Well of course EULAs are nessesarly if source code comes with it.
That depends entirely on why you are distributing source code. If it's because the software is source-portable, and you want your user to be able to compile it for his own system, then you don't need a EULA. You might want to remind your users that just having the source doesn't mean they are allowed to redistribute it, but you certainly don't need to enter into a contract with them to prevent them from doing so.
If you're distributing the source so someone can make compatible software, you probably want an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement; means they can't tell others what they find in there), among other things. That's certainly not an End-User License Agreement, though.
I think the distinguishing trait of a EULA is that it is mandatory for every end user of the product. Optional licenses, such as open source licenses, are not targetted at the end user as an end user, but the end user as a distributor or developer.
I'm really not seeing any situations where going from distributing just the binary to distributing the binary plus source would make you need a EULA. It might make you want to offer some sort of additional license, to encourage users to share bug fixes, though.
Software was first just something that came with the hardware, or developed in-house, then as the industry developed, software companies came along which would license one program out to multiple customers, and it just grew from there. Software was being *nudge* *wink* licensed over the counter in shrink-wrapped boxes since before it was 100% clear that copyright even really applied to computer software.
When it was cleared up, and special provisions for software were written into copyright law (in 1980, in the USA), the pseudo-licensing was already a habit. Habits like turning disclaimers of quality into license terms ("You know all that stuff we claimed in the advertising? Well, if those were lies, you can't sue us!") are not casually abandoned in a litigious society.
Basically, the ability to impose any terms on your customers is better than the deal normal copyright sale gives you, so once the industry was in the habit, they had no reason to change.
Since newcomers usually just follow the herd, I sometimes wonder how many people in the software business even know that EULAs are not entirely necessary to sell software. The people most likely to know are the lawyers, and can you imagine a lawyer hired to write up a EULA telling his customer, "You know, you don't need me, you could just sell your product as they do in most industries." ?
Copyright law clearly recognizes the distinction between owning a copy of a work, and owning copyright to a work.
Owning a copy of a work not only gives you normal ownership of the physical copy of the work, but also fair use rights to the information expressed in that copy. These are transferred along with the physical copy, should you sell it or give it away.
Owning copyright to a work gives you the exclusive privilege to create copies of the work. This privilege may be granted to others through licenses.
If you sold me a print of one of your photos, I would be entirely within my rights to resell it, exactly as if you sold me a sack of potatoes.
Software works like that, too. If you sell a copy of a program, you don't give up copyright on it, and the purchaser gains the right to install it, to run it, to back it up, and to resell it. Copyright law has been changed to handle the specific needs of over-the-counter software.
it would be really great to own Windows XP for a few hundred bucks and then to tell MicroSoft to cease and desist selling MY SOFTWARE.
This is ridiculous. If Windows XP was sold without a EULA, you would obviously be buying a copy, not the copyright.
EULAs are no more necessary or beneficial to software than they would be for toasters or automobiles. This has been quite clear since at least the mid-80's, when the whole idiotic business should have been dropped.
The point is that if it is possible to buy an advantage, it makes the game suck. If people are farming for money, this makes the game suck more, as they interfere with the people playing for fun.
So taking a cut would not only hurt their image, but legitimize and encourage farming, hurting their gameplay, either costing them more in development and support to compensate, or costing them paying accounts.
I can understand the temptation. Pretty much every progressive stats-dominated (IOW, MUD-style) MOG I've seen suffers from bunny-killer syndrome: when you start, you're pathetically weak, and you have to spend ages killing what most players consider pathetically weak creatures, the game-equivalent of (if not literally) rabbits and squirrels. Not very heroic.
It doesn't matter what they call the bunnies, or how fearsome they make them look, you still have this situation where 99% of the creatures could squash you like a bug.
This may work fine for a single-player RPG, because you're the center of attention all the way along, and not exposed to the stronger creatures, but in a MOG, your pathetic weakness is rubbed in your face by the relative strength of other players. This is escapism?
It seems that these games would be a lot more fun without the grind of the stats-building process, but that's also a lot harder and more expensive to make (they won't be leveling, they won't be farming items, what will they be doing? there can't be enough earth-shaking heroic quests to go around...). Also, the stats-building process does have an addictive quality that keeps people playing even when they're not having fun (camping, anyone?). It makes economic sense.
It's bad for the game on the whole, but it makes sense for the people buying. Building up your character from a puny noob just isn't the fun part.
...the company would do it itself. It would be great for them to be able sell high-ranking or rare items as a primary source of income. I've seen MUDs do that, but always on a very limited scale: a handful of select, not too powerful, items given to people who pay extra (or pay at all, as it's usually on otherwise free MUDs that I've seen this).
The problem is, that doesn't make a good game. It's like playing chess in a league where people who bribe the referee can have all their pawns replaced with queens at the start of the game. Either you have to spend your money just to get a level playing field, or you have a hell of a time getting a decent game.
So it's a matter of protecting the gameplay. They can't just allow it. The question of legality depends entirely on the contract. Obviously, you can set acceptable use rules in the user contract.
This challenge looks pretty ridiculous to me. It seems basically to me like people disputing the right of a sports league to ban players for taking bribes to throw the game.
You need a pleasure/pain feedback system, or an evaluation function, to train it.
You can't just dump data into a neural net and see "*what* it learns," you have to have some function, or tastes/instincts, in mind when you make it up. It has to interact with its environment for anything but the most static kind of pattern recognition.
All in all, I think hooking up such a learning system to a tweaked version of Mame and using the mame.dk and gamefaqs archives would give more interesting results. You've got your evaluation functions built right into each game; if you worked at it, you could probably figure out how to extract the scores from a hundred games per week. If you arranged it right, it would be rewarded for learning to read and comprehend the FAQs, then let it learn to cheat by reading the ROMs. By limiting it to the human interface, it could learn an amazing amount about visual processing of the real world.
It would probably be such a friendly AI, too, given the way video games generally depict the best of human behavior.
I'm totally serious. NASA's manned program is still mostly using 70's technology, it's pathetic. They were on the moon over 30 years ago, but haven't left near-Earth orbit since, or managed to decrease the cost of putting a human in orbit.
It's blazingly obvious to anyone who's taken a good look at the shuttle program that they should never have made a second one. They were supposed to learn from their mistakes making the first one, and make better shuttles, but instead they basically copied their first attempt at a reusable vehicle to make a small fleet and kept it in service even after it was obvious that it offered no benefit over single-use rockets.
People wondered what the point of the ISS was from day one. It's just a huge money-sink in the sky.
The best justification for these manned missions is that they are paving the way for future manned spaceflight, but they are somehow both bloated and unambitious: so costly that their failure could not be tolerated, so only "established" technologies are used for the functions they are supposed to be developing, merely spending resources on accomplishing these non-accomplishments rather than taking chances on potentially revolutionary technologies.
NASA is increasingly an organization of frightened bureaucrats, desperately avoiding failure, rather than bold explorers, risking much to gain much.
I mean, obviously you have some kind of grudge against it, to abuse it that way.
Take the RAM out of your computer and throw it at your workmate/housemate/mum. He or she will say 'Ow!', and it's not because he or she was hit by electrons!
This would, indeed, be the use of RAM as a mechanical object but this type of use is not characteristic. You appear to be claiming with this example that any solid object (and possibly any matter) is a "mechanical component," which is wrong and would be harmful to meaningful communication if accepted.
Any solid object's atoms move in relation to each other. This does not mean it can be said to have "moving parts" (this useful phrase would be rendered meaningless, otherwise), or make it a "mechanical device" (ditto).
Every electrical device is utterly reliant on its physical structure to function properly, and will cease to function properly if its structure is altered beyond certain limits. A broken connection is not a mechanical failure.
Sure, the clip that holds it in place is mechanical, and can suffer mechanical failure, but that is not part of the RAM. To note Telstra's odd problem as evidence of RAM being subject to mechanical failure is like talking about a wind-up alarm clock being struck by lightning as evidence of such clocks being subject to electrical failure (this would, of course, actually be an electrical event causing a mechanical failure).
Actually, the most expensive time is after the source code has been lost, all back-ups of the object code have been lost, the original programmers have died, all computers of the model you are running the software on except the one in use have ceased to function, the specifications for the computer have been lost, and the computer is firmly ensconced in a mission-critical installation which allows zero downtime.
This time is known as the "event horizon" in the black hole extension of the waterfall model of software development.
Bill Gates himself returned to his role as MS spokesman by holding a surprise press conference announcing their latest product, Windows NB.
"It stands for Windows (with) No Bugs." Mr. Gates began his speech with, "After an intensive month of effort, we have corrected every implementation flaw of Windows XP, as demonstrated by our foolproof testing process."
"As we move into the new millennium, the reliability and security of our computers could not be more important," he continued with evident pleasure and pride, "and to that end we are offering all Microsoft customers, who have a legally-purchased copy of any version of Windows, a free upgrade to the new system."
He concluded the main announcement with the rueful comment, "I don't know why we didn't think of this earlier, of course we knew all along that we were just a month away from perfecting the features already implemented, but really thought you all wanted animated menus and custom audio formats more than a system that doesn't let teen vandals take control of your computer whenever it's connected to the internet, or lock up and need to be restarted twice per day. If only people had let us know earlier, we really didn't know it was a problem. Still, we are terribly sorry."
Discussing future designs, he announced the release of, "Windows PI: Perfect Innovation. Scheduled to be released in six months, maintaining the bug-free status of Windows NB, yet adding exciting Microsoft-invented features such as human-equivalent natural-language processing, full archival state preservation, and semi-sentience. It will turn your PC into the perfect secretary, net gofer, and perhaps even a close personal friend."
He was given a standing ovation by every reporter present. Overwhelmed by the gratitude and respect, was seen wiping away tears of joy, and was not the only one. One sports commentator who was filling in for a tech columnist due to the short notice even went so far as to triumphantly spike his laptop, performing a small victory dance, before being informed that MS is primarily a software company, and the free upgrades would not include replacing any hardware.
In selecting customs, for a given level of sophistication, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between efficiency and robustness. In other words, choice must be made between aiming for the maximum profit in the probable case, or the maximum probability of sufficient profit. The longer a civilization enjoys prosperity, the more it will tend to slip towards a preference for efficiency. Considered in isolation or over the short term, each step along this path seems wise: after all, a failure this year is unlikely, and a failure in any one system can be compensated for with others.
Then, some unaccounted trend changes the rules, it turns out that the probabilities were incorrectly estimated, and the civilization collapses.
To become more efficient, all the businesses are sacrificing their reserves. For example, the switch from warehousing to Just In Time manufacturing and delivery. This saves money by letting them buy materials later, use less storage space, and forcing them to have a smoother, more predictable supply chain (when you have no reserve of parts, and the needed shipment of parts doesn't arrive or is defective, someone gets fired; JIT makes it much harder to hide mistakes from upper management).
It also means that disruption of any element disrupts the entire system. Production halts. Distribution halts. Productivity drops to zero until everything gets back to normal.
Or look at computers, and the increasing emphasis on network resources. Why keep a dictionary by your desk when it's quicker to look it up in dictionary.com? Why have software that can be run on an unconnected computer if you can reduce piracy and keep it up to date better by having it served fresh on the network? Why not just let all work grind to a halt when the network goes down if you've got 99% uptime?
I don't even want to think about the delicate lace of high finance, much less talk about it. The fact that the typical private person is now deeply in debt rather than having savings is sufficiently illustrative of our modern philosophy of finance and the relative esteem in which we hold efficiency and robustness.
To make matters worse, we have these cultural contradictions: we have one set of rules for disasters, and rely on a contradictory set of rules for business as usual, including preparing for disasters.
During a disaster our capitalist system suddenly switches to, "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability." There is plenty of compensation for loss, but no reward for preserving oneself and not being a drain on others. Those who hold reserves in disasters are greedy hoarders, those who sell them at the market value reflecting the shortage condition are filthy gougers.
In short, there is no profit incentive to hold a reserve for times of disaster, as it will be taken from you and you will be compensated at non-disaster rates at best. Even spending extra money to reduce your vulnerability means that you won't get your cut of emergency measures compensation. Instead of letting preparation pay its fair dividends, we rely on government to force unaffected regions to bail out affected ones... which works until the affected region is too large for unaffected ones to compensate for.
In short, it is not our technology, but our culture which makes us vulnerable. The technology supports a full range between optimal efficiency and optimal robustness, and we choose to discourage safeguards by our pattern of investments, choice of products and vendors, and reaction to crisis.
Essentially, you're relying on voluntary payment. So far, so good. People are honest. Most leave their quarter in the basket by the coffee machine, even when they're in someone else's department and nobody would notice them stealing coffee.
The major flaw with this is convenience: the time it takes to pay is part of the price. Often, it's damn expensive, as it means tracking down how to pay, filling out registration forms, sometimes even actually writing out a check and mailing it. Think of an extra cost of fifteen minutes to half-hour, when the customer knows that none of the value of that time is being transferred to the donor, it's all being wasted.
The other flaw of shareware is setting a price. You're already relying utterly on the user's honesty, yet you have the gall to insult him by telling him exactly what to pay you. That's like a waitress saying, "Remember to tip 15%; I won't check until after you've left but you have to tip me exactly 15% of the price of your meal." How many tips do you think she would get?
How do you set a price? For each user, if it's less than he's willing to pay, you're turning away part of the payment, if it's more, you're turning away all of the payment. Shareware doesn't compete on price, nobody downloads the $5 shareware because they can't afford the $30 shareware. So people pull up random numbers that only serve to annoy the user.
Most of the time, shareware is waaay over priced. You have these situations where if everyone who ever used the software paid for it as they are supposedly legallly required to, a lone programmer of moderate skill would make a hundred million dollars for a two months' work. People know that kind of price isn't based on an expectation of them being honest, so they don't feel an obligation to be honest. If most people were paying, a small fraction of current posted prices would often be profitable. When it's not overpriced, it's too small to be worth taking 15 minutes to pay.
That's not even getting into the question of why a user wouldn't be entirely willing to pay for a piece of software in multiple installments, just whenever they think, "Damn, this thing is handy! Why shouldn't I give this guy another dime?"
The key is to make this voluntary payment more convenient than grabbing change out of your pocket, and it has to work for such small amounts that people can use it every day to be in the habit without spending an arm and a leg. Click on "Pay for it," click on "$0.25" that's it. Maybe the donor has to do some setup (choosing a service provider) and monthly maintenance (paying the bill) to make the payment system work, but if you can get him using it for a few cents here and there every day, that won't be significant.
That's why I came up with just such a system (Buskpay): to make this truly Free, yet truly commercial style of software, which I call Buskware, practical. It's working now, it's completely free and open (public domain, in fact), and every part of it except the service providers already exists, and it's a free market so anyone can provide that simple service (business or hobby, it's far, far simpler and safer from fraud than a real-time, authenticated, mandatory payment system) and there are substitutes already fully functioning (such as probabilistic payments and mass payment with E-Gold). Since it's based on caching intended payments on the donor's own machine, and recipients using general payment information rather than accounts with the delivery services, you can start using it without worrying about how you will actually send the money -- you can cross that bridge when you come to it, and rest assured that your cached pledges are part of a growing incentive for someone to provide that service.
If only the people who wanted to make money from it themselves started using it, and put up with the inconveniences of booting it up, that would be enough to attract and refine the necessary infrastructure to make it attractive to their target market: the general public.
No matter how badly we mistreat this world, it won't be worse than anything we find out there, unless one happens to have extremely Earth-like life on it already, the kind of place they find all the time on Star Trek, with lumpy-foreheaded humans and grass and spruce trees (foam boulders optional).
By "habitable" they mean planets like Mars and Venus. Places you can live on in extremely well made air-tight shelters, and maybe eventually terraform.
We could have a sustained nuclear war (presumably sustained from off-planet), stripping the planet of sophisticated lifeforms and blowing off half of its atmosphere, and it would still be a nicer place to live than anywhere else in our solar system or anything we're likely to find orbiting another star.
In terms of human habitability, we're taking pretty good care of this one. Wiping out the wilds is sad, but a choice of farms or forests is easy for hungry people. Where it appears unnecessary, done too casually for convenience rather than survival, that is just staying ahead of what the population growth will demand in a generation or two. The pollution looks bad, but it's a feature of short-lived transitional technology, and will tail off before intolerable damage is done.
On the whole, human effort is greatly increasing human habitability of Earth, not decreasing it. The pristine, wild world of a hundred centuries ago couldn't support half a billion humans, while today it supports well over 6 billion, and the way is being made for 10. Even one century ago, it probably couldn't have sustained half our current population. Things probably won't get tight here on Earth's surface until at least 100 billion, by which time we'll be seriously working on these other places to live. As it is, we haven't seriously dented the resources of our planet, just dug around a little at the choice bits on the surface.
It's beautifully animated and full of exciting fight scenes. The big story, though, with the prophesy and crazy powerful people doing crazy things, is just plain stupid, with really overdone and tiresome religious/philosophical angst.
What it reminds me of is The Matrix, which I enjoyed watching once just for the cool special effects, but didn't feel like watching again. I feel almost exactly the same about the Escaflowne movie. I'm not going to spoil it, but there were things that made me cringe nearly as much as the "they're using us for batteries" scene.
The series is better (at least what I've seen of it), but the movie's definitely worth watching for anyone who can happily sit and admire beautiful animation without being bothered too much by an unintentionally ridiculous story.
Rule 1 of Efficient Lisp: Lisp is not functional
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Common Lisp: Inside Sabre
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The system has a state, which you don't feed entirely into your top-level query, rather, you examine the state, and sometimes change it, from wherever in the program flow you need the data.
The characteristic that really gives you benefits in Lisp is the way you can have Lisp write itself, creating little programming languages which fit each problem. They don't have the visual appeal of a specialized language written with full freedom to define the syntax, but their form still reflects the programmer's understanding of the problem, rather than the details of the solution.
People shouldn't talk about Lisp as "functional" versus "imperative" languages like C++, they should talk about Lisp as "flexible" as opposed to the inflexibility of C, which forces the programmer to do tedious, repetitive work.
Everything about Lisp facilitates this flexibility, from its simple, regular syntax to its implicit type handling.
Turing said: "This process of constructing instruction tables [i.e., programming] should be very fascinating. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself." And Lisp is certainly well-made for this method of avoiding drudgery.
The real beauty of it comes when you have to optimize your code: rather than fiddling with the part that defines the problem, you change the bit that transforms it from a problem definition to a solution. This ability to seperate leaves you free to optimize one problem area however you wish, without having to go around and fix the code in a thousand other places your modification breaks.
Getting back on topic, Lisp certainly allows functional programming, but sit down with Common Lisp and try to translate a C program into it line by line; you'll have very little trouble: it contains all the imperative stuff you need. For that matter, you can program C in a very functional style, using the trinary ?: operator and recursion, if you like. In either language, though, sticking to functional style as strictly as possible will hurt your performance.
Just as the standard teaching examples of C, full of gets(), sprintf(), and the like, are terrible for C code stability, the standard teaching examples of Lisp, which emphasize its functional nature, are terrible for code efficiency.
Some tasks are naturally functional, some are inherently imperative, and any large project (even most small projects!) will include both. A good language for large projects provides support for both, as it is foolish to fight the nature of the problem.
If we're going to go to such extreme wierdness as space having dozens of dimensions, why not just give up on the concept of position as fundamental quality of a particle? Between relativity and quantum mechanics, we've already lost absolute motion, flat space, and simultaneous exact position and momentum. What still makes so much sense about the concept of space?
Why not go for a dimensionless graph universe of immutable particles/nodes representing conserved quantities? In addition to mass particles, have energy particles, charge particles, etc. (these are bad examples, of course; given the mass-energy equivalence, a "particle" of kinetic energy would have to be a compound entity). Just set up the rules to define the various types of connections, which have variable quantities (or possibly, are made and broken; however it works out to be simpler) and for determining the probabilities with which they may change from one arrangement to another. To put it in programming terms, take the data out of the particles, and put it into the relationships between them.
It wouldn't be easy, it might be useless, but I know it would at least give me fewer headaches to start with a clean slate than to twist the classical ideas of space all out of shape.
You can certainly have a graph system that behaves identically to a spacial system (though a graph system of Newton's physics would certainly be uglier than his elegant concepts), and it would lead to fighting fewer spacial preconceptions that give people such a miserable time keeping up with modern physics.
I assume you're referring to their conventional tower line. That hardly makes a case for design brilliance on their part; from a hardware perspective, they're mainly unusual in that they're unusually expensive and underpowered. They don't exploit their freedom in setting hardware requirements for their software to make better computers, only to maintain their monopoly on compatible hardware. The hardware side of their business would be dead within a year if they wrote their software to run on open market boxes.
"you won't be able to find a single thing on an Apple that hasn't had thought put into it"
How about the USB port placement? Why on earth isn't this on the front of the iMac, or better yet, with a hub built into the keyboard?
How about sound? The oddball video port? How about being able to buy the thing without the cheesy laptop screen so it's not in the way of your good screen?
Its awkward shape makes it tough to hide away in a corner like a traditional box PC, instead, this ugly blob insists on grabbing your attention like a spoiled child.
This design is as crude and silly as the original iMac. It has plenty of immediately obvious, easily corrected shortcomings (remember the puck mouse?), and many subtle ones associated with its unorthodox design. As Apple continues to jump around from radical redesign to radical redesign, rather than correct known flaws in past experiments to provide real design quality, they will continue to surprise their users with unexpected difficulties. No doubt we'll be hearing about plenty of them in a month or two.
...was something I read in the introduction or foreword (I can't remember which), which pointed out that the details of motorcycle function "weren't particularly factual."
Those were the parts I enjoyed, because it really felt like I was learning something concrete, that it was presenting a new mode of learning from a book, something closer to real-world experience. It seemed to me that any subject could be presented in that way, drawing your interest into something you would normally find too boring to really pay attention to, cementing facts in your mind by giving them the qualities of important details from an exciting, dangerous experience.
To discover that the author had been slipping misconceptions in among the facts, and didn't particularly care as long as it still made a good story, was like learning that a waiter had spit in a cup of coffee I had already half-drank, and was enjoying. I felt betrayed, and no longer cared to finish the book.
How about regenerative ferrobraking? Shoot iron slugs from an accelerator at the spacecraft, and have it catch them in a magnetic field and throw them back to the accelerator. No propellant loss, spectacular efficiency, works for starting as well as for stopping. Accuracy is problematic.
You think it's easy to make space probes that work perfectly?!
They have to launch these fragile robots through the harsh interplanetary void, always mere inches -- no wait, was it centimeters? maybe cubits... fathoms? -- from disaster...
That's a circular argument. "All particles have antiparticles with all charges opposite" is the essense of C-symmetry. Adding more twists and terms (and math) to a circular argument doesn't make it less circular. Actually, stating the more precise form of C-symmetry (which would claim that the particle is identical except for the opposite form) introduces an innaccuracy, since, as you say, C-symmetry is broken in some situations, and a larger symmetry is actually followed (antiparticles should behave identically in a mirror image universe with time going backwards, IIRC; what was it called... CPT-symmetry?).
Who was it who said, "Do not express yourself more clearly than you think."?
My point was that the existance of antiparticles is inseperable from a fundamental principle, which doesn't have a mechanism of simpler components to explain it.
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Well of course EULAs are nessesarly if source code comes with it.
That depends entirely on why you are distributing source code. If it's because the software is source-portable, and you want your user to be able to compile it for his own system, then you don't need a EULA. You might want to remind your users that just having the source doesn't mean they are allowed to redistribute it, but you certainly don't need to enter into a contract with them to prevent them from doing so.
If you're distributing the source so someone can make compatible software, you probably want an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement; means they can't tell others what they find in there), among other things. That's certainly not an End-User License Agreement, though.
I think the distinguishing trait of a EULA is that it is mandatory for every end user of the product. Optional licenses, such as open source licenses, are not targetted at the end user as an end user, but the end user as a distributor or developer.
I'm really not seeing any situations where going from distributing just the binary to distributing the binary plus source would make you need a EULA. It might make you want to offer some sort of additional license, to encourage users to share bug fixes, though.
Software was first just something that came with the hardware, or developed in-house, then as the industry developed, software companies came along which would license one program out to multiple customers, and it just grew from there. Software was being *nudge* *wink* licensed over the counter in shrink-wrapped boxes since before it was 100% clear that copyright even really applied to computer software.
When it was cleared up, and special provisions for software were written into copyright law (in 1980, in the USA), the pseudo-licensing was already a habit. Habits like turning disclaimers of quality into license terms ("You know all that stuff we claimed in the advertising? Well, if those were lies, you can't sue us!") are not casually abandoned in a litigious society.
Basically, the ability to impose any terms on your customers is better than the deal normal copyright sale gives you, so once the industry was in the habit, they had no reason to change.
Since newcomers usually just follow the herd, I sometimes wonder how many people in the software business even know that EULAs are not entirely necessary to sell software. The people most likely to know are the lawyers, and can you imagine a lawyer hired to write up a EULA telling his customer, "You know, you don't need me, you could just sell your product as they do in most industries." ?
Copyright law clearly recognizes the distinction between owning a copy of a work, and owning copyright to a work.
Owning a copy of a work not only gives you normal ownership of the physical copy of the work, but also fair use rights to the information expressed in that copy. These are transferred along with the physical copy, should you sell it or give it away.
Owning copyright to a work gives you the exclusive privilege to create copies of the work. This privilege may be granted to others through licenses.
If you sold me a print of one of your photos, I would be entirely within my rights to resell it, exactly as if you sold me a sack of potatoes.
Software works like that, too. If you sell a copy of a program, you don't give up copyright on it, and the purchaser gains the right to install it, to run it, to back it up, and to resell it. Copyright law has been changed to handle the specific needs of over-the-counter software.
it would be really great to own Windows XP for a few hundred bucks and then to tell MicroSoft to cease and desist selling MY SOFTWARE.
This is ridiculous. If Windows XP was sold without a EULA, you would obviously be buying a copy, not the copyright.
EULAs are no more necessary or beneficial to software than they would be for toasters or automobiles. This has been quite clear since at least the mid-80's, when the whole idiotic business should have been dropped.
The point is that if it is possible to buy an advantage, it makes the game suck. If people are farming for money, this makes the game suck more, as they interfere with the people playing for fun.
So taking a cut would not only hurt their image, but legitimize and encourage farming, hurting their gameplay, either costing them more in development and support to compensate, or costing them paying accounts.
I can understand the temptation. Pretty much every progressive stats-dominated (IOW, MUD-style) MOG I've seen suffers from bunny-killer syndrome: when you start, you're pathetically weak, and you have to spend ages killing what most players consider pathetically weak creatures, the game-equivalent of (if not literally) rabbits and squirrels. Not very heroic.
It doesn't matter what they call the bunnies, or how fearsome they make them look, you still have this situation where 99% of the creatures could squash you like a bug.
This may work fine for a single-player RPG, because you're the center of attention all the way along, and not exposed to the stronger creatures, but in a MOG, your pathetic weakness is rubbed in your face by the relative strength of other players. This is escapism?
It seems that these games would be a lot more fun without the grind of the stats-building process, but that's also a lot harder and more expensive to make (they won't be leveling, they won't be farming items, what will they be doing? there can't be enough earth-shaking heroic quests to go around...). Also, the stats-building process does have an addictive quality that keeps people playing even when they're not having fun (camping, anyone?). It makes economic sense.
It's bad for the game on the whole, but it makes sense for the people buying. Building up your character from a puny noob just isn't the fun part.
...the company would do it itself. It would be great for them to be able sell high-ranking or rare items as a primary source of income. I've seen MUDs do that, but always on a very limited scale: a handful of select, not too powerful, items given to people who pay extra (or pay at all, as it's usually on otherwise free MUDs that I've seen this).
The problem is, that doesn't make a good game. It's like playing chess in a league where people who bribe the referee can have all their pawns replaced with queens at the start of the game. Either you have to spend your money just to get a level playing field, or you have a hell of a time getting a decent game.
So it's a matter of protecting the gameplay. They can't just allow it. The question of legality depends entirely on the contract. Obviously, you can set acceptable use rules in the user contract.
This challenge looks pretty ridiculous to me. It seems basically to me like people disputing the right of a sports league to ban players for taking bribes to throw the game.
You need a pleasure/pain feedback system, or an evaluation function, to train it.
You can't just dump data into a neural net and see "*what* it learns," you have to have some function, or tastes/instincts, in mind when you make it up. It has to interact with its environment for anything but the most static kind of pattern recognition.
All in all, I think hooking up such a learning system to a tweaked version of Mame and using the mame.dk and gamefaqs archives would give more interesting results. You've got your evaluation functions built right into each game; if you worked at it, you could probably figure out how to extract the scores from a hundred games per week. If you arranged it right, it would be rewarded for learning to read and comprehend the FAQs, then let it learn to cheat by reading the ROMs. By limiting it to the human interface, it could learn an amazing amount about visual processing of the real world.
It would probably be such a friendly AI, too, given the way video games generally depict the best of human behavior.
I'm totally serious. NASA's manned program is still mostly using 70's technology, it's pathetic. They were on the moon over 30 years ago, but haven't left near-Earth orbit since, or managed to decrease the cost of putting a human in orbit.
The shuttles and the ISS are rotten programs.
It's blazingly obvious to anyone who's taken a good look at the shuttle program that they should never have made a second one. They were supposed to learn from their mistakes making the first one, and make better shuttles, but instead they basically copied their first attempt at a reusable vehicle to make a small fleet and kept it in service even after it was obvious that it offered no benefit over single-use rockets.
People wondered what the point of the ISS was from day one. It's just a huge money-sink in the sky.
The best justification for these manned missions is that they are paving the way for future manned spaceflight, but they are somehow both bloated and unambitious: so costly that their failure could not be tolerated, so only "established" technologies are used for the functions they are supposed to be developing, merely spending resources on accomplishing these non-accomplishments rather than taking chances on potentially revolutionary technologies.
NASA is increasingly an organization of frightened bureaucrats, desperately avoiding failure, rather than bold explorers, risking much to gain much.
I mean, obviously you have some kind of grudge against it, to abuse it that way.
Take the RAM out of your computer and throw it at your workmate/housemate/mum. He or she will say 'Ow!', and it's not because he or she was hit by electrons!
This would, indeed, be the use of RAM as a mechanical object but this type of use is not characteristic. You appear to be claiming with this example that any solid object (and possibly any matter) is a "mechanical component," which is wrong and would be harmful to meaningful communication if accepted.
Any solid object's atoms move in relation to each other. This does not mean it can be said to have "moving parts" (this useful phrase would be rendered meaningless, otherwise), or make it a "mechanical device" (ditto).
Every electrical device is utterly reliant on its physical structure to function properly, and will cease to function properly if its structure is altered beyond certain limits. A broken connection is not a mechanical failure.
Sure, the clip that holds it in place is mechanical, and can suffer mechanical failure, but that is not part of the RAM. To note Telstra's odd problem as evidence of RAM being subject to mechanical failure is like talking about a wind-up alarm clock being struck by lightning as evidence of such clocks being subject to electrical failure (this would, of course, actually be an electrical event causing a mechanical failure).
Actually, the most expensive time is after the source code has been lost, all back-ups of the object code have been lost, the original programmers have died, all computers of the model you are running the software on except the one in use have ceased to function, the specifications for the computer have been lost, and the computer is firmly ensconced in a mission-critical installation which allows zero downtime.
This time is known as the "event horizon" in the black hole extension of the waterfall model of software development.
Redmond March 1, 2002 -- MS Releases Windows NB
Bill Gates himself returned to his role as MS spokesman by holding a surprise press conference announcing their latest product, Windows NB.
"It stands for Windows (with) No Bugs." Mr. Gates began his speech with, "After an intensive month of effort, we have corrected every implementation flaw of Windows XP, as demonstrated by our foolproof testing process."
"As we move into the new millennium, the reliability and security of our computers could not be more important," he continued with evident pleasure and pride, "and to that end we are offering all Microsoft customers, who have a legally-purchased copy of any version of Windows, a free upgrade to the new system."
He concluded the main announcement with the rueful comment, "I don't know why we didn't think of this earlier, of course we knew all along that we were just a month away from perfecting the features already implemented, but really thought you all wanted animated menus and custom audio formats more than a system that doesn't let teen vandals take control of your computer whenever it's connected to the internet, or lock up and need to be restarted twice per day. If only people had let us know earlier, we really didn't know it was a problem. Still, we are terribly sorry."
Discussing future designs, he announced the release of, "Windows PI: Perfect Innovation. Scheduled to be released in six months, maintaining the bug-free status of Windows NB, yet adding exciting Microsoft-invented features such as human-equivalent natural-language processing, full archival state preservation, and semi-sentience. It will turn your PC into the perfect secretary, net gofer, and perhaps even a close personal friend."
He was given a standing ovation by every reporter present. Overwhelmed by the gratitude and respect, was seen wiping away tears of joy, and was not the only one. One sports commentator who was filling in for a tech columnist due to the short notice even went so far as to triumphantly spike his laptop, performing a small victory dance, before being informed that MS is primarily a software company, and the free upgrades would not include replacing any hardware.
In selecting customs, for a given level of sophistication, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between efficiency and robustness. In other words, choice must be made between aiming for the maximum profit in the probable case, or the maximum probability of sufficient profit. The longer a civilization enjoys prosperity, the more it will tend to slip towards a preference for efficiency. Considered in isolation or over the short term, each step along this path seems wise: after all, a failure this year is unlikely, and a failure in any one system can be compensated for with others.
Then, some unaccounted trend changes the rules, it turns out that the probabilities were incorrectly estimated, and the civilization collapses.
To become more efficient, all the businesses are sacrificing their reserves. For example, the switch from warehousing to Just In Time manufacturing and delivery. This saves money by letting them buy materials later, use less storage space, and forcing them to have a smoother, more predictable supply chain (when you have no reserve of parts, and the needed shipment of parts doesn't arrive or is defective, someone gets fired; JIT makes it much harder to hide mistakes from upper management).
It also means that disruption of any element disrupts the entire system. Production halts. Distribution halts. Productivity drops to zero until everything gets back to normal.
Or look at computers, and the increasing emphasis on network resources. Why keep a dictionary by your desk when it's quicker to look it up in dictionary.com? Why have software that can be run on an unconnected computer if you can reduce piracy and keep it up to date better by having it served fresh on the network? Why not just let all work grind to a halt when the network goes down if you've got 99% uptime?
I don't even want to think about the delicate lace of high finance, much less talk about it. The fact that the typical private person is now deeply in debt rather than having savings is sufficiently illustrative of our modern philosophy of finance and the relative esteem in which we hold efficiency and robustness.
To make matters worse, we have these cultural contradictions: we have one set of rules for disasters, and rely on a contradictory set of rules for business as usual, including preparing for disasters.
During a disaster our capitalist system suddenly switches to, "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability." There is plenty of compensation for loss, but no reward for preserving oneself and not being a drain on others. Those who hold reserves in disasters are greedy hoarders, those who sell them at the market value reflecting the shortage condition are filthy gougers.
In short, there is no profit incentive to hold a reserve for times of disaster, as it will be taken from you and you will be compensated at non-disaster rates at best. Even spending extra money to reduce your vulnerability means that you won't get your cut of emergency measures compensation. Instead of letting preparation pay its fair dividends, we rely on government to force unaffected regions to bail out affected ones... which works until the affected region is too large for unaffected ones to compensate for.
In short, it is not our technology, but our culture which makes us vulnerable. The technology supports a full range between optimal efficiency and optimal robustness, and we choose to discourage safeguards by our pattern of investments, choice of products and vendors, and reaction to crisis.
Essentially, you're relying on voluntary payment. So far, so good. People are honest. Most leave their quarter in the basket by the coffee machine, even when they're in someone else's department and nobody would notice them stealing coffee.
The major flaw with this is convenience: the time it takes to pay is part of the price. Often, it's damn expensive, as it means tracking down how to pay, filling out registration forms, sometimes even actually writing out a check and mailing it. Think of an extra cost of fifteen minutes to half-hour, when the customer knows that none of the value of that time is being transferred to the donor, it's all being wasted.
The other flaw of shareware is setting a price. You're already relying utterly on the user's honesty, yet you have the gall to insult him by telling him exactly what to pay you. That's like a waitress saying, "Remember to tip 15%; I won't check until after you've left but you have to tip me exactly 15% of the price of your meal." How many tips do you think she would get?
How do you set a price? For each user, if it's less than he's willing to pay, you're turning away part of the payment, if it's more, you're turning away all of the payment. Shareware doesn't compete on price, nobody downloads the $5 shareware because they can't afford the $30 shareware. So people pull up random numbers that only serve to annoy the user.
Most of the time, shareware is waaay over priced. You have these situations where if everyone who ever used the software paid for it as they are supposedly legallly required to, a lone programmer of moderate skill would make a hundred million dollars for a two months' work. People know that kind of price isn't based on an expectation of them being honest, so they don't feel an obligation to be honest. If most people were paying, a small fraction of current posted prices would often be profitable. When it's not overpriced, it's too small to be worth taking 15 minutes to pay.
That's not even getting into the question of why a user wouldn't be entirely willing to pay for a piece of software in multiple installments, just whenever they think, "Damn, this thing is handy! Why shouldn't I give this guy another dime?"
The key is to make this voluntary payment more convenient than grabbing change out of your pocket, and it has to work for such small amounts that people can use it every day to be in the habit without spending an arm and a leg. Click on "Pay for it," click on "$0.25" that's it. Maybe the donor has to do some setup (choosing a service provider) and monthly maintenance (paying the bill) to make the payment system work, but if you can get him using it for a few cents here and there every day, that won't be significant.
That's why I came up with just such a system (Buskpay): to make this truly Free, yet truly commercial style of software, which I call Buskware, practical. It's working now, it's completely free and open (public domain, in fact), and every part of it except the service providers already exists, and it's a free market so anyone can provide that simple service (business or hobby, it's far, far simpler and safer from fraud than a real-time, authenticated, mandatory payment system) and there are substitutes already fully functioning (such as probabilistic payments and mass payment with E-Gold). Since it's based on caching intended payments on the donor's own machine, and recipients using general payment information rather than accounts with the delivery services, you can start using it without worrying about how you will actually send the money -- you can cross that bridge when you come to it, and rest assured that your cached pledges are part of a growing incentive for someone to provide that service.
If only the people who wanted to make money from it themselves started using it, and put up with the inconveniences of booting it up, that would be enough to attract and refine the necessary infrastructure to make it attractive to their target market: the general public.
No matter how badly we mistreat this world, it won't be worse than anything we find out there, unless one happens to have extremely Earth-like life on it already, the kind of place they find all the time on Star Trek, with lumpy-foreheaded humans and grass and spruce trees (foam boulders optional).
By "habitable" they mean planets like Mars and Venus. Places you can live on in extremely well made air-tight shelters, and maybe eventually terraform.
We could have a sustained nuclear war (presumably sustained from off-planet), stripping the planet of sophisticated lifeforms and blowing off half of its atmosphere, and it would still be a nicer place to live than anywhere else in our solar system or anything we're likely to find orbiting another star.
In terms of human habitability, we're taking pretty good care of this one. Wiping out the wilds is sad, but a choice of farms or forests is easy for hungry people. Where it appears unnecessary, done too casually for convenience rather than survival, that is just staying ahead of what the population growth will demand in a generation or two. The pollution looks bad, but it's a feature of short-lived transitional technology, and will tail off before intolerable damage is done.
On the whole, human effort is greatly increasing human habitability of Earth, not decreasing it. The pristine, wild world of a hundred centuries ago couldn't support half a billion humans, while today it supports well over 6 billion, and the way is being made for 10. Even one century ago, it probably couldn't have sustained half our current population. Things probably won't get tight here on Earth's surface until at least 100 billion, by which time we'll be seriously working on these other places to live. As it is, we haven't seriously dented the resources of our planet, just dug around a little at the choice bits on the surface.
It's beautifully animated and full of exciting fight scenes. The big story, though, with the prophesy and crazy powerful people doing crazy things, is just plain stupid, with really overdone and tiresome religious/philosophical angst.
What it reminds me of is The Matrix, which I enjoyed watching once just for the cool special effects, but didn't feel like watching again. I feel almost exactly the same about the Escaflowne movie. I'm not going to spoil it, but there were things that made me cringe nearly as much as the "they're using us for batteries" scene.
The series is better (at least what I've seen of it), but the movie's definitely worth watching for anyone who can happily sit and admire beautiful animation without being bothered too much by an unintentionally ridiculous story.
The system has a state, which you don't feed entirely into your top-level query, rather, you examine the state, and sometimes change it, from wherever in the program flow you need the data.
The characteristic that really gives you benefits in Lisp is the way you can have Lisp write itself, creating little programming languages which fit each problem. They don't have the visual appeal of a specialized language written with full freedom to define the syntax, but their form still reflects the programmer's understanding of the problem, rather than the details of the solution.
People shouldn't talk about Lisp as "functional" versus "imperative" languages like C++, they should talk about Lisp as "flexible" as opposed to the inflexibility of C, which forces the programmer to do tedious, repetitive work.
Everything about Lisp facilitates this flexibility, from its simple, regular syntax to its implicit type handling.
Turing said: "This process of constructing instruction tables [i.e., programming] should be very fascinating. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself." And Lisp is certainly well-made for this method of avoiding drudgery.
The real beauty of it comes when you have to optimize your code: rather than fiddling with the part that defines the problem, you change the bit that transforms it from a problem definition to a solution. This ability to seperate leaves you free to optimize one problem area however you wish, without having to go around and fix the code in a thousand other places your modification breaks.
Getting back on topic, Lisp certainly allows functional programming, but sit down with Common Lisp and try to translate a C program into it line by line; you'll have very little trouble: it contains all the imperative stuff you need. For that matter, you can program C in a very functional style, using the trinary ?: operator and recursion, if you like. In either language, though, sticking to functional style as strictly as possible will hurt your performance.
Just as the standard teaching examples of C, full of gets(), sprintf(), and the like, are terrible for C code stability, the standard teaching examples of Lisp, which emphasize its functional nature, are terrible for code efficiency.
Some tasks are naturally functional, some are inherently imperative, and any large project (even most small projects!) will include both. A good language for large projects provides support for both, as it is foolish to fight the nature of the problem.
If we're going to go to such extreme wierdness as space having dozens of dimensions, why not just give up on the concept of position as fundamental quality of a particle? Between relativity and quantum mechanics, we've already lost absolute motion, flat space, and simultaneous exact position and momentum. What still makes so much sense about the concept of space?
Why not go for a dimensionless graph universe of immutable particles/nodes representing conserved quantities? In addition to mass particles, have energy particles, charge particles, etc. (these are bad examples, of course; given the mass-energy equivalence, a "particle" of kinetic energy would have to be a compound entity). Just set up the rules to define the various types of connections, which have variable quantities (or possibly, are made and broken; however it works out to be simpler) and for determining the probabilities with which they may change from one arrangement to another. To put it in programming terms, take the data out of the particles, and put it into the relationships between them.
It wouldn't be easy, it might be useless, but I know it would at least give me fewer headaches to start with a clean slate than to twist the classical ideas of space all out of shape.
You can certainly have a graph system that behaves identically to a spacial system (though a graph system of Newton's physics would certainly be uglier than his elegant concepts), and it would lead to fighting fewer spacial preconceptions that give people such a miserable time keeping up with modern physics.
Anyway, just a random thought.
I assume you're referring to their conventional tower line. That hardly makes a case for design brilliance on their part; from a hardware perspective, they're mainly unusual in that they're unusually expensive and underpowered. They don't exploit their freedom in setting hardware requirements for their software to make better computers, only to maintain their monopoly on compatible hardware. The hardware side of their business would be dead within a year if they wrote their software to run on open market boxes.
"you won't be able to find a single thing on an Apple that hasn't had thought put into it"
How about the USB port placement? Why on earth isn't this on the front of the iMac, or better yet, with a hub built into the keyboard?
How about sound? The oddball video port? How about being able to buy the thing without the cheesy laptop screen so it's not in the way of your good screen?
Its awkward shape makes it tough to hide away in a corner like a traditional box PC, instead, this ugly blob insists on grabbing your attention like a spoiled child.
This design is as crude and silly as the original iMac. It has plenty of immediately obvious, easily corrected shortcomings (remember the puck mouse?), and many subtle ones associated with its unorthodox design. As Apple continues to jump around from radical redesign to radical redesign, rather than correct known flaws in past experiments to provide real design quality, they will continue to surprise their users with unexpected difficulties. No doubt we'll be hearing about plenty of them in a month or two.
...was something I read in the introduction or foreword (I can't remember which), which pointed out that the details of motorcycle function "weren't particularly factual."
Those were the parts I enjoyed, because it really felt like I was learning something concrete, that it was presenting a new mode of learning from a book, something closer to real-world experience. It seemed to me that any subject could be presented in that way, drawing your interest into something you would normally find too boring to really pay attention to, cementing facts in your mind by giving them the qualities of important details from an exciting, dangerous experience.
To discover that the author had been slipping misconceptions in among the facts, and didn't particularly care as long as it still made a good story, was like learning that a waiter had spit in a cup of coffee I had already half-drank, and was enjoying. I felt betrayed, and no longer cared to finish the book.
I'll be chuckling over that for days...
How about regenerative ferrobraking? Shoot iron slugs from an accelerator at the spacecraft, and have it catch them in a magnetic field and throw them back to the accelerator. No propellant loss, spectacular efficiency, works for starting as well as for stopping. Accuracy is problematic.
You think it's easy to make space probes that work perfectly?!
They have to launch these fragile robots through the harsh interplanetary void, always mere inches -- no wait, was it centimeters? maybe cubits... fathoms? -- from disaster...
That's a circular argument. "All particles have antiparticles with all charges opposite" is the essense of C-symmetry. Adding more twists and terms (and math) to a circular argument doesn't make it less circular. Actually, stating the more precise form of C-symmetry (which would claim that the particle is identical except for the opposite form) introduces an innaccuracy, since, as you say, C-symmetry is broken in some situations, and a larger symmetry is actually followed (antiparticles should behave identically in a mirror image universe with time going backwards, IIRC; what was it called... CPT-symmetry?).
Who was it who said, "Do not express yourself more clearly than you think."?
My point was that the existance of antiparticles is inseperable from a fundamental principle, which doesn't have a mechanism of simpler components to explain it.
I'd rather only have to pack a kilogram of antimatter on my space ship than a moderately sized inland sea's worth of chemical fuel.