Those assurances aren't entirely heartening, though, unless Amazon is way ahead of the curve with content-filtering technology.
Amazon has the spammer's credit card details, knows where each email comes from, and can freeze or terminate accounts at the touch of a button (or via an algorithm). This gives it a considerable advantage over those that have to passively filter spam.
And in any case, spam filters are pretty damn good these days. I've had a public email address for going on 15 years, which used to get hundreds of spam emails every day. Now it's very rare for even one to slip past GMail's filter.
None of your scenarios are especially likely. Intergalactic travel is too energy-expensive to be a reasonable solution for any of the scenarios you outline.
I wonder if this will have any impact Ubuntu's recent announcement that they are switching to use Yahoo (which is Microsoft Bing underneath) as the default search engine in their next release.
Yahoo already has a history of rolling over for the Chinese government. If Canonical doesn't mind associating with a company that helps oppressive regimes track down dissidents, I don't think Microsoft's announcement is going to make much difference.
I can't find the part in the SLIME manual where it helps me write and debug programs written in any of the languages supported in Visual Studio. The one I care about is C.
C is a statically compiled language, so you can't really build a system like SLIME for it. SLIME needs to be connected to a running VM that it can push code to dynamically. C wasn't designed with that capability in mind.
Visual Studio doesn't support any programming language with macros, unless someone has made a Boo plugin whilst I wasn't looking.
Or did you mean keyboard macros? Because you don't need to write any code for that, either. Now, I don't think Emacs is as quite good as Vim for defining keyboard macros, but it's certainly better than Visual Studio.
I can think of plenty of features that SLIME has, but VS does not. However, I can't think of any feature in VS that is not matched by either Emacs itself, SLIME or some other extension.
Oh, but eliminating patents is exactly like that and the socialists and commies are salivating at that prospect.
I don't think you understand what socialism and communism are. Patents are a form of government regulation. Socialists and communists are not about small government; quite the opposite. Rather, eliminating patents would be a minarchist or anarchist action.
In your example, item needs to be defined elsewhere. E.g. What does the line contain, csv, tab-delimited, space separated? Whereas split() makes it pretty obvious.
I'm just took one of the examples on their page. Presumably their system is smart enough to work out the mimetype of the file, but I agree that it seems rather brittle and ambiguous.
I wonder if they didn't compare themselves to Ruby or Python because they couldn't contrive examples that produce huge LOC differences?
Probably. There's no difference in length between:
get the last item of line 2 of URL url
And:
open(url).readlines[1].split(",").last
I guess the former is easier to read, but languages that have a lot of "magic" in them tend to be pretty bad at scenarios the developers didn't think of. Which will inevitably turn out to be something you want to do.
I'm not sure what you mean by "recursive style", but the biggest commercial users of functional programming languages tend to be companies behind high-traffic websites that need to handle a lot of concurrent requests. Facebook developed their real-time chat application in Erlang, for instance, and Twitter uses Scala to handle its message queue.
As if Google doesn't have enough user data already.
You really think they don't want more user data? You don't seem to understand how important good data is when trying to predict what a user wants. More data usually beats better algorithms.
This is a nice gesture of goodwill from Google... I wonder how much it costs.
Goodwill? Well maybe, but I suspect that they'll also be storing all that lovely user data about people's surfing habits. Airports have a lot of different passengers going through each day, so they'd get a good cross-section of the population. Also, as network traffic on airport wifis is predominantly from personal laptops, perhaps there will be less clickbots/spambots to screw up Google's statistics. They could also tailor their advertisements more effectively, showing people ads for local businesses in and around the airport, for example.
You would prefer "Please stop that, children, we need to sell those products to other people so that we can make more money"?
I really don't understand what you think the "mature" response to people undermining your ability to sell your own product are.
The problem is that it is technology and economics that is affecting their ability to sell their products.
The content industry make their money by selling copies. This worked in an era when making copies was expensive, or required expensive equipment. But now, the cost of copying is approaching zero. Economically, it's hard to make much of a profit off something that can be had for nothing.
The only way they can continue with their current business model is to attempt to hold back technology with legislation. But this is only a temporary solution; eventually there will be enough bandwidth to stream movies anonymously, and someone will create a P2P client with a nice easy interface. Whether this is right or wrong, technology tends to be rather amoral.
The content industry needs to find a way of making money off content that doesn't involve selling copies. This is by no means an insurmountable problem. However, it will require a large shift in the industry, and I'd be surprised if many of the current big players survive.
In any event I'm tired of this conversation, so I probably won't reply again. I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but frankly, most of your arguments are more emotionally charged and abusive than well reasoned, even when the reason that you did have would have made a decent argument.
Abusive? I believe the worst I've done is to phrase questions with a certain rhetorical edge, and then only in response to the occasional less-than-polite tone that crept into your posts.
First, this is Slashdot; I am not exactly the most impolite poster you'll meet. Second, if you want a more polite tone from me, then be more polite yourself. For instance, instead of saying "Whoooosh", you might say "Sorry, I don't think we're quite on the same track". Then I might be a little less sarcastic in my response.
In other words, chasing after one particular person and yelling "Pirate! Pirate! You're gonna get in trouble!" is childish.
But when the content industry does that to many people, suddenly it's not childish?
Putting out an official notice that those who violate the law will be viewed in the eyes of the law as not only criminals, but serious criminals, isn't childish.
The term "piracy" did not arise from a legal document or an official government notice.
In particular, when the term is used so that other people will be more likely to report the activity, then it is a tactical maneuver, even if it is a sleazy one.
Just because something is a tactical maneuver, does not mean that it is not childish. A child may call another names in order to elevate their own social status. They may not be able to articulate their reasons for doing so, but merely because they are obeying evolutionary instinct rather than rational thought, does not mean that their actions are not tactical.
I can't imagine a child, on his own accord, thinking of official edicts, or people enforcing charters, or choosing a term that's just related enough to be plausible and invective enough to stir people's emotions, or even setting policies in general.
I think you're underestimating children, and overestimating the content industry:)
Piracy might have once been a good phrase to use, evoking emotion and fear. But since then the content industries have gone through several cycles of rebirth, and the word "pirate" could now be taken to mean "the people who will succeed us". This perhaps isn't the message the current content industry would like to put out.
Knowing this, while you have a point, you have not shown any reason why my argument is incorrect.
It's true that there are some tentative similarities between seafaring theft and teenagers downloading files without permission. So your argument is not really incorrect.
But loose connections can be drawn between any two words. For instance, fast food restaurants often sell unhealthy food. Unhealthy food can reduce your life expectancy. So can suicide. So if I wanted to make an emotional argument I might call fast food restaurants "suicide bars".
But just because you can make such connections, doesn't mean you should do so. It's just a form of name-calling, and therefore childish and idiotic.
The word "piracy" wasn't chosen because it accurately described copyright infringement. It was coined by the Stationer's Company in the 17th century, which at the time had a government monopoly on producing printed works. They chose the word as a way of casting aspersions on their opponents, who were publishing without the government's permission. At that time, the connotations of the word "piracy" were far worse than the are today.
In more modern times, the same principle was used to compare VHS tapes to the Boston Strangler, and suggest that copyright infringement funds terrorism. It's pure hyperbole. A form of argumentum ad hominem. A way of appealing to people's emotions rather than rational thought. In other words, it's idiotic because it attempts to sway the beliefs of idiots.
Nowadays, real pirates are rather less numerous than they once were, so the term has lost much of its bite. When the content industries want to make an emotional argument, they tend to use words like "thief" instead. The word "pirate" has become almost purely descriptive.
The reason I still dislike this word is not so much that its original meaning has been twisted (that happens to words all the time), but because its indicative of distasteful tactics that are employed as much today as they were four centuries ago. It's name-calling by companies too stupid to adapt to marketplace changes.
Was your previous post meant to be sarcastic? If so, the humour was too subtle for me.
And yet in both cases, your company's products--whether the actual article or identical duplicates--are appearing in unregulated markets in large quantities.
So your argument is that if you can find something in common between two words, even if in every other respect they are completely different, it is acceptable to substitute one word for the other.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, you have to be registered with the Financial Services Authority, or the equivalent in another EU/EEA country to run such a service.
What do you mean by "such a service"?
Those assurances aren't entirely heartening, though, unless Amazon is way ahead of the curve with content-filtering technology.
Amazon has the spammer's credit card details, knows where each email comes from, and can freeze or terminate accounts at the touch of a button (or via an algorithm). This gives it a considerable advantage over those that have to passively filter spam.
And in any case, spam filters are pretty damn good these days. I've had a public email address for going on 15 years, which used to get hundreds of spam emails every day. Now it's very rare for even one to slip past GMail's filter.
automate every possible kind of work humans can do
That would require AI with at least human-equivalent intelligence, which is some way off.
Then we can just sit around and maybe push one button or two every once in a while.
Or live a life currently reserved for the extremely wealthy.
This is the equivalent of saying lamda functions have nothing to do with functional programming.
No, it's equivalent to saying that lambda functions have nothing to do with self-modifying code.
I'm not sure where this confusion of yours has arisen. Why would you think an anonymous function is self-modifying code?
None of your scenarios are especially likely. Intergalactic travel is too energy-expensive to be a reasonable solution for any of the scenarios you outline.
That sounds even more expensive and even more worthless than invasion.
I wonder if this will have any impact Ubuntu's recent announcement that they are switching to use Yahoo (which is Microsoft Bing underneath) as the default search engine in their next release.
Yahoo already has a history of rolling over for the Chinese government. If Canonical doesn't mind associating with a company that helps oppressive regimes track down dissidents, I don't think Microsoft's announcement is going to make much difference.
I can't find the part in the SLIME manual where it helps me write and debug programs written in any of the languages supported in Visual Studio. The one I care about is C.
C is a statically compiled language, so you can't really build a system like SLIME for it. SLIME needs to be connected to a running VM that it can push code to dynamically. C wasn't designed with that capability in mind.
Tool chain integration that actually works
What doesn't work?
not having to code in lisp to make macros work
Visual Studio doesn't support any programming language with macros, unless someone has made a Boo plugin whilst I wasn't looking.
Or did you mean keyboard macros? Because you don't need to write any code for that, either. Now, I don't think Emacs is as quite good as Vim for defining keyboard macros, but it's certainly better than Visual Studio.
SLIME does not hold a candle to VS sorry.
I can think of plenty of features that SLIME has, but VS does not. However, I can't think of any feature in VS that is not matched by either Emacs itself, SLIME or some other extension.
Could you explain why you think VS is better?
Anyone that claims either vi or emacs is a useful editor hasn't used a modern Windows IDE.
Anyone that claims Visual Studio is a useful IDE hasn't used Emacs SLIME :)
King Henry drafted up a plan to assassinate whatever political leader of the new world had the most power, a hundred years or so later.
Henry VIII planned to assassinate Louis XIV?! The plot thickens!
Oh, but eliminating patents is exactly like that and the socialists and commies are salivating at that prospect.
I don't think you understand what socialism and communism are. Patents are a form of government regulation. Socialists and communists are not about small government; quite the opposite. Rather, eliminating patents would be a minarchist or anarchist action.
In your example, item needs to be defined elsewhere. E.g. What does the line contain, csv, tab-delimited, space separated? Whereas split() makes it pretty obvious.
I'm just took one of the examples on their page. Presumably their system is smart enough to work out the mimetype of the file, but I agree that it seems rather brittle and ambiguous.
I wonder if they didn't compare themselves to Ruby or Python because they couldn't contrive examples that produce huge LOC differences?
Probably. There's no difference in length between:
And:
I guess the former is easier to read, but languages that have a lot of "magic" in them tend to be pretty bad at scenarios the developers didn't think of. Which will inevitably turn out to be something you want to do.
Yes, I realise all that. I was just pointing out that all functional languages use "recursive style", as ls671 puts it.
> I'm not sure what you mean by "recursive style",
Look at Quicksort in Haskell :
qsort [] = []
qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (= x) xs)
This is what I mean, no loops, recursion.
Well, all functional programming languages use recursion, so "recursive style functional programming languages" is a bit redundant :)
I'm not sure what you mean by "recursive style", but the biggest commercial users of functional programming languages tend to be companies behind high-traffic websites that need to handle a lot of concurrent requests. Facebook developed their real-time chat application in Erlang, for instance, and Twitter uses Scala to handle its message queue.
As if Google doesn't have enough user data already.
You really think they don't want more user data? You don't seem to understand how important good data is when trying to predict what a user wants. More data usually beats better algorithms.
This is a nice gesture of goodwill from Google... I wonder how much it costs.
Goodwill? Well maybe, but I suspect that they'll also be storing all that lovely user data about people's surfing habits. Airports have a lot of different passengers going through each day, so they'd get a good cross-section of the population. Also, as network traffic on airport wifis is predominantly from personal laptops, perhaps there will be less clickbots/spambots to screw up Google's statistics. They could also tailor their advertisements more effectively, showing people ads for local businesses in and around the airport, for example.
You would prefer "Please stop that, children, we need to sell those products to other people so that we can make more money"?
I really don't understand what you think the "mature" response to people undermining your ability to sell your own product are.
The problem is that it is technology and economics that is affecting their ability to sell their products.
The content industry make their money by selling copies. This worked in an era when making copies was expensive, or required expensive equipment. But now, the cost of copying is approaching zero. Economically, it's hard to make much of a profit off something that can be had for nothing.
The only way they can continue with their current business model is to attempt to hold back technology with legislation. But this is only a temporary solution; eventually there will be enough bandwidth to stream movies anonymously, and someone will create a P2P client with a nice easy interface. Whether this is right or wrong, technology tends to be rather amoral.
The content industry needs to find a way of making money off content that doesn't involve selling copies. This is by no means an insurmountable problem. However, it will require a large shift in the industry, and I'd be surprised if many of the current big players survive.
In any event I'm tired of this conversation, so I probably won't reply again. I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but frankly, most of your arguments are more emotionally charged and abusive than well reasoned, even when the reason that you did have would have made a decent argument.
Abusive? I believe the worst I've done is to phrase questions with a certain rhetorical edge, and then only in response to the occasional less-than-polite tone that crept into your posts.
First, this is Slashdot; I am not exactly the most impolite poster you'll meet. Second, if you want a more polite tone from me, then be more polite yourself. For instance, instead of saying "Whoooosh", you might say "Sorry, I don't think we're quite on the same track". Then I might be a little less sarcastic in my response.
In other words, chasing after one particular person and yelling "Pirate! Pirate! You're gonna get in trouble!" is childish.
But when the content industry does that to many people, suddenly it's not childish?
Putting out an official notice that those who violate the law will be viewed in the eyes of the law as not only criminals, but serious criminals, isn't childish.
The term "piracy" did not arise from a legal document or an official government notice.
In particular, when the term is used so that other people will be more likely to report the activity, then it is a tactical maneuver, even if it is a sleazy one.
Just because something is a tactical maneuver, does not mean that it is not childish. A child may call another names in order to elevate their own social status. They may not be able to articulate their reasons for doing so, but merely because they are obeying evolutionary instinct rather than rational thought, does not mean that their actions are not tactical.
I can't imagine a child, on his own accord, thinking of official edicts, or people enforcing charters, or choosing a term that's just related enough to be plausible and invective enough to stir people's emotions, or even setting policies in general.
I think you're underestimating children, and overestimating the content industry :)
Piracy might have once been a good phrase to use, evoking emotion and fear. But since then the content industries have gone through several cycles of rebirth, and the word "pirate" could now be taken to mean "the people who will succeed us". This perhaps isn't the message the current content industry would like to put out.
[citation needed]
Wikipedia
Knowing this, while you have a point, you have not shown any reason why my argument is incorrect.
It's true that there are some tentative similarities between seafaring theft and teenagers downloading files without permission. So your argument is not really incorrect.
But loose connections can be drawn between any two words. For instance, fast food restaurants often sell unhealthy food. Unhealthy food can reduce your life expectancy. So can suicide. So if I wanted to make an emotional argument I might call fast food restaurants "suicide bars".
But just because you can make such connections, doesn't mean you should do so. It's just a form of name-calling, and therefore childish and idiotic.
The word "piracy" wasn't chosen because it accurately described copyright infringement. It was coined by the Stationer's Company in the 17th century, which at the time had a government monopoly on producing printed works. They chose the word as a way of casting aspersions on their opponents, who were publishing without the government's permission. At that time, the connotations of the word "piracy" were far worse than the are today.
In more modern times, the same principle was used to compare VHS tapes to the Boston Strangler, and suggest that copyright infringement funds terrorism. It's pure hyperbole. A form of argumentum ad hominem. A way of appealing to people's emotions rather than rational thought. In other words, it's idiotic because it attempts to sway the beliefs of idiots.
Nowadays, real pirates are rather less numerous than they once were, so the term has lost much of its bite. When the content industries want to make an emotional argument, they tend to use words like "thief" instead. The word "pirate" has become almost purely descriptive.
The reason I still dislike this word is not so much that its original meaning has been twisted (that happens to words all the time), but because its indicative of distasteful tactics that are employed as much today as they were four centuries ago. It's name-calling by companies too stupid to adapt to marketplace changes.
Whoooosh.
Was your previous post meant to be sarcastic? If so, the humour was too subtle for me.
And yet in both cases, your company's products--whether the actual article or identical duplicates--are appearing in unregulated markets in large quantities.
So your argument is that if you can find something in common between two words, even if in every other respect they are completely different, it is acceptable to substitute one word for the other.