It was self defense
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 4, Funny
But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out."
Hey, I've got intelligence that shows that those microbes could evolve into sentient tool using creatures then develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction in a mere million years. If we wait to know for certain the first warning may be a mushroom cloud on Earth. Can we take that risk? We have to strike first!
Reputable people don't need access to their car's computers. If you want access you must be a thief of some sort. Oh, some Free Car/Open Car hippy here will whine "But I want to be able to repair my own car," or "I want to be able to hire a third party to repair my car." Yeah, right. Most people can't fix their own cars, having the ability to open the hood and work on their car is totally worthless. Letting the millions of thieves in just so that a few freaks can try (and probably fail) to fix their own cars is unacceptable. Only the original manufacturer can really fix it. Fortunately I think we can expect to see EDLA (End Driver License Agreements) that will make this nice and clear to everyone.
Re:"set -e" will go a long way to helping you
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 1
That shell script can be improved a lot by using " set -e " to exit on failure, as follows:
Indeed that will help for the simple case. However it doesn't really scale when you have blocks smaller than an entire script which you want to abort on a failure (and that a higher level block can recover from). You can try nesting scripts, but that's a nuisance to code and debug. -e is also useless if you want to actually do error recovery (including the popular "loop until it works").
FTSH is an exception system for shell programming
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What's with all of the people claiming that FTSH will ruin the world because it makes it easier to be a sloppy programmer. Did you freaking read the documentation?
To massively oversimplify, FTSH adds exceptions to shell scripting. Is that really so horrible? Is of line-after-line of "if [$? -eq 0] then" really an improvement? Welcome to the 1980's, we've discovered that programming languages should try and minimize the amount of time you spent typing the same thing over and over again. Human beings are bad at repetitive behavior, avoid repetition if you can.
Similarlly FTSH provides looping constructs to simplify the common case of "Try until it works, or until some timer or counter runs out." Less programmer time wasted coding Yet Another Loop, less opportunities for a stupid slip-up while coding that loop.
If you're so bothered by the possibility of people ignoring return codes it should please you to know that FTSH forces you to appreciate that return codes are very uncertain things. Did diff return 1 because the files are different, or because the linker failed to find a required library? Ultimately all you can say is that diff failed.
Christ, did C++ and Java get this sort of reaming early on? "How horrible, exceptions mean that you don't have to check return codes at every single level."
Something that holds your hand and lets you code while remaining oblivious to the realities of the scripting/programming environment is a bad thing IMHO.
Try reading (or re-reading if necessary) the docs. FTSH does not allow you to remain oblivious. What FTSH adds is powerful exception and recovery system for shell. Sure you can rely on the default behavior (no exceptions, bail on any error), in that case at least it's better than plain old Bourne shell (which by default cheerfully charges onward on an error). But if you want to do error handling FTSH provides a much more powerful recovery system ("Try this block again up to six times").
I mean, come one, you don't want your script to just quit if it encounters an error...
For most people "script" means a small, specialized program designed to do a single job in a relatively controlled environment. If the assumptions of the script aren't valid then there usually any any sort of error correction possible, all you can do is write a complain to standard error and exit with a non-zero return value (that is to say, die() in Perl). If your nightly web stat reporting scripts can't find the log files there isn't anything it can do other than bail out.
It's a well meaning idea, but it would cause more problems than it would solve. It would just encourage sloppy code; people would rationalize "I don't need to fix errors because it doesn't matter", which is a very bad habit to get into when programming, ignoring errors, or even warnings
You've got it backwards.
Most shell scripting is quick and dirty; no one checks error codes (mostly because it's a nuisance). FTSH makes it easier to check error codes, in part because the default behavior is the bail on any error. In essence FTSH adds exception-like behavior to shell programming. FTSH makes it easier to write shell programs that fail gracefully. How can that possibly be a bad thing?
I still don't know why Slashdot doesn't reference non-high bandwidth sites using
the freecache service.
Perhaps because, to quote the site you linked to:
Please note that you
cannot submit a whole site to FreeCache as in
http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/
This will not work as only index.html will be cached. You have to prefix every item
that you want to have cached seperately.
So caching big_pictures.html as you suggest would cache the HTML (typically the small part) while leaving the "big pictures" that chew up bandwidth hosed from the poor original site.
It benefits the site owner by having reduced bandwidth costs...
What if the site owner is prepared to accept the bandwidth costs? Some "small sites" are perfectly able to take a Slashdotting while some large businesses have been taken down. There is no way to know short of prior arrangements with the web site. Now, should Slashdot contact sites that look small to check? That's an entirely different discussion. But providing a mirror without prior permission is presumptive and rude.
Typical/. hypocrisy. When you misappropriate IP in the form of music, movies, and software, you say it's not "theft" -- but when someone does the same to your website, you call them thieves, and get all up at arms about it...
Typical Anonymous Coward trolling. Slashdot is neither a hive mind nor a borg. Believe it or not, the thousands of readers of Slashdot have diffent opinions. That you don't understand this marks you as an idiot or a troll.
But on a more specific level, why are these two things totally different? If someone took one of my web sites and copied it for personal use I would be fine with that (although I'd ask that they use a bit of tact in doing the site rip; no need to be rude and totally soak all of my bandwidth). I'd be grumpy if someone provided a free public mirror of my site without my permission (that is, sharing my work), I would try to get the site taken down, but I'm going to be mellow about it. However, if someone were to take my web site, represent it as their own work, then try to profit from it, I would very, very angry. Similarly with music, movies, or software. Copies for personal use are fine; non-commercial sharing with original authorship preserved is wrong but we can work it out, commercial copies with authorship removed is evil.
What's wrong with that? Nothing. It's public domain, and it is ripe for the plundering.
I don't think that the problem is that Disney is doing it; the problem is that they want to reap the benefits of a public domain while not ever having to contribute to it. The best example is Disney's The Jungle Book, based on a book whose copyright had expired a mere eleven years earlier. If Kipling (and his heirs) had enjoyed the copyright that Disney is demanding now, Disney would have had to wait 39 more years to make the movie. Instead of a 1967 release that is already a classic movie Disney's The Jungle Book would be a relatively recent movie from 1994. Conversely, if Disney's The Jungle Book enjoyed the same copyright that the original book did I could look forward to seeing it enter the public domain in my lifetime (2023) instead of 12 years after my (statistically estimated) death in 2062. I was born years after the movie came out and can expect to die years before it will enter the public domain. That seems a bit broken.
A few years ago I interviewed at
a company developing radiation treatment machines. It was exciting stuff, the machine scans someone to build an exact map of where the cancer is, then generates a computer controlled treatment plan that maximizes the radiation delivered to the cancer while minimizing the amount to healthy cells. The end result would be that patients needing radiation treatment ended up killing less healthy cells while simultaneously killing more cancer cells. Great stuff. But just a tad bit daunting as a software developer. The entire system was computer controlled. The clever algorithms that optimized the irradiation weren't obvious, a tech running the machine would be hard pressed to identify an bad or mis-applied plan. Potentially the difference between life and death was entirely within the hands of the software. I wasn't sure at the time if I was ready for that.
Change your user agent string to one matching the googlebot....
I'm pretty sure many "registration only" websites would magically open themselves...
Indeed. I do exactly this to access the Insiders Only content on
IGN. (You'll also need to disable javascript). I'd feel bad about it, but this pricks clearly intend to deceive. I find links to interesting content through Google, but the link leads somewhere else. I don't mind paid content (I pay for two online magazines), but attempting to mislead both Google and visitors is wrong. So I report the abuse, tweak my browser, and head back to enjoy free, free content. (The magic string is "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)". You can try it with one of these links.) I hate sites that try to mislead Google. If you don't want to provide the content to random people, don't provide it to Google. If you want to pimp your product be honest about it and purchase AdWords.
If it can cause third degree burns in less than three seconds, then it should cause second degree burns in even less time than that, so why didn't Mickey Dee's have lots of people running around with blisters on their tounges?
Do you remember how hot McDonald's served their coffee? Regular coffee drinkers at McDonald's knew to respect, no, fear that coffee. I would fully expect to to get minor burns if I simply took a big swallow of McDonald's coffee during that era. It was wicked hot. You delicately sipped the smallest amounts of if for several minutes until it cooled. I know more than one person who forgot how hot McDonald's coffee was, took a healthy swig, then spit it out when their self-preseveration insticts kicked in warning that it was too hot.
Part of the reason I'm so familiar with this is that my Mom preferred getting McDonald's coffee on her way out some place. It was hot enough that she knew it would still be pleasantly hot ten minutes later when she arrived at her destination and started drinking it.
Perhaps the biggest thing I took from this is that the increasingly specialized and unused fixed width formatting functionality in Perl is moving out of the core language and into a powerful module. Those of us who don't need it will never need to worry about it; those who need it will find it actually improved over previous versions. Finally "write" will be free in Perl to mean something slightly less crazy.
That said, I can think of one important use for fixed width formatting: email reports. Sure, you can use HTML, but you really ought to also provide a plain text version. Many (arguably crappy) web mail clients will only display the plain text, ditto for us crotchety old command line mail tool users. With a bit of care you have have your table heavy report in shiny HTML and your functional text all in one MIME encoded message. (Remember that "reports" includes things like your email receipt from an online store.)
What I don't get is, why (in this age of middleware and reused engines) can the game not be made on a more modest budget?
These days programmer time often isn't the most expensive part of the project. The expensive part is creating the content. Textures, models, background paintings, scripted sequences, puzzles, etc. At best you can reuse some of it from a previous game, but you need to create new content each time. (Interestingly, this is why open source game engines aren't an entirely unrealistic option. Even if your competitors get you engine when you ship they're got many man-years of work to actually create something. And no matter how good the engine is, if the content sucks it's worthless.)
LucasArts has consistently shipped some of the best adventure games ever.
The worst adventure games from LucasArts are still fun. They sell at least
tolerably well. The most recent Monkey Island game did, I understand, quite
well when ported to the PS2, even though it had been available on PC for a year
or two at that point.
Full Throttle and
Sam & Max Hit the Road
are two of the most creative adventure games ever; I know I
wasn't the only person eagerly anticipating the sequels. (Sequels suck in general, yes, but LucasArts has proven that it's possible to buck the trend by releasing 4 great
Monkey Island games.)
Adventure gamers have gone from being able to look forward to two great games to zero. Feh. At least we can look forward to
Dreamfall and
Syberia 2.
With all that in mind I can't understand those states that have "open" primaries. Why should somebody who isn't even a member of my party get to decide who is going to run for us?
If you want to foot the bill to run the primary election you're free to keep it as closed as you like. But as long as the taxpayers are paying for your primary you're going to have to let everyone have a say. I think it's a reasonable trade off: in exchange for giving citizens an increased voice in the political process we'll foot the bill of the primary. Personally I refuse to register as a member of any party, but I appreciate that I can give my opinion on the candidates.
As for why the party gets the state to run the elections to assign the pledged delegates who else should run it? Should it be a private election with no accountability?
Sounds good to me. States should not be in the business of providing free-of-charge, high-security polls for private organizations. Closed primaries are just a government handout to the parties. If you don't like open primaries then fund your own darn primaries.
Okay, there are lots of silly things you can believe about Free Software.
Believing that no one should ever make money selling software seems daft to me. Some people believe such things, I don't. However, I do believe than an increasing amount of software should be Free Software.
When I was a young child I knew that I wanted to write software. When I
actually started programming it was every bit as satisfying as I had hoped.
That youngster stumbled across some piece of Free Software and I was confused.
Giving it away for free? How do you pay the bills? This Free Software thing
is clearly bullshit.
Since then I've regularlly rethought the issue. As I learn more and more
about how the world works Free Software makes more and more sense. When I
graduated from college I felt that some core software (operating systems,
compilers) should be free, some other things might be free, and some things
(games, for example) should never be free. Now, as I continue to look back on
what I've seen I think even more software should be free and I can reasonably
imagine a world in which everything is Free Software. I'm a programmer by
profession and this brave new world of Free Software doesn't worry me in the
slightest.
So why aren't I worried?
First, the vast majority of programmers don't write software that is sold
for a profit. Most software is used internally to the business or organization
that commissioned it. If the market for software suddenly dropped to zero these programmers would still have jobs.
Second, of the remaining software, that software which is sold, much of it
derives most of its value from supporting data sold with the software. The
most obvious example is video games. Without the level design and graphics and
sounds the software itself is basically useless. Sure, you competitors will
appreciate being able to take your great engine and reusing it, but you'll at
least have a lead; they only start work when your product is on shelves with
all its shiny graphics and level design tuned by people who worked on the core
engine.
This does leave the minority of software where the value is really in the
software itself and the money comes from selling the software. Do these poor
programmers starve to death? Of course not! People clearly want the software
and are willing to pay for it. Programmers are capable of writing the software
and want to be paid. Ultimately I have faith in the free market to work it
out. We might see software sold using the Street Performer
Protocol. Users are generally going to trust the original developers more
than people who just copy it; this means that software can be sold on the basis
of that trust (Sure, you can get it for free, but do you trust those guys?), or
to convince users to accept ad-ware. Yet other software might be supported
wealthy patrons. Also, some of those users are large businesses; they might
band together to fund a team of developers to develop software they all need.
In practice I would expect all of the above and some innovative ideas.
The world of 100% Free Software is in the distant future and may not ever
exist. But the near future, the one in which Free Software is a small but
significant force, isn't some doom-and-gloom situation. Most programmers
wouldn't notice a thing. Of the remaining number, ultimately capitalism will
figure something out. Clemens compares the situation to communism, which is an
interesting comparision. One of the best things about various attempts at
communism is that the free market inevitably sneaks out (often in the form of
black markets).
If your business is large enough to pay for a listing in the yellow pages than you are large enough to pay for a website. You can afford a very nice little site for $12 a month. Sure, you're not necessarily going to do business over the web, instead think of it much like you would a brochure. Put a map to your business (if you're the sort of business that people visit), your phone number, your business hours, a brief summary of what you do, some photos of your wonderful product, and perhaps a catalog or menu. At the very least this allows you some control over what people see when they search for you online. A minor web presence allows your customers to point to something when they recommend you to others.
By way of example, it's not much, but if I wanted to suggest
my favorite comic book store I have a place to link. Regrettably there isn't a map, but at the very least you'll find an address, business hours, and a telephone number. That said, I don't actually think that the page is necessarily managed by my local comic shop, I think it's a third party, making this a good example of why you should have your own site.
I get lots of entertainment and useful information from my television. That we have two-way communication systems doesn't invalidate the use for one-way communication systems. For certain areas (news reporting, entertainment), on the whole I'd rather that the content creators spent more time creating better information (better news, better entertainment), than engaging in two way communication with their audience.
As a replacement for email and usenet, RSS is clearly inferior. But as a replacement for checking the dozen or so news, commentary, and comic sites I visit almost daily, RSS is clearly superior.
My apartment complex's elevators hold the doors open for a long time, far longer than any other elevator I've ever used. This wouldn't irritate me so much except that the Close Doors button doesn't do anything. It doesn't matter if you push the button or not, the doors will close when they're damn well good and ready.
How can you sue a company because you refuse to comply with safety procedures. You can't. The catch 22 is IBM knows you won't follow procedure and doesn't expect you to. They expect you to get the job done fast and right. If you can't do that because you follow procedure to a T you WILL be fired. (at least in IBM Essex)
So you're saying IBM refuses to let you comply with safety procedures (because if you do, you'll be fired). That's a perfectly reason to sue IBM. Claiming that you refused to follow procedures is silly. Next we'll be hearing arguments that we can't prosecute mobsters because I chose to give them my money. If you'll lose your job if you don't do certain things than the company is responsible for those actions.
Despite your claim to being a software engineer, you're still a computing scientist.
Perhaps we simply have a terminology problem. By your definition, yes, I guess I'm a computer scientist. But by identification I'm a programmer, a hacker, a software engineer. I don't feel myself as a scientist; I'm a problem solver. It's a inaccurate stereotype, but Real Computer Scientists seem to look at actually touching computers with a bit of distain.
There are numerous technical colleges that can produce fine programmers that can do a good job.
I'm familiar with various technical college programs and on the whole I'm suspicious of them (although I'm sure there are some great programs and some great people that come from them). But on the whole simply being taught languages and basic technique isn't good enough. To write software that doesn't, well, suck, you need a grounding in the context and theory. Sure, you'll be able to put together simple front ends and such, but you'll be hard pressed to manage a large scale project.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I've got intelligence that shows that those microbes could evolve into sentient tool using creatures then develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction in a mere million years. If we wait to know for certain the first warning may be a mushroom cloud on Earth. Can we take that risk? We have to strike first!
A suggestion in case you ever consider anti-bacterial soap again: You're not supposed to eat it.
What I really want are holosuites. Why? Ummm, well, erm, so I can do Sherlock Holmes mysteries like Picard, yeah that's it. Certainly nothing else.
Reputable people don't need access to their car's computers. If you want access you must be a thief of some sort. Oh, some Free Car/Open Car hippy here will whine "But I want to be able to repair my own car," or "I want to be able to hire a third party to repair my car." Yeah, right. Most people can't fix their own cars, having the ability to open the hood and work on their car is totally worthless. Letting the millions of thieves in just so that a few freaks can try (and probably fail) to fix their own cars is unacceptable. Only the original manufacturer can really fix it. Fortunately I think we can expect to see EDLA (End Driver License Agreements) that will make this nice and clear to everyone.
Indeed that will help for the simple case. However it doesn't really scale when you have blocks smaller than an entire script which you want to abort on a failure (and that a higher level block can recover from). You can try nesting scripts, but that's a nuisance to code and debug. -e is also useless if you want to actually do error recovery (including the popular "loop until it works").
What's with all of the people claiming that FTSH will ruin the world because it makes it easier to be a sloppy programmer. Did you freaking read the documentation?
To massively oversimplify, FTSH adds exceptions to shell scripting. Is that really so horrible? Is of line-after-line of "if [$? -eq 0] then" really an improvement? Welcome to the 1980's, we've discovered that programming languages should try and minimize the amount of time you spent typing the same thing over and over again. Human beings are bad at repetitive behavior, avoid repetition if you can.
Similarlly FTSH provides looping constructs to simplify the common case of "Try until it works, or until some timer or counter runs out." Less programmer time wasted coding Yet Another Loop, less opportunities for a stupid slip-up while coding that loop.
If you're so bothered by the possibility of people ignoring return codes it should please you to know that FTSH forces you to appreciate that return codes are very uncertain things. Did diff return 1 because the files are different, or because the linker failed to find a required library? Ultimately all you can say is that diff failed.
Christ, did C++ and Java get this sort of reaming early on? "How horrible, exceptions mean that you don't have to check return codes at every single level."
Try reading (or re-reading if necessary) the docs. FTSH does not allow you to remain oblivious. What FTSH adds is powerful exception and recovery system for shell. Sure you can rely on the default behavior (no exceptions, bail on any error), in that case at least it's better than plain old Bourne shell (which by default cheerfully charges onward on an error). But if you want to do error handling FTSH provides a much more powerful recovery system ("Try this block again up to six times").
For most people "script" means a small, specialized program designed to do a single job in a relatively controlled environment. If the assumptions of the script aren't valid then there usually any any sort of error correction possible, all you can do is write a complain to standard error and exit with a non-zero return value (that is to say, die() in Perl). If your nightly web stat reporting scripts can't find the log files there isn't anything it can do other than bail out.
You've got it backwards.
Most shell scripting is quick and dirty; no one checks error codes (mostly because it's a nuisance). FTSH makes it easier to check error codes, in part because the default behavior is the bail on any error. In essence FTSH adds exception-like behavior to shell programming. FTSH makes it easier to write shell programs that fail gracefully. How can that possibly be a bad thing?
Perhaps because, to quote the site you linked to:
So caching big_pictures.html as you suggest would cache the HTML (typically the small part) while leaving the "big pictures" that chew up bandwidth hosed from the poor original site.
What if the site owner is prepared to accept the bandwidth costs? Some "small sites" are perfectly able to take a Slashdotting while some large businesses have been taken down. There is no way to know short of prior arrangements with the web site. Now, should Slashdot contact sites that look small to check? That's an entirely different discussion. But providing a mirror without prior permission is presumptive and rude.
Typical Anonymous Coward trolling. Slashdot is neither a hive mind nor a borg. Believe it or not, the thousands of readers of Slashdot have diffent opinions. That you don't understand this marks you as an idiot or a troll.
But on a more specific level, why are these two things totally different? If someone took one of my web sites and copied it for personal use I would be fine with that (although I'd ask that they use a bit of tact in doing the site rip; no need to be rude and totally soak all of my bandwidth). I'd be grumpy if someone provided a free public mirror of my site without my permission (that is, sharing my work), I would try to get the site taken down, but I'm going to be mellow about it. However, if someone were to take my web site, represent it as their own work, then try to profit from it, I would very, very angry. Similarly with music, movies, or software. Copies for personal use are fine; non-commercial sharing with original authorship preserved is wrong but we can work it out, commercial copies with authorship removed is evil.
I don't think that the problem is that Disney is doing it; the problem is that they want to reap the benefits of a public domain while not ever having to contribute to it. The best example is Disney's The Jungle Book, based on a book whose copyright had expired a mere eleven years earlier. If Kipling (and his heirs) had enjoyed the copyright that Disney is demanding now, Disney would have had to wait 39 more years to make the movie. Instead of a 1967 release that is already a classic movie Disney's The Jungle Book would be a relatively recent movie from 1994. Conversely, if Disney's The Jungle Book enjoyed the same copyright that the original book did I could look forward to seeing it enter the public domain in my lifetime (2023) instead of 12 years after my (statistically estimated) death in 2062. I was born years after the movie came out and can expect to die years before it will enter the public domain. That seems a bit broken.
A few years ago I interviewed at a company developing radiation treatment machines. It was exciting stuff, the machine scans someone to build an exact map of where the cancer is, then generates a computer controlled treatment plan that maximizes the radiation delivered to the cancer while minimizing the amount to healthy cells. The end result would be that patients needing radiation treatment ended up killing less healthy cells while simultaneously killing more cancer cells. Great stuff. But just a tad bit daunting as a software developer. The entire system was computer controlled. The clever algorithms that optimized the irradiation weren't obvious, a tech running the machine would be hard pressed to identify an bad or mis-applied plan. Potentially the difference between life and death was entirely within the hands of the software. I wasn't sure at the time if I was ready for that.
Indeed. I do exactly this to access the Insiders Only content on IGN. (You'll also need to disable javascript). I'd feel bad about it, but this pricks clearly intend to deceive. I find links to interesting content through Google, but the link leads somewhere else. I don't mind paid content (I pay for two online magazines), but attempting to mislead both Google and visitors is wrong. So I report the abuse, tweak my browser, and head back to enjoy free, free content. (The magic string is "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)". You can try it with one of these links.) I hate sites that try to mislead Google. If you don't want to provide the content to random people, don't provide it to Google. If you want to pimp your product be honest about it and purchase AdWords.
Do you remember how hot McDonald's served their coffee? Regular coffee drinkers at McDonald's knew to respect, no, fear that coffee. I would fully expect to to get minor burns if I simply took a big swallow of McDonald's coffee during that era. It was wicked hot. You delicately sipped the smallest amounts of if for several minutes until it cooled. I know more than one person who forgot how hot McDonald's coffee was, took a healthy swig, then spit it out when their self-preseveration insticts kicked in warning that it was too hot.
Part of the reason I'm so familiar with this is that my Mom preferred getting McDonald's coffee on her way out some place. It was hot enough that she knew it would still be pleasantly hot ten minutes later when she arrived at her destination and started drinking it.
Perhaps the biggest thing I took from this is that the increasingly specialized and unused fixed width formatting functionality in Perl is moving out of the core language and into a powerful module. Those of us who don't need it will never need to worry about it; those who need it will find it actually improved over previous versions. Finally "write" will be free in Perl to mean something slightly less crazy.
That said, I can think of one important use for fixed width formatting: email reports. Sure, you can use HTML, but you really ought to also provide a plain text version. Many (arguably crappy) web mail clients will only display the plain text, ditto for us crotchety old command line mail tool users. With a bit of care you have have your table heavy report in shiny HTML and your functional text all in one MIME encoded message. (Remember that "reports" includes things like your email receipt from an online store.)
You'll never get past my redacting. I put a white rectangle on top of a black rectangle over a white rectangle. You meddling kids will never catch me!
LucasArts also recently cancelled Full Throttle 2 . (Although good luck confirming it through official channels thanks to an incompetant web site at LucasArts.)
LucasArts has consistently shipped some of the best adventure games ever. The worst adventure games from LucasArts are still fun. They sell at least tolerably well. The most recent Monkey Island game did, I understand, quite well when ported to the PS2, even though it had been available on PC for a year or two at that point. Full Throttle and Sam & Max Hit the Road are two of the most creative adventure games ever; I know I wasn't the only person eagerly anticipating the sequels. (Sequels suck in general, yes, but LucasArts has proven that it's possible to buck the trend by releasing 4 great Monkey Island games.) Adventure gamers have gone from being able to look forward to two great games to zero. Feh. At least we can look forward to Dreamfall and Syberia 2 .
If you want to foot the bill to run the primary election you're free to keep it as closed as you like. But as long as the taxpayers are paying for your primary you're going to have to let everyone have a say. I think it's a reasonable trade off: in exchange for giving citizens an increased voice in the political process we'll foot the bill of the primary. Personally I refuse to register as a member of any party, but I appreciate that I can give my opinion on the candidates.
Sounds good to me. States should not be in the business of providing free-of-charge, high-security polls for private organizations. Closed primaries are just a government handout to the parties. If you don't like open primaries then fund your own darn primaries.
Okay, there are lots of silly things you can believe about Free Software. Believing that no one should ever make money selling software seems daft to me. Some people believe such things, I don't. However, I do believe than an increasing amount of software should be Free Software.
When I was a young child I knew that I wanted to write software. When I actually started programming it was every bit as satisfying as I had hoped. That youngster stumbled across some piece of Free Software and I was confused. Giving it away for free? How do you pay the bills? This Free Software thing is clearly bullshit.
Since then I've regularlly rethought the issue. As I learn more and more about how the world works Free Software makes more and more sense. When I graduated from college I felt that some core software (operating systems, compilers) should be free, some other things might be free, and some things (games, for example) should never be free. Now, as I continue to look back on what I've seen I think even more software should be free and I can reasonably imagine a world in which everything is Free Software. I'm a programmer by profession and this brave new world of Free Software doesn't worry me in the slightest.
So why aren't I worried?
First, the vast majority of programmers don't write software that is sold for a profit. Most software is used internally to the business or organization that commissioned it. If the market for software suddenly dropped to zero these programmers would still have jobs.
Second, of the remaining software, that software which is sold, much of it derives most of its value from supporting data sold with the software. The most obvious example is video games. Without the level design and graphics and sounds the software itself is basically useless. Sure, you competitors will appreciate being able to take your great engine and reusing it, but you'll at least have a lead; they only start work when your product is on shelves with all its shiny graphics and level design tuned by people who worked on the core engine.
This does leave the minority of software where the value is really in the software itself and the money comes from selling the software. Do these poor programmers starve to death? Of course not! People clearly want the software and are willing to pay for it. Programmers are capable of writing the software and want to be paid. Ultimately I have faith in the free market to work it out. We might see software sold using the Street Performer Protocol. Users are generally going to trust the original developers more than people who just copy it; this means that software can be sold on the basis of that trust (Sure, you can get it for free, but do you trust those guys?), or to convince users to accept ad-ware. Yet other software might be supported wealthy patrons. Also, some of those users are large businesses; they might band together to fund a team of developers to develop software they all need. In practice I would expect all of the above and some innovative ideas.
The world of 100% Free Software is in the distant future and may not ever exist. But the near future, the one in which Free Software is a small but significant force, isn't some doom-and-gloom situation. Most programmers wouldn't notice a thing. Of the remaining number, ultimately capitalism will figure something out. Clemens compares the situation to communism, which is an interesting comparision. One of the best things about various attempts at communism is that the free market inevitably sneaks out (often in the form of black markets).
If your business is large enough to pay for a listing in the yellow pages than you are large enough to pay for a website. You can afford a very nice little site for $12 a month. Sure, you're not necessarily going to do business over the web, instead think of it much like you would a brochure. Put a map to your business (if you're the sort of business that people visit), your phone number, your business hours, a brief summary of what you do, some photos of your wonderful product, and perhaps a catalog or menu. At the very least this allows you some control over what people see when they search for you online. A minor web presence allows your customers to point to something when they recommend you to others.
By way of example, it's not much, but if I wanted to suggest my favorite comic book store I have a place to link. Regrettably there isn't a map, but at the very least you'll find an address, business hours, and a telephone number. That said, I don't actually think that the page is necessarily managed by my local comic shop, I think it's a third party, making this a good example of why you should have your own site.
So what?
I get lots of entertainment and useful information from my television. That we have two-way communication systems doesn't invalidate the use for one-way communication systems. For certain areas (news reporting, entertainment), on the whole I'd rather that the content creators spent more time creating better information (better news, better entertainment), than engaging in two way communication with their audience.
As a replacement for email and usenet, RSS is clearly inferior. But as a replacement for checking the dozen or so news, commentary, and comic sites I visit almost daily, RSS is clearly superior.
Stupid elevator.
So you're saying IBM refuses to let you comply with safety procedures (because if you do, you'll be fired). That's a perfectly reason to sue IBM. Claiming that you refused to follow procedures is silly. Next we'll be hearing arguments that we can't prosecute mobsters because I chose to give them my money. If you'll lose your job if you don't do certain things than the company is responsible for those actions.
Perhaps we simply have a terminology problem. By your definition, yes, I guess I'm a computer scientist. But by identification I'm a programmer, a hacker, a software engineer. I don't feel myself as a scientist; I'm a problem solver. It's a inaccurate stereotype, but Real Computer Scientists seem to look at actually touching computers with a bit of distain.
I'm familiar with various technical college programs and on the whole I'm suspicious of them (although I'm sure there are some great programs and some great people that come from them). But on the whole simply being taught languages and basic technique isn't good enough. To write software that doesn't, well, suck, you need a grounding in the context and theory. Sure, you'll be able to put together simple front ends and such, but you'll be hard pressed to manage a large scale project.