You're obviously not a web developer. I would love it if instead of IE, windows computers came bundled with Opera or Firefox. That would be the best thing ever! Though IE is a browser you can always bet a PC user will have on-hand, it is NOT a standard browser in the real sense of the word, and the need to know it's always available is only there because a lot of web developers are jackasses who don't bother testing in a real browser before deploying. I have to test on IE6, IE7, Safari, and Firefox all the time. Do you have any idea how freaking annoying it is when a web site I'm working on looks flawless in Safari, beautiful in Firefox, and like a steaming pile of shit in IE?
The existence of this "standard" browser you're so enamored with easily increases the length of time I have to work on any project by 15% minimum, and I pass the savings onto my clientele. That's real, actual money out there that is wasted because of IE, and I'm not the only one who feels that way.
So no. It would not be laughably stupid to remove IE, since IE shouldn't be tied so closely to the operating system to begin with.
It's not always necessary to judge if a given solution is the solution, because often determining the optimality of a solution is tantamount to computing that solution analytically (i.e., not using genetic or EC techniques). For genetic algorithms it's only really necessary to determine the relative optimality of two solutions so that you can compare them and pick the best ones of the group quickly.
That's always annoyed me so much! "Page cannot be displayed" is a lot less informative than an http error number. It displays the same thing, practically, for a 404 error as when your internet connection is down. Presumably Amazon's dealie will be more useful? I dunno the patent just seems to be for a pretty useless service.
This is why disbarment would probably be the best course of action. Fines are not an effective deterrent for these guys because, like you said, they have way too much money for that, and like someone else pointed out earlier they could just pass the fines along to their clients. Disbarment is the ultimate penalty for a lawyer, and seriously hurts them as they are no longer able to make any money because it is illegal at that point for them to be practicing law in whichever state disbars them.
So, is it more of a cost-cutting measure or is it because they know it's easier to slip one faulty lawsuit past the courts than trying to slip 27 past?
Also let me just say how great it is to find a lawyer who's so concerned with preserving the sanity of the law as it is written rather than allowing it to be pilfered senselessly by his contemporaries. Keep up the good work, NewYorkCountryLawyer!
This is largely a consequence of how greed has permeated the recording industry. Real musicians do what they do because they love it, but notice I didn't say "music" industry. The real money here is in the distribution of work, and musicians get compensated a very very small portion of that. What musicians really seem to feel they're owed is a lifestyle that could only have existed during the heyday of the recording industry. During that time entertainers were paid an absurd amount, and recording execs paid an even more absurd amount, and this was artificially high. It's just not possible anymore. They need to just give up.
Sorry for the incoherence . . . feelin' pretty scatterbrained today.
but the numbers have shown us this time and time again.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that, in my own personal experience, so-called "illegal" file sharing has opened my ears to a great deal of music that I wouldn't have purchased (legally, I might add) otherwise. I can point to at least three bands I've discovered in the past few months and purchased at least an album (in one case two), or gone to a show (in one case both). It's just that going over to a friend's house and listening to their records has now been superseded by passing mp3s around via the internet.
But really . . . I wasn't aware that my experience was commonplace enough for numbers to back it up. Do you have any you could point us all to? 'Cause that'd be pretty neat.
What you're really talking about here is the difference between the Turing machine model of computation and the Lambda Calculus model, and you're absolutely right. Even though the two are provably equivalent (try expressing one of your Haskell programs as a while loop with a stack; it works but it sucks having to write it!), the very mentality that you use when programming in a language like Haskell is so totally radically different from how you program in C that it's useless comparing the two.
In college I did a lot of work in cryptography and artificial intelligence. These are tasks for which functional programming is particularly well suited. I remember the day that I learned what the functional folding did. It was like that moment you're talking about, when suddenly I realized that summing all the values in a list didn't require its own function and it was just one succinct statement. Suddenly the evaluation of a perceptron network became a functional fold nested in a functional map, and my AI code shrank from hundreds of lines to dozens, but was still perfectly readable.
People can say that languages are universal . . . but that's really not the full story is it? The fibonacci sequence, for instance. I'd express it like this in Haskell:
let fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)
How do you explain that line of code to someone who's only ever seen C? And yet it'll compute the 1000th fibonacci number almost instantly on my computer. The infinite list idiom can only exist in a lazy-evaluative language, and that's a concept that doesn't even translate well to other functional languages like ML (unless you cheat and use ML's lazy module, which I've never really figured out).
One of the greatest things that I learned in college was that languages are not universal. The people who say they are obviously talking about Java vs. C vs. C# et cetera. Going from imperative to semi-OO like C to C++, you're not really switching entire paradigms. Going from imperative to, say, pure OO (see also: Ruby, Smalltalk), or going from imperative to pure functional (see also: lisp, ML, Haskell, Prolog), is quite a mindfsck.
Anyways I'm glad to hear that it's not just me here who loves the functional languages. Have you decided to do anything cool with it yet?
That's not really what I'm saying. You're already given the fact that kids are posting god knows what online, whether parents moderate it or not (and I agree with you: they should). Given that, whatever it is they've got up there be it really sleazy or not needs to be kept away from pedophiles and other shady characters anyway. The point I was making is that there are far too many users, far too many photos, for all of them to be looked over before they're made public. There's a reason profiles of children under the age of 16 are made private, anyway, and it's mostly to absolve Myspace of liability. I'm saying that they have failed even at this.
Look where you're posting. I don't think there's anyone here who's arguing that it's the government's job to raise people's children. The government's job is to protect the common good, which includes keeping children safe from predators.
Well what if you had, say, photos from a party that were okay for your friends to see but might have unintended consequences if your boss saw them, or a prospective employer did? Do you want your drinking photos to be visible to people who've never even met you before? Yet to you and your friends they're significant and acceptable for online posting.
Really? I think it just shows that MySpace is not (nor is it intended to be) a high security repository.
With underage kids able to post whatever photos they want without moderation, it needs to be, though. If myspace can't hold their shit together with this then they're going to either have to start moderating photos somehow, start verifying ages somehow, or not allow youngin's to join at all. I doubt any of those is particularly palatable with them, but really this is just a consequence of appealing to the super-young crowd anyway. It's become a haven for all manner of shadiness.
This is a pretty important distinction that I feel is lost among a great majority of slashdot users, unfortunately. And maybe I'm inviting flamewar upon myself by saying this, but here it is.
If you have to trudge down into the depths of the registry, some ini file, or swap out a DLL to fix something, that does not mean you can write it off as trivial. I've mentioned this before. If your fix requires deep knowledge of the OS to fix something that ought to work to begin with, it's not fixed. You've found a workaround that an extreme minority of users (and, at least for Windows, I am not one of them) can execute successfully.
The worst for me is that after turning UAC off, it shows that little shield icon in my taskbar to tell me that UAC is turned off, as if this is some huge security breach. I turned it off for a reason! It was annoying me constantly and I just got tired of it. This is right up there with the thing that tells you there are unused icons on your desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
You're obviously not a web developer. I would love it if instead of IE, windows computers came bundled with Opera or Firefox. That would be the best thing ever! Though IE is a browser you can always bet a PC user will have on-hand, it is NOT a standard browser in the real sense of the word, and the need to know it's always available is only there because a lot of web developers are jackasses who don't bother testing in a real browser before deploying. I have to test on IE6, IE7, Safari, and Firefox all the time. Do you have any idea how freaking annoying it is when a web site I'm working on looks flawless in Safari, beautiful in Firefox, and like a steaming pile of shit in IE?
The existence of this "standard" browser you're so enamored with easily increases the length of time I have to work on any project by 15% minimum, and I pass the savings onto my clientele. That's real, actual money out there that is wasted because of IE, and I'm not the only one who feels that way.
So no. It would not be laughably stupid to remove IE, since IE shouldn't be tied so closely to the operating system to begin with.
It's not always necessary to judge if a given solution is the solution, because often determining the optimality of a solution is tantamount to computing that solution analytically (i.e., not using genetic or EC techniques). For genetic algorithms it's only really necessary to determine the relative optimality of two solutions so that you can compare them and pick the best ones of the group quickly.
That's always annoyed me so much! "Page cannot be displayed" is a lot less informative than an http error number. It displays the same thing, practically, for a 404 error as when your internet connection is down. Presumably Amazon's dealie will be more useful? I dunno the patent just seems to be for a pretty useless service.
This is why disbarment would probably be the best course of action. Fines are not an effective deterrent for these guys because, like you said, they have way too much money for that, and like someone else pointed out earlier they could just pass the fines along to their clients. Disbarment is the ultimate penalty for a lawyer, and seriously hurts them as they are no longer able to make any money because it is illegal at that point for them to be practicing law in whichever state disbars them.
So, is it more of a cost-cutting measure or is it because they know it's easier to slip one faulty lawsuit past the courts than trying to slip 27 past?
Also let me just say how great it is to find a lawyer who's so concerned with preserving the sanity of the law as it is written rather than allowing it to be pilfered senselessly by his contemporaries. Keep up the good work, NewYorkCountryLawyer!
This is largely a consequence of how greed has permeated the recording industry. Real musicians do what they do because they love it, but notice I didn't say "music" industry. The real money here is in the distribution of work, and musicians get compensated a very very small portion of that. What musicians really seem to feel they're owed is a lifestyle that could only have existed during the heyday of the recording industry. During that time entertainers were paid an absurd amount, and recording execs paid an even more absurd amount, and this was artificially high. It's just not possible anymore. They need to just give up.
Sorry for the incoherence . . . feelin' pretty scatterbrained today.
I'm colourblind, you insensitive clod!!!
Mr. Spoonman, I would like to buy your rock....
Also, Ender's Game
There's an excellent analysis on wikipedia, including a pretty good breakdown of the chronology leading up to and after the meltdown.
Ever been to Centralia?
You win again, gravity!
Soviet Russia?
I agree with you wholeheartedly that, in my own personal experience, so-called "illegal" file sharing has opened my ears to a great deal of music that I wouldn't have purchased (legally, I might add) otherwise. I can point to at least three bands I've discovered in the past few months and purchased at least an album (in one case two), or gone to a show (in one case both). It's just that going over to a friend's house and listening to their records has now been superseded by passing mp3s around via the internet.
But really . . . I wasn't aware that my experience was commonplace enough for numbers to back it up. Do you have any you could point us all to? 'Cause that'd be pretty neat.
I'm way more scared of the skincare daleks?
What you're really talking about here is the difference between the Turing machine model of computation and the Lambda Calculus model, and you're absolutely right. Even though the two are provably equivalent (try expressing one of your Haskell programs as a while loop with a stack; it works but it sucks having to write it!), the very mentality that you use when programming in a language like Haskell is so totally radically different from how you program in C that it's useless comparing the two.
In college I did a lot of work in cryptography and artificial intelligence. These are tasks for which functional programming is particularly well suited. I remember the day that I learned what the functional folding did. It was like that moment you're talking about, when suddenly I realized that summing all the values in a list didn't require its own function and it was just one succinct statement. Suddenly the evaluation of a perceptron network became a functional fold nested in a functional map, and my AI code shrank from hundreds of lines to dozens, but was still perfectly readable.
People can say that languages are universal . . . but that's really not the full story is it? The fibonacci sequence, for instance. I'd express it like this in Haskell:
How do you explain that line of code to someone who's only ever seen C? And yet it'll compute the 1000th fibonacci number almost instantly on my computer. The infinite list idiom can only exist in a lazy-evaluative language, and that's a concept that doesn't even translate well to other functional languages like ML (unless you cheat and use ML's lazy module, which I've never really figured out).
One of the greatest things that I learned in college was that languages are not universal. The people who say they are obviously talking about Java vs. C vs. C# et cetera. Going from imperative to semi-OO like C to C++, you're not really switching entire paradigms. Going from imperative to, say, pure OO (see also: Ruby, Smalltalk), or going from imperative to pure functional (see also: lisp, ML, Haskell, Prolog), is quite a mindfsck.
Anyways I'm glad to hear that it's not just me here who loves the functional languages. Have you decided to do anything cool with it yet?
That's not really what I'm saying. You're already given the fact that kids are posting god knows what online, whether parents moderate it or not (and I agree with you: they should). Given that, whatever it is they've got up there be it really sleazy or not needs to be kept away from pedophiles and other shady characters anyway. The point I was making is that there are far too many users, far too many photos, for all of them to be looked over before they're made public. There's a reason profiles of children under the age of 16 are made private, anyway, and it's mostly to absolve Myspace of liability. I'm saying that they have failed even at this.
Look where you're posting. I don't think there's anyone here who's arguing that it's the government's job to raise people's children. The government's job is to protect the common good, which includes keeping children safe from predators.
Well what if you had, say, photos from a party that were okay for your friends to see but might have unintended consequences if your boss saw them, or a prospective employer did? Do you want your drinking photos to be visible to people who've never even met you before? Yet to you and your friends they're significant and acceptable for online posting.
OMG you just gave me a great idea! *goes and posts something on pirate bay*
With underage kids able to post whatever photos they want without moderation, it needs to be, though. If myspace can't hold their shit together with this then they're going to either have to start moderating photos somehow, start verifying ages somehow, or not allow youngin's to join at all. I doubt any of those is particularly palatable with them, but really this is just a consequence of appealing to the super-young crowd anyway. It's become a haven for all manner of shadiness.
While you're all telnetting to port 80 to read slashdot, this dude's posting comments via carrier pigeon!
*ducks*
This is a pretty important distinction that I feel is lost among a great majority of slashdot users, unfortunately. And maybe I'm inviting flamewar upon myself by saying this, but here it is.
If you have to trudge down into the depths of the registry, some ini file, or swap out a DLL to fix something, that does not mean you can write it off as trivial. I've mentioned this before. If your fix requires deep knowledge of the OS to fix something that ought to work to begin with, it's not fixed. You've found a workaround that an extreme minority of users (and, at least for Windows, I am not one of them) can execute successfully.
The worst for me is that after turning UAC off, it shows that little shield icon in my taskbar to tell me that UAC is turned off, as if this is some huge security breach. I turned it off for a reason! It was annoying me constantly and I just got tired of it. This is right up there with the thing that tells you there are unused icons on your desktop.
Slashdot was my last refuge from The Game! Now I'm gonna lose all the damn time because of you jokers!! Thanks.
...with blackjack? And hookers? Dude forget about the network!