There was once a very good reason not to eat X, and that reason is now gone. There was also once a very good reason for IP laws, and guess what? That reason still exists.
The original "very good reason" for trademarks still exists (discouraging identity theft). The reason for copyrights (encouraging the mass production of printed material) is largly gone, and the reason for patents (encouraging the small number of inventors to share their inventions) is totally gone. In both of the later cases, there are so many more people actively engaged in the fields that we are more in need of a filter than a pump.
You've shifted your ground. You started out saying that people wouldn't create without the "incentive" of being able to prevent others from doing the same thing they did. I pointed out that the original incentive would still be there--that by definition something that is useful has a use and therefore there is incentive to do it even if you can't stop others from doing the same thing.
Now you are saying that "digital artists would largely be screwed if copyright went away" which may be a problem for them, but has nothing to do with the original question of the need to provide aditional incentives. If you look at the facts on the ground, the vast majority of "digital artists" are screwed right now. A small fraction of them make it big, and guess what, most of them are screwed too. So why do they create? Perhaps to fill some inner need, or because it's just plain fun, but whatever their reasons there is a very good chance they would still be there; only people who are motivated by a desire to have some form of control over the actions of others need IP to provide their incentives.
The people who would loose are not the people doing the creating; the people who would loose are the ones living off their present role as middlemen and gatekeepers.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I gather from your sig that you are not the sysadmin?
If you want to eat in your cube, fine. Just keep it within your cube. I don't want to know about it. I don't want to smell your questionable fish-and-garlic-suprise, I don't want to have to wipe your barbeque sauce off my white board, and whatever it is you are eating I don't want to hear you chewing it (or doing what ever that guy in the fly did to consume his food).
And speaking of flies, take your trash to the lunch room as soon as you are done. The janitors will not dig through your pile of printouts to find your week-old pesto pieces, but there are six legged clean-up crews that will.
The problem is that while IP and copyright are clearly outdated, they serve a necessary function in our economy, that is, giving people an incentive to create art/useful programs.
According to who? If this were true, we should expect to see a derth of innovation in fields (such as recipies, fashion, mathematics, courtship, etc., etc.) that have no IP protection. Yet in fact, we see as much if not more effort being expended in these areas as we do in areas with IP protection. Arguably, most of the real innovation in computer science came before it had significant IP protection (back when it was correctly recognized as a branch of mathematics and not a convoluted form of prostitution).
I would offer that the motivation for useful innovation is the fact that it is useful and that what IP pundants are really worried about isn't the death of innovation but the death of a ready means of exploitation. In this context note how often IP "protection" is being used against people who independently developed a similar technique. It is not being used to reward innovation, but rather to punish it. But bluntly, it's rather silly to claim that "The-god-given-right-to-thump-people-who-try-to-th ink-up-something-you-already-thought-up is the mother of invention," but that's pretty much what the "we need a way to reward innovation" argument boils down to.
Some one comments that the IP laws have not kept up with technolgical and social change, and that they are now impeding the cultural goals they origonally served. They may have made sense when we were limited to exchaging physical objects, but they don't make sense now.
And the responses are allong the lines of:
But it's the law.
I hope the RIAA gets you.
Then I suppose an idiot like you won't mind if I take your stuff!
The respondents are completely missing the point. To see this, imagine what the discussion might have looked like if it had happened way back when:
The rule about not eating X hasn't kept up with the times. It made sense when we didn't know about the parasites, but now that we know how to clean and cook them it doesn't makes sense.
I suspect the responses would have been along the lines of:
But it's the law.
I hope the gods get you.
Then I suppose an idiot like you won't mind eating dog poop!
Every time I see this played out, my response is, "Gee, IP law really is dying, isn't it?", with the same sort of awe I had watching little bits of sand wash downstream at the bottom of the grand canyon.
Every time this comes up I am amazed that it isn't completely obvious to almost everyone. After all, every substance known to man has the Goldilocks Property (too much is bad, too little is bad, so just right is best). It seems like everyone wants to pretend that they live in a world where things are either good or bad in-and-of themselves, when in fact nothing they have ever encountered works the way they are trying to pretend that everything does.
The only explanation I can think of is that it would be great for people who don't want to think, except that in a would like that people never would have evolved in the first place.
You are correct, but I doubt many people will realize it unless you explain it (or they think long and hard). For the non-physics majors out there:
Electrons have mass, and thus move very slowly compared to photons, which don't have mass and thus move at the speed of light. Among their other duties, photons carry the replusive and attractive forces we associate with charged objects such as ellections (as most of us had to memorize at some point, opposites attract and like-charges repel).
So how does this move data? To grossly oversimplify, when an electron moves down a wire (or through a semiconductor, or whatever) it emits a photon that goes rushing on ahead, and eventually encounters an other electron, which (because of the repulsive force of the electron coming towards it) starts moving in the same direction. The process continues all the way down the wire, with almost all of the distance being covered by the travel of photons. Thus we see the signal moving (via the photons) at a significant fraction of the speed of light even though the electrons themselves are poking along much more slowly.
...who the heck would take that absurd position? That's just NUTTY!
It's not as common as it was at the height of the bubble (when I was shorting like a rabid weasle, I'm proud to say) but there are still a lot of people in the press (and even more at every brokerage I've delt with) that have "Dow high = good" in their mental startup scripts. On NPR Marketplace, for example, they play happy music for an up market ("Happy Days are Here Again" IIRC) and sad music ("Stormy Weather"?) when it's down.
When these individuals know what shorting is and how it affects prices, they logically oppose it. I'm not faulting their logic, but rather (in agreement with the rest of your post), their assumptions. The problem is that most people don't realize how much things like corporate misconduct and securities fraud hurt everyone, and how important it is to have short-willing watchdogs out there, ready to stomp it early, stomp it offen.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. *smile* I also suspect they I have no idea how fun it is to profit from spotting a lying scumbag and doing your small part to help take him down.
Uh, wrong. It'a a $5/30% issue, which could be quite profitable to short at it's present (~$15/share) price. Be sure to have enough cash on hand to make sure you don't get caught by a short squeeze (and make sure you understand what a short squeeze is) before you try it. Do the math (fire up gnumeric or open office) and be sure you understand what will happen to your position under various conditions (like, what if it shoots up to $20 in a day? $25?) know what your plan is for these sorts of situations before you start.
Happy hunting!
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Don't be put off by the "shorting is un-american" blather. We need a healthy market, not another bubble. That means we need a market in which solid issues rise and the crap gets driven into the basement as quickly as posible. The people who equate unfettered growth of every moronic company that pimps their stock with health are either stupid, working on commission, or both.
I would say the biggest advance in the last twenty years has been in computer aided acting. Perhaps it's just because I don't know as much about how it's done, but I find it much more impressive than all the flash-boom-and-lots-of-nicely-lit-splines side of the biz.
For example, I've seen several John Travolta movies over the last decade or so where it was posible to forget for a scene or two that he was a smarmy self absorbed scientologist. As I said, I have no idea how they did this, but I was impressed. All I know is we've come a long way from the days of having the short guys stand on boxes to kiss the tall girls.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. At this rate, I wouldn't be suprised if Keanu Reeves comes out with a movie someday that doesn't remind me of excellent!
Planting non GMO WHEAT in someone elses field to arouse awareness!
Awareness of what? That neo-ludites can temporarily use FUD to block the development of crops that might help feed people who are starving? I think we were all aware of that.
Comparing them to Ghandi is just silly. He was, after all, on the side of the oppressed, not on the side of a bunch of spoiled over-priviledged whiners that want to preserve the status quo. If Ghandi were alive he'd be no friend of theirs.
Do you want to get greenpeace mad at you? All you have to do is come up with something that might level the playing field between the rich and the
poor, bring food to the hungry or provide energy to help make people's lives better, and they'll be all over you. Their idea of a perfect world seems to be going back to the days where you could get thrown in jail (or even worse) for poaching or trespassing on the king's wilderness park, even if you were only trying to feed your starving children. Progress? Who needs it! They've already got their SUVs and their coffee lattes, and that's enough for them. They'd even be willing to let millions (of foriegn poor of course) die to to stop it from going any further.
Something with a halflife of a few days isn't a problem, it is gone before it sits around long... If something has a halflife of 10e-16 seconds, but decays into something with a halflife of 10,000 years, it is still dangerious in quanity.
Foul! You changed scope there. I agree that something with a half life of 10,000 years can be dangeous in quantity but I still maintain that it would be safer than the same quantity of the 10e-16 precursor. You are right, it will be gone before it sits around long, but if you are talking about "in quantity" chances are you and a good chunk of the scenery will be gone with it!
Granted. I'm mostly just objecting to the knee-jerk assumption that shorter half-lives are always better than longer ones, when in fact they generally aren't (excluding factors such as practicality of management scheduling).
Remember though, even in the some-what long half-life range (e.g., most radioactive wastes) the longer half-life isotopes are generally safer than the shorter half-life ones, since they produce fewer events per mole. I say generally because there are "gotcha" isotopes that have a longish half-life but break down into a chain of short-half-life (and thus annoying to have around) biproducts. (IIRC, this is how most domestic Radon comes about).
Why does everyone seem to equate "long half-life" with "bad" and "short half-life" with "good"? Things with long half-lives are stable; the ones you need to worry about are the ones with the short half-lives because they break down very quickly. Why is this so hard for everyone to comprehend?
I saw a poll once where people said they wouldn't mind having large quantities of radioactive material with < 1 day half-life trucked past their home, but would object strongly to matierial with million-to-billion year half life passing by. This means that the most radioactive isotopes of Radon, Plutonium, etc. are fine, but they don't want any of the normal isotopes of Iron, Silicon, Carbon, etc. in their neighborhood.
Sure, but they didn't sue the people who 'waved the knife'. They sued the people who encouraged them to 'wave the knife'. By that logic, Greenpeace would be the largest racketeer in the US.
Hmmm. I'll admit right off that I'm not familliar with the details
of this case, but seems to me if someone was sending attackers of any form against their opponent they aren't just "speaking" anymore, and ought to be held accountable. There are quite a few parallels (hiring a hit man is illegal, as is inciting to riot, barrity (using laywers as a bludgeon),
etc.).
As for your second point, I'd like to see Greenpeace held accountable for their actions (which often do more to damage their case than anything else). At the very least they should be forced to change their name to something more honest.
I think you're missing a key distinction in their position: they supported both sides's right to voice their opinion; but they opposed ones side's use of extortion to try to silence the other. Specifically, when the leaders of one side "directed activists involved in that group...to use threats and acts of intimidation and extortion in their efforts to shut down" the other group, the ACLU said that this crossed the line from speach to action and thus was not protected.
Basically, someone is allowed to think my nose is too big, and even to say publically that they think it's too big, but they aren't allowed to
wave a knife in my face to make their point.
Feign absolute cluelessness about how this stuff works.
Uh, it said that his job was Unix sysadmin. This tactic might work (in fact, probably works just fine) for MSCEs, but it would be the kiss of death for him.
If you read their fricken AUP before you buy their product, you know what your buying. If you don't, you're stupid, and deserve what you get.
If their AUP differs substantially from their advertisements it's called "bait and switch," (aka fraud).
If you went to an all you can eat buffet (to use your analogy) and after you got there they told you that after the first plate full you could only have one bite every five minutes (i.e. you were rate capped), they would be commiting fraud since this is not "all you can eat."
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I suspect that an iterator could reuse the same block without breaking the semantics,...
I'm not sure: a Proc object is a closure and some memory most be allocated for the environment. In a block it's easy because the environment is always the current environment.
Hmm. I would think (hope?) that it would be possible to make a Proc which "shared" the current environment in a way that was semantically equivalent to a block. But I haven't looked into it.
Easy. Hashes have "=>"; blocks don't.:)
Not necasserily, {:a,1,:b,2} is also possible...
Caught me (that was the reason for the ":)"). Personally, I'd prohibit the paired list form, but that's a personal bias. Someone else (in a nearby post) has suggested using pipe-as-the-first-character-after-open-brace as the signature for a Proc literal. Seems to me that would work & be dead easy (remember, I'm not as worried about performance as some people, so I'd be willing to loose blocks per se in favour of a more uniform system with just Procs).
I worked in one shop where the style was to initial everything (e.g. identifiers of the form MQR.____) "to avoid name conflicts" and "so you always know who to talk to if it's broken"!
LOL! That's code ownership! And I suppose people still were cursing programmers that have left the company several years ago.
There was a mythical programer named Franklin Ulysses Krammer (IIRC) that seemed to get credit for all the really bad kludges. It also broke down rather badly when someone had to modify someone else's code.
I really don't see KDE or any other linux desktop software beating Windows or MacOS in usabilities tests anytime soon. KDE and GNOME keep playing catchup to windows instead of leading the way.
Then you obviously don't know the trick to winning this kind of game. The trick is to stop implementing new features at the exact moment that the "leader" commits to becoming an unusably bloated, worthless feature ladden pile of...
Oh my gosh! Stop! Stop!
-- MarkusQ
Re:Former perl, python, java geek gone to Ruby
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yes! That would solve 95% of my objections (and I'm fighting the urge to bring up the source to see how hard it would be). { ||... } already works for the case you don't need / want args.
Slashdot Mirror
There was once a very good reason not to eat X, and that reason is now gone. There was also once a very good reason for IP laws, and guess what? That reason still exists.
The original "very good reason" for trademarks still exists (discouraging identity theft). The reason for copyrights (encouraging the mass production of printed material) is largly gone, and the reason for patents (encouraging the small number of inventors to share their inventions) is totally gone. In both of the later cases, there are so many more people actively engaged in the fields that we are more in need of a filter than a pump.
-- MarkusQ
You have six legged rats?
Sorry. I neglected to mention what industry I was in.
-- MarkusQ
You've shifted your ground. You started out saying that people wouldn't create without the "incentive" of being able to prevent others from doing the same thing they did. I pointed out that the original incentive would still be there--that by definition something that is useful has a use and therefore there is incentive to do it even if you can't stop others from doing the same thing.
Now you are saying that "digital artists would largely be screwed if copyright went away" which may be a problem for them, but has nothing to do with the original question of the need to provide aditional incentives. If you look at the facts on the ground, the vast majority of "digital artists" are screwed right now. A small fraction of them make it big, and guess what, most of them are screwed too. So why do they create? Perhaps to fill some inner need, or because it's just plain fun, but whatever their reasons there is a very good chance they would still be there; only people who are motivated by a desire to have some form of control over the actions of others need IP to provide their incentives.
The people who would loose are not the people doing the creating; the people who would loose are the ones living off their present role as middlemen and gatekeepers.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I gather from your sig that you are not the sysadmin?
My biggest gripe in a cube farm:
Eating.
If you want to eat in your cube, fine. Just keep it within your cube. I don't want to know about it. I don't want to smell your questionable fish-and-garlic-suprise, I don't want to have to wipe your barbeque sauce off my white board, and whatever it is you are eating I don't want to hear you chewing it (or doing what ever that guy in the fly did to consume his food).
And speaking of flies, take your trash to the lunch room as soon as you are done. The janitors will not dig through your pile of printouts to find your week-old pesto pieces, but there are six legged clean-up crews that will.
Thank you.
-- MarkusQ
The problem is that while IP and copyright are clearly outdated, they serve a necessary function in our economy, that is, giving people an incentive to create art/useful programs.
According to who? If this were true, we should expect to see a derth of innovation in fields (such as recipies, fashion, mathematics, courtship, etc., etc.) that have no IP protection. Yet in fact, we see as much if not more effort being expended in these areas as we do in areas with IP protection. Arguably, most of the real innovation in computer science came before it had significant IP protection (back when it was correctly recognized as a branch of mathematics and not a convoluted form of prostitution).
I would offer that the motivation for useful innovation is the fact that it is useful and that what IP pundants are really worried about isn't the death of innovation but the death of a ready means of exploitation. In this context note how often IP "protection" is being used against people who independently developed a similar technique. It is not being used to reward innovation, but rather to punish it. But bluntly, it's rather silly to claim that "The-god-given-right-to-thump-people-who-try-to-th ink-up-something-you-already-thought-up is the mother of invention," but that's pretty much what the "we need a way to reward innovation" argument boils down to.
-- MarkusQ
There is an interesting pattern here:
- Some one comments that the IP laws have not kept up with technolgical and social change, and that they are now impeding the cultural goals they origonally served. They may have made sense when we were limited to exchaging physical objects, but they don't make sense now.
And the responses are allong the lines of:The respondents are completely missing the point. To see this, imagine what the discussion might have looked like if it had happened way back when:
- The rule about not eating X hasn't kept up with the times. It made sense when we didn't know about the parasites, but now that we know how to clean and cook them it doesn't makes sense.
I suspect the responses would have been along the lines of:Every time I see this played out, my response is, "Gee, IP law really is dying, isn't it?", with the same sort of awe I had watching little bits of sand wash downstream at the bottom of the grand canyon.
-- MarkusQ
Every time this comes up I am amazed that it isn't completely obvious to almost everyone. After all, every substance known to man has the Goldilocks Property (too much is bad, too little is bad, so just right is best). It seems like everyone wants to pretend that they live in a world where things are either good or bad in-and-of themselves, when in fact nothing they have ever encountered works the way they are trying to pretend that everything does.
The only explanation I can think of is that it would be great for people who don't want to think, except that in a would like that people never would have evolved in the first place.
-- MarkusQ
You are correct, but I doubt many people will realize it unless you explain it (or they think long and hard). For the non-physics majors out there:
Electrons have mass, and thus move very slowly compared to photons, which don't have mass and thus move at the speed of light. Among their other duties, photons carry the replusive and attractive forces we associate with charged objects such as ellections (as most of us had to memorize at some point, opposites attract and like-charges repel).
So how does this move data? To grossly oversimplify, when an electron moves down a wire (or through a semiconductor, or whatever) it emits a photon that goes rushing on ahead, and eventually encounters an other electron, which (because of the repulsive force of the electron coming towards it) starts moving in the same direction. The process continues all the way down the wire, with almost all of the distance being covered by the travel of photons. Thus we see the signal moving (via the photons) at a significant fraction of the speed of light even though the electrons themselves are poking along much more slowly.
-- MarkusQ
It's not as common as it was at the height of the bubble (when I was shorting like a rabid weasle, I'm proud to say) but there are still a lot of people in the press (and even more at every brokerage I've delt with) that have "Dow high = good" in their mental startup scripts. On NPR Marketplace, for example, they play happy music for an up market ("Happy Days are Here Again" IIRC) and sad music ("Stormy Weather"?) when it's down.
When these individuals know what shorting is and how it affects prices, they logically oppose it. I'm not faulting their logic, but rather (in agreement with the rest of your post), their assumptions. The problem is that most people don't realize how much things like corporate misconduct and securities fraud hurt everyone, and how important it is to have short-willing watchdogs out there, ready to stomp it early, stomp it offen.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. *smile* I also suspect they I have no idea how fun it is to profit from spotting a lying scumbag and doing your small part to help take him down.
SCO stock is non marginable.
you can't sell it short.
Uh, wrong. It'a a $5/30% issue, which could be quite profitable to short at it's present (~$15/share) price. Be sure to have enough cash on hand to make sure you don't get caught by a short squeeze (and make sure you understand what a short squeeze is) before you try it. Do the math (fire up gnumeric or open office) and be sure you understand what will happen to your position under various conditions (like, what if it shoots up to $20 in a day? $25?) know what your plan is for these sorts of situations before you start.
Happy hunting!
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Don't be put off by the "shorting is un-american" blather. We need a healthy market, not another bubble. That means we need a market in which solid issues rise and the crap gets driven into the basement as quickly as posible. The people who equate unfettered growth of every moronic company that pimps their stock with health are either stupid, working on commission, or both.
I would say the biggest advance in the last twenty years has been in computer aided acting. Perhaps it's just because I don't know as much about how it's done, but I find it much more impressive than all the flash-boom-and-lots-of-nicely-lit-splines side of the biz.
For example, I've seen several John Travolta movies over the last decade or so where it was posible to forget for a scene or two that he was a smarmy self absorbed scientologist. As I said, I have no idea how they did this, but I was impressed. All I know is we've come a long way from the days of having the short guys stand on boxes to kiss the tall girls.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. At this rate, I wouldn't be suprised if Keanu Reeves comes out with a movie someday that doesn't remind me of excellent!
Planting non GMO WHEAT in someone elses field to arouse awareness!
Awareness of what? That neo-ludites can temporarily use FUD to block the development of crops that might help feed people who are starving? I think we were all aware of that.
Comparing them to Ghandi is just silly. He was, after all, on the side of the oppressed, not on the side of a bunch of spoiled over-priviledged whiners that want to preserve the status quo. If Ghandi were alive he'd be no friend of theirs.
Do you want to get greenpeace mad at you? All you have to do is come up with something that might level the playing field between the rich and the poor, bring food to the hungry or provide energy to help make people's lives better, and they'll be all over you. Their idea of a perfect world seems to be going back to the days where you could get thrown in jail (or even worse) for poaching or trespassing on the king's wilderness park, even if you were only trying to feed your starving children. Progress? Who needs it! They've already got their SUVs and their coffee lattes, and that's enough for them. They'd even be willing to let millions (of foriegn poor of course) die to to stop it from going any further.
-- MarkusQ
Something with a halflife of a few days isn't a problem, it is gone before it sits around long... If something has a halflife of 10e-16 seconds, but decays into something with a halflife of 10,000 years, it is still dangerious in quanity.
Foul! You changed scope there. I agree that something with a half life of 10,000 years can be dangeous in quantity but I still maintain that it would be safer than the same quantity of the 10e-16 precursor. You are right, it will be gone before it sits around long, but if you are talking about "in quantity" chances are you and a good chunk of the scenery will be gone with it!
-- MarkusQ
Granted. I'm mostly just objecting to the knee-jerk assumption that shorter half-lives are always better than longer ones, when in fact they generally aren't (excluding factors such as practicality of management scheduling).
Remember though, even in the some-what long half-life range (e.g., most radioactive wastes) the longer half-life isotopes are generally safer than the shorter half-life ones, since they produce fewer events per mole. I say generally because there are "gotcha" isotopes that have a longish half-life but break down into a chain of short-half-life (and thus annoying to have around) biproducts. (IIRC, this is how most domestic Radon comes about).
-- MarkusQ
Why does everyone seem to equate "long half-life" with "bad" and "short half-life" with "good"? Things with long half-lives are stable; the ones you need to worry about are the ones with the short half-lives because they break down very quickly. Why is this so hard for everyone to comprehend?
I saw a poll once where people said they wouldn't mind having large quantities of radioactive material with < 1 day half-life trucked past their home, but would object strongly to matierial with million-to-billion year half life passing by. This means that the most radioactive isotopes of Radon, Plutonium, etc. are fine, but they don't want any of the normal isotopes of Iron, Silicon, Carbon, etc. in their neighborhood.
That's just plain nuts!
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Sure, but they didn't sue the people who 'waved the knife'. They sued the people who encouraged them to 'wave the knife'. By that logic, Greenpeace would be the largest racketeer in the US.
Hmmm. I'll admit right off that I'm not familliar with the details of this case, but seems to me if someone was sending attackers of any form against their opponent they aren't just "speaking" anymore, and ought to be held accountable. There are quite a few parallels (hiring a hit man is illegal, as is inciting to riot, barrity (using laywers as a bludgeon), etc.).
As for your second point, I'd like to see Greenpeace held accountable for their actions (which often do more to damage their case than anything else). At the very least they should be forced to change their name to something more honest.
-- MarkusQ
I think you're missing a key distinction in their position: they supported both sides's right to voice their opinion; but they opposed ones side's use of extortion to try to silence the other. Specifically, when the leaders of one side "directed activists involved in that group...to use threats and acts of intimidation and extortion in their efforts to shut down" the other group, the ACLU said that this crossed the line from speach to action and thus was not protected.
Basically, someone is allowed to think my nose is too big, and even to say publically that they think it's too big, but they aren't allowed to wave a knife in my face to make their point.
-- MarkusQ
Feign absolute cluelessness about how this stuff works.
Uh, it said that his job was Unix sysadmin. This tactic might work (in fact, probably works just fine) for MSCEs, but it would be the kiss of death for him.
-- MarkusQ
If you read their fricken AUP before you buy their product, you know what your buying. If you don't, you're stupid, and deserve what you get.
If their AUP differs substantially from their advertisements it's called "bait and switch," (aka fraud).
If you went to an all you can eat buffet (to use your analogy) and after you got there they told you that after the first plate full you could only have one bite every five minutes (i.e. you were rate capped), they would be commiting fraud since this is not "all you can eat."
-- MarkusQ
[SA]HatfulOfHollow, is that you?
No.
-- MarkusQ
I suspect that an iterator could reuse the same block without breaking the semantics,...
I'm not sure: a Proc object is a closure and some memory most be allocated for the environment. In a block it's easy because the environment is always the current environment.
Hmm. I would think (hope?) that it would be possible to make a Proc which "shared" the current environment in a way that was semantically equivalent to a block. But I haven't looked into it.
Easy. Hashes have "=>"; blocks don't. :)
Not necasserily, {:a,1,:b,2} is also possible...
Caught me (that was the reason for the ":)"). Personally, I'd prohibit the paired list form, but that's a personal bias. Someone else (in a nearby post) has suggested using pipe-as-the-first-character-after-open-brace as the signature for a Proc literal. Seems to me that would work & be dead easy (remember, I'm not as worried about performance as some people, so I'd be willing to loose blocks per se in favour of a more uniform system with just Procs).
I worked in one shop where the style was to initial everything (e.g. identifiers of the form MQR.____) "to avoid name conflicts" and "so you always know who to talk to if it's broken"!
LOL! That's code ownership! And I suppose people still were cursing programmers that have left the company several years ago.
There was a mythical programer named Franklin Ulysses Krammer (IIRC) that seemed to get credit for all the really bad kludges. It also broke down rather badly when someone had to modify someone else's code.
-- MarkusQ
KDE could include spikes that stick out of the computer and pierce my skull every five minutes,
You could probably rig something up by hacking xscreensaver to run a usb link to one of those battle-bot kits off e-bay.
Just a thought.
-- MarkusQ
I really don't see KDE or any other linux desktop software beating Windows or MacOS in usabilities tests anytime soon. KDE and GNOME keep playing catchup to windows instead of leading the way.
Then you obviously don't know the trick to winning this kind of game. The trick is to stop implementing new features at the exact moment that the "leader" commits to becoming an unusably bloated, worthless feature ladden pile of... Oh my gosh! Stop! Stop!
-- MarkusQ
Yes! That would solve 95% of my objections (and I'm fighting the urge to bring up the source to see how hard it would be). { ||
-- MarkusQ