Well, DOOM is more or less the same game as Wolfenstein 3D, too - and Wolfenstein wasn't the first ego-shooter, either (that honour probably goes to Maze Wars, although it probably depends on your definition of "ego-shooter"). I agree that pretty much 100% of all games are just new variants of something that has already been done before, but the situation wasn't much different 10 or 15 years ago (when DOOM was released), either.
Advances in technology (hardware) allow the designers more freedom, but ultimately, we've already seen it all - sports games, simulations (like the ones Sid is famous for), strategy games, shooters, puzzle games, RPGs, racing games, adventures and so on. Genres do wane in popularity sometimes, of course (adventures are one example of this, and jump'n'runs are another), while others become more popular (like ego-shooters), but I honestly can't remember the last time an entire new *genre* was invented (as opposed to "just" a new twist on an existing genre).
*If* the downloaded material is, in reality, not the movie it was claimed to be, but rather just a random collection of ones and zeros, then obviously, anyone having downloaded it is not guilty of copyright infringement.
On the other hand, *if* the downloaded material really *is* what it was claimed to be, then, well... anyone having downloaded it is not guilty of copyright infringement, as it was the rights holders themselves that voluntarily and knowingly uploaded the material. You don't even have to argue about entrapment, because copying movies is not something that is *inherently* illegal - it's just illegal if you haven't gotten permission, and if you're downloading from the rights holders themselves, then you can argue that you had permission - it's called concludent behaviour.
The only thing that you *might* get sued for is attempted (i.e., not actual) copyright infringement - but then, it's not clear whether an unsuccessful attempt to infringe on someone else's copyright is something you can be sued for at all, and the matter is furthermore complicated by the fact that you could, in this case, still argue that it was entrapment (probably not legal, either, if it's not the police doing it - and even then, it's not at all clear), etc.
Surgery may or may not be a good example, though, because in reality, it'll be more like this: who would you rather have perform surgery on you - the young doctor who was hired by the hospital two years ago and who's doing the grunt work and performing surgery every day, or the old doctor who's been the clinic's director for the last 15 years and who probably hasn't held an actual scalpel in months?
Beware of analogies. More often than not, they'll come back to shoot you in the foot.
I don't know, but sometimes, the articles posted on Slashdot are so blatantly sensationalist that you can't help but wonder. Of course, Hanlon's razor dictates that it probably really is just the editors posting everything that looks vaguely interesting without bothering to even look at the actual stories linked, but... who knows. I wouldn't be terribly surprised, at least.
Well, if everyone did this, there wouldn't be a *need* for a second generation, as companies would learn that they can't get away with stupid bugs and annoyances anymore and that they have to test their products *before* they ship the first batch.
That's an understatement -- TeX is Turing-complete.
That's a non-statement - Postscript is also Turing-complete (for example), but neither does Turing-completeness matter when all you want to do is create good-looking text documents, nor does Turing-completeness actually say anything about the usability of a language. (Sure, there are people who write web servers in Postscript, for example, but that's just the exception that proves the rule)
Of course, that being said, I *do* agree that TeX/LateX are clearly superior solutions when you want to create beautiful documents, too. But the reason for that is not that TeX is Turing-complete.
I have never seen them publish any information that's actually interesting/informative/insightful, or - for that matter - NEW, but they often get coverage on Slashdot for some reason. Makes you wonder...
1) You can use the DNS system to resolve IP addresses to hostnames, which may tell you something about the organisation they belong to. 2) For more information, perform a whois query.
That's news? Seriously, people, that's like saying that you can control your car with the help of this "steering wheel"...
The FBI (as part of the federal government) planning to crack down on "indecent" porn sure sounds like imposing their view on society in general to me.
Urinating on someone or even drinking urine will not transmit anything that wouldn't be transmitted by other acts of sex - the urine of a healthy person is pretty sterile. Feces is another matter, of course (no pun intended), but as long as you don't swallow it, you should be reasonably safe there, too.
And don't forget Cisco - they're the ones who provided the hardware etc. for China's nation-wide firewall, after all. I'm sure they made a pretty penny with helping curtail Chinese internet users' freedom that way...
I agree - there'll always be specialists who do this sort of thing. My aunt, for example, has an extensive collection of movies recorded by my grandfather during her youth, 50 to 60 years ago; none of us has the equipment to show them anymore these days, but she simply contacted a company specialising in this sort of thing a few years ago and had them transferred to DVD.
Unless the CD-ROMs etc. our grandchildren will find in our attics are *physically* deteriorated to the point of being unreadable, I don't think that we'll have to worry about them not being able to read them anymore. It might not be possible for them using their own equipment, just like we can't listen to wax cylinder recordings anymore today, but I don't see why there wouldn't be people or companies who offer this kind of service.
As long as there is a demand, at least, there *will* be people who're willing to do this - for a fee, of course.
Round shape pretty much depends on size only, yes; the bigger an object is, the smoother it'll always be (which is why the highest mountain on Earth is less than 9 km above sea level, while on Mars, which is smaller than Earth, it's more than 27 km). However, pretty much everything that's bigger than an asteroid will have a more or less round shape overall, so that's a non-criterion.
A better idea that I've heard being discussed would be to abandon the term "planet" altogether and instead label objects according to their characteristics - so Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be "earth-likes", Jupitur, Saturn, Neptun and Uranus would be "gas giants", and Pluto, Sedna etc. would be - for example - "ice dwarves". "Large Kuiper belt objects" (LKBOs?) would also be a good term, of course, but "ice dwarves" could probably be applied to objects in other solar systems more easily, as it doesn't rely on the existence of a Kuiper belt to define the objects being talked about.
Regarding the "charitable" Mr Gates... let me just say this: if a thief breaks into your house, steals all your money and then donates 1% of it to charitable causes, will you commend him for being such a good person? Or will you point out that it was *your* money and that he *stole* it? Because that's what Microsoft has been doing: they're using an illegal monopoly to steal your money.
And furthermore, it's easy to give if you have more than you could possibly ever spend, anyway. I'm not a big fan of the bible or religion generally, but the story of the widow's mite I always could agree with - someone who's donating money to charitable causes despite not having much themselves deserves more praise than someone who donates lots because he's so rich he doesn't feel the difference, anyway. And that's *doubly* true for a thief like Gates.
Still, quite chilling. Among other things, they (apparently) searched his flat without getting a warrant from a judge, took DNA samples (among other things), kept the SIM card from his phone (has he gotten that one back?), and will keep records on him in their database, which probably will be shared with other nations' police agencies, too (thanks to Interpol), even though he's innocent.
Considering that all he did was wear a "suspicious" jacket, look at the stairs he was walking down and carry a rucksack, that's quite a lot. What if he had looked like someone from an Arab country and ran to catch a train, too? I wouldn't at all be surprised if some over-eager officer had decided to shoot him dead in that case.
What may be even worse is that nothing's actually gained this way. Sure, there was a terrorist attack on the tube this summer, but honestly, do you think that the terrorists are gonna attack it again now? I don't know, but if *I* was a terrorist, I'd target something else next - an amusement park, a sports arena, a shopping mall, but certainly *not* the tube again; it's obvious that that one's being watched much more closely now.
But that's just the point: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Guarding the tube doesn't do *anything at all* as far as the overall threat is concerned - it merely makes it more likely that other targets will be selected.
What's more, this story makes it clear that the police are pretty much running around like the proverbial headless chickens - that they're acting completely irrationaly. And *that* is something that makes it all that easier for the real terrorists.
Do you feel safer now? I certainly don't. I feel less safe because of random idiotic police actions like this, and I also feel less safe because I know that those responsible are not looking at the big picture and resorting to ineffective measures - counter-effective ones, even, as stuff like this not only not makes things safer, but actually makes everything *less* safe.
Why? As you say, much of the world doesn't have access to gas, water, electricity, telephone and all that, but doesn't that actually show that not all the world has to have access to something in order for it to be the next "big thing", so to speak?
Of course, it would be good if all the world did have access to these things, but even though it's not the case, we not only do but in fact have become so dependent on these things that we can hardly imagine a life without them. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that broadband Internet access, and applications built on top of it (not applications as in "computer programs", but applications in a more general sense), will soon become... well, not quite ubiquitious, of course, as certain groups will probably not have an interest in these things (my grandmother, for example, while being quite fascinated by computers and the Internet has categorically said that she won't ever get one), but widespread enough that they will reach the same level of fundamentality (I hope that's a word *s*) that electricity, water etc. do.
But to stay on-topic a bit, I think that M$ is, above all, showing one thing here: namely, that they still don't understand that not everything is "all-or-nothing" and that it's perfectly possible to coexist and compete without every player but one going bankrupt or being bought after a couple of years. It's understandable that they don't understand, of course, given their history (they were effectively granted a monopoly by IBM, and have since tried to maintain that monopoly at all costs and to also expand it into other markets), but it ain't true: it *is* possible to coexist.
They probably would sue, for the simple reason that if they didn't, they'd risk losing their mark altogether. Remember, copyright comes automatically and doesn't require you to do anything, but trademarks have to be actively enforced - it's use it or loose it there.
I'm not Larry Wall, but let me answer that one for you:
You should not stick to Perl religiously but rather use the best tool for the job you need to get done. TIMTOWTDI, remember? If Python works for you, that's fine; if Python works better for you than Perl, then by all means, do use Python!
That's not to say that your decision to use Python is automatically right, but it's not automatically wrong, either, and without any knowledge whatsoever about the project you're working on, your personal preferences, your experiences and all that, how do you expect *us* (that is, the Perl community, although I can only speak for myself, of course) to tell you whether Perl or Python is the better tool for your job?
That's up to you to decide - we don't care what you use, although we may be interested in hearing why you didn't choose Perl.
It's amazing how quickly you can cast off Perl 6 when there's not even an alpha version of the interpreter yet (Pugs doesn't count) and when even the specs are not set in stone yet.
I think what you're exhibiting here is what I'd like to refer to as an "inverse God complex" ("inverse" is not the best word, admittedly, but I can't think of a better one) - you do a thought experiment where you try to do something (improve Perl), find that you can't do so in two minutes, and thus conclude that failure is *inevitable* (hence a God complex: if you can't do it, noone can) and that any *actual* attempt to do so must automatically fail as well.
Nevermind, of course, that lots of people, most of them much more intelligent than you and me, have worked on this problem for years; you're still able to not only dismiss their current work, but also all the work they have not done yet and conclude that they're not only doomed to fail, but in fact fail so catastrophically that Perl will die - that is already is dying.
Yes, definitely a God complex. Sorry.
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode?
on
State of the Onion 9
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with chromatic: you obviously don't know a thing about Perl. And I'm not just referring to the technical level here; you probably could code a simple program in Perl, but you'd be working against the language instead of *with* the language, because you ultimately don't grok either Perl or its principles or the community behind it.
Go and play with PHP, kid.:) You think you may have known Perl, but you really never did.
Re:Of course functional programming is ancient.
on
State of the Onion 9
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· Score: 4, Informative
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that you said that Haskell was the first functional language - certainly not. I merely wanted to point out that Haskell isn't new, so if a revolution hasn't happened yet, why should it happen now?
I've met many people, especially at the university, who believed that functional languages were the holy grail of programming and that they would be taking over the (computer) world Real Soon Now(tm). But it's never happened, and nowadays, I believe that these people are just out of touch with reality.
Let's face it - the IT industry is just like any other industry, especially in one regard: things usually happen by evolution rather than revolution. Traits of functional programming languages will certainly find their way into the "mainstream" (and the "mainstream" languages), but nobody'll decide to just throw out all existing code all of a sudden and reinvent everything from the ground up in a new language - no matter how good that language is or, more important, how much better it is than the existing languages. Even object-oriented programming is really an extension of the imperative programming paradigm, not a replacement.
Paradigm shifts do occur, but they occur over time, and it's a smooth transition, not an abrupt one. Statements like "we've hit the limits of imperative languages" may sound cool, but they ultimately don't mean anything - the limits are changing. Boundaries *can* be pushed, and *that* is something that is *especially* true in the computer industry in general and the software industry in particular.
I won't deny that I'm not a fan of functional programming languages myself, of course. Personally, I think they're rather unnatural; it may be easier to model their semantics mathematically (and the mathematical models will be more "natural", too), but I also think that the step-by-step approach of imperative languages is more natural for the human mind - it's how we do things, and that's probably why imperative languages took off when functional languages didn't (and for the record, both functional and imperative programming language started at the same time, in the mid-50s, and the theoretical foundations, in the form of Turing machines and lambda calculus, also popped up at about the same time).
Nevertheless, I do realise that functional programming languages have some very interesting and useful features, and I'm certain that these will be incorporated into existing languages (or new languages based on existing ones, in the sense that Java is a new language based on C, for example) eventually - and that's a good thing. Pure functional programming, however, will (IMO!) always remain a specialised niche for certain, mostly mathematical (that is, theoretical) problems that naturally lend themselves to being modelled in functional ways.
Re:What I've learned from Pugs.
on
State of the Onion 9
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· Score: 4, Informative
Functional programming has been around for a long, long time, actually, but it has never revolutionised programming, so I'm not sure why Haskell should do it now - it's been around for almost 20 years already, too.
Not that functional languages don't have their merits, of course, but I honestly don't see why they should suddenly take over and obsolete other programming paradigms now.
That being said, have you taken a look at Curry? It's a language that combines functional and logical programming (à la Prolog) - definitely rather cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever hired a lawyer? A "couple hundred bucks" is not an uncommon *hourly* fee for a good one.
Well, DOOM is more or less the same game as Wolfenstein 3D, too - and Wolfenstein wasn't the first ego-shooter, either (that honour probably goes to Maze Wars, although it probably depends on your definition of "ego-shooter"). I agree that pretty much 100% of all games are just new variants of something that has already been done before, but the situation wasn't much different 10 or 15 years ago (when DOOM was released), either.
Advances in technology (hardware) allow the designers more freedom, but ultimately, we've already seen it all - sports games, simulations (like the ones Sid is famous for), strategy games, shooters, puzzle games, RPGs, racing games, adventures and so on. Genres do wane in popularity sometimes, of course (adventures are one example of this, and jump'n'runs are another), while others become more popular (like ego-shooters), but I honestly can't remember the last time an entire new *genre* was invented (as opposed to "just" a new twist on an existing genre).
Lions and tigers and exploding PSUs... only in Kenya!
(For those who don't get it, it's a pun on one of Weebl's cartoons).
True, but still... there's two possibilities.
*If* the downloaded material is, in reality, not the movie it was claimed to be, but rather just a random collection of ones and zeros, then obviously, anyone having downloaded it is not guilty of copyright infringement.
On the other hand, *if* the downloaded material really *is* what it was claimed to be, then, well... anyone having downloaded it is not guilty of copyright infringement, as it was the rights holders themselves that voluntarily and knowingly uploaded the material. You don't even have to argue about entrapment, because copying movies is not something that is *inherently* illegal - it's just illegal if you haven't gotten permission, and if you're downloading from the rights holders themselves, then you can argue that you had permission - it's called concludent behaviour.
The only thing that you *might* get sued for is attempted (i.e., not actual) copyright infringement - but then, it's not clear whether an unsuccessful attempt to infringe on someone else's copyright is something you can be sued for at all, and the matter is furthermore complicated by the fact that you could, in this case, still argue that it was entrapment (probably not legal, either, if it's not the police doing it - and even then, it's not at all clear), etc.
Surgery may or may not be a good example, though, because in reality, it'll be more like this: who would you rather have perform surgery on you - the young doctor who was hired by the hospital two years ago and who's doing the grunt work and performing surgery every day, or the old doctor who's been the clinic's director for the last 15 years and who probably hasn't held an actual scalpel in months?
Beware of analogies. More often than not, they'll come back to shoot you in the foot.
I don't know, but sometimes, the articles posted on Slashdot are so blatantly sensationalist that you can't help but wonder. Of course, Hanlon's razor dictates that it probably really is just the editors posting everything that looks vaguely interesting without bothering to even look at the actual stories linked, but... who knows. I wouldn't be terribly surprised, at least.
Well, if everyone did this, there wouldn't be a *need* for a second generation, as companies would learn that they can't get away with stupid bugs and annoyances anymore and that they have to test their products *before* they ship the first batch.
That's a non-statement - Postscript is also Turing-complete (for example), but neither does Turing-completeness matter when all you want to do is create good-looking text documents, nor does Turing-completeness actually say anything about the usability of a language. (Sure, there are people who write web servers in Postscript, for example, but that's just the exception that proves the rule)
Of course, that being said, I *do* agree that TeX/LateX are clearly superior solutions when you want to create beautiful documents, too. But the reason for that is not that TeX is Turing-complete.
I have never seen them publish any information that's actually interesting/informative/insightful, or - for that matter - NEW, but they often get coverage on Slashdot for some reason. Makes you wonder...
To sum up the article:
1) You can use the DNS system to resolve IP addresses to hostnames, which may tell you something about the organisation they belong to.
2) For more information, perform a whois query.
That's news? Seriously, people, that's like saying that you can control your car with the help of this "steering wheel"...
The FBI (as part of the federal government) planning to crack down on "indecent" porn sure sounds like imposing their view on society in general to me.
Urinating on someone or even drinking urine will not transmit anything that wouldn't be transmitted by other acts of sex - the urine of a healthy person is pretty sterile. Feces is another matter, of course (no pun intended), but as long as you don't swallow it, you should be reasonably safe there, too.
And don't forget Cisco - they're the ones who provided the hardware etc. for China's nation-wide firewall, after all. I'm sure they made a pretty penny with helping curtail Chinese internet users' freedom that way...
I agree - there'll always be specialists who do this sort of thing. My aunt, for example, has an extensive collection of movies recorded by my grandfather during her youth, 50 to 60 years ago; none of us has the equipment to show them anymore these days, but she simply contacted a company specialising in this sort of thing a few years ago and had them transferred to DVD.
Unless the CD-ROMs etc. our grandchildren will find in our attics are *physically* deteriorated to the point of being unreadable, I don't think that we'll have to worry about them not being able to read them anymore. It might not be possible for them using their own equipment, just like we can't listen to wax cylinder recordings anymore today, but I don't see why there wouldn't be people or companies who offer this kind of service.
As long as there is a demand, at least, there *will* be people who're willing to do this - for a fee, of course.
Round shape pretty much depends on size only, yes; the bigger an object is, the smoother it'll always be (which is why the highest mountain on Earth is less than 9 km above sea level, while on Mars, which is smaller than Earth, it's more than 27 km). However, pretty much everything that's bigger than an asteroid will have a more or less round shape overall, so that's a non-criterion.
A better idea that I've heard being discussed would be to abandon the term "planet" altogether and instead label objects according to their characteristics - so Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be "earth-likes", Jupitur, Saturn, Neptun and Uranus would be "gas giants", and Pluto, Sedna etc. would be - for example - "ice dwarves". "Large Kuiper belt objects" (LKBOs?) would also be a good term, of course, but "ice dwarves" could probably be applied to objects in other solar systems more easily, as it doesn't rely on the existence of a Kuiper belt to define the objects being talked about.
Regarding the "charitable" Mr Gates... let me just say this: if a thief breaks into your house, steals all your money and then donates 1% of it to charitable causes, will you commend him for being such a good person? Or will you point out that it was *your* money and that he *stole* it? Because that's what Microsoft has been doing: they're using an illegal monopoly to steal your money.
And furthermore, it's easy to give if you have more than you could possibly ever spend, anyway. I'm not a big fan of the bible or religion generally, but the story of the widow's mite I always could agree with - someone who's donating money to charitable causes despite not having much themselves deserves more praise than someone who donates lots because he's so rich he doesn't feel the difference, anyway. And that's *doubly* true for a thief like Gates.
Think about it.
Still, quite chilling. Among other things, they (apparently) searched his flat without getting a warrant from a judge, took DNA samples (among other things), kept the SIM card from his phone (has he gotten that one back?), and will keep records on him in their database, which probably will be shared with other nations' police agencies, too (thanks to Interpol), even though he's innocent.
Considering that all he did was wear a "suspicious" jacket, look at the stairs he was walking down and carry a rucksack, that's quite a lot. What if he had looked like someone from an Arab country and ran to catch a train, too? I wouldn't at all be surprised if some over-eager officer had decided to shoot him dead in that case.
What may be even worse is that nothing's actually gained this way. Sure, there was a terrorist attack on the tube this summer, but honestly, do you think that the terrorists are gonna attack it again now? I don't know, but if *I* was a terrorist, I'd target something else next - an amusement park, a sports arena, a shopping mall, but certainly *not* the tube again; it's obvious that that one's being watched much more closely now.
But that's just the point: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Guarding the tube doesn't do *anything at all* as far as the overall threat is concerned - it merely makes it more likely that other targets will be selected.
What's more, this story makes it clear that the police are pretty much running around like the proverbial headless chickens - that they're acting completely irrationaly. And *that* is something that makes it all that easier for the real terrorists.
Do you feel safer now? I certainly don't. I feel less safe because of random idiotic police actions like this, and I also feel less safe because I know that those responsible are not looking at the big picture and resorting to ineffective measures - counter-effective ones, even, as stuff like this not only not makes things safer, but actually makes everything *less* safe.
Why? As you say, much of the world doesn't have access to gas, water, electricity, telephone and all that, but doesn't that actually show that not all the world has to have access to something in order for it to be the next "big thing", so to speak?
Of course, it would be good if all the world did have access to these things, but even though it's not the case, we not only do but in fact have become so dependent on these things that we can hardly imagine a life without them. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that broadband Internet access, and applications built on top of it (not applications as in "computer programs", but applications in a more general sense), will soon become... well, not quite ubiquitious, of course, as certain groups will probably not have an interest in these things (my grandmother, for example, while being quite fascinated by computers and the Internet has categorically said that she won't ever get one), but widespread enough that they will reach the same level of fundamentality (I hope that's a word *s*) that electricity, water etc. do.
But to stay on-topic a bit, I think that M$ is, above all, showing one thing here: namely, that they still don't understand that not everything is "all-or-nothing" and that it's perfectly possible to coexist and compete without every player but one going bankrupt or being bought after a couple of years. It's understandable that they don't understand, of course, given their history (they were effectively granted a monopoly by IBM, and have since tried to maintain that monopoly at all costs and to also expand it into other markets), but it ain't true: it *is* possible to coexist.
I wonder if they'll ever understand that.
ESR is everyone's nightmare... but we still love him.
They probably would sue, for the simple reason that if they didn't, they'd risk losing their mark altogether. Remember, copyright comes automatically and doesn't require you to do anything, but trademarks have to be actively enforced - it's use it or loose it there.
I'm not Larry Wall, but let me answer that one for you:
You should not stick to Perl religiously but rather use the best tool for the job you need to get done. TIMTOWTDI, remember? If Python works for you, that's fine; if Python works better for you than Perl, then by all means, do use Python!
That's not to say that your decision to use Python is automatically right, but it's not automatically wrong, either, and without any knowledge whatsoever about the project you're working on, your personal preferences, your experiences and all that, how do you expect *us* (that is, the Perl community, although I can only speak for myself, of course) to tell you whether Perl or Python is the better tool for your job?
That's up to you to decide - we don't care what you use, although we may be interested in hearing why you didn't choose Perl.
It's amazing how quickly you can cast off Perl 6 when there's not even an alpha version of the interpreter yet (Pugs doesn't count) and when even the specs are not set in stone yet.
I think what you're exhibiting here is what I'd like to refer to as an "inverse God complex"
("inverse" is not the best word, admittedly, but I can't think of a better one) - you do a thought experiment where you try to do something (improve Perl), find that you can't do so in two minutes, and thus conclude that failure is *inevitable* (hence a God complex: if you can't do it, noone can) and that any *actual* attempt to do so must automatically fail as well.
Nevermind, of course, that lots of people, most of them much more intelligent than you and me, have worked on this problem for years; you're still able to not only dismiss their current work, but also all the work they have not done yet and conclude that they're not only doomed to fail, but in fact fail so catastrophically that Perl will die - that is already is dying.
Yes, definitely a God complex. Sorry.
I agree with chromatic: you obviously don't know a thing about Perl. And I'm not just referring to the technical level here; you probably could code a simple program in Perl, but you'd be working against the language instead of *with* the language, because you ultimately don't grok either Perl or its principles or the community behind it.
:) You think you may have known Perl, but you really never did.
Go and play with PHP, kid.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that you said that Haskell was the first functional language - certainly not. I merely wanted to point out that Haskell isn't new, so if a revolution hasn't happened yet, why should it happen now?
I've met many people, especially at the university, who believed that functional languages were the holy grail of programming and that they would be taking over the (computer) world Real Soon Now(tm). But it's never happened, and nowadays, I believe that these people are just out of touch with reality.
Let's face it - the IT industry is just like any other industry, especially in one regard: things usually happen by evolution rather than revolution. Traits of functional programming languages will certainly find their way into the "mainstream" (and the "mainstream" languages), but nobody'll decide to just throw out all existing code all of a sudden and reinvent everything from the ground up in a new language - no matter how good that language is or, more important, how much better it is than the existing languages. Even object-oriented programming is really an extension of the imperative programming paradigm, not a replacement.
Paradigm shifts do occur, but they occur over time, and it's a smooth transition, not an abrupt one. Statements like "we've hit the limits of imperative languages" may sound cool, but they ultimately don't mean anything - the limits are changing. Boundaries *can* be pushed, and *that* is something that is *especially* true in the computer industry in general and the software industry in particular.
I won't deny that I'm not a fan of functional programming languages myself, of course. Personally, I think they're rather unnatural; it may be easier to model their semantics mathematically (and the mathematical models will be more "natural", too), but I also think that the step-by-step approach of imperative languages is more natural for the human mind - it's how we do things, and that's probably why imperative languages took off when functional languages didn't (and for the record, both functional and imperative programming language started at the same time, in the mid-50s, and the theoretical foundations, in the form of Turing machines and lambda calculus, also popped up at about the same time).
Nevertheless, I do realise that functional programming languages have some very interesting and useful features, and I'm certain that these will be incorporated into existing languages (or new languages based on existing ones, in the sense that Java is a new language based on C, for example) eventually - and that's a good thing. Pure functional programming, however, will (IMO!) always remain a specialised niche for certain, mostly mathematical (that is, theoretical) problems that naturally lend themselves to being modelled in functional ways.
Functional programming has been around for a long, long time, actually, but it has never revolutionised programming, so I'm not sure why Haskell should do it now - it's been around for almost 20 years already, too.
Not that functional languages don't have their merits, of course, but I honestly don't see why they should suddenly take over and obsolete other programming paradigms now.
That being said, have you taken a look at Curry? It's a language that combines functional and logical programming (à la Prolog) - definitely rather cool.