OK, whatever. You're just ignorant on this issue, I don't feel a need to educate you or try to get you to change your mind. Comics as a medium are not unilaterally pieces of disposable junk; if you want to think that, oh well.
Oh, and some graffiti artists are also quite impressive and very creative. Some of them also have had a great deal of commercial success, including an artist who ended up being recruited by the very companies whose billboards he was "defacing", because they liked his work (wish I could find a cite, it was a good article but I read it way too long ago).
Monster trucks and jingles, maybe those can't be redeemed. Some stuff really is all crap, not just 90% crap.
"overbearing pride evidenced by a superior manner toward inferiors"
I've never seen that in Stallman, in person or in writing (and I've met him on a couple occasions at various appearances he has made). He's a stubborn cuss, and has great difficulty seeing things from another perspective, and but he doesn't seem prideful or one to look down on others.
When I think of arrogance, I think of Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons":-)
It's not arrogance when you actually are a brilliant and skilled creator in your field. Alan Moore is, in his medium, probably the best living writer. Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis are good, but they also split their focus a bit in other mediums. Alan Moore has, for over 25 years, consistently produced the best work in comics. In that same period, he's also gotten screwed over many times by publishers going back on their word. DC (owned by Time Warner)in particular has time and time again done things he feels are breaches of their "good word", not to mention outright breaches of contract. I get the sense Alan is a man of his word, and gets particularly peeved when he doesn't get the same respect in return. People of high standards and not a small bit of genius often tend to be a bit short-tempered when they feel disrespected.
Oh, and "COMIC BOOKS" are real books nowadays, you know. Go to a bookstore sometime, they probably have several shelves full of highly respected works of graphic fiction... not to mention some very fun works of complete escapist fluff too.
Presumably if the owner gets hit by a bus, a lot of WTF? is going to go down. I assume he's mission critical because, for all we know, it's him and maybe 2 other people working for the company. I've been there, you really can't have redundancies when it's just less than 10 of you trying to make this company work.
Slow? I hardly ever find Java slow. Is the VM slow to start up? Yes... but that really doesn't matter in most contexts where you would use it (i.e., a Web application that starts up once, then runs).
In general, Java is very fast.
That having been said, Perl is quite portable, and runs decently fast under something like mod_perl, where (once again) you incur the overhead of startup once, then the code runs many times.
I wish people would stop bringing up the speed of Java, then point to applets. Very few people use applets at all these days, Flash is becoming more attractive for many of those sorts of things and is darn faster. Even Java desktop applications seem plenty zippy to me most of the time (although in some, like JBuilder, I can totally tell when garbage collection is taking place, I get freezes of the interface at times like that... something is a little wonky in how that app is written).
I believe the difference is, while the administration would like to be able to do all of these things, and does get away with most of this stuff unopposed, the system is not designed to uphold this. The problem isn't the American governmental structure (well, not yet, they haven't wiped their ass with the Consitutition just yet), it is that people are basically allowing them to get away with this. Not out of fear of reprisals (which would enforce the totalitarian assertion), but out of sheer neglect. The country is not being taken away from people's control, they are freely giving it away.
Despite the probable dirty tricks in the last election, it was a free election. We didn't have people staying away from the polls because they feared being shot by the opposition. We didn't have people being strong-armed into voting for the "one party". Truthfully, it was a close election. Bush very well could have gotten voted out, and if he had gotten voted out, Kerry would have become president, and policies and politics would have changed. I somehow doubt we would have seen Bush declare a coup and surround the capital with tanks refusing to cede power. Such a scenario seems pretty plausible in a truly totalitarian regime.
We're not in an ideal situation right now by any means, but let's not cheapen things by saying "OMG! We live in Nazi Germany!" or claiming the republic has fallen. If we think like that, then people are going to become even more apathetic.
Much better to take a real look at things and figure out how to avoid letting things get that bad (because, sure, things could get that bad if people don't wake up). The US could change things if people gave a shit and wanted something different out of their government.
What does it do that is so unique? I guess I just don't see the niche it fills that is so wonderful. Java isn't the most awesome language in the world, but it seems to do pretty well in terms of being the cross-platform (even cross-language) VM. C/C++ are the "powerhouse" languages.
And Lisp, of course, is the language everyone else borrows from poorly.
Well, we don't have to, but some of us think it's damn funny...
I'm sorry, but Mormonism? Amongst the flakiest of the flaky religions. The very founding of it was mocked on South Park, for G_d's sake! When animated foul-mouthed kids are making fun of you, and it actually seems like a cogent analysis and critique, you just might have a problem.
It's just a basic fact, Mormons are funny.:-P
Jehovah Witnesses are kind of strange too, but at least they don't basically own a state of their own and rule it like a theocracy. That's probably a large part of what annoys me, because otherwise I just might like Utah.
...that's not going to help you, it's just going to make the compiler not complain.
I actually make it a point to put in a comment like "// do nothing, this is OK" when I do something like that, so it's clear to the next programmer that I meant to just shut up the compiler, and I've either got a case that I know doesn't matter or cannot happen because of other constraints.
I think most people at least make an effort to privately contact the vendor first and give them a lead on any public disclosures. That's considered to be polite, even if you just give them a heads-up and 24 hours notice.
> By the by, do you really believe non-living chemicals learnt to walk and talk all by themselves?
Yes, I do. Absolutely. Not just based on pure faith, but based on solid theories and quite a few experiments that seem to show this is quite possible (given very long periods of time). It's a good explanation for what we see around us, and it's useful for future expansion and learning. So, for me, that works.
Note that this doesn't say anything about God or !God. I reserve my opinion on that for myself.
I found lots of interesting reading material via BitTorrent, including comic scans that I had zero interest in and would never have bought, but enjoyed because they were essential "free" to me.
I don't defend that position, rationalize it, or claim I'm "right". I just say that, yep, that's what I did. Just like I've download plenty of MP3's in my day too (although, interestingly enough, not so much anymore - I guess I like having the actual CDs, or more and more I just buy music via MPeria)
I think we all have to face up to the fact that people are doing stuff like this, they're liking it, and it doesn't seem likely to stop anytime soon. No possible solution can be reached without that realization.
Saying "well, they hosted torrents for legitimate stuff too!" is like saying "well, John Gotti bought cookies from the Girl Scouts!". A very minor 'good thing' doesn't really excuse the fact that the sites really were engaging in fairly widespread piracy. I saw commercial software posted there every day... as much as I despise the MPAA and RIAA, I can understand that at the most basic level, they do have legitimate complaints.
Is this the best use of their time and resources? Well, no, obviously not. The real pirates are a much bigger danger to their bottom line, and are much more clearly "real" criminals. However, I can't really muster up much in the way of a defense of the right for SuperNova.org or other sites to do what they did.
Too bad, though, I did find lots of "grey" stuff there of interest - scans of old comic books in particular (the only loss of commerce there being perhaps to my local comics store's back issue sales, but I support them with plenty of my income as it is, I doubt they would complain much).
I think no one does it because that approach isn't fun or interesting. Plenty of games have tried other approaches, of varying complexities. I've never liked any of them.
I do like location-based damage systems, and I do think wounds to certain locations should result in certain penalties, but I'd prefer to keep it very simple.
Top Secret SI was a good compromise system... you had 10 locations (2 arms, 2 legs, head, 2 chest, 1 abdomen, 2 hands) and equal hit points in each. Loss of all points in the 4 critical areas was basically incapitation, and I think loss of 2x the points was death. In arms, legs, and hands 1x was incapitation of the limb, 2x was amputation. Roll a d10 for the location an attack hits, or you could also do called shots at a penalty.
I'd use a system like that, I guess. Of course, most of the time now, my sessions are pretty combat-lite, so I don't really sweat the details.
I not only know it from inference, I've seen it, at very high levels at a former employer. I was told once not to question how a particular document was obtained, but to read it and figure out a counter-strategy before product X came to market.
So yeah, the original poster is dead wrong. Corporate espionage is very real, although usually it's done through much more mundane things - like buddying up to someone who does business with both you and Competitor X, and convincing him that violating his NDA and giving you secrets will let you under-bid Competitor X for his business.
Umm... most MSSP's are not located "offshore". Most of the people in that space are right here in the US. You've probably heard of them - Symantec, Internet Security Systems, Verisign?
Data regulations in Europe would probably entirely prohibit any European companies from even contracting with an overseas firm, certainly (sensitive data often cannot cross national borders, by law). I don't know of any specific US regulations, but I'd imagine the companies themselves are highly unlikely to go for this.
I would wait until she actually gets placed on a "no fly" list before I panic too much. No, I don't think her posting was worth this much fuss, but I can see where if you squint at it right, it's not beyond the domain of the Secret Service. Truthfully, these are guys with poor senses of humor anyway, as witnessed by the whole Steve Jackson thing.
As far as FBI file, I dunno. Might affect her if she wanted a job with the CIA or military clearance, but otherwise? In any case, she's in good company, most of the people who did anything (or nothing) in the 60s got a file too...
I don't know about the average state of affairs in this regard, but let be mention a very interesting data point from my recent experience.
I just finished assembling a Kuro Box, which is a 200 Mhz PowerPC based NAS "kit". This thing runs Linux, is very customizable, and is also very fast and capable, considering it runs on a 17W power supply and is smaller than even the new PS2 boxes.
The fact that I can grab most of the standard Linux software and at least compile it myself to put on this box is just awesome to me. Once I had it set up, the whole environment was totally familiar to me and easy to use -- I forget that this isn't an x86 based box.
So, the fact that Linux is so portable among platforms is definitely a nice thing, and is useful for this very purpose. I was even able to grab a pre-built MySQL binary package from mysql.com and it just worked as-is. Neato!
That's the idea, you know. SQL is a declarative language, not procedural. You tell the database engine what you want, not how to get it. The idea is that then the query analyzer figures out the most efficient how.
Yeah, I hate that too. I never used the term Java 2, though, and I'll be damned if Java 5 is going to cross my lips. It's marketing-speak of the worst sort.
Slashdot Mirror
How did this get labeled Troll?
I'm making a note to hit metamoderation extra hard these next couple days... this is getting silly.
OK, whatever. You're just ignorant on this issue, I don't feel a need to educate you or try to get you to change your mind. Comics as a medium are not unilaterally pieces of disposable junk; if you want to think that, oh well.
Oh, and some graffiti artists are also quite impressive and very creative. Some of them also have had a great deal of commercial success, including an artist who ended up being recruited by the very companies whose billboards he was "defacing", because they liked his work (wish I could find a cite, it was a good article but I read it way too long ago).
Monster trucks and jingles, maybe those can't be redeemed. Some stuff really is all crap, not just 90% crap.
My Google for a definition of arrogance gives me:
:-)
"overbearing pride evidenced by a superior manner toward inferiors"
I've never seen that in Stallman, in person or in writing (and I've met him on a couple occasions at various appearances he has made). He's a stubborn cuss, and has great difficulty seeing things from another perspective, and but he doesn't seem prideful or one to look down on others.
When I think of arrogance, I think of Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons"
It's not arrogance when you actually are a brilliant and skilled creator in your field. Alan Moore is, in his medium, probably the best living writer. Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis are good, but they also split their focus a bit in other mediums. Alan Moore has, for over 25 years, consistently produced the best work in comics.
In that same period, he's also gotten screwed over many times by publishers going back on their word. DC (owned by Time Warner)in particular has time and time again done things he feels are breaches of their "good word", not to mention outright breaches of contract. I get the sense Alan is a man of his word, and gets particularly peeved when he doesn't get the same respect in return. People of high standards and not a small bit of genius often tend to be a bit short-tempered when they feel disrespected.
Oh, and "COMIC BOOKS" are real books nowadays, you know. Go to a bookstore sometime, they probably have several shelves full of highly respected works of graphic fiction... not to mention some very fun works of complete escapist fluff too.
Original post:
"I own a dot-com..."
Presumably if the owner gets hit by a bus, a lot of WTF? is going to go down. I assume he's mission critical because, for all we know, it's him and maybe 2 other people working for the company. I've been there, you really can't have redundancies when it's just less than 10 of you trying to make this company work.
Slow? I hardly ever find Java slow. Is the VM slow to start up? Yes... but that really doesn't matter in most contexts where you would use it (i.e., a Web application that starts up once, then runs).
In general, Java is very fast.
That having been said, Perl is quite portable, and runs decently fast under something like mod_perl, where (once again) you incur the overhead of startup once, then the code runs many times.
I wish people would stop bringing up the speed of Java, then point to applets. Very few people use applets at all these days, Flash is becoming more attractive for many of those sorts of things and is darn faster. Even Java desktop applications seem plenty zippy to me most of the time (although in some, like JBuilder, I can totally tell when garbage collection is taking place, I get freezes of the interface at times like that... something is a little wonky in how that app is written).
Right, because I always make sure not to recommend books I want people to buy.
I believe the difference is, while the administration would like to be able to do all of these things, and does get away with most of this stuff unopposed, the system is not designed to uphold this. The problem isn't the American governmental structure (well, not yet, they haven't wiped their ass with the Consitutition just yet), it is that people are basically allowing them to get away with this. Not out of fear of reprisals (which would enforce the totalitarian assertion), but out of sheer neglect. The country is not being taken away from people's control, they are freely giving it away.
Despite the probable dirty tricks in the last election, it was a free election. We didn't have people staying away from the polls because they feared being shot by the opposition. We didn't have people being strong-armed into voting for the "one party". Truthfully, it was a close election. Bush very well could have gotten voted out, and if he had gotten voted out, Kerry would have become president, and policies and politics would have changed. I somehow doubt we would have seen Bush declare a coup and surround the capital with tanks refusing to cede power. Such a scenario seems pretty plausible in a truly totalitarian regime.
We're not in an ideal situation right now by any means, but let's not cheapen things by saying "OMG! We live in Nazi Germany!" or claiming the republic has fallen. If we think like that, then people are going to become even more apathetic.
Much better to take a real look at things and figure out how to avoid letting things get that bad (because, sure, things could get that bad if people don't wake up). The US could change things if people gave a shit and wanted something different out of their government.
BitPass has worked great for me on Mperia.com as a purchaser, I have no complaints so far about it.
Of course, PayPal works great for me as a purchaser also, so I guess I'm just not angry enough in general or something...
What does it do that is so unique? I guess I just don't see the niche it fills that is so wonderful. Java isn't the most awesome language in the world, but it seems to do pretty well in terms of being the cross-platform (even cross-language) VM. C/C++ are the "powerhouse" languages.
And Lisp, of course, is the language everyone else borrows from poorly.
Well, we don't have to, but some of us think it's damn funny...
:-P
I'm sorry, but Mormonism? Amongst the flakiest of the flaky religions. The very founding of it was mocked on South Park, for G_d's sake! When animated foul-mouthed kids are making fun of you, and it actually seems like a cogent analysis and critique, you just might have a problem.
It's just a basic fact, Mormons are funny.
Jehovah Witnesses are kind of strange too, but at least they don't basically own a state of their own and rule it like a theocracy. That's probably a large part of what annoys me, because otherwise I just might like Utah.
If the "do something with it" looks like this:...that's not going to help you, it's just going to make the compiler not complain.
I actually make it a point to put in a comment like "// do nothing, this is OK" when I do something like that, so it's clear to the next programmer that I meant to just shut up the compiler, and I've either got a case that I know doesn't matter or cannot happen because of other constraints.
I think most people at least make an effort to privately contact the vendor first and give them a lead on any public disclosures. That's considered to be polite, even if you just give them a heads-up and 24 hours notice.
> By the by, do you really believe non-living chemicals learnt to walk and talk all by themselves?
Yes, I do. Absolutely. Not just based on pure faith, but based on solid theories and quite a few experiments that seem to show this is quite possible (given very long periods of time). It's a good explanation for what we see around us, and it's useful for future expansion and learning. So, for me, that works.
Note that this doesn't say anything about God or !God. I reserve my opinion on that for myself.
Perhaps I should have clarified:
I found lots of interesting reading material via BitTorrent, including comic scans that I had zero interest in and would never have bought, but enjoyed because they were essential "free" to me.
I don't defend that position, rationalize it, or claim I'm "right". I just say that, yep, that's what I did. Just like I've download plenty of MP3's in my day too (although, interestingly enough, not so much anymore - I guess I like having the actual CDs, or more and more I just buy music via MPeria)
I think we all have to face up to the fact that people are doing stuff like this, they're liking it, and it doesn't seem likely to stop anytime soon. No possible solution can be reached without that realization.
Saying "well, they hosted torrents for legitimate stuff too!" is like saying "well, John Gotti bought cookies from the Girl Scouts!". A very minor 'good thing' doesn't really excuse the fact that the sites really were engaging in fairly widespread piracy. I saw commercial software posted there every day... as much as I despise the MPAA and RIAA, I can understand that at the most basic level, they do have legitimate complaints.
Is this the best use of their time and resources? Well, no, obviously not. The real pirates are a much bigger danger to their bottom line, and are much more clearly "real" criminals. However, I can't really muster up much in the way of a defense of the right for SuperNova.org or other sites to do what they did.
Too bad, though, I did find lots of "grey" stuff there of interest - scans of old comic books in particular (the only loss of commerce there being perhaps to my local comics store's back issue sales, but I support them with plenty of my income as it is, I doubt they would complain much).
Wow, all that flamebait packed into one post. Kudos!
:-)
I mean, you're completely wrong and utterly ignorant, but nice post!
(OK, you're right about PHP. It does suck.)
I think no one does it because that approach isn't fun or interesting. Plenty of games have tried other approaches, of varying complexities. I've never liked any of them.
I do like location-based damage systems, and I do think wounds to certain locations should result in certain penalties, but I'd prefer to keep it very simple.
Top Secret SI was a good compromise system... you had 10 locations (2 arms, 2 legs, head, 2 chest, 1 abdomen, 2 hands) and equal hit points in each. Loss of all points in the 4 critical areas was basically incapitation, and I think loss of 2x the points was death. In arms, legs, and hands 1x was incapitation of the limb, 2x was amputation. Roll a d10 for the location an attack hits, or you could also do called shots at a penalty.
I'd use a system like that, I guess. Of course, most of the time now, my sessions are pretty combat-lite, so I don't really sweat the details.
My sister-in-law uses it for one reason only: parental filters. Nosy parents are probably the #1 business driver for AOL now.
I not only know it from inference, I've seen it, at very high levels at a former employer. I was told once not to question how a particular document was obtained, but to read it and figure out a counter-strategy before product X came to market.
So yeah, the original poster is dead wrong. Corporate espionage is very real, although usually it's done through much more mundane things - like buddying up to someone who does business with both you and Competitor X, and convincing him that violating his NDA and giving you secrets will let you under-bid Competitor X for his business.
Umm... most MSSP's are not located "offshore". Most of the people in that space are right here in the US. You've probably heard of them - Symantec, Internet Security Systems, Verisign?
Data regulations in Europe would probably entirely prohibit any European companies from even contracting with an overseas firm, certainly (sensitive data often cannot cross national borders, by law). I don't know of any specific US regulations, but I'd imagine the companies themselves are highly unlikely to go for this.
I would wait until she actually gets placed on a "no fly" list before I panic too much. No, I don't think her posting was worth this much fuss, but I can see where if you squint at it right, it's not beyond the domain of the Secret Service. Truthfully, these are guys with poor senses of humor anyway, as witnessed by the whole Steve Jackson thing.
As far as FBI file, I dunno. Might affect her if she wanted a job with the CIA or military clearance, but otherwise? In any case, she's in good company, most of the people who did anything (or nothing) in the 60s got a file too...
I don't know about the average state of affairs in this regard, but let be mention a very interesting data point from my recent experience.
I just finished assembling a Kuro Box, which is a 200 Mhz PowerPC based NAS "kit". This thing runs Linux, is very customizable, and is also very fast and capable, considering it runs on a 17W power supply and is smaller than even the new PS2 boxes.
The fact that I can grab most of the standard Linux software and at least compile it myself to put on this box is just awesome to me. Once I had it set up, the whole environment was totally familiar to me and easy to use -- I forget that this isn't an x86 based box.
So, the fact that Linux is so portable among platforms is definitely a nice thing, and is useful for this very purpose. I was even able to grab a pre-built MySQL binary package from mysql.com and it just worked as-is. Neato!
That's the idea, you know. SQL is a declarative language, not procedural. You tell the database engine what you want, not how to get it. The idea is that then the query analyzer figures out the most efficient how.
Yeah, I hate that too. I never used the term Java 2, though, and I'll be damned if Java 5 is going to cross my lips. It's marketing-speak of the worst sort.