realize that it is their network, they can do whatever they want with it
Well, no, actually. That claim is easily proven to be false: they can't use their network to sell child porn, therefore they can't do whatever they want with it.
They can do whatever they want within the limits of the law and the constraints of the contract they have signed with you.
If you have agreed in your contract that they can throttle your usage or restrict certain types of traffic, then they can do that. On the other hand, if they have foolishly agreed to supply you with a certain level of connectivity regardless of what you are using it for, then they cannot simply turn around and say "oops, we've changed our minds" -- they took your money, and that means they are obliged to give you what you paid for.
I suspect most, if not all, of the contracts people have agreed to do permit the ISP to change the terms of service and do permit the ISP to restrict traffic based on what the ISP decides is reasonable. In which case, yes, they can do that. But please don't spread the dangerous myth that ownership of property allows you ultimate power over that property. It doesn't. Every right has responsibilities attached.
For morons like you who don't understand what this means, it essentially boils down to the requirement that the punishment for a crime has to fit the seriousness of the crime. You can't get a death sentence for stealing a pack of bubble gum, for example; and that's not just because the law doesn't allow for it. It's because such a law would be unconstitutional.
No, but you can get 25 years to life, and that has been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court. Elsewhere in the world we would consider that "cruel and unusual", but there you go. I guess in most other Western nations we consider the death penalty unacceptable, so it's already pretty clear that Americans tolerate draconian punishments far more readily than many.
I care about choice, and it is consumer choice that will make the world better, not fiat or force.
Consumers will choose whatever makes them most comfortable today. I don't see why you think there is any logical progression from this to the world becoming a better place.
For example, it's not so long ago that a large group of consumers chose to institute and sustain a brutal system of slavery. It made them more prosperous, and why should they care about the slaves? It wasn't at all obvious to them that slavery had any bad consequences. It took both fiat and force -- four violent and bloody years of force -- to make the world a better place.
So clearly there are cases where your rule doesn't hold. Oh, I'm not for a moment suggesting that whatever we're supposed to be talking about here (SUVs, was it?) is anything like slavery. Just pointing out that counterexamples exist at extremes, and your rule needs to be modified to take them into account.
If you are in the 0.001% of Slashdot users who don't get the joke because you haven't read Neal Stephenson's [amazon.com] , you don't know what you've been missing
[amazon.com]? No, I haven't read that one. Snow Crash is pretty good, though.:)
How is it that a Mac 512 worked so well with the OS and word processor on the floppy and the data on another flopy, and with 512 kb of memory. Seriously, I want to know. It wasn't all that bad.
You're kidding, right?
I got into Macs with an LC II. That had several megabytes of memory, a large hard disk, and a much faster processor.
Move a window on the screen, and you could literally sit back for several seconds and watch it redraw it a line at a time.
Type text into Wordperfect, and you literally had to pause at the end of each paragraph and wait for the display to catch up.
It was slow. It only seemed tolerably fast because we didn't know better. Remember how it seemed incredible, in Jules Verne's day, that a man might circumnavigate the globe in 80 days? Yeah, like that.
To all my fellow developers, the next time you are about to use a 3rd party lib instead of writing a couple optimized and custom tailored routines to the program you are working on; ask yourself why you you are against vb and microsoft bloated development environments and ask yourself if you aren't manually enforcing the same bloat and inefficiency in the name of ease and rapid development that those programs automatically enforce.
(a) I hate VB because it's a nasty language. I have nothing against other MS development environments; I don't use them, but that's because I like other tools better, not because I hate them.
(b) Reinventing the wheel is stupid. Why the hell should I waste time writing dozens of poorly-optimised routines for myself, when I could just plug in someone else's finely tuned, heavily optimised library?
Seriously, which is better? A set of applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org which have reinvented all their own wheels and use custom application-specific GUI toolkits, or a set of applications like Konqueror + KWrite, or Galeon + AbiWord, that reuse a single standard shared widget toolkit that only needs to be stored once on the system and only needs to take up memory once?
Shared libraries don't create bloat, they reduce it.*
Now, it's possible that there are also some libraries that would benefit from static linking with whole-program optimisation and dead code elimination. More work in those areas might pay off.
* In theory. Of course, the common situation where you require both GTK+ and Qt on the same system is clearly bad and bloated, but that's solved by choosing applications to go together well, not by forcing every single programmer to reinvent the wheel.
OS/X is a decent OS. It's really good for grandma and grandpa with it's simplicity.
Huh? Examples, please, of things grandparents are likely to want to do which are noticably simpler in OS X than in Windows or Linux.
(Speaking from my own, purely anecdotal experience, I find people have a far, far harder time figuring out how the hell the dock is supposed to work than they do using the applications-menu system common to all the other major desktop environments. Maybe OS X is simpler for setting up wireless networks or something. But that's not something my grandparents are likely to want to do.)
It still seems odd to me to hear my English co-workers talking about what is going on in Europe. To me it would be like hearing New Yorkers talk about taking a trip to America.
But I thought New Yorkers think New York is America?:P
A better example would be Hawaiians. Do they see a difference between the part of the US that's in North America and the part of the US that's in Hawaii, or is it all just "America" to them?
I can't help but wonder with the amount of people registering in the GB, 257,368 at present, if this is meaning people are becoming more accepting of the idea of Britian being considered a part of europe.
Even UKIP.eu is registered! Truly we must be on the dawn of a new era.
You can acquire and release resources in many languages, too, but using the RAII idiom in C++ you never forget the latter, while in languages that rely on finally or Dispose or whatever, you can.
Of course, RAII breaks down as soon as your object lifetimes are not naturally nested (in C++'s low-level view, when you have to use heap allocation). You can go a long way towards solving that by using smart pointers, but all the implementations of those have their own flaws (reference-counting fails on cyclic data structures, etc).
In other words, it's questionable how much RAII actually gains you over idioms like C#'s "using", or the "finally" functions popular in various FP languages. Sure, you can forget to use "using". But you can forget to use a smart pointer in C++, too.
So, in order to show my point, I made another anti-Microsoft post to another thread, without any warning flags this time. And lookie, within a quarter of an hour, it already caught a Troll moderation!
Well, yes - that's because it was a troll post. That is to say, anyone reading it would be perfectly reasonable to draw the conclusion that it was solely intended to provoke.
Sorry, but I fail to see how troll posts being moderated Troll proves that moderators are biased.
A valid test would be to post a statistically significant number of genuinely insightful posts that actually discuss Microsoft's failings in an intelligent and unbiased way, and see what proportion of those get modded down quickly. (A single-post test, even one where the post in question was not one that deserved modding down in and of itself, would prove only that a single moderator was biased.)
Yeh, that'll work. I'll go and make a feature film of my favourite book tomorrow. Don't worry, I'll give the author a bit of cash, despite the fact he doesn't want me making a film of it, and is in the middle of making a film himself. I've got a great Beatles soundtrack I'm going to use.
Sounds good to me. The free market decides which film people want to have. The author doesn't lose out, because he gets royalties from your film if it succeeds, and profits from his own film if that succeeds, and he's already made a load of money from writing a popular book in the first place.
If authors do not have an absolute right to control their work - if that right is a privilege granted by society - then society has a right to revoke, or restrict, that privilege as it sees fit, and the scenario you describe would be a perfectly fair scenario for a society to choose to permit. It's only a nightmare scenario (as you seem to have intended it to be) if you take the line that authors have some kind of God-given right to decide what happens to their work.
And in that case, even the present system makes no sense. If authors do have an absolute inherent right to control their work, then copyrights must be made perpetual, because we cannot take someone's property rights away after death! Imagine if your kids got to keep everything that you leave them in your will, but 70 years later the state came along and reclaimed everything that had been your property? That's clearly ludicrous. So if copyright is a property right like any other, it absolutely must become perpetual.
Good luck finding the rightful heir of Shakespeare when you want to put on a production of Hamlet, though.
Ingvar Kamprad is one of the richest men in the world (possibly the richest, depending on whose figures you believe). What a terrible country Sweden must be, if it stifles its entrepeneurs so much that all they can do is dominate international markets and end up richer than Bill Gates!
If the DRM process was an open spec that anyone could implement, and the creators could dictate the terms of use for their creation, [...] the public is not hindered to use their creations, because anyone can create a legal player so long as it respects the DRM.
Sorry, but no. If the creators are given the freedom to say "this work may be watched precisely once and once only", then the public is hindered in its use of this creation, because they can only watch it once.
That's why the GP proposed getting rid of all systems that allow content creators to dictate terms of use, and replacing them with a system that ensures content creators are compensated for the use that people choose to make.
Because, see, you've been able to run Windows on Macs for years now. Virtual PC does it very nicely. The only thing it's no good for is 3D action games.
If people wouldn't put up with the infinitesimal slowdown of Virtual PC, why do you think they're going to put up with the even greater inconvenience of constant rebooting?
One nice thing about Mozilla is that you can easily disseminate who is or is not vulnerable based upon a simple to understand version number.
As long as the vulnerability is always present, not triggered by individual extensions. And except for all the people using nightlies, and unofficial builds. And for flaws in Gecko, you have a different "simple" version number for every single Gecko browser - Firefox, Seamonkey, Galeon, Camino, and all the others that I've forgotten.
Sorry, but while Mozilla et al. have many advantages, simplicity of identifying which users are at risk from any given flaw is not one of them.
Won't happen and can't happen. No national censorship has been undertaken, nor will it -- and you have no evidence to show how it is likely to, either.
Well, duh. That's because all the evidence was censored.
Except for all the spelling problems. When to use "ou" and when to use "oo", for example, or (in katakana) when to use "ei" and when to use "e-". And some words don't even have fixed spellings. Quick - is "vaiorin" likely to be regarded as more correct than "baiorin"? I bet you don't know off the top of your head.
And that is assuming that you don't count kanji issues as "spelling". Which "sou" should I use in "kawaisou"? (I'm amazed how many native speakers regularly misspell that word. To be fair, most instances are probably just henkan mistakes, but still.)
And then there's okurigana. Should it be "wa(karu)" or "waka(ru)"? (And which of the three common kanji for this word should I use in this case? Of course, that affects the okurigana...)
If those don't count as spelling problems, I'd like to know what would.:)
Right, it certainly wasn't intended to keep developers away from OpenGL...
Correct - it wasn't.
I realise this goes against/. groupthink and may be a concept that it's impossible for many readers to grasp, but Direct3D is not, in fact, evil.
Back when Direct3D was first designed, OpenGL was practically unknown on consumer hardware. None of the 3D accelerators aimed at the home market supported it well. (Don't quote GLQuake against that - who could forget the gigantic nightmare that was the 3DFX OpenGL mini-driver?)
Instead, 3D accelerated games had to code to proprietary APIs that were different for every brand of card. Want 3DFX users to play your game? You'd better write your rendering code with the Glide API, then. Want S3 users to play your game? Aha, that means you need to target the MeTaL API. Want PowerVR users to play your game? Another unique proprietary incompatible API.
Gamers suffered. Either a game would only run on one brand of video card (usually 3DFX), or it would run badly on several. Case in point: Unreal. When it was released, it ran well on 3DFX cards, and if you had something else, you had to use software rendering. Eventually they released a series of patches which tried to add support for other cards and APIs, but since they hadn't designed the engine to work with them, they were always buggy. I don't think that game ever ran perfectly on non-3DFX hardware.
In that context, Direct3D was an effort to create standardisation, not an effort to destroy it. Yes, Microsoft could have adopted OpenGL. But why should they? OpenGL was a technical system for high-end workstations. It wasn't designed for games. Gamers didn't care about it. Consumer graphcis hardware didn't support it. From Microsoft's point of view, it made far, far more sense to design their own API, which would interact well with the other gaming APIs they were developing.
Misguided? Perhaps. Evil? Sorry, but no. Not in any possible sense.
It would be fscking hilarious if someone were to prove that you can't always find a given chunk of data within {original-size} bytes of pi, so the offset might be bigger than the original data, and this algorithm wouldn't even be guaranteed to actually compress your data.
Here is a chunk of data that cannot be compressed with your algorithm:
Slashdot Mirror
realize that it is their network, they can do whatever they want with it
Well, no, actually. That claim is easily proven to be false: they can't use their network to sell child porn, therefore they can't do whatever they want with it.
They can do whatever they want within the limits of the law and the constraints of the contract they have signed with you.
If you have agreed in your contract that they can throttle your usage or restrict certain types of traffic, then they can do that. On the other hand, if they have foolishly agreed to supply you with a certain level of connectivity regardless of what you are using it for, then they cannot simply turn around and say "oops, we've changed our minds" -- they took your money, and that means they are obliged to give you what you paid for.
I suspect most, if not all, of the contracts people have agreed to do permit the ISP to change the terms of service and do permit the ISP to restrict traffic based on what the ISP decides is reasonable. In which case, yes, they can do that. But please don't spread the dangerous myth that ownership of property allows you ultimate power over that property. It doesn't. Every right has responsibilities attached.
"Jack Thompson plays videogame, sues self."
winning the game is possible in 30 minutes
Make that 17 minutes and 20 seconds.
For morons like you who don't understand what this means, it essentially boils down to the requirement that the punishment for a crime has to fit the seriousness of the crime. You can't get a death sentence for stealing a pack of bubble gum, for example; and that's not just because the law doesn't allow for it. It's because such a law would be unconstitutional.
No, but you can get 25 years to life, and that has been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court. Elsewhere in the world we would consider that "cruel and unusual", but there you go. I guess in most other Western nations we consider the death penalty unacceptable, so it's already pretty clear that Americans tolerate draconian punishments far more readily than many.
Did you miss his subject line? It says "Ignoramus is right". That would appear to be talking about you. :)
I think he replied to the wrong person. That's all.
I care about choice, and it is consumer choice that will make the world better, not fiat or force.
Consumers will choose whatever makes them most comfortable today. I don't see why you think there is any logical progression from this to the world becoming a better place.
For example, it's not so long ago that a large group of consumers chose to institute and sustain a brutal system of slavery. It made them more prosperous, and why should they care about the slaves? It wasn't at all obvious to them that slavery had any bad consequences. It took both fiat and force -- four violent and bloody years of force -- to make the world a better place.
So clearly there are cases where your rule doesn't hold. Oh, I'm not for a moment suggesting that whatever we're supposed to be talking about here (SUVs, was it?) is anything like slavery. Just pointing out that counterexamples exist at extremes, and your rule needs to be modified to take them into account.
This is surprising... at least to me.
Not really, if you think back a bit. I have an impression Goldeneye sold almost as many N64s as Mario 64 did.
If you are in the 0.001% of Slashdot users who don't get the joke because you haven't read Neal Stephenson's [amazon.com] , you don't know what you've been missing
:)
[amazon.com]? No, I haven't read that one. Snow Crash is pretty good, though.
How is it that a Mac 512 worked so well with the OS and word processor on the floppy and the data on another flopy, and with 512 kb of memory. Seriously, I want to know. It wasn't all that bad.
You're kidding, right?
I got into Macs with an LC II. That had several megabytes of memory, a large hard disk, and a much faster processor.
Move a window on the screen, and you could literally sit back for several seconds and watch it redraw it a line at a time.
Type text into Wordperfect, and you literally had to pause at the end of each paragraph and wait for the display to catch up.
It was slow. It only seemed tolerably fast because we didn't know better. Remember how it seemed incredible, in Jules Verne's day, that a man might circumnavigate the globe in 80 days? Yeah, like that.
To all my fellow developers, the next time you are about to use a 3rd party lib instead of writing a couple optimized and custom tailored routines to the program you are working on; ask yourself why you you are against vb and microsoft bloated development environments and ask yourself if you aren't manually enforcing the same bloat and inefficiency in the name of ease and rapid development that those programs automatically enforce.
(a) I hate VB because it's a nasty language. I have nothing against other MS development environments; I don't use them, but that's because I like other tools better, not because I hate them.
(b) Reinventing the wheel is stupid. Why the hell should I waste time writing dozens of poorly-optimised routines for myself, when I could just plug in someone else's finely tuned, heavily optimised library?
Seriously, which is better? A set of applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org which have reinvented all their own wheels and use custom application-specific GUI toolkits, or a set of applications like Konqueror + KWrite, or Galeon + AbiWord, that reuse a single standard shared widget toolkit that only needs to be stored once on the system and only needs to take up memory once?
Shared libraries don't create bloat, they reduce it.*
Now, it's possible that there are also some libraries that would benefit from static linking with whole-program optimisation and dead code elimination. More work in those areas might pay off.
* In theory. Of course, the common situation where you require both GTK+ and Qt on the same system is clearly bad and bloated, but that's solved by choosing applications to go together well, not by forcing every single programmer to reinvent the wheel.
OS/X is a decent OS. It's really good for grandma and grandpa with it's simplicity.
Huh? Examples, please, of things grandparents are likely to want to do which are noticably simpler in OS X than in Windows or Linux.
(Speaking from my own, purely anecdotal experience, I find people have a far, far harder time figuring out how the hell the dock is supposed to work than they do using the applications-menu system common to all the other major desktop environments. Maybe OS X is simpler for setting up wireless networks or something. But that's not something my grandparents are likely to want to do.)
You Europeans are with us on pr0n, right?
The Germans and British will be, but good luck convincing the French and Dutch.
It still seems odd to me to hear my English co-workers talking about what is going on in Europe. To me it would be like hearing New Yorkers talk about taking a trip to America.
:P
But I thought New Yorkers think New York is America?
A better example would be Hawaiians. Do they see a difference between the part of the US that's in North America and the part of the US that's in Hawaii, or is it all just "America" to them?
I can't help but wonder with the amount of people registering in the GB, 257,368 at present, if this is meaning people are becoming more accepting of the idea of Britian being considered a part of europe.
Even UKIP.eu is registered! Truly we must be on the dawn of a new era.
You can acquire and release resources in many languages, too, but using the RAII idiom in C++ you never forget the latter, while in languages that rely on finally or Dispose or whatever, you can.
Of course, RAII breaks down as soon as your object lifetimes are not naturally nested (in C++'s low-level view, when you have to use heap allocation). You can go a long way towards solving that by using smart pointers, but all the implementations of those have their own flaws (reference-counting fails on cyclic data structures, etc).
In other words, it's questionable how much RAII actually gains you over idioms like C#'s "using", or the "finally" functions popular in various FP languages. Sure, you can forget to use "using". But you can forget to use a smart pointer in C++, too.
There really aren't any silver bullets.
So, in order to show my point, I made another anti-Microsoft post to another thread, without any warning flags this time.
And lookie, within a quarter of an hour, it already caught a Troll moderation!
Well, yes - that's because it was a troll post. That is to say, anyone reading it would be perfectly reasonable to draw the conclusion that it was solely intended to provoke.
Sorry, but I fail to see how troll posts being moderated Troll proves that moderators are biased.
A valid test would be to post a statistically significant number of genuinely insightful posts that actually discuss Microsoft's failings in an intelligent and unbiased way, and see what proportion of those get modded down quickly. (A single-post test, even one where the post in question was not one that deserved modding down in and of itself, would prove only that a single moderator was biased.)
Yeh, that'll work. I'll go and make a feature film of my favourite book tomorrow. Don't worry, I'll give the author a bit of cash, despite the fact he doesn't want me making a film of it, and is in the middle of making a film himself. I've got a great Beatles soundtrack I'm going to use.
Sounds good to me. The free market decides which film people want to have. The author doesn't lose out, because he gets royalties from your film if it succeeds, and profits from his own film if that succeeds, and he's already made a load of money from writing a popular book in the first place.
If authors do not have an absolute right to control their work - if that right is a privilege granted by society - then society has a right to revoke, or restrict, that privilege as it sees fit, and the scenario you describe would be a perfectly fair scenario for a society to choose to permit. It's only a nightmare scenario (as you seem to have intended it to be) if you take the line that authors have some kind of God-given right to decide what happens to their work.
And in that case, even the present system makes no sense. If authors do have an absolute inherent right to control their work, then copyrights must be made perpetual, because we cannot take someone's property rights away after death! Imagine if your kids got to keep everything that you leave them in your will, but 70 years later the state came along and reclaimed everything that had been your property? That's clearly ludicrous. So if copyright is a property right like any other, it absolutely must become perpetual.
Good luck finding the rightful heir of Shakespeare when you want to put on a production of Hamlet, though.
And that's why Sweden is the world leader in... oh, that's right, nothing. No innovative tech, no huge exports.
Ahem.
Ingvar Kamprad is one of the richest men in the world (possibly the richest, depending on whose figures you believe). What a terrible country Sweden must be, if it stifles its entrepeneurs so much that all they can do is dominate international markets and end up richer than Bill Gates!
If the DRM process was an open spec that anyone could implement, and the creators could dictate the terms of use for their creation, [...] the public is not hindered to use their creations, because anyone can create a legal player so long as it respects the DRM.
Sorry, but no. If the creators are given the freedom to say "this work may be watched precisely once and once only", then the public is hindered in its use of this creation, because they can only watch it once.
That's why the GP proposed getting rid of all systems that allow content creators to dictate terms of use, and replacing them with a system that ensures content creators are compensated for the use that people choose to make.
Um, no.
Because, see, you've been able to run Windows on Macs for years now. Virtual PC does it very nicely. The only thing it's no good for is 3D action games.
If people wouldn't put up with the infinitesimal slowdown of Virtual PC, why do you think they're going to put up with the even greater inconvenience of constant rebooting?
One nice thing about Mozilla is that you can easily disseminate who is or is not vulnerable based upon a simple to understand version number.
As long as the vulnerability is always present, not triggered by individual extensions. And except for all the people using nightlies, and unofficial builds. And for flaws in Gecko, you have a different "simple" version number for every single Gecko browser - Firefox, Seamonkey, Galeon, Camino, and all the others that I've forgotten.
Sorry, but while Mozilla et al. have many advantages, simplicity of identifying which users are at risk from any given flaw is not one of them.
Won't happen and can't happen. No national censorship has been undertaken, nor will it -- and you have no evidence to show how it is likely to, either.
Well, duh. That's because all the evidence was censored.
By, like, the Illuminati and stuff.
spelling problems are nonexistent.
:)
Except for all the spelling problems. When to use "ou" and when to use "oo", for example, or (in katakana) when to use "ei" and when to use "e-". And some words don't even have fixed spellings. Quick - is "vaiorin" likely to be regarded as more correct than "baiorin"? I bet you don't know off the top of your head.
And that is assuming that you don't count kanji issues as "spelling". Which "sou" should I use in "kawaisou"? (I'm amazed how many native speakers regularly misspell that word. To be fair, most instances are probably just henkan mistakes, but still.)
And then there's okurigana. Should it be "wa(karu)" or "waka(ru)"? (And which of the three common kanji for this word should I use in this case? Of course, that affects the okurigana...)
If those don't count as spelling problems, I'd like to know what would.
Right, it certainly wasn't intended to keep developers away from OpenGL...
/. groupthink and may be a concept that it's impossible for many readers to grasp, but Direct3D is not, in fact, evil.
Correct - it wasn't.
I realise this goes against
Back when Direct3D was first designed, OpenGL was practically unknown on consumer hardware. None of the 3D accelerators aimed at the home market supported it well. (Don't quote GLQuake against that - who could forget the gigantic nightmare that was the 3DFX OpenGL mini-driver?)
Instead, 3D accelerated games had to code to proprietary APIs that were different for every brand of card. Want 3DFX users to play your game? You'd better write your rendering code with the Glide API, then. Want S3 users to play your game? Aha, that means you need to target the MeTaL API. Want PowerVR users to play your game? Another unique proprietary incompatible API.
Gamers suffered. Either a game would only run on one brand of video card (usually 3DFX), or it would run badly on several. Case in point: Unreal. When it was released, it ran well on 3DFX cards, and if you had something else, you had to use software rendering. Eventually they released a series of patches which tried to add support for other cards and APIs, but since they hadn't designed the engine to work with them, they were always buggy. I don't think that game ever ran perfectly on non-3DFX hardware.
In that context, Direct3D was an effort to create standardisation, not an effort to destroy it. Yes, Microsoft could have adopted OpenGL. But why should they? OpenGL was a technical system for high-end workstations. It wasn't designed for games. Gamers didn't care about it. Consumer graphcis hardware didn't support it. From Microsoft's point of view, it made far, far more sense to design their own API, which would interact well with the other gaming APIs they were developing.
Misguided? Perhaps.
Evil? Sorry, but no.
Not in any possible sense.
Here is a chunk of data that cannot be compressed with your algorithm:
Hilarious, eh?