I have spent 750 getting the right MICROPHONE for a recording session with a particular instrument.
Seriously? You have ENOUGH fans who are sophisticated enough to hear the difference in microphone that you need to spend this much or lose them? Seriously? Or are you doing the dot-com thing of buying really expensive equipment UP FRONT on the off chance that you make it big so you don't have to upgrade later? What's wrong with a $12.50 microphone today and a more expensive one once you make some money? If that's your best business sense you deserve to fail.
But, it's just silly to say that if you want it you shouldn't have to pay for it.
Yeah, like the air I'm exhaling. I should get paid for that because you are literally just TAKING it for your damn trees and shrubbery. THIEF!
Say you loved a certain painting (also a creative piece of art) and you just took it without paying. Did you commit a crime? Of course. But more importantly, was it an immoral thing to do? Absolutely.
No, this isn't a good analogy. Try this: Say you loved a certain painting (also a creative piece of art) and you just took a picture of it without paying. Did you commit a crime? Of course. But more importantly, was it an immoral thing to do? Absolutely.
Consuming art without compensating the artist is an absurd idea -- unless, of course, that's what the artist wants for one reason or another.
I fully disagree. If I want to charge for the air that I breathe out, does that seem reasonable? If I told you a good joke, should you owe me money to retell it to your friends for the next 180 years?
Or even better, if I discover the perfect cure for cancer & AIDS, is it MORAL and LEGAL for me to withold it from the people who don't pay my fee?
I was pretty certain that we didn't have to pay anything for radio. I did a search and it depends on the situation.
So, I wonder if you had enough for lawyers if you could sue them for tranmitting radiowaves through your business and "tresspassing". What if you have an EULA on the airspace in your resturant that says anything played in any frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum in your resturant belongs to you and if you don't want to give away your music then don't send it through the building. Would that work?
Much research has gone into the research of feral children and their missing ability of speech. It seems that the require portion of our brain, for speech, does not develop without training. Primal grunts and basic "animal communications", does not appear to stimulate the speech centers of our brains. Accordingly, if that portion of our brain is not stimulated by some early age (something like 2-4 years of age), chances are, it will never properly mature. The closer a ferel child gets to puberty, the less likely speech will ever develop because the speech center of the brain has more or less, been completely turned off. Various brain scans seem to support this conclussion. In other words, use it or lose.
To the best of my knowledge, which is by no means extensive, there has never been a ferel, [post-]pubescent child found, that was able to develop language skills.
I've never seen research that says this, and I'm technically an anthropologist. Most data suggests exactly the opposite... that children with hearing ability (and even some deaf, but it's less obvious) develop verbal language even in the absense of stimulus. These made up languages when studied are always as complex and nuanced as any modern language, not random grunting and spitting.
Most likely the reports of feral children not developing language skills is more along the lines of them not developing the skill to speak any OTHER languages than the made up one they will naturally create, which is perfectly reasonable. You can't easily take somone after puberty and get them to speak a new language without a lot of dedication.
am a fervent liberal, but Republicans claim to be about smaller gov, and less taxes. Well, the tax cuts enacted earlier warranted great cuts in programs. I don't like seeing the space and science budgets cut, being a fervent liberal, but hey, they need to do things right, and it's about time. I have an 8 month old daughter and she will be paying for the sins of this administration for a long time after I am (possibly) retired. What they need are massive cuts around the board to protect her.
HA ha ha ha! Whew, man, I haven't laughed so loud in a long time. 15b is a fraction of the price of the made up war on Iraq, and the benefit is so fleeting. Having new tech and new knowledge gained from space programs could enrich her life, make her live in a more perfect and wonderful world. Bitching that they spend 15b on space while completely ignoring the 90b+ spent on invading a country on a whim is truly ironic.
But we should spend the most on today, some on tomorrow, and a bit on years from now.
If this is the way humans habitually thought we would still be hunter gatherers. The great thing about space exploration is that the technology we create to get us there sticks around forever once it's invented. Just think about it this way. If you can spend $100 today to invent a technology that will generate you $100,000,000 tomorrow, are you going to really bitch about losing a C note?
The riches that space has to offer are vast beyond all belief. A single iron asteroid could contain more raw material than we can dig up in decades. The output of the sun in any given hour dumps out more energy than the entire human race has ever used up in it's 3 million year history; in a given month more energy than can EVER exist on the planet without the help of anti-matter.
The day that we harness space completely for our own benifit is the day that the entire planet will come as close to utopia as can possibly be realisticlly imagined.
With a nearly infinite amout of energy and raw material available, the entire concept of starvation and poverty will have to be redefined globally. Scarcity will have a new meaning, turning our economy from an exploitive neccessary evil into a wonderland.
We can sit here and focus on the poor, the opressed and teh downtrodden today, and tomorrow, and every day for the next 4000 years... Or we could spend thirty years redefining our destiny and ending up in a candyland world where starving means waiting an extra ten minutes for the all you can eat buffet.
I'm terribly sorry to have to say this (I have been trying to keep this discussion civilised). But you can't possibly have written much Java code if you believe that you are supposed to have a "generic" way to handle the checked exceptions.
I'm sorry to say this, but you must not have been speaking the enlgish language long if you think that's what I'm advocating. I'm advocating precisely the opposite.
My point is not about unexpected exceptions.
My point IS about unexpected exceptions.
The exceptions you do have to catch, however, are the ones that can occur even in a perfectly working program. There is no way you can program your way around the fact that you can get an IOException, that's why it's declared as a checked exception.
If IOException was not checked, then the simple case of a missing file, or a broken network connection would be considered "unexpected" and cause the entire app to crash (of you're lucky).
Well, there are many ways around programming a checked exception, everything from using reflection (essentially converting it into other checked exceptions, or by using a compiler that doesn't care about exceptions. Checked exceptions are only checked athe compiler level... But I digress.
Unexpected is any exception that is thrown that you aren't catching. The APIs do NOT list every exception that can be thrown, only a few. What's the difference between not being able to read a file of name X because it doesn't exist or getting a null pointer exception because name X was null? Both of those situations are indentical in terms of recoverability.
If there were no checked exceptions you could still just as easily catch and deal with the unchecked exceptions. But you wouldn't be lead into a false sense of security thinking that you've dealt with all the "important" exceptions.
Such a problem will probably not be discovered until much later, and probably by a customer. The fact that Java forces you to make an active choice on what to do is good.
Having the customer find it is NOT always bad. If you can't find your config file, the user should know as soon as possible, don't you agree?
The fact is, Java only forces you to make an active choice SOMETIMES, and the rest of the time it doesn't, and there is no clear distinction as to when or why this happens. Why declare a IOException as checked but a NumberFormatException when you parseInt() as unchecked? Logically, the NumberFormatException is actually MORE likely to occor in common usage because you are more likely to be taking user input as strings (i.e. if you were trying to make an int in code, you probably already know what the int is that you want thus would hard code it).
Why is this a better approach than, say, one that allows you to declare exceptions (for API purposes) but doesn't force you to deal with them?
Oh, and another thing (I already mentioned this in an earlier post of mine). There are cases where certain methods are declared to throw checked exceptions even if they shouldn't, simply because it implements an interface which declares that exception. A good example is StringWriter.write(). We know this method will never throw an exception so you can safely ignore it. A good way is to write it is to wrap it in a
Just out of curiosity, why are you intentionally losing the stack trace of e? Wouldn't you like to see how the heck a StringWriter threw and IOException? And why allow somone to turn off this "wrapping" by disabling asserts? In fact, if I remember correctly, unless somone is specifically turning them on, they are disabled by default. You could be throwing an IOException here which would silently get eaten. All you need is to run your program using a non-compliant set of library binaries, perhaps some implementation of java that your client decided they were going to write by themselves back in
Ok, so let me try again, the point I am trying to make is that when an exception occours that you were NOT ready for, in most cases the very best thing your system can do is crash right there. You can check all the FileNotFound exceptions that you want, whenever you want, but when you get an exception that you wren't prepared to deal with, letting it propigate all the way up and kinning the entire JVM is always safe.
A complex multi-threaded application will have subtle interactions going on all the time between all of the various components. A rouge thread, one that SHOULD be doing X, but due to an unexpected exception is now doing Y, could be running around destroying your system and never letting you know until if long past too late. Imagine some funny code where the part of the code that starts and handles your database transaction goes down, but the part of your code that writes to the database is still going strong. Do you honestly think in such a situation it's a good idea to let threads be writing to the database unprotected, with no transactional logic in place?
Sure, that's an arbitrary example, but think about it logically. You are not God, so you can't write some magic "generic" error handling code that will always put a faulty application into a good state no matter what the error. But you can stop the machine from doing potential harm while it's in an unknown state. You can also know when an error occoured as soon as it happens, instead of weeks later when you you begin to get the first glimpses of an amazingly serious flaw that has left your entire system corrupt.
From a risk management perspective, which is easier to deal with: a hundred bitching customers who are experiencing unexpected downtime, or a hundred bitching customers that found out that the rouge server just sent "sell" commands on every share of thier stock. In the first case, you may lose a few customers, in the second you may lose your entire company in lawsuits.
(Case in point, not about Java, but just to illustrate. I worked at a company that had no backups for over 6 months while believeing that they did, becuase the huge backup machine they spent big bucks on kept answering requests and kept chugging along even though it's disks were full. IF it had died outright, we would have know the day it died instead of after it was too late.)
So if we didn't give them broader ownership, most of them would charge an exorbitant price for their work, but could only sell it once. Surely in this situation, the buyer would have an impossible time making his money back, since as soon as he started to sell it, it would be copied ad infinitum.
Unless he sold it once for an exorbitant price - $5, once. Ad infinitum.
You do know that the JVM doesn't actually check exceptions, don't you? It's all compiler sugar.
Seriously, would you rathar let a mission critical application die outright or perform with UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR? People who catch exceptions with a an empty {} are DANGEROUS.
But if they are not caught, then the stupid developer (note: almost all developers are stupid, we all know this) will not catch it. He will ignore a FileNotFoundException for example, the exception will propagate up, get printed on stdout (which the users never see) and the whole damn thread will die.
This may be good for your average VB-type desktop app, but for a multi threaded backend server this is a disaster. Such things simply should never be allowed to occur.
Depends on if you'd rathar your server die and tell you it can't find the password file than to ignore it an let everyone in by default.
If you threaten to sue for an illegal act you believe the other party is committing against you unless they agree to get a contract that makes the act legal, I doubt you can legally call that racketeering..
Well, that's the thing... most likely, the Universities would not be blamed... but it would cost millions to reach this point.
Imagine this: Pay be $500 bucks or I'll tell child services that I think you are a child molester. I mean, it's just my opinion that you are molesting your kid, and it MIGHT be right, but mor ethan likely you'll be proven innocent. In the meantime you'll be branded a child molester by the neighborhood, for friends, your co-workers, and spend thousands in legal bills, etc. How is that not extortion?
What crack are you smoking? (I want some!) If it ain't in the public record/artistic commons/similar licence and (C) is owned by someone who wants to charge for it then you should (and legally MUST) pay for it. Fair use as a legal construct only applies to limited use (i.e. educational setting, keeping your purchased media safe while playing a backup, etc.) What really pisses me off is peoples' like you with their sense of entitlement. YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED! (Unless you live in Canada where they already pay for downloads in a roundabout way) Mod me a Troll/Flamebait/whatever But this is the reality.
Hi, you are brainwashed. We, the people, allow an artists a LIMITED ownership of his work. We LEND him ownership for a while so that he feels like producing more in the future. The arists gets to own his work because we LET HIM. We, the people, are the real owners, and we are entitled to it, as much as we are entitled to the air you exhale. That is how copyright was designed.
Doing "what's best because you think it is" against the will of 90% of the people is wrong.
My point is that the majority of people would support the idea in theory, but not in personal practice. I am not the arbitor of what's best, I am pointing out that belief of an idea in the abstract often does not translate to action in accordance with that idea. I think most people would agree that educating people is good (or does this make me an anti-democratic evil baby-killer), yet many would not make that active choice to give money for it.
That sounds to me like people don't actually agree. Perhaps they only agree with sounding good, but not with doing action. In that case, why not give the people what they want? Something that sounds good but makes no difference?
You're missing the point that is the vast majority of people WANT hypocracy, why is it wrong to let them have it? I personally don't believe they do. I beleive they would be more than willing to help the poor, but I'm not going to force that on them.
I have not mentioned race at all. I have referred to helping poor students by levying a small fee on people who are able to pay for college. I specifically did not talk about race, as I see it being a very complicated side issue. Ideally, socioeconomic status would be the deciding factor not race...as it happens, though race is actually a pretty reasonable predictor of SES.
The grand-parent post was specifically about race. It didn't even mention poor, I think. Just race. Besides, how do you judge sociaoeconomic status? If my mom is a billionaire but won't lend me a penny for school, where do I fit in?
You can't honestly suggest that $1/credit hour is going to burden the vast majority of students.
Hey, I like that logic... You can't argue that $1 given to me would burden you, or the rest of the slashdot community, right? So why not hand over the cash and get everyone else on this website to follow suit.
And this is an argument why should keep it!? 90% of the people don't like it so it must be good? Where does that logic come from?
And here I assumed financial support for poor, disadvantaged students was a good thing.
Sorry, it's not democratic, thus it's wrong. Doing "what's best because you think it is" against the will of 90% of the people is wrong. It's the first step to totolitarian dictatorship. It's the path of evil. What if you "decide" women having the vote is bad for the country? What if you decide the world is overpopulated and we need to start killing babies? What makes you arbitor of what's best?
If you honestly believe that taking money from poor white's and asians and giving it to poor blacks and hispanics is good for the country, then go make it happen the "right" way. If cou honestly beleieve that race should be a basis for deciding who can go to school and who can't then go out and convince those poor white kids that they don't deserve the money because theywere born with the wrong skin color.
Explain to them why they really, really need to be donating to the others and let them choose it. Don't force them, that's evil.
I can't see the South Koreans loving the prospect of seeing their economy crumple to dust when they have to start providing for twenty two million new citizens with no first-world-economy skills.
That's one possibility... the other is 22 million people who just love the dickens out of being exploited. Free slave labor, free prostitution rings, however they can be exploited, it will happen... and the whole time everyone participating thinks they are living the good life.
Very interesting. Perhaps the most insightful post I've seen yet on why to oppose DRM.
But, here's the other side of the question...
How would you ensure that those 60+ hour work weeks get paid for?
How do we ensure the same thing at McDonalds? You sell something, people buy it, simple as that. It's true, you can only sell your software once, instead of putting all the effort into the first copy and then exploiting your information replicator technology to make a killing on the rest.
It's easy when those hours are spent making buckets, or CDs. Want one? Buy it!
The Internet changes that, by making it so easy to copy intellectual works. In fact, the Internet is a giant, supercheap, intellectual printing press.
I can sell you a copy of work X. But if you then give out copies of X to anybody who wants them, I'm now competing with myself and somebody who's done nothing to create work X.
Raise the price on the first one to $1,000,000. Sell it once. Then whoever bought it can sell it again, once, for $999,000, etc. OR he could give it away, his choice.
This is essentially patronage, just like how we got all those prety pictures back in the old days. Believe it or not, there used to be artists before there was even money... How could that have ever happened, I wonder?
He was saying that once the nano-replicator exists, nobody has the right to whine about thier intellectual property. If you do so AFTER THE REPLICATOR EXISTS, then you are a greedy control freak. This is a valid point, and totally true.
Bullshit. If all material things were to become worthless, your ideas and creativity would really be the only possession that would be worth protecting. Your reputation would be your entire wealth.
You are stuck in old think mode on this topic. In a world of replicators, weath is meaningless. So I have more weath than you, how does that translate into ANYTHING tangible? You can still own the same things as me, EXACTLY the same things. Your house could look exactly like mine. The food you eat could be atom for atom identical to what I eat. In future world, what the hell is wealth!?!
Seriously. What does that word even mean at that point?
Their comment did seem a bit flip to me. The question before us is not "how do TMBG make enough money to eat?" but "how do we set up an economic system such that artists in general can be paid fairly for their work?"
It's possible (not probable, maybe just a flip remark) that they have the same feeling as me on this subject... Which is: Why are artists so damn special? Why don't plumbers get paid continuously every time somone uses a pipe they replaced? Why don't TV manufaturers get money for every minute you watch TV? Why doesn't the guy flipping burgers get a nickle for ever cell in your body that uses a burger molecule? Why are artists the only ones who have some kind of RIGHT to profit continuously off one single pice of work but other people only get paid once, no matter how hard thier job was?
Is it more difficult to be an artists than, say, a nurse, or a teacher, or a baker, or a janitor? Are musicians just better people than us and thus deserve special treatment for all the "value" they add to society? I guess so. After all, where would we be as a society if there were no more paid artists? (Probably in a much better place than if there were no paid garbage men, but I digress.)
How about just being a 30-something man trying to provide a comfortable existence for his family? Somebody who really wishes his children grow up to be engineers, scientists, or teachers?
Are you an idiot or intentionally misreading his point. He was saying that once the nano-replicator exists, nobody has the right to whine about thier intellectual property. If you do so AFTER THE REPLICATOR EXISTS, then you are a greedy control freak. This is a valid point, and totally true.
If you have the ability to replicate anything, then having a comfortable life for you kids is as easy as pressing a button. After that point what else do you expect to get for your hard work? Money? To buy what? To buy the stuff you can replicate? That's absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
I have spent 750 getting the right MICROPHONE for a recording session with a particular instrument.
Seriously? You have ENOUGH fans who are sophisticated enough to hear the difference in microphone that you need to spend this much or lose them? Seriously? Or are you doing the dot-com thing of buying really expensive equipment UP FRONT on the off chance that you make it big so you don't have to upgrade later? What's wrong with a $12.50 microphone today and a more expensive one once you make some money? If that's your best business sense you deserve to fail.
But, it's just silly to say that if you want it you shouldn't have to pay for it.
Yeah, like the air I'm exhaling. I should get paid for that because you are literally just TAKING it for your damn trees and shrubbery. THIEF!
Say you loved a certain painting (also a creative piece of art) and you just took it without paying. Did you commit a crime? Of course. But more importantly, was it an immoral thing to do? Absolutely.
No, this isn't a good analogy. Try this: Say you loved a certain painting (also a creative piece of art) and you just took a picture of it without paying. Did you commit a crime? Of course. But more importantly, was it an immoral thing to do? Absolutely.
Consuming art without compensating the artist is an absurd idea -- unless, of course, that's what the artist wants for one reason or another.
I fully disagree. If I want to charge for the air that I breathe out, does that seem reasonable? If I told you a good joke, should you owe me money to retell it to your friends for the next 180 years?
Or even better, if I discover the perfect cure for cancer & AIDS, is it MORAL and LEGAL for me to withold it from the people who don't pay my fee?
I was pretty certain that we didn't have to pay anything for radio. I did a search and it depends on the situation.
So, I wonder if you had enough for lawyers if you could sue them for tranmitting radiowaves through your business and "tresspassing". What if you have an EULA on the airspace in your resturant that says anything played in any frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum in your resturant belongs to you and if you don't want to give away your music then don't send it through the building. Would that work?
Much research has gone into the research of feral children and their missing ability of speech. It seems that the require portion of our brain, for speech, does not develop without training. Primal grunts and basic "animal communications", does not appear to stimulate the speech centers of our brains. Accordingly, if that portion of our brain is not stimulated by some early age (something like 2-4 years of age), chances are, it will never properly mature. The closer a ferel child gets to puberty, the less likely speech will ever develop because the speech center of the brain has more or less, been completely turned off. Various brain scans seem to support this conclussion. In other words, use it or lose.
To the best of my knowledge, which is by no means extensive, there has never been a ferel, [post-]pubescent child found, that was able to develop language skills.
I've never seen research that says this, and I'm technically an anthropologist. Most data suggests exactly the opposite... that children with hearing ability (and even some deaf, but it's less obvious) develop verbal language even in the absense of stimulus. These made up languages when studied are always as complex and nuanced as any modern language, not random grunting and spitting.
Most likely the reports of feral children not developing language skills is more along the lines of them not developing the skill to speak any OTHER languages than the made up one they will naturally create, which is perfectly reasonable. You can't easily take somone after puberty and get them to speak a new language without a lot of dedication.
am a fervent liberal, but Republicans claim to be about smaller gov, and less taxes. Well, the tax cuts enacted earlier warranted great cuts in programs. I don't like seeing the space and science budgets cut, being a fervent liberal, but hey, they need to do things right, and it's about time. I have an 8 month old daughter and she will be paying for the sins of this administration for a long time after I am (possibly) retired. What they need are massive cuts around the board to protect her.
HA ha ha ha! Whew, man, I haven't laughed so loud in a long time. 15b is a fraction of the price of the made up war on Iraq, and the benefit is so fleeting. Having new tech and new knowledge gained from space programs could enrich her life, make her live in a more perfect and wonderful world. Bitching that they spend 15b on space while completely ignoring the 90b+ spent on invading a country on a whim is truly ironic.
But we should spend the most on today, some on tomorrow, and a bit on years from now.
If this is the way humans habitually thought we would still be hunter gatherers. The great thing about space exploration is that the technology we create to get us there sticks around forever once it's invented. Just think about it this way. If you can spend $100 today to invent a technology that will generate you $100,000,000 tomorrow, are you going to really bitch about losing a C note?
The riches that space has to offer are vast beyond all belief. A single iron asteroid could contain more raw material than we can dig up in decades. The output of the sun in any given hour dumps out more energy than the entire human race has ever used up in it's 3 million year history; in a given month more energy than can EVER exist on the planet without the help of anti-matter.
The day that we harness space completely for our own benifit is the day that the entire planet will come as close to utopia as can possibly be realisticlly imagined.
With a nearly infinite amout of energy and raw material available, the entire concept of starvation and poverty will have to be redefined globally. Scarcity will have a new meaning, turning our economy from an exploitive neccessary evil into a wonderland.
We can sit here and focus on the poor, the opressed and teh downtrodden today, and tomorrow, and every day for the next 4000 years... Or we could spend thirty years redefining our destiny and ending up in a candyland world where starving means waiting an extra ten minutes for the all you can eat buffet.
I'm terribly sorry to have to say this (I have been trying to keep this discussion civilised). But you can't possibly have written much Java code if you believe that you are supposed to have a "generic" way to handle the checked exceptions.
I'm sorry to say this, but you must not have been speaking the enlgish language long if you think that's what I'm advocating. I'm advocating precisely the opposite.
My point is not about unexpected exceptions.
My point IS about unexpected exceptions.
The exceptions you do have to catch, however, are the ones that can occur even in a perfectly working program. There is no way you can program your way around the fact that you can get an IOException, that's why it's declared as a checked exception.
If IOException was not checked, then the simple case of a missing file, or a broken network connection would be considered "unexpected" and cause the entire app to crash (of you're lucky).
Well, there are many ways around programming a checked exception, everything from using reflection (essentially converting it into other checked exceptions, or by using a compiler that doesn't care about exceptions. Checked exceptions are only checked athe compiler level... But I digress.
Unexpected is any exception that is thrown that you aren't catching. The APIs do NOT list every exception that can be thrown, only a few. What's the difference between not being able to read a file of name X because it doesn't exist or getting a null pointer exception because name X was null? Both of those situations are indentical in terms of recoverability.
If there were no checked exceptions you could still just as easily catch and deal with the unchecked exceptions. But you wouldn't be lead into a false sense of security thinking that you've dealt with all the "important" exceptions.
Such a problem will probably not be discovered until much later, and probably by a customer. The fact that Java forces you to make an active choice on what to do is good.
Having the customer find it is NOT always bad. If you can't find your config file, the user should know as soon as possible, don't you agree?
The fact is, Java only forces you to make an active choice SOMETIMES, and the rest of the time it doesn't, and there is no clear distinction as to when or why this happens. Why declare a IOException as checked but a NumberFormatException when you parseInt() as unchecked? Logically, the NumberFormatException is actually MORE likely to occor in common usage because you are more likely to be taking user input as strings (i.e. if you were trying to make an int in code, you probably already know what the int is that you want thus would hard code it).
Why is this a better approach than, say, one that allows you to declare exceptions (for API purposes) but doesn't force you to deal with them?
Oh, and another thing (I already mentioned this in an earlier post of mine). There are cases where certain methods are declared to throw checked exceptions even if they shouldn't, simply because it implements an interface which declares that exception. A good example is StringWriter.write(). We know this method will never throw an exception so you can safely ignore it. A good way is to write it is to wrap it in a
try { } catch(IOException e) { assert false : e.getMessage(); }
Just out of curiosity, why are you intentionally losing the stack trace of e? Wouldn't you like to see how the heck a StringWriter threw and IOException? And why allow somone to turn off this "wrapping" by disabling asserts? In fact, if I remember correctly, unless somone is specifically turning them on, they are disabled by default. You could be throwing an IOException here which would silently get eaten. All you need is to run your program using a non-compliant set of library binaries, perhaps some implementation of java that your client decided they were going to write by themselves back in
Ok, so let me try again, the point I am trying to make is that when an exception occours that you were NOT ready for, in most cases the very best thing your system can do is crash right there. You can check all the FileNotFound exceptions that you want, whenever you want, but when you get an exception that you wren't prepared to deal with, letting it propigate all the way up and kinning the entire JVM is always safe.
A complex multi-threaded application will have subtle interactions going on all the time between all of the various components. A rouge thread, one that SHOULD be doing X, but due to an unexpected exception is now doing Y, could be running around destroying your system and never letting you know until if long past too late. Imagine some funny code where the part of the code that starts and handles your database transaction goes down, but the part of your code that writes to the database is still going strong. Do you honestly think in such a situation it's a good idea to let threads be writing to the database unprotected, with no transactional logic in place?
Sure, that's an arbitrary example, but think about it logically. You are not God, so you can't write some magic "generic" error handling code that will always put a faulty application into a good state no matter what the error. But you can stop the machine from doing potential harm while it's in an unknown state. You can also know when an error occoured as soon as it happens, instead of weeks later when you you begin to get the first glimpses of an amazingly serious flaw that has left your entire system corrupt.
From a risk management perspective, which is easier to deal with: a hundred bitching customers who are experiencing unexpected downtime, or a hundred bitching customers that found out that the rouge server just sent "sell" commands on every share of thier stock. In the first case, you may lose a few customers, in the second you may lose your entire company in lawsuits.
(Case in point, not about Java, but just to illustrate. I worked at a company that had no backups for over 6 months while believeing that they did, becuase the huge backup machine they spent big bucks on kept answering requests and kept chugging along even though it's disks were full. IF it had died outright, we would have know the day it died instead of after it was too late.)
So if we didn't give them broader ownership, most of them would charge an exorbitant price for their work, but could only sell it once. Surely in this situation, the buyer would have an impossible time making his money back, since as soon as he started to sell it, it would be copied ad infinitum.
Unless he sold it once for an exorbitant price - $5, once. Ad infinitum.
You do know that the JVM doesn't actually check exceptions, don't you? It's all compiler sugar.
Seriously, would you rathar let a mission critical application die outright or perform with UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR? People who catch exceptions with a an empty {} are DANGEROUS.
But if they are not caught, then the stupid developer (note: almost all developers are stupid, we all know this) will not catch it. He will ignore a FileNotFoundException for example, the exception will propagate up, get printed on stdout (which the users never see) and the whole damn thread will die.
This may be good for your average VB-type desktop app, but for a multi threaded backend server this is a disaster. Such things simply should never be allowed to occur.
Depends on if you'd rathar your server die and tell you it can't find the password file than to ignore it an let everyone in by default.
If you threaten to sue for an illegal act you believe the other party is committing against you unless they agree to get a contract that makes the act legal, I doubt you can legally call that racketeering..
Well, that's the thing... most likely, the Universities would not be blamed... but it would cost millions to reach this point.
Imagine this: Pay be $500 bucks or I'll tell child services that I think you are a child molester. I mean, it's just my opinion that you are molesting your kid, and it MIGHT be right, but mor ethan likely you'll be proven innocent. In the meantime you'll be branded a child molester by the neighborhood, for friends, your co-workers, and spend thousands in legal bills, etc. How is that not extortion?
We certainly DO deserve music for free.
What crack are you smoking? (I want some!)
If it ain't in the public record/artistic commons/similar licence and (C) is owned by someone who wants to charge for it then you should (and legally MUST) pay for it. Fair use as a legal construct only applies to limited use (i.e. educational setting, keeping your purchased media safe while playing a backup, etc.)
What really pisses me off is peoples' like you with their sense of entitlement. YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED! (Unless you live in Canada where they already pay for downloads in a roundabout way)
Mod me a Troll/Flamebait/whatever But this is the reality.
Hi, you are brainwashed. We, the people, allow an artists a LIMITED ownership of his work. We LEND him ownership for a while so that he feels like producing more in the future. The arists gets to own his work because we LET HIM. We, the people, are the real owners, and we are entitled to it, as much as we are entitled to the air you exhale. That is how copyright was designed.
there has to be some sort of compromise between the two
How about, say, 7 year copyright with an optional 7 year extension? I'd play ball with that...
Even in jest. Even in part. It's neither funny nor reasonable to suggest sending an assassin after your political or financial enemies.
I take it you've never heard of Assassination politics?
Sorry, it's not democratic, thus it's wrong.
Bullshit.
Can't argue against that bit of masterful speech.
Doing "what's best because you think it is" against the will of 90% of the people is wrong.
My point is that the majority of people would support the idea in theory, but not in personal practice. I am not the arbitor of what's best, I am pointing out that belief of an idea in the abstract often does not translate to action in accordance with that idea. I think most people would agree that educating people is good (or does this make me an anti-democratic evil baby-killer), yet many would not make that active choice to give money for it.
That sounds to me like people don't actually agree. Perhaps they only agree with sounding good, but not with doing action. In that case, why not give the people what they want? Something that sounds good but makes no difference?
You're missing the point that is the vast majority of people WANT hypocracy, why is it wrong to let them have it? I personally don't believe they do. I beleive they would be more than willing to help the poor, but I'm not going to force that on them.
I have not mentioned race at all. I have referred to helping poor students by levying a small fee on people who are able to pay for college. I specifically did not talk about race, as I see it being a very complicated side issue. Ideally, socioeconomic status would be the deciding factor not race...as it happens, though race is actually a pretty reasonable predictor of SES.
The grand-parent post was specifically about race. It didn't even mention poor, I think. Just race. Besides, how do you judge sociaoeconomic status? If my mom is a billionaire but won't lend me a penny for school, where do I fit in?
You can't honestly suggest that $1/credit hour is going to burden the vast majority of students.
Hey, I like that logic... You can't argue that $1 given to me would burden you, or the rest of the slashdot community, right? So why not hand over the cash and get everyone else on this website to follow suit.
And this is an argument why should keep it!? 90% of the people don't like it so it must be good? Where does that logic come from?
And here I assumed financial support for poor, disadvantaged students was a good thing.
Sorry, it's not democratic, thus it's wrong. Doing "what's best because you think it is" against the will of 90% of the people is wrong. It's the first step to totolitarian dictatorship. It's the path of evil. What if you "decide" women having the vote is bad for the country? What if you decide the world is overpopulated and we need to start killing babies? What makes you arbitor of what's best?
If you honestly believe that taking money from poor white's and asians and giving it to poor blacks and hispanics is good for the country, then go make it happen the "right" way. If cou honestly beleieve that race should be a basis for deciding who can go to school and who can't then go out and convince those poor white kids that they don't deserve the money because theywere born with the wrong skin color.
Explain to them why they really, really need to be donating to the others and let them choose it. Don't force them, that's evil.
why don't they not automatically charge those fees but ask if you are interested in contributing instead.
Because 90% of those you ask would say no.
And this is an argument why should keep it!? 90% of the people don't like it so it must be good? Where does that logic come from?
if you fill in an online for as CompanyName.com@domain.com, you can watch and see fi they sell your email address.
I can't see the South Koreans loving the prospect of seeing their economy crumple to dust when they have to start providing for twenty two million new citizens with no first-world-economy skills.
That's one possibility... the other is 22 million people who just love the dickens out of being exploited. Free slave labor, free prostitution rings, however they can be exploited, it will happen... and the whole time everyone participating thinks they are living the good life.
Very interesting. Perhaps the most insightful post I've seen yet on why to oppose DRM.
But, here's the other side of the question...
How would you ensure that those 60+ hour work weeks get paid for?
How do we ensure the same thing at McDonalds? You sell something, people buy it, simple as that. It's true, you can only sell your software once, instead of putting all the effort into the first copy and then exploiting your information replicator technology to make a killing on the rest.
It's easy when those hours are spent making buckets, or CDs. Want one? Buy it!
The Internet changes that, by making it so easy to copy intellectual works. In fact, the Internet is a giant, supercheap, intellectual printing press.
I can sell you a copy of work X. But if you then give out copies of X to anybody who wants them, I'm now competing with myself and somebody who's done nothing to create work X.
Raise the price on the first one to $1,000,000. Sell it once. Then whoever bought it can sell it again, once, for $999,000, etc. OR he could give it away, his choice.
This is essentially patronage, just like how we got all those prety pictures back in the old days. Believe it or not, there used to be artists before there was even money... How could that have ever happened, I wonder?
just drop our geek information network and there is no telling what they will do.
He was saying that once the nano-replicator exists, nobody has the right to whine about thier intellectual property. If you do so AFTER THE REPLICATOR EXISTS, then you are a greedy control freak. This is a valid point, and totally true.
Bullshit. If all material things were to become worthless, your ideas and creativity would really be the only possession that would be worth protecting. Your reputation would be your entire wealth.
You are stuck in old think mode on this topic. In a world of replicators, weath is meaningless. So I have more weath than you, how does that translate into ANYTHING tangible? You can still own the same things as me, EXACTLY the same things. Your house could look exactly like mine. The food you eat could be atom for atom identical to what I eat. In future world, what the hell is wealth!?!
Seriously. What does that word even mean at that point?
Their comment did seem a bit flip to me. The question before us is not "how do TMBG make enough money to eat?" but "how do we set up an economic system such that artists in general can be paid fairly for their work?"
It's possible (not probable, maybe just a flip remark) that they have the same feeling as me on this subject... Which is: Why are artists so damn special? Why don't plumbers get paid continuously every time somone uses a pipe they replaced? Why don't TV manufaturers get money for every minute you watch TV? Why doesn't the guy flipping burgers get a nickle for ever cell in your body that uses a burger molecule? Why are artists the only ones who have some kind of RIGHT to profit continuously off one single pice of work but other people only get paid once, no matter how hard thier job was?
Is it more difficult to be an artists than, say, a nurse, or a teacher, or a baker, or a janitor? Are musicians just better people than us and thus deserve special treatment for all the "value" they add to society? I guess so. After all, where would we be as a society if there were no more paid artists? (Probably in a much better place than if there were no paid garbage men, but I digress.)
"Greedy"? "Control-freak"? Strong words.
How about just being a 30-something man trying to provide a comfortable existence for his family? Somebody who really wishes his children grow up to be engineers, scientists, or teachers?
Are you an idiot or intentionally misreading his point. He was saying that once the nano-replicator exists, nobody has the right to whine about thier intellectual property. If you do so AFTER THE REPLICATOR EXISTS, then you are a greedy control freak. This is a valid point, and totally true.
If you have the ability to replicate anything, then having a comfortable life for you kids is as easy as pressing a button. After that point what else do you expect to get for your hard work? Money? To buy what? To buy the stuff you can replicate? That's absurd.