a=b:
if c=d: do_aeqb_and_ceqd1()
do_aeqb_and_ceqd2()
It's immediately apparent from the indentation that the second function call is in the "if a=b" block, not the "if c=d" block.
However, I do think that pushing Python as a teaching language is a terrible mistake. Since it does things like treat "=" as comparison in conditionals and assignment in statements, as well as the whole whitespace formatting thing, it totally spoils you for writing in things like C and Perl. Even experienced C programmers often forget things like semicolons and mix up comparison and assignment, people moving from Python to C just have a terrible time.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
What do people cling to C's hideous syntax when they write a new language? Not only is it, IMHO, a bad syntax choice, but it messes you up when you go to learn it and you expect things to work like they did in C.
I wrote a C/C++ preprocessor that lets you use Python-style whitespace-significant code, called Cugar to escape the ugliness of C. I just don't understand why people keep pushing back toward it.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
wmx
It's great, I usually run about 10 virtual screens and it doesn't use up any screen real-estate on any of them. My Netscape window is sized right up to 1024X768, and wmx doesn't take any of it for junk it decides I need.
Just the thing for running a 16 copies of gvim (Graphical VI iMproved, for those who don't know), 10 xterms and having a half-dozen Netscape windows open on a 14" monitor (yeah, I'm a cheapskate, honestly I don't see much need for a bigger one with this setup). It is truly the ultimate development environment.
My one nitpick: I've got to get around to hacking on it a bit so when I start up a full-screen sized window, I don't have to manually center it so the tab is offscreen. Luckily, the source is small and quite hackable, so it should be fairly easy. I might also get rid of some of the shaped window stuff I'm sure is slowing it down a bit.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Why? In a word: "fraud".
If you want everybody in a company to be doing what B.G. Roller at the top wants, you need a hierarchy of middle management to keep an eye on everybody and see what they are doing.
Don't forget that a corporation has the purpose of gathering all profit to one point. This requires that hierarchy of watchdogs to make sure all the profit keeps flowing uphill. People steal. Most of them, given the chance, will skim from the profits (or worse yet, fake crises and steal directly from the investment capital).
This is the diseconomy of scale: the cost of policing the workforce, then policing the police, etc. The larger the scale, the taller the pyramid, the higher the police:worker ratio.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
All the more reason to leave the planet. There's no practical end to the uranium and deuterium easily available in the solar system.
We aren't even seriously exploiting the potential for fission generation on this planet. We could generate electricity so cheaply it wouldn't even be worth metering the stuff for household use. Instead, we tie up the process with absurd amounts of red tape, make policies based on a layman's understanding of nuclear fission (i.e. a healthy mix of voodoo and pure nonsense), and don't let our engineers get any real practice building nuclear reactors, then complain that it's not as cheap as it they claimed it could be.
Humans aren't reaching for the stars, they're being squeezed out among them. Exponential population growth reaches any fixed limit eventually, and while we could probably support over a trillion humans on this planet, fights for breathing space would limit the population long before that.
Seriously, though, wood?! That isn't even an actually relevant commodity, just a sentimental hang-up and a building-material and fuel of desperation for the outcastes of the world economy. As well talk about the disturbingly short supply of draft-horses.
As for oil, we've got plenty left (assuming that there even is a limited supply; we just seem to keep finding more the harder we look and now there's a serious theory floating around that it is a natural geological occurance like rocks and is in no way a "fossil fuel" nor is it, in any practical sense, finite), and we just use it out of laziness. We'll have no trouble switching to alternate energy sources and synthesizing what we need if we're pushed to it.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Of course, you can sue anyone for anything, and of course, you can be punished for suing someone for something utterly baseless. The number of lawyers who get disbarred is just more evidence of how you don't need any justification to initiate a lawsuit.
Those of us who have been plaintiffs know that it's already hard enough to win a judgement when you are totally in the right.
If you look a bit harder, you realize the reason for that is that being totally in the right is often only one relatively minor playing piece. It's usually enough to tip the balance when both sides can hire nearly equally good lawyers and have equally suitable clients (a client who is a talented deceiver is worth a whole team of $1000/hour lawyers), and occasionally there's enough evidence that only an incompetent lawyer could lose. However, the law is so absurdly complicated and poorly worded that often a good lawyer can bring up any number of technicalities and inexplicable precedents which only an equally good lawyer can counter. If you throw a jury into the mix (an average group of people with typically weak logic and ignorance of the law, who are then told to put aside their common sense and decide purely on legal issues), there's no telling what will happen; they aren't even held accountable for their decision.
It seems to me that it is quite common for both corporations and individuals to threaten lawsuits that have no real legal basis, and not unheard-of for them to win despite this. The cure is not to make it harder and more dangerous to sue (as you seem to be protesting the suggestion of such), but to simplify and clarify the whole body of law and let lawyers argue the uncertainty of the facts rather than the uncertainty of the laws. Of course, this isn't going to happen any time soon.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
On the other hand, if the website was directly profitting from those pictures (i.e. selling the pictures themselves) I think they could be in trouble (I don't think that happened though).
That has nothing to do with anything. The basic criterion for fair use of a portion of a copyrighted product is that the sample is sufficiently small that it doesn't serve as a replacement for the product it is taken from.
This would seem to suggest that these websites have no right to copy the entire picture. However, the pictures in question haven't been treated as products by Apple, but rather as speech. They use them to tell the world what their product looks like, not to sell for profit as a product on their own. That makes any sort of copyright protection practically impossible to enforce.
Copyright protection is based on commercial value. Basically, you can only sue someone for your losses. If you try to sue someone for distributing publicity shots that are publicly available from your website, you'll probably end up paying their legal costs for malicious litigation.
While, technically, any copyright violation like this is a tort, when no damage is done to the commercial value of the copyrighted work itself, successful litigation is impossible (this is part of why the GPL is legally questionable; since the copyright holder doesn't gain any unique profit to himself, it could be argued that no damage could be caused and thus no grounds for financial restitution could ever be found due to noncompliance with GPL terms, so anything under the GPL is effectively in the public domain).
So this could perhaps be called "back door" fair use: it is allowed because copyright was never designed to protect this kind of thing, so the mechanisms of enforcement don't work, not because specific exceptions for it were written into copyright law.
(IANAL)
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
What's the number one most hated thing about Lisp? Five million parentheses per line. Compare Forth, with zero parentheses per line (unless you want to write comments).
Postfix is great. It simplifies everything into a sequence of simple actions. Push number, push number, add top 2 numbers on stack; as Chuck Moore says, it's so simple it should be taught to kids after counting and before long division. It is programming the way real computers work, basically the world's best macro processor for assembly language.
Forth is known for encouraging highly compact and efficient code, because it's basically super assembly language. Lisp is known for encouraging "elegant" inefficient code, because its design is not based on the way computers work at all, but rather on the lambda calculus, a theoretical construct of expression simplification. Even working things like numbers into the lambda calculus involves hideous kludges. Writing efficient code in Lisp means using the theoretically kludged in (but computationally simple and efficient) imperative features and C-style looping constructs, and thereby losing any reason you had for touching Lisp in the first place.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I can understand "celebrating and memorializing his life", if you're a big fan of his work, but most of what I see here is a collection of "curlish comments".
/. when there's nothing technical to discuss. Nobody is going to write a worthy memorial here, and nobody's going to put up any information you can't find with google in 3 minutes. Just gossip, bad jokes, and arguments over whether this should have been posted in the first place.
/. to be worth mentioning. 98% of slashdotters said "Who? Oh, Obi Wan." You think he would have wanted to be remembered that way?
/. , it's all over the news. That's why this is "News for Nerds", it's supposed to be stuff you won't hear every 20 minutes on CNN.
/. story?
Most of the on-topic posts here can be summed up as one of:
1) This is sad.
2) Obi Wan was struck down, and has become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
3) He hated Star Wars, stop calling him Obi Wan!
4) He also acted in Bridge on the River Kwai.
5) This isn't News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters.
Just the kind of crap you'd expect from
He just has too little relevance to the general population of
Besides, it's not as if we wouldn't have heard of this except on
In summary: lousy discussion topic, news we heard anyway. What makes a worse
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I, actually, am not saddened by his death. Many thousands of people die every day, and I'm not particularly moved by the passing of some guy who once participated in making a product I liked. Probably dozens of such people die every day. Unlike many of the people dying every day, this one had a good full life. What more can you ask for than to be rich and famous and live to a ripe old age? (well, I'm sure many of us would like to become the immortal overlord of all the universe, but probably only one of us will)
There are a lot of good stories that get passed up, but this one goes up so we can wallow in the death of a stranger? Now that makes me sad.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
IMHO, going after Napster was wrong, because it isn't Napster that was sharing the copyrighted files, they only provide a service which happens to be used for illegal purposes often.
But Sega is suing the actual people who are illegally copying their copyrighted materials. This is unquestionably within their legal rights. As a business, it is right and proper that they should keep others from making unauthorized copies. You can argue that they aren't making any money from it now, but who is to say that they won't be selling legal copies of game ROMs in the near future? Whoever owns the Intellivision system now did just that fairly recently.
However, regardless of what is right for them to do, the copyright protection of older ROMs is clearly not supplying a significant motivation for them to create new materials (which is why we're supposed to be tolerating copyright in the first place). I think we should all speak out loudly and often in favor of shortening copyright terms to 5 years. If a copyrighted product isn't going to pay enough to justify its production within 5 years, it isn't going to be made for profit (in other words, nobody makes a game or movie because they'll be able to sell it in a "classic collection" ten years later). When copyrights were first made they had a short term: I think around 20 years or so. Since then, publishing moves much, much faster, though constant lobbying from the publishing industries have increased the term by an absurd amount (of course they're always going to want more! who turns away profits? that doesn't mean it's good for the rest of us). Most profits from video games are made in the first few weeks after release, ditto for movies, and even most novels probably pass their peak sales within a year of their release.
It managed to creep up slowly, because it's hard to raise a passionate public opposition to a 10% increase in copyright term. In the past, very few people were capable of making copies, and most of them had a vested interest in longer copyright terms. Well, now we are just beginning to all be able to make perfect copies, and most of us have a vested interest in shorter terms. Now, a five-year old movie, book, or game is a historical artifact and a part of our cultural heritage that should be free to share and preserve, just like a 200-year old book or painting.
I think if we make a loud enough noise about it (not here, of course), we can stir up widespread support.
Businesses should be expected to follow their own best interests. However, the voting public should also follow their own best interests, and limit intellectual property for their own benefit.
And, of course, all of these arguments go double for software. Nobody will decide not to write software just because it'll go into the public domain in 5 years.
OT question: does anyone know the basis for merchandising monopolies? How the heck does copyright on videos featuring a certain purple dinosaur translate to a monopoly on stuffed purple dinosaurs that look similar to the one in the video?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.