Streaming live video? What other purpose does that really serve?
Sport and teleconferencing.
Actually, is streaming live video even used for porn at all? What's the point of broadcasting porn live? I'd have thought most people would want it prerecorded, so they can get a guaranteed quality level.
High speed internet? It only reached critical mass because it allows people to download their porn faster and in higher resolution.
Actually, downloading music and sharing digital photos (of grandchildren etc., not porn) are probably more common factors. Porn might have driven early adopters, but not the general public.
Newsgroups? If you every actually used one, you'd see what they were used for.
In my experience, mostly technical discussion, homework questions, and general social banter. Note that the vast majority of news servers (including Google Groups) do not carry the binaries groups, so the vast majority of users have no idea that you can get porn on Usenet at all.
Sorry to burst your bubble and all, but while I realise the belief that porn drives technology is somehow appealing to many people, it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you start looking at facts instead of fantasy.
Viewers certainly want an enhanced sense of realism in their movies/TV
Key word: "sense". A sense of realism does not mean they want their entertainment to be realistic.
Example: with only a handful of exceptions, practically every space opera ever made has sound effects in space -- because whatever the scientific facts, viewers get a better sense of "being there" if engines roar and explosions go "bang" and lasers go "zap" as they whizz through space slower than the average bullet.
If you make a show that's actually realistic, you're unlikely to get many viewers. (Even shows that are supposed to thrive on the everyday, like soap operas, have to constantly introduce extraordinary events to keep the viewers watching.)
Good luck persuading people to watch your dream show, which would presumably flood their living-room with the stench of decomposing bodies or something. Somehow I don't see you getting very good ratings, even from the people who supposedly hunger for "realism"...
Replying to myself = bad, sure, but I think I must clarify what I meant when I said Inkscape does not support CMYK, before some fanboy tells me about the CMYK tab in the colour selection dialog box.
Try using that tab to specify the standard colour Pantone DE 321-3 C (C60 M90 Y100 K30). I can't. It keeps changing the values I've already input. This is, so far as I can tell, because Inkscape stores RGB internally and does not even attempt to support any other colour model; so when I input a CMYK value, it converts my input to RGB, then converts it back to CMYK to show me. Oops, it's not a clean round-trip conversion. So some perfectly standard colours are completely impossible to specify in Inkscape.
This alone makes Inkscape completely useless for anyone working for print rather than the screen. Equally, it's not a problem in the slightest for anyone working on web graphics, which is why it's not a problem with Inkscape at all, because Inkscape is aimed at the web market not the print market.
What exactly does Inkscape not do that makes Corel draw irreplacable in your eyes? (That way I can get it added;)
Well, first and foremost, some flipping documentation would be nice. When I go into the "Help" menu in Inkscape, I get a basic keyboard reference and some links to online tutorials. What I want is a reference that actually describes the options and tools available.
Okay, so here are some random features I use every day in CorelDraw that Inkscape appears not to provide:
Multi-page layouts (to be fair, Illustrator also lacks this feature)
Support for vertical Japanese text. (Inkscape claims to support this, but fails miserably to position punctuation correctly.)
Ability to export to TIFF (in CMYK) and JPEG.
Ability to convert vector objects to embedded bitmaps.
CMYK support.
Pantone CMS support.
Any colour management support at all, in fact.
I can't be bothered to look further, as it's already clear that it does not even come close to satisfying my requirements at this time.
Which is really not surprising, because Inkscape's own developers have made it perfectly clear that they are not interested in competing with CorelDraw and Illustrator. They are setting out to make the best SVG editor for Web graphics, not to compete in the commercial publishing world. I don't know why people are so desperate to make out that the program competes in markets it's not even intended for.
for example, with most other programs when you use the color picker you have to go back and pick your paintbrush (or line tool, or floodfill) again. Microangelo would remember which tool you were using. A tiny detail, but it's amazing what a difference such simple UI features can make. Corel is utterly clueless about that.
Corel, like Adobe, expects its users to invest the time required to learn the program.
What does "go back and pick" mean? When I use a graphics package, I have one hand holding a pen and the other on the keyboard, where the convenient single-keypress tool selection shortcuts are far more convenient than wrestling with a program that keeps unselecting the colour picker tool when you accidentally picked the wrong colour.
Microsoft did get a controlling stake at Corel and shut its Linux division down.
Hardly. The shares Microsoft bought were non-voting shares. It's a bit hard for a non-voting shareholder to control a company, you know.
And there was nothing about Linux in the accompanying agreement, which was mainly to do with Corel continuing to support Microsoft technologies like VBA and.NET.
The funny thing is Microsoft threatened to sue Corel for using a spellcheck in its office suite claiming they have a patent on it.
No, the patent in question was on the method of displaying squiggly lines under misspelled words. Which is of course equally silly, but it demonstrates exactly how little fact-checking people like you bother to do before they start spreading anti-Microsoft FUD.
So tell me again Microsoft never used its patents to sue a competitor.
Oooh, a non-sequitur! Since when did threatening to sue someone equal suing them?
(And even "threatened to sue" is a wonderfully vague phrase in the mouths of a hater like you; I can't find any references to tell me what really happened, but it could mean anything from "announced a lawsuit" to "observed in passing that Corel technology might possibly infringe a Microsoft patent".)
Simple. The mall isn't your property. Next question.
Okay, here's your next question: since you agree that it is not OK to fire a gun recklessly in a mall that is not your property, do you also agree that it is not OK to drive a car recklessly on a road that is not your property?
However, rephrased as "I'll make sure the teacher were dead" or "I will kill that SOB" the quotes are more threatening, maybe?
Well, yes. However, given that the message that this article is about did not, in fact, contain any statement of intent, I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say.
It is the message that is important, not the medium it is delivered in, and in this case the message was pretty clear.
Well... no, apparently the message wasn't clear at all. See, if the message had been clear, then there wouldn't be a whole bunch of people sitting here right now arguing over whether it was a joke or not, would there?
(Note that while this judge concluded that there was nothing to suggest it was a joke, the local sheriff's office declined to act because they thought it was pretty obvious that it was a joke. So, yes, there is actually some disagreement among professional law enforcement people whose job it is to work out when a threat is a joke. This is not typically a characteristic of "clear" messages.)
If client wants a commercial font, and publishing house doesn't have a licence to the commercial font, then the contract between client and publishing house needs to specify who pays for the font licence and who owns the font licence when the print job is complete. [...] Presumably you can sell on a 'second-hand' font licence, like you can sell on the right to use pretty much any kind of intellectual property ?
What you can and can't do with a commercially-licensed font naturally depends on the terms of the license. Let's look at some.
Here is Linotype's standard license. With regard to your first point, observe 1.4, which states that you do not need to own a license simply to print documents that use the font, i.e. a license is only needed to create or modify such documents; this implies that only designers and typesetters need licenses. With regard to selling licenses second-hand, observe 1.3: they permit it under certain strict conditions.
Here are Adobe's font licenses. They're pretty similar, and permit transferring the license to a third party in much the same way. Interestingly, Adobe appears to be stricter than Linotype: they require printers to own a valid license as well, even if they are only printing a document that you created. This may be why so many unlicensed Adobe products were found in this raid.
Note that font licenses do tend to be valid contracts; typically you are presented with the license before you have made any payment, and in the case of more expensive fonts you may even have to provide a physical signature. These aren't dodgy shrink-wrap EULAs of the sort we all hate so much.
For your other point: Can you rent fonts, like you can rent cars ? You might only need it for one print job; or you might need to own the licence like you own a car, to use every day for years and years.
That is entirely up to the person issuing the licenses; the answer is typically "no" (assuming you live in a jurisdiction where it's possible to prohibit this). But with the price of a perpetual license to a single weight of a font typically being between $10 and $30, it's unlikely in practice that you'd save much money that way anyway. Just buy the weights the job needs -- it's peanuts compared to the other expenses.
Why should computer fonts be copyrightable, when everyone accepts that typefaces are not?
It is not the case that "everyone" accepts this. That is the case in the USA, but this article is about events in Britain. US law doesn't apply here.
I don't know off-hand what UK law actually says on the matter, but I do know that it's probably irrelevant, because you can't get your hands on any computer font that's worth printing without agreeing to a legally-binding contract anyway.
So... by your logic, Apple, which breaks backwards compatibility to force an upgrade on an almost annual basis, must be the least ethical business ever, while Microsoft has been acting like a saint for the last 20 years?
So I went to look at the list, and it wasn't in the article. There was a link to it, though. So I middle-clicked the link, to open it in a new tab, and... oops. The tab's empty.
Oh, I see, it wasn't a link at all, it was a pointless bit of JavaScript that merely looked like a link. So I go back and click on it the way they were expecting, and... oops. There's still no list: just an empty window with a title at the top.
Okay, fine, their online article won't work in Firefox. So I'll use the print version instead. No JavaScript there, right? Wrong. The print link takes you to... the same article, formatted for printing. Complete with lack of list, complete with stupid JavaScript non-link.
Sorry, guys, but if you've gone to such lengths to make sure I can't read your damn article, I really don't see why I should care who you think matters. If you can't write plain HTML, you have no business talking about the web.
Who was alive 400 years ago to confirm this so-called "global warming"?
Who was alive 13.7 billion years ago to confirm the Big Bang, or, if you're a creationist, who was around 6000-odd years ago to confirm Genesis?
If you want to know where these claims come from, try finding out instead of just rubbishing something you clearly don't understand.
Anyone who thinks we, as humans, are big enough to affect this God given Earth in a permanent way, has a blown up ego.
Sure. Thing is, I don't particularly care about this God-given Earth. As you say, it can take care of itself. In the event of e.g. nuclear armageddon, the planet would barely notice and would carry on spinning round the sun in much the same way. Why, it wouldn't even wipe out all life!
But that wouldn't be much consolation to the folk left crawling around in the glowing ruins of what were once cities, dying slowly of radiation sickness.
I don't know about you, but I'm actually kind of attached to human civilisation, and I'm pretty damn sure we, as humans, are quite big enough to do quite a bit of damage to that. For example, by use of the aforementioned nuclear weapons -- or, according to some scientists, by the effects of our actions on the environment.
Global warming, if true, probably won't wipe out life on earth. But it could make it pretty uncomfortable for an awful lot of humans. Again, I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned, that counts as a Bad Thing. Now, yes, fighting global warming would cost money, money which would be wasted if it turned out not to be true after all. But what I want to know is why so many people seem to think that this makes it stupid to spend that money. Nobody seems to have any problem with paying for health insurance (you have no proof you'll get sick!), or car insurance (you have no proof you're going to crash!), or house insurance (you have no proof you're going to be burgled!). So what's wrong with planet insurance?
So, Party A passes a law to curb this... and abides by that law. Eventually, Party B becomes the majority... and they pass a law allowing it again.
I thought you Americans had a neat system specifically designed for making laws to limit government power, whereby a law could be passed which needed more than a mere majority to overturn, making it more resilient to power shifts. It's called the Constitution.
I guess the problem there is that you need a supermajority to get an amendment made in the first place...:/
If net neutrality passes, what if I need a connection with QoS (quality of service) for two-way video or VOIP communication?
In the unlikely situation that your business actually depends on you having guaranteed VOIP, I suggest you take out insurance against outages. Just like if you need to ship a critical parcel overland, you take out insurance against the courier being hit by a truck -- and you don't whine that the government has imposed this ridiculous "freeway neutrality" law that prevents the courier from driving faster than all those guys who are just going shopping or visiting their aunt across the state.
Now what if they had gone ahead and instituted some arbitrary standards of 'patently offensive' & 'morbid interest in violence'? The court isn't being asked to rule on the legality of the intent behind the Violent Games Law, merely its vague wording. It isn't like the Lousianna Legislature can't fix the defects in the law & pass it again.
Which is just fine. There's nothing wrong with legally enforced ratings. They don't hurt anyone. The beer industry does not seem to be suffering from the fact that it's illegal to supply liquor to minors; the porn industry does not seem to have been stifled by the fact that Walmart does not stock hardcore videos.
The problem with this law was nothing to do with its stated intent; it was that it was vaguely worded. The wording was designed to create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, where game manufacturers were not able to be sure whether their games would be treated as "violent" or not, and where game retailers were not able to be sure whether they were allowed to sell certain games to minors. That would have stifled people's free expression by encouraging self-censorship. That would have been bad.
But the stated intent itself is not bad. It's not even censorship. A well-written law of this sort, with very precise and rigid definitions and easily-understood effects, would not be a problem. If they want to institute some "arbitrary" standards, then that's fine. If the people change their standards, the law can be changed to reflect that. The people will get what they want, which is what "democracy" means.
It's only vague or over-broad laws, like the DMCA, that have chilling effects.
I suspect that varies with the programmer. I'm pretty certain that much of my Python code contains things that a type deduction system (SML, Haskell) wouldn't be able to cope with. Certainly I use duck typing a lot.
How exactly does duck typing differ from the structural subtyping of e.g. OCaml, which allows you to write a function that can be passed any object, of any class or none, if it provides all the methods that function uses? The type inference system handles it just fine.
Of course, "duck typing" isn't a very well-defined term. Maybe your definition includes things like automatic coercions, introspection, and polymorphic recursion, which are indeed not permitted in OCaml's type system. In that case, you're probably correct in your suspicion that its benefits would not outweigh its disadvantages for you. Though you might find it useful to dabble in anyway; there's nothing so educational as frustration.
And besides, only one of maybe a hundred Python program I've written ran unacceptably slow.
<flamebait> I didn't think my old 386 was unacceptably slow, either... in the days when that was what I was used to. </flamebait>
To be fair, Python is indeed plenty fast enough, as long as all the computation-intensive stuff is happening in external libraries written in C. It's a great language for glue and GUIs (with wxPython). It does get rather slow rather quickly if you try to do anything significant in pure Python code, though.
$ wtf is rtfm rtfm: Read The Manual. Used to gently guide a newbie user to the manual page for the tool he's trying to use. The "F" is historical, and was initially added for emphasis. Nowadays it's just plain necessary. $ wtf is wtf wtf: Who or What, depending on the context. Usually implies a question mark. The "TF" is really padding, to make this a three-letter acronym, meaning something like "pray tell".
That said, I just do not believe a game that's been in development for ten goddamn years can possibly be any good. Prove me wrong, Broussard, prove me wrong.
I don't know. There are games that have been in development for twice as long as that, that still seem to have a few loyal fans.
Slashdot Mirror
Streaming live video? What other purpose does that really serve?
Sport and teleconferencing.
Actually, is streaming live video even used for porn at all? What's the point of broadcasting porn live? I'd have thought most people would want it prerecorded, so they can get a guaranteed quality level.
High speed internet? It only reached critical mass because it allows people to download their porn faster and in higher resolution.
Actually, downloading music and sharing digital photos (of grandchildren etc., not porn) are probably more common factors. Porn might have driven early adopters, but not the general public.
Newsgroups? If you every actually used one, you'd see what they were used for.
In my experience, mostly technical discussion, homework questions, and general social banter. Note that the vast majority of news servers (including Google Groups) do not carry the binaries groups, so the vast majority of users have no idea that you can get porn on Usenet at all.
Sorry to burst your bubble and all, but while I realise the belief that porn drives technology is somehow appealing to many people, it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you start looking at facts instead of fantasy.
Viewers certainly want an enhanced sense of realism in their movies/TV
Key word: "sense". A sense of realism does not mean they want their entertainment to be realistic.
Example: with only a handful of exceptions, practically every space opera ever made has sound effects in space -- because whatever the scientific facts, viewers get a better sense of "being there" if engines roar and explosions go "bang" and lasers go "zap" as they whizz through space slower than the average bullet.
If you make a show that's actually realistic, you're unlikely to get many viewers. (Even shows that are supposed to thrive on the everyday, like soap operas, have to constantly introduce extraordinary events to keep the viewers watching.)
Good luck persuading people to watch your dream show, which would presumably flood their living-room with the stench of decomposing bodies or something. Somehow I don't see you getting very good ratings, even from the people who supposedly hunger for "realism"...
Replying to myself = bad, sure, but I think I must clarify what I meant when I said Inkscape does not support CMYK, before some fanboy tells me about the CMYK tab in the colour selection dialog box.
Try using that tab to specify the standard colour Pantone DE 321-3 C (C60 M90 Y100 K30). I can't. It keeps changing the values I've already input. This is, so far as I can tell, because Inkscape stores RGB internally and does not even attempt to support any other colour model; so when I input a CMYK value, it converts my input to RGB, then converts it back to CMYK to show me. Oops, it's not a clean round-trip conversion. So some perfectly standard colours are completely impossible to specify in Inkscape.
This alone makes Inkscape completely useless for anyone working for print rather than the screen. Equally, it's not a problem in the slightest for anyone working on web graphics, which is why it's not a problem with Inkscape at all, because Inkscape is aimed at the web market not the print market.
Well, first and foremost, some flipping documentation would be nice. When I go into the "Help" menu in Inkscape, I get a basic keyboard reference and some links to online tutorials. What I want is a reference that actually describes the options and tools available.
Okay, so here are some random features I use every day in CorelDraw that Inkscape appears not to provide:
I can't be bothered to look further, as it's already clear that it does not even come close to satisfying my requirements at this time.
Which is really not surprising, because Inkscape's own developers have made it perfectly clear that they are not interested in competing with CorelDraw and Illustrator. They are setting out to make the best SVG editor for Web graphics, not to compete in the commercial publishing world. I don't know why people are so desperate to make out that the program competes in markets it's not even intended for.
for example, with most other programs when you use the color picker you have to go back and pick your paintbrush (or line tool, or floodfill) again. Microangelo would remember which tool you were using. A tiny detail, but it's amazing what a difference such simple UI features can make. Corel is utterly clueless about that.
Corel, like Adobe, expects its users to invest the time required to learn the program.
What does "go back and pick" mean? When I use a graphics package, I have one hand holding a pen and the other on the keyboard, where the convenient single-keypress tool selection shortcuts are far more convenient than wrestling with a program that keeps unselecting the colour picker tool when you accidentally picked the wrong colour.
We have a Corel icon?
:P
So it would seem.
It's a logo they stopped using more than five years ago, but hey, why be picky?
Microsoft did get a controlling stake at Corel and shut its Linux division down.
.NET.
Hardly. The shares Microsoft bought were non-voting shares. It's a bit hard for a non-voting shareholder to control a company, you know.
And there was nothing about Linux in the accompanying agreement, which was mainly to do with Corel continuing to support Microsoft technologies like VBA and
The funny thing is Microsoft threatened to sue Corel for using a spellcheck in its office suite claiming they have a patent on it.
No, the patent in question was on the method of displaying squiggly lines under misspelled words. Which is of course equally silly, but it demonstrates exactly how little fact-checking people like you bother to do before they start spreading anti-Microsoft FUD.
So tell me again Microsoft never used its patents to sue a competitor.
Oooh, a non-sequitur! Since when did threatening to sue someone equal suing them?
(And even "threatened to sue" is a wonderfully vague phrase in the mouths of a hater like you; I can't find any references to tell me what really happened, but it could mean anything from "announced a lawsuit" to "observed in passing that Corel technology might possibly infringe a Microsoft patent".)
Simple. The mall isn't your property. Next question.
Okay, here's your next question: since you agree that it is not OK to fire a gun recklessly in a mall that is not your property, do you also agree that it is not OK to drive a car recklessly on a road that is not your property?
The law should punish bad and reckless actions, not actions that may or may not lead to bad and reckless actions.
Yes, I quite agree. The law should punish bad and reckless actions... like talking on a cellphone while you drive.
However, rephrased as "I'll make sure the teacher were dead" or "I will kill that SOB" the quotes are more threatening, maybe?
Well, yes. However, given that the message that this article is about did not, in fact, contain any statement of intent, I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say.
It is the message that is important, not the medium it is delivered in, and in this case the message was pretty clear.
Well... no, apparently the message wasn't clear at all. See, if the message had been clear, then there wouldn't be a whole bunch of people sitting here right now arguing over whether it was a joke or not, would there?
(Note that while this judge concluded that there was nothing to suggest it was a joke, the local sheriff's office declined to act because they thought it was pretty obvious that it was a joke. So, yes, there is actually some disagreement among professional law enforcement people whose job it is to work out when a threat is a joke. This is not typically a characteristic of "clear" messages.)
Oh please - I use the initials "ASS" every chance I get.
What's offensive about donkeys?
If client wants a commercial font, and publishing house doesn't have a licence to the commercial font, then the contract between client and publishing house needs to specify who pays for the font licence and who owns the font licence when the print job is complete.
[...]
Presumably you can sell on a 'second-hand' font licence, like you can sell on the right to use pretty much any kind of intellectual property ?
What you can and can't do with a commercially-licensed font naturally depends on the terms of the license. Let's look at some.
Here is Linotype's standard license. With regard to your first point, observe 1.4, which states that you do not need to own a license simply to print documents that use the font, i.e. a license is only needed to create or modify such documents; this implies that only designers and typesetters need licenses. With regard to selling licenses second-hand, observe 1.3: they permit it under certain strict conditions.
Here are Adobe's font licenses. They're pretty similar, and permit transferring the license to a third party in much the same way. Interestingly, Adobe appears to be stricter than Linotype: they require printers to own a valid license as well, even if they are only printing a document that you created. This may be why so many unlicensed Adobe products were found in this raid.
Note that font licenses do tend to be valid contracts; typically you are presented with the license before you have made any payment, and in the case of more expensive fonts you may even have to provide a physical signature. These aren't dodgy shrink-wrap EULAs of the sort we all hate so much.
For your other point:
Can you rent fonts, like you can rent cars ? You might only need it for one print job; or you might need to own the licence like you own a car, to use every day for years and years.
That is entirely up to the person issuing the licenses; the answer is typically "no" (assuming you live in a jurisdiction where it's possible to prohibit this). But with the price of a perpetual license to a single weight of a font typically being between $10 and $30, it's unlikely in practice that you'd save much money that way anyway. Just buy the weights the job needs -- it's peanuts compared to the other expenses.
Why should computer fonts be copyrightable, when everyone accepts that typefaces are not?
It is not the case that "everyone" accepts this. That is the case in the USA, but this article is about events in Britain. US law doesn't apply here.
I don't know off-hand what UK law actually says on the matter, but I do know that it's probably irrelevant, because you can't get your hands on any computer font that's worth printing without agreeing to a legally-binding contract anyway.
Microsoft's obligation is as an ethical business.
So... by your logic, Apple, which breaks backwards compatibility to force an upgrade on an almost annual basis, must be the least ethical business ever, while Microsoft has been acting like a saint for the last 20 years?
Sorry, I just don't see it.
So I went to look at the list, and it wasn't in the article. There was a link to it, though. So I middle-clicked the link, to open it in a new tab, and... oops. The tab's empty.
Oh, I see, it wasn't a link at all, it was a pointless bit of JavaScript that merely looked like a link. So I go back and click on it the way they were expecting, and... oops. There's still no list: just an empty window with a title at the top.
Okay, fine, their online article won't work in Firefox. So I'll use the print version instead. No JavaScript there, right? Wrong. The print link takes you to... the same article, formatted for printing. Complete with lack of list, complete with stupid JavaScript non-link.
Sorry, guys, but if you've gone to such lengths to make sure I can't read your damn article, I really don't see why I should care who you think matters. If you can't write plain HTML, you have no business talking about the web.
Who was alive 400 years ago to confirm this so-called "global warming"?
Who was alive 13.7 billion years ago to confirm the Big Bang, or, if you're a creationist, who was around 6000-odd years ago to confirm Genesis?
If you want to know where these claims come from, try finding out instead of just rubbishing something you clearly don't understand.
Anyone who thinks we, as humans, are big enough to affect this God given Earth in a permanent way, has a blown up ego.
Sure. Thing is, I don't particularly care about this God-given Earth. As you say, it can take care of itself. In the event of e.g. nuclear armageddon, the planet would barely notice and would carry on spinning round the sun in much the same way. Why, it wouldn't even wipe out all life!
But that wouldn't be much consolation to the folk left crawling around in the glowing ruins of what were once cities, dying slowly of radiation sickness.
I don't know about you, but I'm actually kind of attached to human civilisation, and I'm pretty damn sure we, as humans, are quite big enough to do quite a bit of damage to that. For example, by use of the aforementioned nuclear weapons -- or, according to some scientists, by the effects of our actions on the environment.
Global warming, if true, probably won't wipe out life on earth. But it could make it pretty uncomfortable for an awful lot of humans. Again, I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned, that counts as a Bad Thing. Now, yes, fighting global warming would cost money, money which would be wasted if it turned out not to be true after all. But what I want to know is why so many people seem to think that this makes it stupid to spend that money. Nobody seems to have any problem with paying for health insurance (you have no proof you'll get sick!), or car insurance (you have no proof you're going to crash!), or house insurance (you have no proof you're going to be burgled!). So what's wrong with planet insurance?
This sort of begs the question, how many names are we gonna have to come up with. Surely Classical mythology has a finite supply...
There's no shortage of other mythologies, though. Haven't you read Rendezvous with Rama?
So, Party A passes a law to curb this ... and abides by that law. ... and they pass a law allowing it again.
:/
Eventually, Party B becomes the majority
I thought you Americans had a neat system specifically designed for making laws to limit government power, whereby a law could be passed which needed more than a mere majority to overturn, making it more resilient to power shifts. It's called the Constitution.
I guess the problem there is that you need a supermajority to get an amendment made in the first place...
If net neutrality passes, what if I need a connection with QoS (quality of service) for two-way video or VOIP communication?
In the unlikely situation that your business actually depends on you having guaranteed VOIP, I suggest you take out insurance against outages. Just like if you need to ship a critical parcel overland, you take out insurance against the courier being hit by a truck -- and you don't whine that the government has imposed this ridiculous "freeway neutrality" law that prevents the courier from driving faster than all those guys who are just going shopping or visiting their aunt across the state.
Now what if they had gone ahead and instituted some arbitrary standards of 'patently offensive' & 'morbid interest in violence'? The court isn't being asked to rule on the legality of the intent behind the Violent Games Law, merely its vague wording. It isn't like the Lousianna Legislature can't fix the defects in the law & pass it again.
Which is just fine. There's nothing wrong with legally enforced ratings. They don't hurt anyone. The beer industry does not seem to be suffering from the fact that it's illegal to supply liquor to minors; the porn industry does not seem to have been stifled by the fact that Walmart does not stock hardcore videos.
The problem with this law was nothing to do with its stated intent; it was that it was vaguely worded. The wording was designed to create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, where game manufacturers were not able to be sure whether their games would be treated as "violent" or not, and where game retailers were not able to be sure whether they were allowed to sell certain games to minors. That would have stifled people's free expression by encouraging self-censorship. That would have been bad.
But the stated intent itself is not bad. It's not even censorship. A well-written law of this sort, with very precise and rigid definitions and easily-understood effects, would not be a problem. If they want to institute some "arbitrary" standards, then that's fine. If the people change their standards, the law can be changed to reflect that. The people will get what they want, which is what "democracy" means.
It's only vague or over-broad laws, like the DMCA, that have chilling effects.
Of course, "duck typing" isn't a very well-defined term. Maybe your definition includes things like automatic coercions, introspection, and polymorphic recursion, which are indeed not permitted in OCaml's type system. In that case, you're probably correct in your suspicion that its benefits would not outweigh its disadvantages for you. Though you might find it useful to dabble in anyway; there's nothing so educational as frustration.
<flamebait> I didn't think my old 386 was unacceptably slow, either... in the days when that was what I was used to. </flamebait>
To be fair, Python is indeed plenty fast enough, as long as all the computation-intensive stuff is happening in external libraries written in C. It's a great language for glue and GUIs (with wxPython). It does get rather slow rather quickly if you try to do anything significant in pure Python code, though.
Move them from Access to SQL or something.
Great idea! Shall we also move them from Word to C++? I hear C++ has a much better spellchecker!
Get a decent OS. One with the "wtf" command:
$ wtf is rtfm
rtfm: Read The Manual. Used to gently guide a newbie user to the manual page for the tool he's trying to use. The "F" is historical, and was initially added for emphasis. Nowadays it's just plain necessary.
$ wtf is wtf
wtf: Who or What, depending on the context. Usually implies a question mark. The "TF" is really padding, to make this a three-letter acronym, meaning something like "pray tell".
That said, I just do not believe a game that's been in development for ten goddamn years can possibly be any good. Prove me wrong, Broussard, prove me wrong.
I don't know. There are games that have been in development for twice as long as that, that still seem to have a few loyal fans.