so if you need to tell yourself that you're not stealing so you can sleep better at night, by all means, go ahead.
Again the mistaken assumption that the only reason someone might want to use a different name is so they can pretend it's not as bad as theft.
The reason I don't call copyright infringement "theft" is the same as the reason I don't call it "libel" or "trespass" or "arson" or "tax evasion". It's because there is a qualitative difference to the act. It is a different act which breaks different laws, affects the injured party in different ways, and has penalties. Therefore it also has a different name.
The qualitative difference is completely and utterly separate from and orthogonal to any question of whether copyright infringement is "better" or "worse" than theft. The simple fact is that it is not theft, and it is misleading to call it theft. When someone downloads a movie they don't have the right to download, they are breaking the law in a way that is just as bad as some kinds of theft. But they are not stealing, any more than they're raping or murdering. They're infringing copyright.
Python with SDL (pygame) has been used to write Dungeon Siege (I think that was the game, correct me if I'm wrong) and I liked the result a lot.
I don't know what game you're thinking of, but it certainly isn't Dungeon Siege, which was written very conventionally in C++ with DirectX. (It was originally developed with OpenGL, but the developers switched to Direct3D later on, possibly because the game was being published by Microsoft.)
At any rate, certainly neither Python nor SDL was involved at any stage.
BS. A game software maker can certainly tell you their software will not run on anything other than an X-box. No Nintendo or Playstations will run it. So why should Apple not be allowed to print on that nice box of OSX you just legally bought that this software will ONLY install and run on a genuine Apple box?
Of course they should be allowed to print that on the box. They should be allowed to print anything they like, as long as what they print doesn't materially harm anyone else. That's kind of the whole point of the First Amendment.
But if it's not true, should the law step in and make it true?
If OS X doesn't only run on genuine Apple hardware, should the law step in and prevent people from running it on non-Apple hardware? If the XBox game can be run on a PC or a PS3 by using an emulator, should the law step in and prevent people from using that emulator? If Ford say that their cars will only run if you use Ford engine oil, should the law step in and make it illegal to use another brand of oil?
Of course not. You should be allowed to do whatever you want with your property, to the extent that it does not harm anyone else. So you should be allowed to use any brand of oil in your car, provided it does not significantly increase the likelihood of an accident that will harm people other than you. And you should be allowed to run your software on any hardware you can get to run it, provided you didn't steal the software or the hardware.
for a word that means "Don't interpret this the accepted way, but rather exactly as it is written," I must protest.
And according to whom does it mean only that?
The OED gives citations going back to the early 19th century for "literally" being used "to indicate that the following word or phrase must be taken... in its strongest admissible sense".
In other words, "literally" has meant "figuratively" for at least 200 years. How long does a word have to have a particular meaning before you'll accept that norma loquendi has made up its mind to disagree with you?
Something like this: "Yahoo is committed to obey local laws, ONLY if they don't go against international treaties and human rights."
But Yahoo is based in a country that does not particularly respect international treaties on human rights; for example, you're doubtless well aware that the USA is one of only two states that has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
According to the Bush administration, the reason for this is that "the human rights-based approach... poses significant problems" in the text. Which is rather odd for a country that spends so much time spouting off about how much it loves human rights, and spends so much time passing pointless laws on the basis that they'll supposedly make children safer. (Like COPPA, which "protects" children by forcing them to lie about their age.)
The Government has been itching to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with elected (read: identical) officials.
Um, no. The opposition has been itching to replace the House of Lords with an elected body, but what Labour want to do is replace it with an appointed body.
Quite how this is supposed to be "democratic", I don't know.
This can be even more amplified here on Slashdot when someone criticizes something that we have spent a lot of time and intellectual effort to grasp. When someone bash our favourite language, we think our anger comes because we feel "love" for the language, but it has probably more to that with the fact that it is a blow against our major source of pride - our intellectual capabilites. And if the language is not as good as we thought, it might take a long time to learn a new language as well.
Indeed, this is a very real problem, and one I see demonstrated in real life every day, in every pointless language flamewar. Why can't these people swallow their pride and admit that they might have made a mistake?
It's not like it's hard; all they have to do is ditch the slow clunky unsafe dead-end languages like Ruby and Java, and switch to OCaml, the One True Programming Language of the Future. But no - seems they're so jealous that I was smarter than them when I was choosing a language to learn, and they're so desperate to pretend that their investment hasn't been wasted, that they actually waste even more time making up totally ridiculous arguments to try to pretend that my choice of language isn't any better than theirs.
No offense, but who are you to answer those questions for me?
Someone who might provide different answers to Microsoft's answers.
Given that, as you say, different people will find different products suit their needs better, it makes perfect sense that we WANT everyone who advocates a particular product to perform comparative studies against other products. If they don't perform comparative studies, all they'll do is shout about how great their respective products are, and we won't know which will be better to solve which problems. But by looking at the scenarios they choose to show that they're better than the competition, we actually find out which problems their product excels at solving.
So we end up better informed and better able to select the right tool for each job. Sounds good to me.
All religions place some questions beyond the pale. Christians are not allowed to question the divinity of Jesus. [...] None of them are allowed to question the existence of God in the form of any serious doubt.
Allow me to introduce you to an organisation called the Church of England, where probably no more than half the members and priests believe in God.:P
Also, recall that a rather famous playwright and poet once asked,
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Clearly, the intent is to compare a human being with a temporal event, things that don't share precisely similar traits.
Moreover, he goes on to say "Thou art more lovely" - which is perfectly analogous to saying "Bush is less charismatic".
I am sure that Microsoft's anti-virus/anti-spyware uses less CPU and memory, what with all the undocumented Windows features which were mysteriously used in their software.
Did you forget? They were ordered to document all the undocumented APIs they'd been using, and they did just that.
There are some really useful things in there. I don't know how I ever managed to write a decent Windows program before I had access to PathYetAnotherMakeUniqueName().
More recently, to beg the question has been used as a synonym for "to raise the question", or to indicate that "the question really ought to be addressed". For example, "This year's budget deficit is half a trillion dollars. This begs the question: how are we ever going to balance the budget?" This . . . is now the most common use of the term.
So, how long are pedants going to persist in this pointless prescriptivism? The language has changed. Deal with it.
I clicked "Windows Vista Capable PCs and Customer Benefits" on this page and couldn't find any. What are they again?
Um... that's because that page is talking about the customer benefits of having a Windows Vista-capable PC, which are simply that you get to run Windows Vista with all the eye candy turned on. Maybe you should look for a relevant page, instead of complaining that an irrelevant page is irrelevant?
As for your actual point, the advantages of Vista over Windows XP seem to me to be roughly equivalent to the advantages of OS X Tiger over OS X Panther: eye candy and some upgraded OS components. In which case, a lot of people will be quite happy without it. But then the majority of the Mac users I know haven't seen the point in upgrading to Tiger either, and that doesn't stop Apple fanboys proclaiming it like teh greatest OS evar.
The issue here is the oft-mentioned small inventor, who typically doesn't have the funds to continually defend a patent. Hence biggie-corp's A, B, and C could all kill the little guy by forcing him to hire lawyers and drowning him in legal fees.
And they can't do that already? What's stopping them doing the same thing today? The only difference is that today he has the option of not suing them. So he keeps his patent, but they get away with infringing it. So what's the point of his having a patent in the first place, if other people can infringe it with impunity because he can't afford to sue them?
If patents are going to help small inventors, we need to reform the legal system to make it easier for the little guy to sue the big guy - and if we do that, then the problem you identified disappears, and there's no reason not to go ahead and require people to do so proactively. Or am I missing something here?
Has Microsoft managed to finally get all of of the Windows 2000 holdouts to switch to XP yet?
Hell no. I use Win2k on my home machines (the ones that aren't running various free OSes). Why would I want to upgrade? All Windows XP has to offer me is Cleartype and SP2, and all SP2 has to offer me is a handful of security cushions that might possibly be valuable only if I were a clueless n00b. IE7 might interest me... if I wasn't perfectly happy with the combination of Firefox and Opera.
I might upgrade to Vista if I can see any compelling reason to do so, but it certainly won't be for Halo 2 ("maze of twisty passages evolved!").
Not even necessarily Lisp. Languages like Scala, which is a functional/OO hybrid running on the JVM and therefore essentially interchangable with Java, can be used to write certain modules in a functional style, and then slot them seamlessly into Java systems. One could even write a quick prototype in Scala and put it into production immediately, and it could be replaced seamlessly by a plain Java implementation later on if the suits got too uncomfortable about language diversity.
While I'm not a great fan of VM-based systems, this kind of interoperability is one of their few blindingly obvious advantages.
Even if a law is passed allowing theft (of a drug in this case) it is still wrong.
Theft of a drug? Who said anything about theft? I thought the generics manufacturers were planning to make the cheap copies of drugs themselves, not to steal them from us.
You see, this is the great thing about MDI interfaces - if you maximise them, they act almost like virtual desktops! Except you can also resize them and move them around. And the "desktop" for an application is created automatically when you launch the application, and closed automatically when you close it - so you don't have to manage things by hand, and you don't have to worry about the case where you have N virtual desktops configured and N+1 applications you want to run. Which all makes it actually rather more convenient than virtual desktops, for some people.
Incidentally, I find it kind of amusing that many of the people who praise GIMP for its multiwindow design also tend to praise Firefox for its tabbed browsing. Why is it good to have MDI in Firefox, but bad to have MDI in GIMP?
You mean other than handing the controller to a confused other player?
How is that going to be any worse than if you've selected a different one of the three available control schemes from the one they've always used?
Apparently you don't know how customised controls work in PC games. Let me explain: you have a "controls menu", where you can go and select either one of the "default configurations", or a "custom configuration". You create a "custom configuration" by selecting each action you can perform and pressing the button you want to use to perform it. Then you "save" this configuration so that you can select it easily in future, just as though it was one of the "default" options.
So it's exactly as though the game had included your preferred control scheme as one of the default options. And when you hand the controller to another player, s/he can go and select his/her favourite control scheme from the menu, in exactly the same way as happens now when you disagree on which of the available control schemes is best.
You mean Google not only copy an entire article, but they also somehow remove it from the other company's website?
Oh, wait, you meant "stealing" in the "not actually stealing, but really just copying" sense. So Google are copying entire articles and presenting them as their own property, are they?
Oh, wait, what you actually meant was "stealing" in the sense of "linking to". Wow, that's a terrible crime. Hey, look at this - I just stole George Bush! Does that make me a terrorist, do you think?
I'd go for anything in the.Net family. VB, or C# especially. The GUI tools for both are pretty much the same. However, the development tools can cost quite a bit.
Indeed. I don't know how anyone can justify downloading Visual Studio Express Edition for free when they could get a Java IDE for half the price.:P
(Yeah, the Express Editions are cut down somewhat. But they don't have any particularly nasty license terms - you can use them for commercial purposes - and they should do everything needed in this particular case.)
Anyway, I do not care how fast wine is. I care about API compliance. This is 2006, Microsoft has rewritten half of the OS with longhorn and I continue without being able to run many windows apps created years ago. Wine is far from being a true windows replacement for windows apps today....
I quite agree. Last time I tried Wine it didn't run any of my favourite Windows applications. I'm not talking crappy shareware utilities that I can learn to live without - I'm talking showstoppers like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Cygwin, all the really critical tools I use every day.
Until Wine can adequately run programs like that, I'm sadly going to be stuck using Windows.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, s/has penalties/has different penalties/.
so if you need to tell yourself that you're not stealing so you can sleep better at night, by all means, go ahead.
Again the mistaken assumption that the only reason someone might want to use a different name is so they can pretend it's not as bad as theft.
The reason I don't call copyright infringement "theft" is the same as the reason I don't call it "libel" or "trespass" or "arson" or "tax evasion". It's because there is a qualitative difference to the act. It is a different act which breaks different laws, affects the injured party in different ways, and has penalties. Therefore it also has a different name.
The qualitative difference is completely and utterly separate from and orthogonal to any question of whether copyright infringement is "better" or "worse" than theft. The simple fact is that it is not theft, and it is misleading to call it theft. When someone downloads a movie they don't have the right to download, they are breaking the law in a way that is just as bad as some kinds of theft. But they are not stealing, any more than they're raping or murdering. They're infringing copyright.
Python with SDL (pygame) has been used to write Dungeon Siege (I think that was the game, correct me if I'm wrong) and I liked the result a lot.
I don't know what game you're thinking of, but it certainly isn't Dungeon Siege, which was written very conventionally in C++ with DirectX. (It was originally developed with OpenGL, but the developers switched to Direct3D later on, possibly because the game was being published by Microsoft.)
At any rate, certainly neither Python nor SDL was involved at any stage.
BS. A game software maker can certainly tell you their software will not run on anything other than an X-box. No Nintendo or Playstations will run it. So why should Apple not be allowed to print on that nice box of OSX you just legally bought that this software will ONLY install and run on a genuine Apple box?
Of course they should be allowed to print that on the box. They should be allowed to print anything they like, as long as what they print doesn't materially harm anyone else. That's kind of the whole point of the First Amendment.
But if it's not true, should the law step in and make it true?
If OS X doesn't only run on genuine Apple hardware, should the law step in and prevent people from running it on non-Apple hardware?
If the XBox game can be run on a PC or a PS3 by using an emulator, should the law step in and prevent people from using that emulator?
If Ford say that their cars will only run if you use Ford engine oil, should the law step in and make it illegal to use another brand of oil?
Of course not. You should be allowed to do whatever you want with your property, to the extent that it does not harm anyone else. So you should be allowed to use any brand of oil in your car, provided it does not significantly increase the likelihood of an accident that will harm people other than you. And you should be allowed to run your software on any hardware you can get to run it, provided you didn't steal the software or the hardware.
for a word that means "Don't interpret this the accepted way, but rather exactly as it is written," I must protest.
... in its strongest admissible sense".
And according to whom does it mean only that?
The OED gives citations going back to the early 19th century for "literally" being used "to indicate that the following word or phrase must be taken
In other words, "literally" has meant "figuratively" for at least 200 years. How long does a word have to have a particular meaning before you'll accept that norma loquendi has made up its mind to disagree with you?
Something like this: "Yahoo is committed to obey local laws, ONLY if they don't go against international treaties and human rights."
... poses significant problems" in the text. Which is rather odd for a country that spends so much time spouting off about how much it loves human rights, and spends so much time passing pointless laws on the basis that they'll supposedly make children safer. (Like COPPA, which "protects" children by forcing them to lie about their age.)
But Yahoo is based in a country that does not particularly respect international treaties on human rights; for example, you're doubtless well aware that the USA is one of only two states that has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
According to the Bush administration, the reason for this is that "the human rights-based approach
You could always hold out for a dowry.
The Government has been itching to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with elected (read: identical) officials.
Um, no. The opposition has been itching to replace the House of Lords with an elected body, but what Labour want to do is replace it with an appointed body.
Quite how this is supposed to be "democratic", I don't know.
This can be even more amplified here on Slashdot when someone criticizes something that we have spent a lot of time and intellectual effort to grasp. When someone bash our favourite language, we think our anger comes because we feel "love" for the language, but it has probably more to that with the fact that it is a blow against our major source of pride - our intellectual capabilites. And if the language is not as good as we thought, it might take a long time to learn a new language as well.
Indeed, this is a very real problem, and one I see demonstrated in real life every day, in every pointless language flamewar. Why can't these people swallow their pride and admit that they might have made a mistake?
It's not like it's hard; all they have to do is ditch the slow clunky unsafe dead-end languages like Ruby and Java, and switch to OCaml, the One True Programming Language of the Future. But no - seems they're so jealous that I was smarter than them when I was choosing a language to learn, and they're so desperate to pretend that their investment hasn't been wasted, that they actually waste even more time making up totally ridiculous arguments to try to pretend that my choice of language isn't any better than theirs.
Sometimes I despair of humanity. Truly I do.
No offense, but who are you to answer those questions for me?
Someone who might provide different answers to Microsoft's answers.
Given that, as you say, different people will find different products suit their needs better, it makes perfect sense that we WANT everyone who advocates a particular product to perform comparative studies against other products. If they don't perform comparative studies, all they'll do is shout about how great their respective products are, and we won't know which will be better to solve which problems. But by looking at the scenarios they choose to show that they're better than the competition, we actually find out which problems their product excels at solving.
So we end up better informed and better able to select the right tool for each job. Sounds good to me.
All religions place some questions beyond the pale. Christians are not allowed to question the divinity of Jesus. [...] None of them are allowed to question the existence of God in the form of any serious doubt.
:P
Allow me to introduce you to an organisation called the Church of England, where probably no more than half the members and priests believe in God.
Also, recall that a rather famous playwright and poet once asked,
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Clearly, the intent is to compare a human being with a temporal event, things that don't share precisely similar traits.
Moreover, he goes on to say "Thou art more lovely" - which is perfectly analogous to saying "Bush is less charismatic".
I am sure that Microsoft's anti-virus/anti-spyware uses less CPU and memory, what with all the undocumented Windows features which were mysteriously used in their software.
Did you forget? They were ordered to document all the undocumented APIs they'd been using, and they did just that.
There are some really useful things in there. I don't know how I ever managed to write a decent Windows program before I had access to PathYetAnotherMakeUniqueName().
So, how long are pedants going to persist in this pointless prescriptivism? The language has changed. Deal with it.
I clicked "Windows Vista Capable PCs and Customer Benefits" on this page and couldn't find any. What are they again?
Um... that's because that page is talking about the customer benefits of having a Windows Vista-capable PC, which are simply that you get to run Windows Vista with all the eye candy turned on. Maybe you should look for a relevant page, instead of complaining that an irrelevant page is irrelevant?
As for your actual point, the advantages of Vista over Windows XP seem to me to be roughly equivalent to the advantages of OS X Tiger over OS X Panther: eye candy and some upgraded OS components. In which case, a lot of people will be quite happy without it. But then the majority of the Mac users I know haven't seen the point in upgrading to Tiger either, and that doesn't stop Apple fanboys proclaiming it like teh greatest OS evar.
The issue here is the oft-mentioned small inventor, who typically doesn't have the funds to continually defend a patent. Hence biggie-corp's A, B, and C could all kill the little guy by forcing him to hire lawyers and drowning him in legal fees.
And they can't do that already? What's stopping them doing the same thing today? The only difference is that today he has the option of not suing them. So he keeps his patent, but they get away with infringing it. So what's the point of his having a patent in the first place, if other people can infringe it with impunity because he can't afford to sue them?
If patents are going to help small inventors, we need to reform the legal system to make it easier for the little guy to sue the big guy - and if we do that, then the problem you identified disappears, and there's no reason not to go ahead and require people to do so proactively. Or am I missing something here?
Has Microsoft managed to finally get all of of the Windows 2000 holdouts to switch to XP yet?
Hell no. I use Win2k on my home machines (the ones that aren't running various free OSes). Why would I want to upgrade? All Windows XP has to offer me is Cleartype and SP2, and all SP2 has to offer me is a handful of security cushions that might possibly be valuable only if I were a clueless n00b. IE7 might interest me... if I wasn't perfectly happy with the combination of Firefox and Opera.
I might upgrade to Vista if I can see any compelling reason to do so, but it certainly won't be for Halo 2 ("maze of twisty passages evolved!").
Not even necessarily Lisp. Languages like Scala, which is a functional/OO hybrid running on the JVM and therefore essentially interchangable with Java, can be used to write certain modules in a functional style, and then slot them seamlessly into Java systems. One could even write a quick prototype in Scala and put it into production immediately, and it could be replaced seamlessly by a plain Java implementation later on if the suits got too uncomfortable about language diversity.
While I'm not a great fan of VM-based systems, this kind of interoperability is one of their few blindingly obvious advantages.
Who knew france would be the country to stick up for digital copy rights?
We're talking about FRANCE here. Of course they chose to surrender to the pirates instead of fighting the good fight with Uncle Sam and the {RI,MP}AA.
Even if a law is passed allowing theft (of a drug in this case) it is still wrong.
Theft of a drug? Who said anything about theft? I thought the generics manufacturers were planning to make the cheap copies of drugs themselves, not to steal them from us.
You see, this is the great thing about MDI interfaces - if you maximise them, they act almost like virtual desktops! Except you can also resize them and move them around. And the "desktop" for an application is created automatically when you launch the application, and closed automatically when you close it - so you don't have to manage things by hand, and you don't have to worry about the case where you have N virtual desktops configured and N+1 applications you want to run. Which all makes it actually rather more convenient than virtual desktops, for some people.
Incidentally, I find it kind of amusing that many of the people who praise GIMP for its multiwindow design also tend to praise Firefox for its tabbed browsing. Why is it good to have MDI in Firefox, but bad to have MDI in GIMP?
You mean other than handing the controller to a confused other player?
How is that going to be any worse than if you've selected a different one of the three available control schemes from the one they've always used?
Apparently you don't know how customised controls work in PC games. Let me explain: you have a "controls menu", where you can go and select either one of the "default configurations", or a "custom configuration". You create a "custom configuration" by selecting each action you can perform and pressing the button you want to use to perform it. Then you "save" this configuration so that you can select it easily in future, just as though it was one of the "default" options.
So it's exactly as though the game had included your preferred control scheme as one of the default options. And when you hand the controller to another player, s/he can go and select his/her favourite control scheme from the menu, in exactly the same way as happens now when you disagree on which of the available control schemes is best.
Stealing?
You mean Google not only copy an entire article, but they also somehow remove it from the other company's website?
Oh, wait, you meant "stealing" in the "not actually stealing, but really just copying" sense. So Google are copying entire articles and presenting them as their own property, are they?
Oh, wait, what you actually meant was "stealing" in the sense of "linking to". Wow, that's a terrible crime. Hey, look at this - I just stole George Bush! Does that make me a terrorist, do you think?
I'd go for anything in the .Net family. VB, or C# especially. The GUI tools for both are pretty much the same. However, the development tools can cost quite a bit.
:P
Indeed. I don't know how anyone can justify downloading Visual Studio Express Edition for free when they could get a Java IDE for half the price.
(Yeah, the Express Editions are cut down somewhat. But they don't have any particularly nasty license terms - you can use them for commercial purposes - and they should do everything needed in this particular case.)
Anyway, I do not care how fast wine is. I care about API compliance. This is 2006, Microsoft has rewritten half of the OS with longhorn and I continue without being able to run many windows apps created years ago. Wine is far from being a true windows replacement for windows apps today....
:(
I quite agree. Last time I tried Wine it didn't run any of my favourite Windows applications. I'm not talking crappy shareware utilities that I can learn to live without - I'm talking showstoppers like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Cygwin, all the really critical tools I use every day.
Until Wine can adequately run programs like that, I'm sadly going to be stuck using Windows.