I suggested much the same solution, except I would suggest a progressive tarif starting with $100 for the first ten years, then doubling for each following decade. Would $100 for ten years of protection be worth it?
As for this, You can bet there would be people who did nothing but monitor what went into the public domain and make money selling it for redistribution, sampling, etc.
So you are saying it would create a new industry? Isn't that great, instead of bad? Sure it isn't nice if your song scores a major hit while in PD, but it would most certainly cause you to try again with another song (which, presumably, you wouldn't put in PD anymore). And wasn't that the whole point of copyright?
Indeed, this new industry would serve like a talent hunting system. You get free publicity out of it, without having to sign a contract that limits your options for the next 30 years (like artists currently have to do).
All I see is advantages so far...
In addition to this no large creator of any kind of media could afford to keep all their work in copyright.
If the fee exceeds the value of the work, it makes financial sense to put the work in public domain. If the work is not worth $100 for the first decade, or $200 for the next, or $400 for the one after, then let it go - why hang on to it? What would be the purpose, from a business point of view?
Actually I was more reminded of the Ring Wraiths riding out from Mordor: deadly, unstoppable, sinister, corrupting what they touch, and doing only their evil masters' will without regards for other living creatures...
How about this: copyright lasts for only ten years and requires a small fee to register. After ten years you can extend for another ten years, but the fee doubles. This process can go in indefinitely, allowing you to keep going as long as the work is worth the money. For a fee of, say, $100, Disney could keep Mickey Mouse under copyright for at least 200 years (at which point the fee exceeds $100,000,000 - is Mickey really worth that much? If so, prove it by paying...).
As part of the registraton, a copy of the work is stored in some central vault. It will be available from that location the moment the copyright expires. This avoids "misunderstandings" of copyright law with DRM-technology not allowing anything to pass into public domain, even after copyright ends.
This mechanism allows reasonable copyright protection for those who desire it, for a period of their own choosing, but limited by the value of the product being copyrighted. Thus things of limited commercial value will quickly pass into public domain (keeping the public at large happy with a steady stream of crap movies, older books, ROMs, and what more) and things of great commercial value can be kept locked up somewhat longer (thus keeping big corporations like Disney happy). And as a steady source of revenue, it should appeal to the government as well.
As for Elvis, his heirs will have the choice: are his songs worth $3200 (each)? If so, it is once again time to pay.
It's not like corporations are just big evil moneymaking machines. They are run by people just like any other business, and those people have needs and desires.
If those "needs and desires" are simply to earn a decent living, that is fine with me. But quite a few of these corporations seem to desire ownership of the world and everyone in it.
People seem to think that the stated goal of "making money" excuses everything. Suppose I have a company making a vaccin against anthrax. Would it be ok for me to go around infecting people because that helps my bottom line? I'm guessing you would say "no", because it is against the law.
So, what if I then started throwing around my weight to change the law? You are saying this is acceptable, and if other people don't like it they should feel free to try and compete with my billions of dollars worth of lobbying capital.
While I admit this is how the world works, I will not accept the conclusion that this is therefore acceptable.
Every level in Gauntlet was hand-designed, and the same each time you played the game. What changed was the positions of the enemies, as they tended to spawn extremely rapidly. As a result, minor changes to your own route could radically change the opposition you encountered.
Anyway, I agree with one of the other posters: purely random levels just make the game meaningless. It is the same with soaps on TV (which I consider to be randomly generated for the purpose of this argument): I'd rather see a good, one-off story, then see the same elements repeated in different combinations again and again and again.
This is definitely good. I mean, I hate Microsoft as much as any slashdotter, but once their Windows and Office monopolies disappear under a flurry of penguins (nasty stab wounds from those beaks, btw, but I digress) I wouldn't really want to see all those poor, misguided souls who work for them to lose their jobs. So maybe this is a first step towards a new, gentler (unless you are a spammer) Microsoft, one that is appreciated and praised by all (except spammers) for providing a vital public service. The new Microsoft, Guardian of the Network, Defender of Standards, and Tireless Destroyer of Software Patents and Copyright Extensions! They'll even have their own Linux distribution (Linux XP?) and GPL all of their current Windows source!
Of course, until that day comes, feel free to continue bashing them. I know I will;-)
Your grandmother evidently thinks space exploration is useless and should be stopped until _all_ problems here on Earth are solved. That is, until we have no more terrorists, peace in the middle east, cures for all diseases, no more corruption, hate, violence, or spam; no more drug problems, no more traffic accidents, plentiful resources for everyone, and little girls taking care of all the kittens. Presumably she also wants us all to live in a utopian world without government or money, where people are nice to each other from the goodness of their hearts?
Presumably, once we have achieved all that we will finally be allowed to explore the heavens. Can your grandmother provide some sort of timescale? I'm asking, because I want to *see* that first man on Mars. Right now I think the chances of that are about fifty/fifty, but if she has her way I doubt there will ever be a generation that does.
Finally, look up how much money your country spends on defence, how much it spends on healthcare, and finally how much it spends on space exploration. I'm sure there will be readers who can provide these numbers, but I can already tell you that space exploration will be less than a percent of any of the other two.
In working with non-object oriented code, there will be a procedure or function call in the middle of a chunk of code, and I won't know where it comes from. I then end up wasting time searching through the included header files for a reference to that function...
This is a bogus argument: if you see a function call dereferenced from some object pointer, you still need to look up the object type, find its associated file, and then search that file for the function. You end up with exactly the same problem. Besides, who does this anymore? In a modern development environment you can just click on the function name and choose "go to definition" or "go to declaration".
I also have problems with this "common sense" that you speak about.
Well, if it is any consolation: you are certainly not alone in that.
It isn't spaghetti code if you're writing a self-contained application and have references to parent object in other objects.
No, indeed: that would be (the beginning of) spaghetti *data* (as in, a damn mess of pointers or references pointing to a thousand different things - or not, because whoever wrote the software liked making aliases for everything so you will never be sure what is going on exactly when you do something to an object...). That is just as bad as spaghetti code, but unfortunately software engineering courses have a tendency to overlook it as a source of problems. These days I think it is actually the great scourge.
If you work with Java or C#, keep the functions relevant to the functionality of each object
That was exactly what I was saying. Don't go about inventing classes just to hold functions that would otherwise be global. And don't just add them to the application class just because it happens to be there.
Perhaps it's just a misunderstanding of how to do OO programming that gives you this belief.
I will certainly admit that I will sometimes do things that are considered unorthodox. That doesn't mean I never follow any guidelines or best practices; on the contrary, I follow them for about 99.9% of the time. Just to make sure we understand each other: I have been working in C++ for over six years now (before that I wrote software in a variety of other, mostly non-OO languages). I've written over 200,000 lines of C++ code in those years (most of it on software for testing space craft, where bugs may translate into hundreds of millions of euros of damage), and whenever code reviews come up people comment on the elegance and simplicity of my solutions. Even though I sometimes use a global function or variable;-)
I'm not sure if you persist in your foolish ways because your language of choice forces you to or because you actually think it is the best thing to do? I could respect the former, but in the latter case you really should take a step back and reflect on what you are doing.
As for your comment that "you know what classes contain things, you wrote them": I'm sure you realize that argument could be used to defend every piece of bad programming on the face of the planet.
"Yes, I know this is evil uncommented spagetti code, but I know what it does - I wrote it!"
But you are right, in a sense: if you are working alone and know everything your program is doing, you can certainly do as you please. It is only when you get out into the world and start programming together with other people (so you don't know what everything does, and you didn't write everything) that things like program clarity become an issue.
In the meantime, I continue to believe that software engineering educations fail very badly in that they teach people absolute rules, instead of installing some common sense. And common sense dictates that if something is a global function (and we recognize it because it has global scope, semantically speaking, and no persistent memory) than you shouldn't attempt to hide that fact just to satisfy some arbitrary constraint.
- and does not maintain state between invocations;
- and is not "obviously" part of a group of similar functions;
...then it has no business being inside a class. The OO paradigm does not require that everything must be in a class. Instead it requires that related data and functions operating on that data are grouped together in a class. That does not exclude the possibility of functions that exist on their own, simply by virtue of not being related to anything.
Your idea with references is something I consider rather dangerous. If something has global scope (and since you are apparently passing the reference to _everything_ it effectively has global scope), you should formulate your program in a way that makes this clear. The correct way to do this is by creating a global variable. Not using a global variable means:
- you will create many, many aliases for your "almost global" variable. I consider aliasing a far greater evil in this case.
- you will need to pass that reference everywhere, and store it in every class. This is ugly, and costs time and memory for no good reason.
- you are hiding vital structural information about your program.
Really, it is important to realize that all those programming rules are _really_ just guidelines that happen to be true 999 out of every 1000 times. That last time, though - you must break the rule to create the "best" program.
Without Bill, we would all be using Macs, Amiga's, Atari's, and who knows what else. All of these are/were perfectly fine, highly useable machines. Not like the stinking pile of annoyance that is Windows...
The problem with all these bad things is that they are primarily caused by _the parent(s)_. You know, the same person(s) who want to install that chip? Children do not visit places where they get beaten up regularly, unless they absolutely have to (home, school). And your chip will not change that at all.
Growing up, in large part, is learning to be an adult. Adults have a certain amount of freedom. You cannot expect a kid to become a decent adult if he never gets to experience any of that freedom; instead you get the typical religious background, backwater village type of kid that immediately turn up pregnant and doing drugs the second they hit 18 or 21 or whatever the legal age is where you live. It must be a gradual process, and your chip takes that away. I certaimly wouldn't want to destroy my kids that way.
Face it: the chip is primarily there for _you_, for your comfort, not for your children. It is a selfish thing to do, and I can guarantee it will make your children lesser people once they grow up.
Personally I think you'd be a better parent if you teach your children about essential liberties. Not being continuously monitored by anyone (even you!) is one of those liberties, and the age where they will appreciate that is probably much sooner than you think.
That means you'll have to do your parenting the hard way. You know, like the countless generations before you did...
I haven't played Thief, so I cannot comment on that, but I disagree with your assessment of Hitman. It was an incredibly frustrating experience for many reasons, including:
- Getting stuck in doors. Yeah, like an assassin would find himself unable to operate a simple, unlocked door...
- Not being able to save. You play for an hour, make a tiny mistake, game over. Next step: repeat the previous hour exactly as before...
- Enforces illogical situations. In the restaurant mission you cannot kill your target with a gun, it can only be done with the poison. If you shoot him he just shrugs off the bullets. I've never actually been able to deliver the poison into his food; you only get to try after playing for about an hour and that's just not worth it.
- Guards with eyes in the backs of their heads. You break out the garotte, they shout "weapon, weapon" though you are clearly behind them.
- Getting stuck, period: in some missions you can do things that render the mission impossible for no obvious good reason. Talking to the guards in the restaurant before talking to the receptionist is a good example: the receptionist will never offer you the key through the door afterwards.
Maybe the next games in the series were better (I understand they actually solved the point about saving), but the first outing was a minor disaster.
The downside of the MGS approach is that you spend 90% of your playing time just looking at the radar, instead of the gorgeous backdrops. That kinda sucks.
And I've been playing Far Cry recently and I find that guards tend to notice you in situations where I could have sworn I was utterly invisible (like lying on my belly, behind a tree, in some bushes, in near total darkness). "There he is!" Arg, another hour of sneaking around gone to waste...
No, this is actually great! Now all those people using IE will still be subjected to ads, while we Mozilla users can make Mozilla return a valid value, but still suppress the window.
Instead of just complaining, would you care to name better environments? Specifically, for C++ development? And while you are at it, tell us _why_ they are better?
I'm happy at least somebody noticed. To learn sufficient arabic to make conversation takes years. What does the US needs arabic-speaking soldiers for in a couple of years?
This is not just a case of "being prepared just in case". It also sends a strong political signal that other arabic-speaking countries are on the list for invasion.
Don't you think that people who name their document document6.doc, won't bother to correctly set metadata tags as well? If you think about it, the filename is also just metadata. I know there are plenty of people out there who cannot be bothered to come up with a decent name, and they certainly won't be filling in topic, author, contents, etc. fields either.
Anyway, the grandparent has it exactly wrong: "normal" users who won't correctly name things and store them in a badly-thought out directory tree will not be using metadata. We power users on the other hand, can use it to make our own systems far more useful to us.
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As for this, You can bet there would be people who did nothing but monitor what went into the public domain and make money selling it for redistribution, sampling, etc.
So you are saying it would create a new industry? Isn't that great, instead of bad? Sure it isn't nice if your song scores a major hit while in PD, but it would most certainly cause you to try again with another song (which, presumably, you wouldn't put in PD anymore). And wasn't that the whole point of copyright?
Indeed, this new industry would serve like a talent hunting system. You get free publicity out of it, without having to sign a contract that limits your options for the next 30 years (like artists currently have to do).
All I see is advantages so far... In addition to this no large creator of any kind of media could afford to keep all their work in copyright.
If the fee exceeds the value of the work, it makes financial sense to put the work in public domain. If the work is not worth $100 for the first decade, or $200 for the next, or $400 for the one after, then let it go - why hang on to it? What would be the purpose, from a business point of view?
Actually I was more reminded of the Ring Wraiths riding out from Mordor: deadly, unstoppable, sinister, corrupting what they touch, and doing only their evil masters' will without regards for other living creatures...
As part of the registraton, a copy of the work is stored in some central vault. It will be available from that location the moment the copyright expires. This avoids "misunderstandings" of copyright law with DRM-technology not allowing anything to pass into public domain, even after copyright ends.
This mechanism allows reasonable copyright protection for those who desire it, for a period of their own choosing, but limited by the value of the product being copyrighted. Thus things of limited commercial value will quickly pass into public domain (keeping the public at large happy with a steady stream of crap movies, older books, ROMs, and what more) and things of great commercial value can be kept locked up somewhat longer (thus keeping big corporations like Disney happy). And as a steady source of revenue, it should appeal to the government as well.
As for Elvis, his heirs will have the choice: are his songs worth $3200 (each)? If so, it is once again time to pay.
If those "needs and desires" are simply to earn a decent living, that is fine with me. But quite a few of these corporations seem to desire ownership of the world and everyone in it.
People seem to think that the stated goal of "making money" excuses everything. Suppose I have a company making a vaccin against anthrax. Would it be ok for me to go around infecting people because that helps my bottom line? I'm guessing you would say "no", because it is against the law.
So, what if I then started throwing around my weight to change the law? You are saying this is acceptable, and if other people don't like it they should feel free to try and compete with my billions of dollars worth of lobbying capital.
While I admit this is how the world works, I will not accept the conclusion that this is therefore acceptable.
Anyway, I agree with one of the other posters: purely random levels just make the game meaningless. It is the same with soaps on TV (which I consider to be randomly generated for the purpose of this argument): I'd rather see a good, one-off story, then see the same elements repeated in different combinations again and again and again.
Of course, until that day comes, feel free to continue bashing them. I know I will ;-)
Presumably, once we have achieved all that we will finally be allowed to explore the heavens. Can your grandmother provide some sort of timescale? I'm asking, because I want to *see* that first man on Mars. Right now I think the chances of that are about fifty/fifty, but if she has her way I doubt there will ever be a generation that does.
Finally, look up how much money your country spends on defence, how much it spends on healthcare, and finally how much it spends on space exploration. I'm sure there will be readers who can provide these numbers, but I can already tell you that space exploration will be less than a percent of any of the other two.
This is a bogus argument: if you see a function call dereferenced from some object pointer, you still need to look up the object type, find its associated file, and then search that file for the function. You end up with exactly the same problem. Besides, who does this anymore? In a modern development environment you can just click on the function name and choose "go to definition" or "go to declaration".
I also have problems with this "common sense" that you speak about.
Well, if it is any consolation: you are certainly not alone in that.
It isn't spaghetti code if you're writing a self-contained application and have references to parent object in other objects.
No, indeed: that would be (the beginning of) spaghetti *data* (as in, a damn mess of pointers or references pointing to a thousand different things - or not, because whoever wrote the software liked making aliases for everything so you will never be sure what is going on exactly when you do something to an object...). That is just as bad as spaghetti code, but unfortunately software engineering courses have a tendency to overlook it as a source of problems. These days I think it is actually the great scourge.
If you work with Java or C#, keep the functions relevant to the functionality of each object
That was exactly what I was saying. Don't go about inventing classes just to hold functions that would otherwise be global. And don't just add them to the application class just because it happens to be there.
Perhaps it's just a misunderstanding of how to do OO programming that gives you this belief.
I will certainly admit that I will sometimes do things that are considered unorthodox. That doesn't mean I never follow any guidelines or best practices; on the contrary, I follow them for about 99.9% of the time. Just to make sure we understand each other: I have been working in C++ for over six years now (before that I wrote software in a variety of other, mostly non-OO languages). I've written over 200,000 lines of C++ code in those years (most of it on software for testing space craft, where bugs may translate into hundreds of millions of euros of damage), and whenever code reviews come up people comment on the elegance and simplicity of my solutions. Even though I sometimes use a global function or variable ;-)
As for your comment that "you know what classes contain things, you wrote them": I'm sure you realize that argument could be used to defend every piece of bad programming on the face of the planet.
"Yes, I know this is evil uncommented spagetti code, but I know what it does - I wrote it!"
But you are right, in a sense: if you are working alone and know everything your program is doing, you can certainly do as you please. It is only when you get out into the world and start programming together with other people (so you don't know what everything does, and you didn't write everything) that things like program clarity become an issue.
In the meantime, I continue to believe that software engineering educations fail very badly in that they teach people absolute rules, instead of installing some common sense. And common sense dictates that if something is a global function (and we recognize it because it has global scope, semantically speaking, and no persistent memory) than you shouldn't attempt to hide that fact just to satisfy some arbitrary constraint.
Of course, by complaining about that you have ruined the topic anyway...
- does not operate on any class;
- and does not maintain state between invocations;
- and is not "obviously" part of a group of similar functions;
Your idea with references is something I consider rather dangerous. If something has global scope (and since you are apparently passing the reference to _everything_ it effectively has global scope), you should formulate your program in a way that makes this clear. The correct way to do this is by creating a global variable. Not using a global variable means:
- you will create many, many aliases for your "almost global" variable. I consider aliasing a far greater evil in this case.
- you will need to pass that reference everywhere, and store it in every class. This is ugly, and costs time and memory for no good reason.
- you are hiding vital structural information about your program.
Really, it is important to realize that all those programming rules are _really_ just guidelines that happen to be true 999 out of every 1000 times. That last time, though - you must break the rule to create the "best" program.
In particular, cute single american women should feel free to contact me. Don't forget to include a picture!
Without Bill, we would all be using Macs, Amiga's, Atari's, and who knows what else. All of these are/were perfectly fine, highly useable machines. Not like the stinking pile of annoyance that is Windows...
Growing up, in large part, is learning to be an adult. Adults have a certain amount of freedom. You cannot expect a kid to become a decent adult if he never gets to experience any of that freedom; instead you get the typical religious background, backwater village type of kid that immediately turn up pregnant and doing drugs the second they hit 18 or 21 or whatever the legal age is where you live. It must be a gradual process, and your chip takes that away. I certaimly wouldn't want to destroy my kids that way.
Face it: the chip is primarily there for _you_, for your comfort, not for your children. It is a selfish thing to do, and I can guarantee it will make your children lesser people once they grow up.
That means you'll have to do your parenting the hard way. You know, like the countless generations before you did...
Online games cause early death?
- Getting stuck in doors. Yeah, like an assassin would find himself unable to operate a simple, unlocked door...
- Not being able to save. You play for an hour, make a tiny mistake, game over. Next step: repeat the previous hour exactly as before...
- Enforces illogical situations. In the restaurant mission you cannot kill your target with a gun, it can only be done with the poison. If you shoot him he just shrugs off the bullets. I've never actually been able to deliver the poison into his food; you only get to try after playing for about an hour and that's just not worth it.
- Guards with eyes in the backs of their heads. You break out the garotte, they shout "weapon, weapon" though you are clearly behind them.
- Getting stuck, period: in some missions you can do things that render the mission impossible for no obvious good reason. Talking to the guards in the restaurant before talking to the receptionist is a good example: the receptionist will never offer you the key through the door afterwards.
Maybe the next games in the series were better (I understand they actually solved the point about saving), but the first outing was a minor disaster.
Have you tried Far Cry? What did you think of it?
If you do go ahead, be sure to pick a site with lots of man-sized ventilation shafts. They are a tremendous help in this kind of situation.
And I've been playing Far Cry recently and I find that guards tend to notice you in situations where I could have sworn I was utterly invisible (like lying on my belly, behind a tree, in some bushes, in near total darkness). "There he is!" Arg, another hour of sneaking around gone to waste...
No, this is actually great! Now all those people using IE will still be subjected to ads, while we Mozilla users can make Mozilla return a valid value, but still suppress the window.
Instead of just complaining, would you care to name better environments? Specifically, for C++ development? And while you are at it, tell us _why_ they are better?
This is not just a case of "being prepared just in case". It also sends a strong political signal that other arabic-speaking countries are on the list for invasion.
Anyway, the grandparent has it exactly wrong: "normal" users who won't correctly name things and store them in a badly-thought out directory tree will not be using metadata. We power users on the other hand, can use it to make our own systems far more useful to us.