Lisp is no more of a "functional language" than Python or Perl.
...
Lisp supports a functional programming style (just like Perl and
Python), but it is a procedural language (because its functions can have
side-effects).
That's a novel view of Lisp. Lisp and its close relative Scheme are
generally held to be the most widely used functional languages. Sure, you can
do procedural work in Lisp, but you're cutting against the natural flow of the
language. You can also do alot of functional programming in Perl, but you're
cutting against Perl's grain. It's great that these are both modern enough to
include multiple programming techniques, but fundamentally Lisp wants to be
functional and Perl wants to be procedural. You're doing a perfectly good
language like Lisp a disservice by encouraging introductory students to take
its elegant design and use it like a club. They aren't learning anything true
about the language, just how to pound nails in with a funny shaped hammer.
Lisp syntax is no more complex than Perl or Bourne shell syntax, languages that lots of people use with no hesitation every day.
Lisp's quirkiness (and this is more about quirks than complexity) is an supporting argument against using Lisp as a teaching language, but it's not a complete argument. That said, it most certainly is an argument that can be fairly levelled at both Perl and Bourne Shell. Just because lots of people use a language (I'm fond of and heavily use both Perl and Bourne Shell) doesn't mean it's a good introductory language.
Any CS student that's scared off by Lisp shouldn't be in CS.
Note that I didn't say CS students should never learn Lisp; as I mentioned
every CS student should learn a functional language and Lisp will do the job
quite well. I'm just suggesting that as a introduction to CS it's a
bit daunting. What you're suggesting is basically hazing the students; those
that survive has passed your arbitrary test and can proceed. The test,
however, is arbitrary. Many CS students have little or no programming
experience. Their introductory CS class will often be their first real
experience programming.
As it happens, people don't naturally think object-oriented, or in
UML diagrams, or in terms of recursion, or in terms of pointers. Education is
about teaching people new ways of thinking. It is not about letting people go
on in ruts and just having them memorize a bunch of Java APIs.
I agree that learning APIs is generally a waste of time. You absolutely
need to teach new ways of thinking. But you don't need to immediately leap
into the deep part of the pool. Jumping to more complex ideas early on is a
waste of time, you simply baffle the poor students. Once they have a grasp on the most obvious technique (plain old procedural programming) you can point out the far more interesting ideas (object oriented programming, functional programming, and whatever else).
It is exactly that kind of misguided thinking that makes it important to teach functional programming concepts early on. Languages like Lisp, Python, and Scheme give instructors the option of exposing their students to many programming styles early on.
Do you really remember your CS 101 class (or whatever the first class
would-be CS majors take is called)? These students are baffled by the most
basic things. You can try teaching more interesting concepts like functional
and object oriented programming, but you're wasting your time; it's in one ear
and out the other. It's probably just as well because the type of toy program
you write at that level is so simplistic that it's unclear what the advantage
of any given techique is. To the extent that they use, say, object oriented
programming in their projects they are simply crudely parroting what they
heard.
Quite to the contrary. LISP is an interactive, dynamically typed language, which makes it great for introductory CS teaching.
Lisp is a quirky functional language suitable for scaring off perfectly
qualified CS students. Lisp is quirky to a fault: car, cdr, and the different
meanings of ` and ' are bad historic anomalies enshrined as The Truth. But
that can be worked around. More problematic is that Lisp is a functional As
it happens, people don't naturally think functionally, people think
procedurally. Computers don't process things functionally, they process things
procedurally. Lisp is a deep shock for most people and can very effectively scare new students away.
This is not to say that Lisp is bad. Indeed, Lisp has many useful characteristics. To get a CS degree one should absolutely be exposed to a good functional language like Lisp or Scheme. It's important to know how to think that way and why you might. But it's easier to appreciate (and less scary) after you've worked in procedural languages for a while.
The rest of your suggestions (Python, etc) are more reasonable; I'd just keep strongly functional ones off the list.
I partly agree. I used to TA introductory courses to Computing Science, and the first thing I told my students is that if they wanted to be programmers, they should go to a different institution. We were in the business of making computing scientists.
Understandable, but a very ivory tower attitude.
The reality is that the majority of your students are going on to be programmers, perhaps even software engineers, but they're not going to be computer scientists. This doesn't mean you shouldn't teach computer science, many of those companies want people with CS education, a solid grounding in CS is necessary to be a great engineer.
By way of comparision, it would be like a physics TA telling his students, "If you just want to build bridges and buildings, go somewhere else, we're here to create Physicists, not Engineers." Yet I damn well hope that engineers are taking those physics classes. Pure theory physics is interesting, but it's only useful when people translate it to practice. We need some of each and the pure physicists have to expect to train the engineers.
It's unfortunate that CS blends the science and engineering into a single school. Your naive belief that there is a better place for would be programmers to go is incorrect. There really isn't a software engineering degree; the closest things tend to be fluffy and superficial; they focus on tools and techniques but fail to expose the computer science you need to excel. If you were to limit your class to people who want to be and have the potential to be computer scientists you'll be looking at some very small classes, a lower profile, and lower levels of funding.
I am not a computer scientist, I never have been, I never wanted to be. I'm a software engineer (or a programmer, or a hacker, or a coder, whatever). That's what I wanted to be when I entered college and it's what I'm happy to be today. But I highly value my computer science degree, it's one of the keys that allows me to be a good software engineer.
(I note that you prefer Computing Science over Computer Science to emphasize that you're about the theory, not the actual machines. It's a nice idea, but doomed one. Computer science is the accepted term and most colleges and universities call the department that. It's a tough life for the serious computer scientist. As they say, how real of science can it be if you need to append "science" to its name? If you really want to try and change things, try for just "Computing," no silly science after it. Hmmm, that doesn't look half bad. "I have a degree in Computing," sounds reasonable even.)
"dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs"? Those dumb chairs rock. They're extremely adjustable. They're extremely comfortable, and not in a lounging around way, but in a "I could sit here working at my computer for eight hours a day and not grow to loathe my chair" way. They may be expensive, but they're great chairs. Are they worth the price? That's a more personal question. Personally, as soon as I find a moderately priced used one I plan on getting one for my home.
(Aerons are great chairs, but they have one big weakness: the cheese grater effect. The nylon mesh backing is nice and cool in warm weather, but in the winter when it's tool that mesh shreds sweaters. I ended up putting an old t-shirt over the back of mine at work.)
How are you going to convince the average joe that his insecure computer is a real problem.
When porn spam, with your return address, shows up in the mailboxes of their mother, their wife, their kids, and their boss, that might be a hint. Social ramfications tend to be very effective. Hmmm, maybe that's the best way to curb drunk driving? "If you're caught driving drunk, we'll call your mother. She is going to be very disappointed in you."
Fair use must be non-commercial use, last I checked.
Fair use is way more complicated than that. One of the (many) reasons for fair use is for reviews and commentary on other works. Those reviews and commentary are free to be commercial. Thus, you can create and sell, say, a television show where you review movies and show brief clips of the movie to emphasize or clairify points. (Although I understand many reviewers choose to seek permission; angering the studios means you don't get advance screening tickets.)
Of course, if by commercial use you mean "used in an advertisement" that may be the case, but that's not a terribly common usage of commercial use.
How are SPF or DomainKeys or SMTP AUTH going to help you when all your spam comes from people you know, because spammers have moved to just taking over machines and using those machines to spam the people that person normally emails, as that person?
When people discover that they've been sending out Viagra spam, pissing off their friends and embarassing themselves in front of coworkers, they'll suddenly have a personal understanding on why security is so important. They will scramble to fix the problem to limit the damage to their reputation. When it is explained that they infected themselves by running that screensaver they got through email they'll not do it again. When it becomes endemic they'll start screaming at their software providers to stop shipping buggy crap and to make things secure by default. It may be a messy road, but it will eventually work out.
Futures where sex is the only thing driving humanity.
Geez, as a kid I sought out the slightly racier sci-fi and I never saw
anything that bad. Sure, I saw books that had alot of sex in them (looks to
Heinlein), but where it's the only driving force? Perhaps you're
confusing erotica set in a sci-fi setting with the wide variety of sci-fi options.
I hate to break it to the authors, but this sort of society would quickly degrade due to a lack of scientific focus. Not to mention that human feelings on the subject are actually pretty immutable. (No matter what anyone says.)
I hate to break it to you, but many people would argue that lots of human
advancement is the indirect result of a desire for nookie. Even ignoring the
iffy assumption that human feelings are immutable, if they are immutable they
are immutable in that people want sex; not real complicated.
Most of them have space travel as a background to get to a fantasy-like world.
Heaven above, was your reading limited to erotica and Stasheff?
Yes, there is alot of great sci-fi that doesn't fit into these two categories.
Did Heinlein, Clarke, Orwell, and Asimov never exist?
What in the world are you looking for?
Personally, I thought Heinlen's juveniles were the best examples of Sci-Fi.
Oh, that's what you're looking for. Boy's adventure stories and pulp
adventure. Great stuff, I enjoy them myself, but it's an amazingly small
subset of sci-fi. Sci-fi includes a wide variety of writing, just like
historical fiction, fantasy, or modern stories.
I look back on the time spent reading anything by Piers Anthony and
know I'm going to be wishing I had those hours back when I'm
older.
Why in the hell would you regret that time? Presumably you were enjoying
yourself, otherwise why did you keep reading them? Anthony isn't a
particularly deep writer, but I have fond memories of reading his light,
entertaining books. You made a perfectly reasonable decision at thet time, regretting it is just dumb.
The people who interrogate you at the airport are not police, do not have police powers, and pretty much are not able to do anything except decide whether to let you enter the private property which is the terminal or the aircraft.
No, they're just federal employees enforcing federal laws with the power to seize property*. But they're not police. Call them what you like, they're law enforcement. Highly specialized law enforcement, but law enforcement none-the-less.
* Once they've started screening you any forbidden objects (like a small set of sewing scissors) will be seized. They will not let you exit the line, drop off your scissors in your car, and return.
What everyone here seems to be missing is the fact that the officer was responding to a report...
A report isn't very good cause, and for good reason. I'd rather not have police able to stop random people on random tips. It gives the small number of crooked police an easy excuse to stop people (Well, I got this tip), and provides an easy way to harass someone (call the police with reports from payphones).
...there had already been a physical exchange between the guy and his daughter.
Nice phrasing of the facts. More specifically, his daughter hit him. There was no evidence at the time that he had assaulted his daughter and there is no evidence now. He was not reasonably suspected of a crime, there was no reason to demand his ID.
Then, once additional officers arrive and the arrest is in progress the daugher tries to *phsyically force her way* past one of the cops.
Boo, freaking, hoo. A 17 year old girl tried to push a police officer. Was it stupid? Yup. Did it represent any sort of real danger? Nope. Part of being a cop is dealing with stupid kids. More importantly, the actions of the daughter have nothing to do with the man's right to refuse to hand over ID.
Eh? I'd submit that it's your Social Security Card/number. How many attempts are there to make that into the de facto standard for ID? You can make it to a ripe age without a passport, but try doing anything without an SSN.
True. But you're not required to carry a SS card around. Most people don't, they just know the number. Since it's just a number it's basically worthless as a source of authentication, it doesn't prove that I'm old enough to drink or vote, it doesn't innately map to a name (unless you've got access to a database of SSNs), and unless you've got access to a database of SSNs and photos you'll have a hard time confirming that it's my number. It's nearly worthless as a technique to confirm my nationality. Finally, law enforcement can't demand your SS card. Is it commonly used as an ID? Yes. Is it used as proof that I'm a US citizen? Not in the slightest.
The question is about whether a State has the authority to require a State ID to be given on demand. The State DOES have that authority, because it isn't expressly forbidden by Federal law.
The law in question would be the fourth amendment, protecting against unreasonable search and seizure. Ultimately, is being forced to produce ID on demand without probable cause a form of search? It's not that clear cut.
In California you are required to provide ID,... So even if Hiibel wins the court case, nothing will change in this fine state.
It'll depend on the ruling. If the Supreme Court rules that demanding ID without probable cause amounts to an unreasonable search, or that holding people solely for refusing to provide ID is unreasonable seizure, then California will have to change. By no means a certain thing, but it's a real possibility.
Heh. Still, it's worth noting that this isn't new to Perl 6. Perl's always been a Chimera. Quoth the Perl man page (as it has as long as I can remember), "Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of
the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people famil-
iar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some ves-
tiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.)" As for why being a freakish blend and a giant mess is actually a feature, I suggest checking out Larry Wall's Second State of the Onion. (It's a long page, but the stuff on the advantages of complexity is all near the top.)
start learning 5 anyways or... wait till 6 is released
Learn Perl right now because it will make your life better (assuming your life can be made better by a powerful scripting language/glue-layer from heck). Perl 6 is still far off on the horizon and Perl 5 knowledge will largely transfer to Perl 6.
I can see the value in perl, and what a great tool it is, but for some reason i have a hard time wrapping my lil brain around it. It's a bit less "structured" or "consistent" than say C is.
I think that setting out to learn Perl for its own sake will generally not work. One of Perl's strengths is that it grows with you and your needs. Learn a little bit of Perl and you still solve some very useful problems. For example, many people first learned Perl to do some quick-and-dirty projects like one-off data file reformatting, internal report generation, or simple CGI scripting. Learn more as you need it. It's taken me years to get to the point where I might call myself a skilled Perl hacker. But every step along the way was pleasant. I never felt I was learning stuff for the sake of learning stuff; I was always learning something that made my goals right now easier to achieve.
If you want the real scoop on the on-going planning of Perl 6, you might want to check out Larry Wall's Apocalypse articles:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6. On the down side, they are dense. Very dense. For that reason, I actually recommend Daimon Conway's Exegesis articles:
2,
3,
4,
5,
6. They provide alot more context on what the changes actually mean to you and why they're good.
PARANOIA is generally an extremely easy game to run. Players aren't allowed to demonstrate knowledge of the rules (no rules-lawyer arguments). The Gamemaster has absolute and unquestioned authority.
Oh, that's never been a problem for me. (heh) Perhaps I wasn't clear.
Maybe it would be more accurate to as "Is Paranoia fundamentally an
extremely difficult game to write for? Players generally entertain themselves
by busily plotting against one another.
Of course, the degenerate form of this (The entire group of PCs out of
clones within the first half hour) is one of the stereotypes of
Paranoia. It might be amusing once or twice, but it's not sustainable
as a game. Ultimately you need to provide some sort of plot. (Well, some
groups like more plotless games, but I think they're still busy playing
Vampire and Amber.) And, I gather, that a Paranoia plot
really needs convoluted, conflicting, but survivable buerocracy and goals, a
dash of dark humor. That's nowhere near as easy as whipping up another dungeon
crawl. Paranoia seems to demand a lot from the GM. Not necessarily bad, but it does make the game less accessible. It's similar to horror games, they also demand a lot from the GM. (I've been running horror for year and only now think I'm starting to get okay at it.) (Although, I suppose in its own way Paranoia is horror. Hmmmmm.)
That said, there are things that really appeal. Several examples of play
I've seen capture something great I've never seen elsewhere. "[Handing a
random Infrared passerby a piece of equipment issued to the team for testing by
R&D] Citizen, your loyalty has earned you the priveldge to help your Friend
The Computer by testing this Extremely Safe piece of equipment." And "[While
filming a team member modifying a robot for decidedly non-Computer friendly
purposes] You can see here that Chaos-R-DSC-4 is repairing Commie sabotage to this scrubbot."
Gah, now I want to try playing again. I just need to find someone crazy enough to run it.
Can someone tell me how they manage to get so much?
Sure, here's just a few possibilities.
Be listed as the domain contact for a domain where a working address is mandatory. Failure to have a working address is grounds to have your domain cancelled. (Fortunately many registrars offer filtered address these days, but that doesn't help for the addresses that were visible before and are already on lists.
Post to usenet. I stopped doing that years and years ago, but I got on spammers lists back then and those addresses still circulate.
Have your job require that your email address be on the web. Similarlly, be responsible for a business address (like "support") that has to be on the web.
Post to a publically archived mailing list that doesn't remove email addresses. Posting to said list may be part of your job and can't be avoided.
Have someone else post your mailing address to a publically archived mailing list
Have someone else send you a e-card from a sleazy site that resells addresses
Have a moderately common name and use a moderately popular email host, you might get dictionary attacked
Ultimately, if you use the same address for long enough it will leak somewhere, possibly without your knowledge. Are you sure no one you know isn't posting a "Hey, my friend bob@example.com knows about this, as him" to a publically archived mailing list?
Switching addresses isn't a very good option; it cuts off communication with other people. Throwaway addresses help (I use them myself), but to suggest that it's a reasonable option for Joe Random User is silly.
Count yourself lucky that you haven't had a problem. I got a new email address with a new job about two years ago. That address has never been used for personal use, just work. I've always obfuscated it on my web page (I need to have it available as part of my job). But I'm already getting 10 or so spam a day. (Although that's an improvement over the 80 or so a day I get at my various personal accounts.)
I like Paranoia, but I like it in much the same way I like
HOL or Orkworld. Great read, fascinating ideas, but is it actually playable? The best summary of Paranoia's problems I've seen amounted to basically, "Paranoia feels too much like a private joke between the author of a given adventure and the gamemaster." To players things (notably death) seems a bit arbitrary. The jokes often aren't comprehensible if you don't have context that only the GM has. (The "disco" scene in Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues comes to mind).
If Paranoia is just social commentary and satire, well, that's and interesting read, but it's a basis for a game I play more than once. If it's about humor than the jokes need to be visible to everyone; I'm not going to play a game to amuse my GM. I think that the core game play of Paranoia is supposed to be about the struggle to survive in a bureaucratic nightmare, but that's not the feeling I've gotten from the games I've played. It's unfortunate, because it's such an appealing premise.
I see a lot of potential, but I've never seen it pay off in actual game play. Maybe I've just been unlucky and didn't have GMs up to the task (I've been in love with Shadowrun since the second edition, but only recently actually played in a game I enjoyed), but Paranoia seems like a fundamentally difficult game to get right. The only "famous" module I've played was YCBBB. YCBBB is is generally held to be one of the best modules for the game. What I saw wasn't terribly impressive and appeared to have a strong "private joke between the author and the GM" element. (To be fair, given that the players weren't haven't alot of fun, we stopped playing after only a few sessions.)
So, is the accusation that Paranoia is a private job between the creators and the GM fair? Is there any truth too it? Is Paranoia fundamentally an extremely difficult game to run? Are you changing anything to address these concerns (including possibly working to clarify incorrect perceptions)? What do you feel is the key attraction to playing for players?
He is not qualified to disagree with scientists who got Nobel Prizes.
Everyone is qualified to disagree with scientists who got Nobel prizes. It's a bad idea to set qualifications on disagreeing, it just creates a pedastool of beliefs considered too sacred to challege. All beliefs should be challenged. I just recommend having really done your research, otherwise you're going to get your ass handed to you by people who actually know what they're talking about. The defense against uninformed opinion is informed opinion, not silencing the uninformed opinion.
I've got a series 1 Tivo, and I agree, it's the best remote control I've ever handled. It's just the right size, I can easily reach all of the buttons. Everyone I know who has tried it agrees that it feels right.
Then the series 2 Tivos with their large remotes came out. I find I have to constantly shift my hand around to reach buttons. It's just too damn big. Why did did they take something that worked and screw it up?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a novel view of Lisp. Lisp and its close relative Scheme are generally held to be the most widely used functional languages. Sure, you can do procedural work in Lisp, but you're cutting against the natural flow of the language. You can also do alot of functional programming in Perl, but you're cutting against Perl's grain. It's great that these are both modern enough to include multiple programming techniques, but fundamentally Lisp wants to be functional and Perl wants to be procedural. You're doing a perfectly good language like Lisp a disservice by encouraging introductory students to take its elegant design and use it like a club. They aren't learning anything true about the language, just how to pound nails in with a funny shaped hammer.
Lisp's quirkiness (and this is more about quirks than complexity) is an supporting argument against using Lisp as a teaching language, but it's not a complete argument. That said, it most certainly is an argument that can be fairly levelled at both Perl and Bourne Shell. Just because lots of people use a language (I'm fond of and heavily use both Perl and Bourne Shell) doesn't mean it's a good introductory language.
Note that I didn't say CS students should never learn Lisp; as I mentioned every CS student should learn a functional language and Lisp will do the job quite well. I'm just suggesting that as a introduction to CS it's a bit daunting. What you're suggesting is basically hazing the students; those that survive has passed your arbitrary test and can proceed. The test, however, is arbitrary. Many CS students have little or no programming experience. Their introductory CS class will often be their first real experience programming.
I agree that learning APIs is generally a waste of time. You absolutely need to teach new ways of thinking. But you don't need to immediately leap into the deep part of the pool. Jumping to more complex ideas early on is a waste of time, you simply baffle the poor students. Once they have a grasp on the most obvious technique (plain old procedural programming) you can point out the far more interesting ideas (object oriented programming, functional programming, and whatever else).
Do you really remember your CS 101 class (or whatever the first class would-be CS majors take is called)? These students are baffled by the most basic things. You can try teaching more interesting concepts like functional and object oriented programming, but you're wasting your time; it's in one ear and out the other. It's probably just as well because the type of toy program you write at that level is so simplistic that it's unclear what the advantage of any given techique is. To the extent that they use, say, object oriented programming in their projects they are simply crudely parroting what they heard.
Lisp is a quirky functional language suitable for scaring off perfectly qualified CS students. Lisp is quirky to a fault: car, cdr, and the different meanings of ` and ' are bad historic anomalies enshrined as The Truth. But that can be worked around. More problematic is that Lisp is a functional As it happens, people don't naturally think functionally, people think procedurally. Computers don't process things functionally, they process things procedurally. Lisp is a deep shock for most people and can very effectively scare new students away.
This is not to say that Lisp is bad. Indeed, Lisp has many useful characteristics. To get a CS degree one should absolutely be exposed to a good functional language like Lisp or Scheme. It's important to know how to think that way and why you might. But it's easier to appreciate (and less scary) after you've worked in procedural languages for a while.
The rest of your suggestions (Python, etc) are more reasonable; I'd just keep strongly functional ones off the list.
Understandable, but a very ivory tower attitude.
The reality is that the majority of your students are going on to be programmers, perhaps even software engineers, but they're not going to be computer scientists. This doesn't mean you shouldn't teach computer science, many of those companies want people with CS education, a solid grounding in CS is necessary to be a great engineer.
By way of comparision, it would be like a physics TA telling his students, "If you just want to build bridges and buildings, go somewhere else, we're here to create Physicists, not Engineers." Yet I damn well hope that engineers are taking those physics classes. Pure theory physics is interesting, but it's only useful when people translate it to practice. We need some of each and the pure physicists have to expect to train the engineers.
It's unfortunate that CS blends the science and engineering into a single school. Your naive belief that there is a better place for would be programmers to go is incorrect. There really isn't a software engineering degree; the closest things tend to be fluffy and superficial; they focus on tools and techniques but fail to expose the computer science you need to excel. If you were to limit your class to people who want to be and have the potential to be computer scientists you'll be looking at some very small classes, a lower profile, and lower levels of funding.
I am not a computer scientist, I never have been, I never wanted to be. I'm a software engineer (or a programmer, or a hacker, or a coder, whatever). That's what I wanted to be when I entered college and it's what I'm happy to be today. But I highly value my computer science degree, it's one of the keys that allows me to be a good software engineer.
(I note that you prefer Computing Science over Computer Science to emphasize that you're about the theory, not the actual machines. It's a nice idea, but doomed one. Computer science is the accepted term and most colleges and universities call the department that. It's a tough life for the serious computer scientist. As they say, how real of science can it be if you need to append "science" to its name? If you really want to try and change things, try for just "Computing," no silly science after it. Hmmm, that doesn't look half bad. "I have a degree in Computing," sounds reasonable even.)
(Aerons are great chairs, but they have one big weakness: the cheese grater effect. The nylon mesh backing is nice and cool in warm weather, but in the winter when it's tool that mesh shreds sweaters. I ended up putting an old t-shirt over the back of mine at work.)
When porn spam, with your return address, shows up in the mailboxes of their mother, their wife, their kids, and their boss, that might be a hint. Social ramfications tend to be very effective. Hmmm, maybe that's the best way to curb drunk driving? "If you're caught driving drunk, we'll call your mother. She is going to be very disappointed in you."
An excellent site on fair use.
Fair use is way more complicated than that. One of the (many) reasons for fair use is for reviews and commentary on other works. Those reviews and commentary are free to be commercial. Thus, you can create and sell, say, a television show where you review movies and show brief clips of the movie to emphasize or clairify points. (Although I understand many reviewers choose to seek permission; angering the studios means you don't get advance screening tickets.)
Of course, if by commercial use you mean "used in an advertisement" that may be the case, but that's not a terribly common usage of commercial use.
When people discover that they've been sending out Viagra spam, pissing off their friends and embarassing themselves in front of coworkers, they'll suddenly have a personal understanding on why security is so important. They will scramble to fix the problem to limit the damage to their reputation. When it is explained that they infected themselves by running that screensaver they got through email they'll not do it again. When it becomes endemic they'll start screaming at their software providers to stop shipping buggy crap and to make things secure by default. It may be a messy road, but it will eventually work out.
Two categories that I suspect you would define as crap. Always remember, 90% of everything is crap.
It's a common technique in fiction to try and distill down something "pure" about humanity, to reveal things hidden by day-to-day life. Typically this is done by creating an unusual setting to eliminate reader's preconceived notions. You might do this by trapping children on an island, sending someone to fictional lands, or having animals play the parts of humans. That you might set people into a future distopia or future utopia doesn't change the basic technique.
Geez, as a kid I sought out the slightly racier sci-fi and I never saw anything that bad. Sure, I saw books that had alot of sex in them (looks to Heinlein), but where it's the only driving force? Perhaps you're confusing erotica set in a sci-fi setting with the wide variety of sci-fi options.
I hate to break it to you, but many people would argue that lots of human advancement is the indirect result of a desire for nookie. Even ignoring the iffy assumption that human feelings are immutable, if they are immutable they are immutable in that people want sex; not real complicated.
Heaven above, was your reading limited to erotica and Stasheff? Yes, there is alot of great sci-fi that doesn't fit into these two categories. Did Heinlein, Clarke, Orwell, and Asimov never exist? What in the world are you looking for?
Oh, that's what you're looking for. Boy's adventure stories and pulp adventure. Great stuff, I enjoy them myself, but it's an amazingly small subset of sci-fi. Sci-fi includes a wide variety of writing, just like historical fiction, fantasy, or modern stories.
Why in the hell would you regret that time? Presumably you were enjoying yourself, otherwise why did you keep reading them? Anthony isn't a particularly deep writer, but I have fond memories of reading his light, entertaining books. You made a perfectly reasonable decision at thet time, regretting it is just dumb.
If it was just distasteful work that wouldn't be so bad. But if you get an "job offer" that refuses to clairify the nature of the work and is work at home, you can pretty much assume that it's a scam. Federal Trade Commission's warning on Work-at-Home schemes. Cockeyed.com investigated the Work-at-Home signs that often litter neighborhoods.
No, they're just federal employees enforcing federal laws with the power to seize property*. But they're not police. Call them what you like, they're law enforcement. Highly specialized law enforcement, but law enforcement none-the-less.
* Once they've started screening you any forbidden objects (like a small set of sewing scissors) will be seized. They will not let you exit the line, drop off your scissors in your car, and return.
A report isn't very good cause, and for good reason. I'd rather not have police able to stop random people on random tips. It gives the small number of crooked police an easy excuse to stop people (Well, I got this tip), and provides an easy way to harass someone (call the police with reports from payphones).
Nice phrasing of the facts. More specifically, his daughter hit him. There was no evidence at the time that he had assaulted his daughter and there is no evidence now. He was not reasonably suspected of a crime, there was no reason to demand his ID.
Boo, freaking, hoo. A 17 year old girl tried to push a police officer. Was it stupid? Yup. Did it represent any sort of real danger? Nope. Part of being a cop is dealing with stupid kids. More importantly, the actions of the daughter have nothing to do with the man's right to refuse to hand over ID.
True. But you're not required to carry a SS card around. Most people don't, they just know the number. Since it's just a number it's basically worthless as a source of authentication, it doesn't prove that I'm old enough to drink or vote, it doesn't innately map to a name (unless you've got access to a database of SSNs), and unless you've got access to a database of SSNs and photos you'll have a hard time confirming that it's my number. It's nearly worthless as a technique to confirm my nationality. Finally, law enforcement can't demand your SS card. Is it commonly used as an ID? Yes. Is it used as proof that I'm a US citizen? Not in the slightest.
The law in question would be the fourth amendment, protecting against unreasonable search and seizure. Ultimately, is being forced to produce ID on demand without probable cause a form of search? It's not that clear cut.
It'll depend on the ruling. If the Supreme Court rules that demanding ID without probable cause amounts to an unreasonable search, or that holding people solely for refusing to provide ID is unreasonable seizure, then California will have to change. By no means a certain thing, but it's a real possibility.
Heh. Still, it's worth noting that this isn't new to Perl 6. Perl's always been a Chimera. Quoth the Perl man page (as it has as long as I can remember), "Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people famil- iar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some ves- tiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.)" As for why being a freakish blend and a giant mess is actually a feature, I suggest checking out Larry Wall's Second State of the Onion. (It's a long page, but the stuff on the advantages of complexity is all near the top.)
Learn Perl right now because it will make your life better (assuming your life can be made better by a powerful scripting language/glue-layer from heck). Perl 6 is still far off on the horizon and Perl 5 knowledge will largely transfer to Perl 6.
I think that setting out to learn Perl for its own sake will generally not work. One of Perl's strengths is that it grows with you and your needs. Learn a little bit of Perl and you still solve some very useful problems. For example, many people first learned Perl to do some quick-and-dirty projects like one-off data file reformatting, internal report generation, or simple CGI scripting. Learn more as you need it. It's taken me years to get to the point where I might call myself a skilled Perl hacker. But every step along the way was pleasant. I never felt I was learning stuff for the sake of learning stuff; I was always learning something that made my goals right now easier to achieve.
Perl is about serving you, not you serving it.
If you want the real scoop on the on-going planning of Perl 6, you might want to check out Larry Wall's Apocalypse articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. On the down side, they are dense. Very dense. For that reason, I actually recommend Daimon Conway's Exegesis articles: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. They provide alot more context on what the changes actually mean to you and why they're good.
Oh, that's never been a problem for me. (heh) Perhaps I wasn't clear. Maybe it would be more accurate to as "Is Paranoia fundamentally an extremely difficult game to write for? Players generally entertain themselves by busily plotting against one another.
Of course, the degenerate form of this (The entire group of PCs out of clones within the first half hour) is one of the stereotypes of Paranoia. It might be amusing once or twice, but it's not sustainable as a game. Ultimately you need to provide some sort of plot. (Well, some groups like more plotless games, but I think they're still busy playing Vampire and Amber.) And, I gather, that a Paranoia plot really needs convoluted, conflicting, but survivable buerocracy and goals, a dash of dark humor. That's nowhere near as easy as whipping up another dungeon crawl. Paranoia seems to demand a lot from the GM. Not necessarily bad, but it does make the game less accessible. It's similar to horror games, they also demand a lot from the GM. (I've been running horror for year and only now think I'm starting to get okay at it.) (Although, I suppose in its own way Paranoia is horror. Hmmmmm.)
That said, there are things that really appeal. Several examples of play I've seen capture something great I've never seen elsewhere. "[Handing a random Infrared passerby a piece of equipment issued to the team for testing by R&D] Citizen, your loyalty has earned you the priveldge to help your Friend The Computer by testing this Extremely Safe piece of equipment." And "[While filming a team member modifying a robot for decidedly non-Computer friendly purposes] You can see here that Chaos-R-DSC-4 is repairing Commie sabotage to this scrubbot."
Gah, now I want to try playing again. I just need to find someone crazy enough to run it.
Be listed as the domain contact for a domain where a working address is mandatory. Failure to have a working address is grounds to have your domain cancelled. (Fortunately many registrars offer filtered address these days, but that doesn't help for the addresses that were visible before and are already on lists.
Post to usenet. I stopped doing that years and years ago, but I got on spammers lists back then and those addresses still circulate.
Have your job require that your email address be on the web. Similarlly, be responsible for a business address (like "support") that has to be on the web.
Post to a publically archived mailing list that doesn't remove email addresses. Posting to said list may be part of your job and can't be avoided.
Have someone else post your mailing address to a publically archived mailing list
Have someone else send you a e-card from a sleazy site that resells addresses
Have a moderately common name and use a moderately popular email host, you might get dictionary attacked
Ultimately, if you use the same address for long enough it will leak somewhere, possibly without your knowledge. Are you sure no one you know isn't posting a "Hey, my friend bob@example.com knows about this, as him" to a publically archived mailing list? Switching addresses isn't a very good option; it cuts off communication with other people. Throwaway addresses help (I use them myself), but to suggest that it's a reasonable option for Joe Random User is silly.
Count yourself lucky that you haven't had a problem. I got a new email address with a new job about two years ago. That address has never been used for personal use, just work. I've always obfuscated it on my web page (I need to have it available as part of my job). But I'm already getting 10 or so spam a day. (Although that's an improvement over the 80 or so a day I get at my various personal accounts.)
I like Paranoia, but I like it in much the same way I like HOL or Orkworld. Great read, fascinating ideas, but is it actually playable? The best summary of Paranoia's problems I've seen amounted to basically, "Paranoia feels too much like a private joke between the author of a given adventure and the gamemaster." To players things (notably death) seems a bit arbitrary. The jokes often aren't comprehensible if you don't have context that only the GM has. (The "disco" scene in Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues comes to mind).
If Paranoia is just social commentary and satire, well, that's and interesting read, but it's a basis for a game I play more than once. If it's about humor than the jokes need to be visible to everyone; I'm not going to play a game to amuse my GM. I think that the core game play of Paranoia is supposed to be about the struggle to survive in a bureaucratic nightmare, but that's not the feeling I've gotten from the games I've played. It's unfortunate, because it's such an appealing premise.
I see a lot of potential, but I've never seen it pay off in actual game play. Maybe I've just been unlucky and didn't have GMs up to the task (I've been in love with Shadowrun since the second edition, but only recently actually played in a game I enjoyed), but Paranoia seems like a fundamentally difficult game to get right. The only "famous" module I've played was YCBBB. YCBBB is is generally held to be one of the best modules for the game. What I saw wasn't terribly impressive and appeared to have a strong "private joke between the author and the GM" element. (To be fair, given that the players weren't haven't alot of fun, we stopped playing after only a few sessions.)
So, is the accusation that Paranoia is a private job between the creators and the GM fair? Is there any truth too it? Is Paranoia fundamentally an extremely difficult game to run? Are you changing anything to address these concerns (including possibly working to clarify incorrect perceptions)? What do you feel is the key attraction to playing for players?
If they feel that the Bush Administration is a key source of many negative trends and opinions then it is perfectly appropriate to finger them.
Everyone is qualified to disagree with scientists who got Nobel prizes. It's a bad idea to set qualifications on disagreeing, it just creates a pedastool of beliefs considered too sacred to challege. All beliefs should be challenged. I just recommend having really done your research, otherwise you're going to get your ass handed to you by people who actually know what they're talking about. The defense against uninformed opinion is informed opinion, not silencing the uninformed opinion.
I've got a series 1 Tivo, and I agree, it's the best remote control I've ever handled. It's just the right size, I can easily reach all of the buttons. Everyone I know who has tried it agrees that it feels right.
Then the series 2 Tivos with their large remotes came out. I find I have to constantly shift my hand around to reach buttons. It's just too damn big. Why did did they take something that worked and screw it up?