for some code reason I can't wrap my non-programmer mind around it appears that the program will run out of memory and silently exit a sync if it has to do too many different formats during the sync (FLAC, APE, and MP3, for example).
My programmer mind would say that there's no logical reason for that, either. It should not run out of memory, and it should not exit silently.
Anyway, the file syncing isn't so bad, but it would be nice to sync playlists back and forth so if I built the playlists in Media Monkey, it could back-sync from either the playlists in iTunes
I don't know much about those respective programs, but it's not terribly difficult to take a playlist in a simple text-based format -- m3u, say -- and do a quick search/replace to switch it from one library to another, assuming they have similar folder structures.
They're releasing the DVDs online themselves and then claiming people have pirated them.
Again, that's not what I'm seeing here. Read that quote you so helpfully provided again. Now again, slowly. Maybe it will sink in.
Warner Brothers is combating (piracy of its DVDs) by (releasing a watermarked version online, instead of a DRM-protected DVD).
In other words: Warner Brothers is combating the phenomena where people pirate the DRM-protected DVD by abandoning that scheme, and taking it online.
You've somehow, perversely, read that wrong, even when it's been pointed out to you. You've read it as:
Warner Brothers is combating (piracy of its DVDs by releasing a watermarked version online, instead of a DRM-protected DVD).
That's a much more cumbersome sentence -- is English your first language? "Plain a simply", obviously not.
It's also possible that you've confused what Warner is doing -- since they've said they are doing this instead of releasing a DRM-protected DVD, I can only assume that it's not that they're watermarking a rip and posting it on thepiratebay, so they can blame other people. No, it seems far more likely that they are selling a downloadable, un-DRM'd, but watermarked format, so that if people then choose to distribute it on thepiratebay, they can be tracked.
Read what I said next time, jackass.
Oh, very mature. But the same to you -- rather than taking the time to read my post, and find out what I was trying to say, you instead repeated yours, only with more name-calling.
I'm not suggesting languages so much as _why's introduction to Ruby. Follow that link, and you get an interactive shell (in a web page!) with a 15-minute tutorial, which guides you through not only the language, but an introduction to programming in general.
Yes, I use Ruby a lot, so I'm biased. But if _why had done that for Python, I'd be recommending that, too. I don't agree with everything he does, but this one is pretty amazing.
I know parent is fishing for lols, but how long before steam (valve) get their arse into gear and start offering music?
I would guess never. Alright, yes, you've got a point here:
Could easily build into the steam overlay to control a media player, combine each games soundtrack into your playlist
However, I would never consider buying music or movies through Steam, only games.
You see, with games, Steam offers a clear advantage, despite the DRM. I usually have to run proprietary Windows-only software anyway (the game), but if I get it through Steam, I can re-download whenever I want, I get a community (achievements, friends, etc), and I get these as an overlay on top of whatever game I'm playing.
All for the price of forcing me to be online all the time, which I was going to anyway.
Contrast this with music. Yes, it's nice to be able to re-download whenever I want. However, with DRM-free music, I can back it up however I want, mostly negating that advantage. I can also play it with free software on Linux, or convert it and push it to just about any device which can play music at all, even burn CDs, share/lend it to my friends...
All kinds of advantages to DRM-free music, which I'd lose by getting it through Steam.
Transcending is easy, and faster since you can both encode and decode multiple files at once.
How does FLAC not allow you to do this?
In fact, it does -- I've actually written a script which ran about three processes simultaneously converting from FLAC to AAC, and again from FLAC to MP3.
It doesn't really matter -- FLAC is both free and lossless. This means it's nobody's fault but Apple for not supporting it, but we don't have to care -- it's easy to convert between Flac and whatever else you want.
Besides which, I believe Rockbox does support FLAC, so yes, "major firmware modifications" will let you play FLAC on an iPod.
Except Monkey's Audio is proprietary, last I checked.
FLAC is free, and if you really care, you can convert it to Monkey's Audio. Since Monkey's Audio isn't free, you can't convert it to FLAC without running proprietary, Windows-only software -- which is one of the reasons for wanting a DRM-free format in the first place.
Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.
WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free?
There's actually a good point in there -- not that Michaelangelo should've done it for free, but that he didn't have the inherent right to be paid for it.
Industry execs would like to convince us that this is like Michaelangelo painting the chapel, and then not being paid his commission. And I agree, that would be wrong, if he'd negotiated the price ahead of time.
What is actually happening is more like Michaelangelo sculpting David, and then being unable to sell it -- and somehow making it the fault of people who didn't want to buy a giant sculpture of a naked man.
I just think it's funny how the *same* people who shout about how DRM will kill the music industry are also the first ones to put instructions online explaining how to rip the new DRM-FREE album without paying for it, just to help out the people who are too stupid to do even that.
Slashdot alone is not "the same people" -- I frequently point out DRM as one of the reasons PC gaming is dying. However, when I see a decent game without too much DRM, I buy it. That's how I support DRM-free media.
Uh -- let the stupid people buy the album.
Security through obscurity -- not going to work well.
What works better is making the legitimate music easier to purchase, download, and play than the pirated version -- in other words, actually give them a better product -- and making the price reasonable enough that it can actually compete.
Even someone who "barely uses the net" must be familiar with Google. So there are two very good arguments here:
First, Google provides their service for free. Ask them what they think about that. Where's the catch with Google? Obviously, it's possible to have a business model in which some products or services are given away.
Second, point out Google as one of many large corporations -- along with Amazon and IBM -- which not only use Linux, but use a lot of Linux. On the order of tens of thousands of machines. Obviously they are too big to get away with breaking a law, and too successful to be caught in some sort of catch.
A good way to cement the believability is to explain the "catch" -- what the disadvantages of Linux and open source are.
I think Basic type languages are good for getting your feet wet because you don't have to think too much and when you're not used to programming it might seem daunting to do C or Lisp or something
That's, again, why I recommend Ruby. Not too much you have to think about right away, but...
after learning a real OO language trying to continue a project I had started in VB was just too painful.
That doesn't really happen with Ruby.
Sure, it's going to be painful because you know much more now than you did when you started the project -- but that's true regardless of the language.
But you don't find yourself suddenly disgusted with the language after you learn more -- at least, that was my experience. And, equally important, you don't have to make that big a conceptual leap from your early days of picking up the language to realizing its full potential -- it's a natural evolution.
And, again, less to unlearn -- compare to JavaScript. You can stay in the same language, but you'll have to unlearn the "with" command, avoid using implicit global variables, stop using document.write (ever!) or eval (almost never!), push everything into separate files (and not in in some onClick or onSubmit event in the HTML), at the same time as you're learning closures, OO, and prototypal inheritance.
I love Javascript, but that's only after forgetting half of what I thought I knew about it.
If you've got time to reply to me, spend 15 minutes instead and follow that link, type "help", and follow the tutorial. Both to learn a bit of Ruby, and to understand just how good an introduction to programming can be.
We all know the academic solutions, but do we ever use them?
See, I flunked out of school as fast as it is possible to flunk out -- by not going to class. I've been in the real world for at least 2 years now, close to 3.
It's been annoying at times -- having to go back and look up what big-O notation means, and learning the basic tree types... So I do intend to go back.
But I don't think there's really as much of a connection. You'd get much better results by taking the students who survived the first class -- which, at my school, was mostly a course in "Who already knows Java, or can teach themselves quickly enough?" -- and giving them a brand-new project, a brand-new language, and a semester to finish it.
With some real experience, it might make the introduction of unit tests much more welcome, for example.
Well, hey, I did start with QBASIC, but I didn't do very much.
I did, however, have to un-learn most of what I learned in C++ and Java. So, "rotton brains" isn't maybe the right phrase, but you want to avoid learning bad habits -- easier to pick them up than to cure yourself of them.
And you're absolutely right -- it does matter more how people are taught. That's another reason I linked to tryruby -- I find _why to be quirky and often irritating (I wanted a tutorial/reference, not a comic/collage!), but this is one thing he's gotten pretty much perfect.
You're parsing that wrong. I think you parsed it like as if she's saying Warner Brothers is combating a new kind of piracy where the pirates add watermarks.
She's actually saying that Warner Brothers is releasing those watermarks as a way to combat piracy.
That is, it's not:/Warner Brothers/Is countering/Piracy by watermarking/ It is:/Warner Brothers/Is countering piracy/by watermarking/
I'm not really sure what the appropriate notation is. Maybe I should've just used punctuation. It's a bit like the joke of helping your uncle Jack off a horse...
and I assume Universities will be forced into installing this black box on their network monitoring all their traffic
No, they can't actually force this to happen. However, they do try to legally pressure some universities into doing this. The smarter universities tend to actually protect their students, by quashing any fishing expeditions by MAFIAA members.
For example, less than 1% of the Olympic coverage viewed this past summer was pirated.
So what? Most of us didn't watch it on purpose out of protest.
I suspect this one had much more to do with the fact that Olympic coverage was available in a convenient, free format from the Internet.
In other words, it really has nothing to do with whether it was DRM'd, and everything to do with the fucking basics of the free market -- provide a product that people find valuable, at a price they're willing to pay.
Her reasoning is that VOIP and video is more important because big companies want to turn the Internet into cable TV and Phone.
Perhaps. But she's only using them because they're the typical example given to explain to laymen the need for low-latency, low-bandwidth traffic.
Unfortunately, the constant mention of TV completely undermines that argument. TV is never completely "live", and both YouTube and torrents show that high-quality TV requires a lot of bandwidth -- yet doesn't care much about latency.
The mention of TV is actually an argument for network neutrality.
That is, unless she's suggesting that only the ISP's chosen IPTV network be prioritized, and that it take priority over things like YouTube and BitTorrent. In which case, it's also the perfect ad-absurdum argument for net neutrality -- if she would outright say how disturbingly anticompetitive she would like to make the Internet, that would be a great educational tool for anyone still skeptical.
Oh, and keep in mind -- you don't actually need to use hyperbole here. What she's saying is incredible enough by itself. These do nothing to help your case:
Aren't you a fucking lawyer?! You should know this!... because that isn't weird in a 1984 kind of way... She should stick to her own profession instead of thinking she knows things about computers.... She can not comprehend the Internet as a communication tool used by all, she can only see money to be made.. the more I read the more you sound like a fucking RIAA sleeper agent.... This women should be charged with Treason.... I hope this bitch dies in a fire.
Does she deserve all that? Maybe.
But these statements are overly inflammatory even where you're right, and you're not, always. When you're wrong, it just makes you look like a jackass, which makes it less likely anyone will take the time to read your comment.
The real danger isn't necessarily that they'll be able to win -- it's that they'll be able to convince the majority that it's a good thing, so there won't be as much resistance as you imagine.
But consider the technical trends lately... Alright, yes, mask it as form gets and posts. What happens when ISPs actually start censoring sites? What happens when IPv4 runs out, and we still refuse to upgrade -- so we are all behind NATs, so no one can expose port 80 unless they're one of the approved few?
I don't want to wait until we get to that point -- to where the only real way to take back control will be through more and more direct and blatant acts of sabotage ("borrowing" an approved server to coordinate hole-punching), or receding farther and father underground (using ham radios to coordinate hole-punching)...
No, I like my Internet mostly the way it is -- I get 100 mbit fiber to my house at a reasonable price, and while the policy says otherwise, I can pretty much use it how I want. I would much rather see them keep doing what they're doing -- laying more fiber, actually investing my money in new infrastructure, and keeping far enough ahead that as fast as I can download, I won't be lagging anyone else.
That is one of many reasons I voted for Obama. And yes, I know about Biden's record, but even if he sticks to that, better a pro-neutrality President and an anti-neutrality VP than an entire anti-neutrality party.
A bathroom wall is pretty much exactly where this woman belongs.
Consider that "whore" is not necessarily idle name-calling. Because of the statements she's made, we can either assume that she actually is that stupid, or that she's been swayed by lobbyists -- maybe that she's actually paid by the RIAA, or has some stake in them.
Which would make her a whore, regardless of her gender. The fact that she's a public servant makes her that much more deserving of every profanity we can throw at her.
Of course, the full extent of our disgust doesn't fit into the tags, so it's been condensed to "bitch" and "whore"... which is why you have to actually read the comments.
Some of the users would have bought the material, some wouldn't have.
I'll also bet that some of the users who would have paid for it, would not have paid for as much as they pirate -- which again, skews the numbers.
I suppose it depends how you interpret that -- Piracy does imply some losses, yes. But piracy > losses, therefore piracy != losses. At least, that's how I read it.
Now, what about those who would have bought it, were it unrestricted? As more DRM is added to a product, what happens to the amount of piracy, and to the number of sales?
More than that, there are other concepts, like functional programming, which are somewhat mutually-exclusive with imperative programming.
And I would say, don't teach a paradigm at all. For your very first class, give them something like this introduction to Ruby. After they have a vague concept of how a program goes together, then you worry about teaching them other paradigms -- ideally, they should learn all of them eventually.
Also, avoid starting them with something like COBOL, Visual Basic, or Java. These things may tend to rot their brains.
Which is actually the point -- these creatures do exist, and they can work in teams.
I suspect what Bjarne is afraid of is the uncomfortable truth that most real world programming jobs don't need most of what they teach you in school. The purpose of school is, it's still good practice at stretching your mind, and it makes you more employable -- but it doesn't necessarily make you more prepared for a real job.
Average to less-than-average programmers will never understand virtual functions, templates, or (shudder) multiple inheritance.
Those are relatively easy. The larger problem is that C++ almost seems to go out of its way to make things complicated -- and it is a hideously bloated language. No one is going to understand all of the quirks -- even all of the syntactical quirks. Just look at a template within a template...
Java doesn't make it any easier. Just look at Hello World.
Slashdot Mirror
for some code reason I can't wrap my non-programmer mind around it appears that the program will run out of memory and silently exit a sync if it has to do too many different formats during the sync (FLAC, APE, and MP3, for example).
My programmer mind would say that there's no logical reason for that, either. It should not run out of memory, and it should not exit silently.
Anyway, the file syncing isn't so bad, but it would be nice to sync playlists back and forth so if I built the playlists in Media Monkey, it could back-sync from either the playlists in iTunes
I don't know much about those respective programs, but it's not terribly difficult to take a playlist in a simple text-based format -- m3u, say -- and do a quick search/replace to switch it from one library to another, assuming they have similar folder structures.
They're releasing the DVDs online themselves and then claiming people have pirated them.
Again, that's not what I'm seeing here. Read that quote you so helpfully provided again. Now again, slowly. Maybe it will sink in.
Warner Brothers is combating (piracy of its DVDs) by (releasing a watermarked version online, instead of a DRM-protected DVD).
In other words: Warner Brothers is combating the phenomena where people pirate the DRM-protected DVD by abandoning that scheme, and taking it online.
You've somehow, perversely, read that wrong, even when it's been pointed out to you. You've read it as:
Warner Brothers is combating (piracy of its DVDs by releasing a watermarked version online, instead of a DRM-protected DVD).
That's a much more cumbersome sentence -- is English your first language? "Plain a simply", obviously not.
It's also possible that you've confused what Warner is doing -- since they've said they are doing this instead of releasing a DRM-protected DVD, I can only assume that it's not that they're watermarking a rip and posting it on thepiratebay, so they can blame other people. No, it seems far more likely that they are selling a downloadable, un-DRM'd, but watermarked format, so that if people then choose to distribute it on thepiratebay, they can be tracked.
Read what I said next time, jackass.
Oh, very mature. But the same to you -- rather than taking the time to read my post, and find out what I was trying to say, you instead repeated yours, only with more name-calling.
I'm not suggesting languages so much as _why's introduction to Ruby. Follow that link, and you get an interactive shell (in a web page!) with a 15-minute tutorial, which guides you through not only the language, but an introduction to programming in general.
Yes, I use Ruby a lot, so I'm biased. But if _why had done that for Python, I'd be recommending that, too. I don't agree with everything he does, but this one is pretty amazing.
I wish I could keep the two libraries sync'd, but for some reason media monkey won't do it
Odd. It should be pretty easy to write a script to keep two libraries like that in sync. I wonder if anyone's done that?
I know parent is fishing for lols, but how long before steam (valve) get their arse into gear and start offering music?
I would guess never. Alright, yes, you've got a point here:
Could easily build into the steam overlay to control a media player, combine each games soundtrack into your playlist
However, I would never consider buying music or movies through Steam, only games.
You see, with games, Steam offers a clear advantage, despite the DRM. I usually have to run proprietary Windows-only software anyway (the game), but if I get it through Steam, I can re-download whenever I want, I get a community (achievements, friends, etc), and I get these as an overlay on top of whatever game I'm playing.
All for the price of forcing me to be online all the time, which I was going to anyway.
Contrast this with music. Yes, it's nice to be able to re-download whenever I want. However, with DRM-free music, I can back it up however I want, mostly negating that advantage. I can also play it with free software on Linux, or convert it and push it to just about any device which can play music at all, even burn CDs, share/lend it to my friends...
All kinds of advantages to DRM-free music, which I'd lose by getting it through Steam.
Of course, if you're using GOTO, you should also go straight to jail.
Transcending is easy, and faster since you can both encode and decode multiple files at once.
How does FLAC not allow you to do this?
In fact, it does -- I've actually written a script which ran about three processes simultaneously converting from FLAC to AAC, and again from FLAC to MP3.
It doesn't really matter -- FLAC is both free and lossless. This means it's nobody's fault but Apple for not supporting it, but we don't have to care -- it's easy to convert between Flac and whatever else you want.
Besides which, I believe Rockbox does support FLAC, so yes, "major firmware modifications" will let you play FLAC on an iPod.
Except Monkey's Audio is proprietary, last I checked.
FLAC is free, and if you really care, you can convert it to Monkey's Audio. Since Monkey's Audio isn't free, you can't convert it to FLAC without running proprietary, Windows-only software -- which is one of the reasons for wanting a DRM-free format in the first place.
Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.
WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free?
There's actually a good point in there -- not that Michaelangelo should've done it for free, but that he didn't have the inherent right to be paid for it.
Industry execs would like to convince us that this is like Michaelangelo painting the chapel, and then not being paid his commission. And I agree, that would be wrong, if he'd negotiated the price ahead of time.
What is actually happening is more like Michaelangelo sculpting David, and then being unable to sell it -- and somehow making it the fault of people who didn't want to buy a giant sculpture of a naked man.
I just think it's funny how the *same* people who shout about how DRM will kill the music industry are also the first ones to put instructions online explaining how to rip the new DRM-FREE album without paying for it, just to help out the people who are too stupid to do even that.
Slashdot alone is not "the same people" -- I frequently point out DRM as one of the reasons PC gaming is dying. However, when I see a decent game without too much DRM, I buy it. That's how I support DRM-free media.
Uh -- let the stupid people buy the album.
Security through obscurity -- not going to work well.
What works better is making the legitimate music easier to purchase, download, and play than the pirated version -- in other words, actually give them a better product -- and making the price reasonable enough that it can actually compete.
I think that's less likely, actually, unless he's particularly gouging the real thing, or making it particularly difficult to purchase.
It's far more likely that they'll simply hit thepiratebay for the FLAC files once someone buys them and uploads them.
Even someone who "barely uses the net" must be familiar with Google. So there are two very good arguments here:
First, Google provides their service for free. Ask them what they think about that. Where's the catch with Google? Obviously, it's possible to have a business model in which some products or services are given away.
Second, point out Google as one of many large corporations -- along with Amazon and IBM -- which not only use Linux, but use a lot of Linux. On the order of tens of thousands of machines. Obviously they are too big to get away with breaking a law, and too successful to be caught in some sort of catch.
A good way to cement the believability is to explain the "catch" -- what the disadvantages of Linux and open source are.
I think Basic type languages are good for getting your feet wet because you don't have to think too much and when you're not used to programming it might seem daunting to do C or Lisp or something
That's, again, why I recommend Ruby. Not too much you have to think about right away, but...
after learning a real OO language trying to continue a project I had started in VB was just too painful.
That doesn't really happen with Ruby.
Sure, it's going to be painful because you know much more now than you did when you started the project -- but that's true regardless of the language.
But you don't find yourself suddenly disgusted with the language after you learn more -- at least, that was my experience. And, equally important, you don't have to make that big a conceptual leap from your early days of picking up the language to realizing its full potential -- it's a natural evolution.
And, again, less to unlearn -- compare to JavaScript. You can stay in the same language, but you'll have to unlearn the "with" command, avoid using implicit global variables, stop using document.write (ever!) or eval (almost never!), push everything into separate files (and not in in some onClick or onSubmit event in the HTML), at the same time as you're learning closures, OO, and prototypal inheritance.
I love Javascript, but that's only after forgetting half of what I thought I knew about it.
If you've got time to reply to me, spend 15 minutes instead and follow that link, type "help", and follow the tutorial. Both to learn a bit of Ruby, and to understand just how good an introduction to programming can be.
FYI, your trailing slash broke the link.
We all know the academic solutions, but do we ever use them?
See, I flunked out of school as fast as it is possible to flunk out -- by not going to class. I've been in the real world for at least 2 years now, close to 3.
It's been annoying at times -- having to go back and look up what big-O notation means, and learning the basic tree types... So I do intend to go back.
But I don't think there's really as much of a connection. You'd get much better results by taking the students who survived the first class -- which, at my school, was mostly a course in "Who already knows Java, or can teach themselves quickly enough?" -- and giving them a brand-new project, a brand-new language, and a semester to finish it.
With some real experience, it might make the introduction of unit tests much more welcome, for example.
Well, hey, I did start with QBASIC, but I didn't do very much.
I did, however, have to un-learn most of what I learned in C++ and Java. So, "rotton brains" isn't maybe the right phrase, but you want to avoid learning bad habits -- easier to pick them up than to cure yourself of them.
And you're absolutely right -- it does matter more how people are taught. That's another reason I linked to tryruby -- I find _why to be quirky and often irritating (I wanted a tutorial/reference, not a comic/collage!), but this is one thing he's gotten pretty much perfect.
How is it piracy if Warner Brothers releases it?
You're parsing that wrong. I think you parsed it like as if she's saying Warner Brothers is combating a new kind of piracy where the pirates add watermarks.
She's actually saying that Warner Brothers is releasing those watermarks as a way to combat piracy.
That is, it's not: /Warner Brothers/Is countering/Piracy by watermarking/ /Warner Brothers/Is countering piracy/by watermarking/
It is:
I'm not really sure what the appropriate notation is. Maybe I should've just used punctuation. It's a bit like the joke of helping your uncle Jack off a horse...
and I assume Universities will be forced into installing this black box on their network monitoring all their traffic
No, they can't actually force this to happen. However, they do try to legally pressure some universities into doing this. The smarter universities tend to actually protect their students, by quashing any fishing expeditions by MAFIAA members.
For example, less than 1% of the
Olympic coverage viewed this past summer was pirated.
So what? Most of us didn't watch it on purpose out of protest.
I suspect this one had much more to do with the fact that Olympic coverage was available in a convenient, free format from the Internet.
In other words, it really has nothing to do with whether it was DRM'd, and everything to do with the fucking basics of the free market -- provide a product that people find valuable, at a price they're willing to pay.
Her reasoning is that VOIP and video is more important because big companies want to turn the Internet into cable TV and Phone.
Perhaps. But she's only using them because they're the typical example given to explain to laymen the need for low-latency, low-bandwidth traffic.
Unfortunately, the constant mention of TV completely undermines that argument. TV is never completely "live", and both YouTube and torrents show that high-quality TV requires a lot of bandwidth -- yet doesn't care much about latency.
The mention of TV is actually an argument for network neutrality.
That is, unless she's suggesting that only the ISP's chosen IPTV network be prioritized, and that it take priority over things like YouTube and BitTorrent. In which case, it's also the perfect ad-absurdum argument for net neutrality -- if she would outright say how disturbingly anticompetitive she would like to make the Internet, that would be a great educational tool for anyone still skeptical.
Oh, and keep in mind -- you don't actually need to use hyperbole here. What she's saying is incredible enough by itself. These do nothing to help your case:
Aren't you a fucking lawyer?! You should know this!... because that isn't weird in a 1984 kind of way... She should stick to her own profession instead of thinking she knows things about computers.... She can not comprehend the Internet as a communication tool used by all, she can only see money to be made.. the more I read the more you sound like a fucking RIAA sleeper agent.... This women should be charged with Treason.... I hope this bitch dies in a fire.
Does she deserve all that? Maybe.
But these statements are overly inflammatory even where you're right, and you're not, always. When you're wrong, it just makes you look like a jackass, which makes it less likely anyone will take the time to read your comment.
Just look at China.
The real danger isn't necessarily that they'll be able to win -- it's that they'll be able to convince the majority that it's a good thing, so there won't be as much resistance as you imagine.
But consider the technical trends lately... Alright, yes, mask it as form gets and posts. What happens when ISPs actually start censoring sites? What happens when IPv4 runs out, and we still refuse to upgrade -- so we are all behind NATs, so no one can expose port 80 unless they're one of the approved few?
I don't want to wait until we get to that point -- to where the only real way to take back control will be through more and more direct and blatant acts of sabotage ("borrowing" an approved server to coordinate hole-punching), or receding farther and father underground (using ham radios to coordinate hole-punching)...
No, I like my Internet mostly the way it is -- I get 100 mbit fiber to my house at a reasonable price, and while the policy says otherwise, I can pretty much use it how I want. I would much rather see them keep doing what they're doing -- laying more fiber, actually investing my money in new infrastructure, and keeping far enough ahead that as fast as I can download, I won't be lagging anyone else.
That is one of many reasons I voted for Obama. And yes, I know about Biden's record, but even if he sticks to that, better a pro-neutrality President and an anti-neutrality VP than an entire anti-neutrality party.
A bathroom wall is pretty much exactly where this woman belongs.
Consider that "whore" is not necessarily idle name-calling. Because of the statements she's made, we can either assume that she actually is that stupid, or that she's been swayed by lobbyists -- maybe that she's actually paid by the RIAA, or has some stake in them.
Which would make her a whore, regardless of her gender. The fact that she's a public servant makes her that much more deserving of every profanity we can throw at her.
Of course, the full extent of our disgust doesn't fit into the tags, so it's been condensed to "bitch" and "whore"... which is why you have to actually read the comments.
Some of the users would have bought the material, some wouldn't have.
I'll also bet that some of the users who would have paid for it, would not have paid for as much as they pirate -- which again, skews the numbers.
I suppose it depends how you interpret that -- Piracy does imply some losses, yes. But piracy > losses, therefore piracy != losses. At least, that's how I read it.
Now, what about those who would have bought it, were it unrestricted? As more DRM is added to a product, what happens to the amount of piracy, and to the number of sales?
More than that, there are other concepts, like functional programming, which are somewhat mutually-exclusive with imperative programming.
And I would say, don't teach a paradigm at all. For your very first class, give them something like this introduction to Ruby. After they have a vague concept of how a program goes together, then you worry about teaching them other paradigms -- ideally, they should learn all of them eventually.
Also, avoid starting them with something like COBOL, Visual Basic, or Java. These things may tend to rot their brains.
Stop saying speed-of-light travel is impossible.
If anything is impossible, this is.
There is always the chance that in 300 years you will be proved horribly wrong..
That is very true. But it's also irrelevant -- read my comment again.
We actually theoretically know how to build a space elevator. We're just figuring out the details -- it's an engineering problem now.
We don't even know where to start on a warp engine. That's a theoretical physics problem.
Which is actually the point -- these creatures do exist, and they can work in teams.
I suspect what Bjarne is afraid of is the uncomfortable truth that most real world programming jobs don't need most of what they teach you in school. The purpose of school is, it's still good practice at stretching your mind, and it makes you more employable -- but it doesn't necessarily make you more prepared for a real job.
Average to less-than-average programmers will never understand virtual functions, templates, or (shudder) multiple inheritance.
Those are relatively easy. The larger problem is that C++ almost seems to go out of its way to make things complicated -- and it is a hideously bloated language. No one is going to understand all of the quirks -- even all of the syntactical quirks. Just look at a template within a template...
Java doesn't make it any easier. Just look at Hello World.