Oh, so it isn't an exact copy of the work in question. Then how is it a copyright violation?
My new book, called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, uses a different typeface from the Bloomsbury editions, so it isn't an exact copy of the work in question. Not a copyright violation, then, right...?
Me? I could live with the long copyrights if we also had big social safety nets and Basic Income (google the phrase if you don't recognize it). A lot of great stuff comes out of Canada and Europe because their socialized health care gives people the freedom to take risks you can't do in the states...
That's kind of back to front. Long copyright means higher potential reward, but any gambler will tell you that this makes it a risky bet. If you lower the risk (basic income) then you should naturally lower the reward, because you've shortened the odds.
Just look at any of the minor channels on your TV, and you'll see a looooooooooot of repeats. I'd guess that half of what I've watched in the last month is over 5 years old. A lot of still-in-production things have been going that long. There's a hierarchy of channels: new programme channels; up to 5 channels; up to 15; up to 30; over 30 and stuff you've never heard of. Stop that long-tail, and you rewrite the whole funding of TV.
Agreed, mostly. With books, we have legal "deposit libraries" so that every published work is preserved for posterity, but due to the intellectual snobbery of libraries, coupled with the fragility of early recording media, computer code, TV etc was never brought under the same control. It would be great to campaign for the same sort of thing for source code, but given all the recent revelations about the NSA et al, who would ever trust a government to protect their code...?
Flow is a very different paradigm from FP. Technical features of FP such as tail recursion are not a specific part of flow programming, because while functional programming is intended to apply at every level of code, whereas flow programming is simply modular coding taken to an extreme.
In fact, while functional programming is a form of classic declarative programming, flow is essentially an attempt to implement something approaching semantic programming within the declarative paradigm. It's an attempt to define programs in terms that business process writers would understand. It's not functional programming.
Besides, functional programming would make even 3D games far less buggy. No, you can't write a 3D game in purely functional terms, but there is a hell of a lot of code in there that does matrix transforms and is inherently deterministic and context-independent. Personally, I would like to see the FP paradigm accepted as a subsystem of procedural programming, where you can nest procedures within procedures, but once you enter a function, there's no way you can call a procedure from inside. This would guarantee stateless subparts of the code, reducing the number of lines of code to check while tracking down an intermittent bug. I wouldn't say it needs to be pure FP, because you're always going to have to have some kind of environment variables, and some people will abuse them as global variables, but hey-ho...
This is quite typical for kickstarter. "Maybe we'll do Linux, you know, if the Windows users give us a lot of money." It's awkward.
But honest.
But is it honest really? Personally, I wouldn't want to put any "maybes" in a call for funding. Offer what you can and will do, not what you could or might.
Contributing to reach the main project goal is fine -- if it doesn't get reached, I get my money back. But there's something fundamentally dishonest about the stretch goals, because you're then trying to get people to put more money in with no opportunity to get the money back if the goal's not reached.
Linux support is included in many projects as a stretch goal. They expect the Linux users to pony up for the Windows version even if the Linux version isn't funded. That's wrong, in my book.
I would love to see secondary conditions in Kickstarter projects. Stretch goals that I'd like to see implemented as secondary conditions are things like:
Support for whichever specific OS (as an Android user, I thought that putting Android support as a stretch goal on an iOS KS project was just stupid)
Translations (what's the point of contributing to a dialogue-heavy adventure game if it's never going to be available in your language?)
Hardware sizes (I've seen things like "big screen version" as a stretchgoal. If I only want the big-screen version, I'm not contributing to the small-screen base goal.)
First, gas turbines are for natural gas, not gasoline.
Bzzt. The gas in a gas turbine is the moving medium, not the fuel. You can burn solid, liquid or gaseous fuel to power a gas turbine, same as a steam turbine. There's presumably a reason why all industrial-scale gas turbine generation uses gaseous fuel, but I'm not sure what it is.
Yes, however I think the people selling such technologies designed it for immediate term benefit to the recipients: reduced costs, improved air quality in the home etc. The real indictment here is that you can't sell the idea to rich backers in the west on the grounds that it will improve poor people's lives, and have to instead manipulate people's desire to "do something" about human pollution without doing the damndest thing about their own overconsumption.
The problem is, the rich always like to kid ourselves on that the poor people are the problem. We're "clean", they're "dirty", so we like to hear about ways they can make themselves "cleaner".
Ironic then that our daily shower in electrically-heated water is pretty dirty in ecological terms.
Cars on the other hand are hugely inefficient, you have a fuel stock that's being used primary to generate waste heat with very little kinetic energy output (as a percentage of stored chemical energy in the gasoline). If we switched all our cars to electric and used the gasoline to generate electricity we would need about half as much.
{{Citation needed}}.
As far as I've been told, chemical batteries are massively inefficient and generate heat in use, particularly during the recharge cycle. Then there's transmission losses within the electricity grid. Unless you use microgeneration, but that introduces new inefficiencies in terms of spin-up and spin-down cycles. The spin-up/down is less of an issue in gas turbines, but the overall efficiency of a gas turbine is lower than that of a traditional steam turbine, which is why steam turbines still dominate, and gas turbines are restricted to cycling for large fluctuations in demand. Chemical batteries are also very heavy, and don't lose weight as they empty.
And if batteries were more efficient than local burning, why is there such a thing as a diesel-electric submarine, rather than them being fully electric? The battery is only used for stealth mode.
Nuclear:
Requires a 8X5 meter pool of water to store the used fuel for a few years.
Coal / biomass / ethanol:
Belches millions of pounds of noxious fumes into the air.
A hard choice?
That's assuming you do it right.
Chernobyl irradiated half of Europe, and generation after generation will suffer higher incidence of birth defects and cancer because of it. Fukushima has proven that we didn't learn our lesson. Even if the doomsayers are wrong about the material leaking out into the Pacific, that would mean they're only wrong this time.
I'm not afraid of nuclear power -- I'm afraid of middle managers and accountants.
Typical response to someone who is incapable of supporting their argument with facts and so must resort to the default position of argument ad hominem.
And, considering that the area would be semi-desert without water being brought in from hundreds of miles away, those trees couldn't survive without human intervention.
Ah, so pumping millions of gallons of water out of rapidly diminishing aquifers is now good for the environment, is it?
It's messy and artibitrary. Why the WuTang controller and no CharacteriSticks? Both are novelty shapes that did nothing to advance the state of the art. Why no mention of the Konix SpeedKing, the first home computer stick that I'm aware of to face the reality of living room gaming, and get rid of the sit-on-computer-desk design (although the later Cheetah bug was much better)? And then there's huge gaps in the heredity, implying the joystick was invented independently several times.
That annoyed me about the article too. Nintendo didn't invent force-feedback, PC stick makers did. The "rumble pak" isn't even force feedback, just rumble. Rubbishy article.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so it isn't an exact copy of the work in question. Then how is it a copyright violation?
My new book, called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, uses a different typeface from the Bloomsbury editions, so it isn't an exact copy of the work in question. Not a copyright violation, then, right...?
That doesn't make it innovative -- it makes it a good final project for an ambitious undergrad.
Me? I could live with the long copyrights if we also had big social safety nets and Basic Income (google the phrase if you don't recognize it). A lot of great stuff comes out of Canada and Europe because their socialized health care gives people the freedom to take risks you can't do in the states...
That's kind of back to front. Long copyright means higher potential reward, but any gambler will tell you that this makes it a risky bet. If you lower the risk (basic income) then you should naturally lower the reward, because you've shortened the odds.
And Mario and Luigi the Italian plumbers was any better...?
Just look at any of the minor channels on your TV, and you'll see a looooooooooot of repeats. I'd guess that half of what I've watched in the last month is over 5 years old. A lot of still-in-production things have been going that long. There's a hierarchy of channels: new programme channels; up to 5 channels; up to 15; up to 30; over 30 and stuff you've never heard of. Stop that long-tail, and you rewrite the whole funding of TV.
Agreed, mostly. With books, we have legal "deposit libraries" so that every published work is preserved for posterity, but due to the intellectual snobbery of libraries, coupled with the fragility of early recording media, computer code, TV etc was never brought under the same control. It would be great to campaign for the same sort of thing for source code, but given all the recent revelations about the NSA et al, who would ever trust a government to protect their code...?
Yeah, giving something away for free doesn't effect sales at all. Not at all. No.
Dagnabbit. I meant "imperative programming", not "declarative". Oops.
Flow is a very different paradigm from FP. Technical features of FP such as tail recursion are not a specific part of flow programming, because while functional programming is intended to apply at every level of code, whereas flow programming is simply modular coding taken to an extreme.
In fact, while functional programming is a form of classic declarative programming, flow is essentially an attempt to implement something approaching semantic programming within the declarative paradigm. It's an attempt to define programs in terms that business process writers would understand. It's not functional programming.
Besides, functional programming would make even 3D games far less buggy. No, you can't write a 3D game in purely functional terms, but there is a hell of a lot of code in there that does matrix transforms and is inherently deterministic and context-independent. Personally, I would like to see the FP paradigm accepted as a subsystem of procedural programming, where you can nest procedures within procedures, but once you enter a function, there's no way you can call a procedure from inside. This would guarantee stateless subparts of the code, reducing the number of lines of code to check while tracking down an intermittent bug. I wouldn't say it needs to be pure FP, because you're always going to have to have some kind of environment variables, and some people will abuse them as global variables, but hey-ho...
This is quite typical for kickstarter. "Maybe we'll do Linux, you know, if the Windows users give us a lot of money." It's awkward.
But honest.
But is it honest really? Personally, I wouldn't want to put any "maybes" in a call for funding. Offer what you can and will do, not what you could or might.
Contributing to reach the main project goal is fine -- if it doesn't get reached, I get my money back. But there's something fundamentally dishonest about the stretch goals, because you're then trying to get people to put more money in with no opportunity to get the money back if the goal's not reached.
Linux support is included in many projects as a stretch goal. They expect the Linux users to pony up for the Windows version even if the Linux version isn't funded. That's wrong, in my book.
I would love to see secondary conditions in Kickstarter projects. Stretch goals that I'd like to see implemented as secondary conditions are things like:
...and you've got and not only changed topic but also changed speaker within a parenthetical. Everyone's even now.
wine does it on the fly sort of...
...then crashes complaining of an unimplemented library and a segmentation fault.
Defrag.
It's like "Centipede" on geological time.
I LOVE that game! Click once, and eventually, you always end up winning!
Always end up winning? Not really. Sometimes I get the "bad ending" telling me I haven't got enough disk space to complete the game....
It's OK, a three hundred million year old lottery ticket would be a forgery anyway, so nothing was lost.
Yes, but needles and transcontinental haystacks come to mind here....
First, gas turbines are for natural gas, not gasoline.
Bzzt. The gas in a gas turbine is the moving medium, not the fuel. You can burn solid, liquid or gaseous fuel to power a gas turbine, same as a steam turbine. There's presumably a reason why all industrial-scale gas turbine generation uses gaseous fuel, but I'm not sure what it is.
Don't forget hot showers. The carbon footprint of manufacturing solar hot water panels is even too high.
Is it the second hand central heating radiator that's the problem, or the black paint?
Yes, however I think the people selling such technologies designed it for immediate term benefit to the recipients: reduced costs, improved air quality in the home etc. The real indictment here is that you can't sell the idea to rich backers in the west on the grounds that it will improve poor people's lives, and have to instead manipulate people's desire to "do something" about human pollution without doing the damndest thing about their own overconsumption.
The problem is, the rich always like to kid ourselves on that the poor people are the problem. We're "clean", they're "dirty", so we like to hear about ways they can make themselves "cleaner".
Ironic then that our daily shower in electrically-heated water is pretty dirty in ecological terms.
Cars on the other hand are hugely inefficient, you have a fuel stock that's being used primary to generate waste heat with very little kinetic energy output (as a percentage of stored chemical energy in the gasoline). If we switched all our cars to electric and used the gasoline to generate electricity we would need about half as much.
{{Citation needed}}.
As far as I've been told, chemical batteries are massively inefficient and generate heat in use, particularly during the recharge cycle. Then there's transmission losses within the electricity grid. Unless you use microgeneration, but that introduces new inefficiencies in terms of spin-up and spin-down cycles. The spin-up/down is less of an issue in gas turbines, but the overall efficiency of a gas turbine is lower than that of a traditional steam turbine, which is why steam turbines still dominate, and gas turbines are restricted to cycling for large fluctuations in demand. Chemical batteries are also very heavy, and don't lose weight as they empty.
And if batteries were more efficient than local burning, why is there such a thing as a diesel-electric submarine, rather than them being fully electric? The battery is only used for stealth mode.
Nuclear: Requires a 8X5 meter pool of water to store the used fuel for a few years.
Coal / biomass / ethanol: Belches millions of pounds of noxious fumes into the air.
A hard choice?
That's assuming you do it right.
Chernobyl irradiated half of Europe, and generation after generation will suffer higher incidence of birth defects and cancer because of it. Fukushima has proven that we didn't learn our lesson. Even if the doomsayers are wrong about the material leaking out into the Pacific, that would mean they're only wrong this time.
I'm not afraid of nuclear power -- I'm afraid of middle managers and accountants.
Typical response to someone who is incapable of supporting their argument with facts and so must resort to the default position of argument ad hominem.
FTFY.
And, considering that the area would be semi-desert without water being brought in from hundreds of miles away, those trees couldn't survive without human intervention.
Ah, so pumping millions of gallons of water out of rapidly diminishing aquifers is now good for the environment, is it?
It's messy and artibitrary. Why the WuTang controller and no CharacteriSticks? Both are novelty shapes that did nothing to advance the state of the art. Why no mention of the Konix SpeedKing, the first home computer stick that I'm aware of to face the reality of living room gaming, and get rid of the sit-on-computer-desk design (although the later Cheetah bug was much better)? And then there's huge gaps in the heredity, implying the joystick was invented independently several times.
That annoyed me about the article too. Nintendo didn't invent force-feedback, PC stick makers did. The "rumble pak" isn't even force feedback, just rumble. Rubbishy article.