I'd like to point out some other benefits of paper you seem to have missed. You can copy it, you can lend it to your friend, anyone can write on it, anyone can read it, and nobody can change or destroy what's written on other people's paper. These attributes exist for digital media now, but the same cable, telecom, internet, hardware, and software companies that are creating our entertainment nerve centers of the future are trying their hardest to remove these benefits.
Copies of 1984 being revoked is just the beginning - keep in mind that if DRM really takes off, 1984 can actually happen! Seriously - remember how they changed news articles and burned all the old copies? That's logistically difficult in meatspace, but simple with DRM.
DRM may not exclude any particular piece of hardware implicitly, but because it does ultimately depend on security by obscurity, it does exclude an entirely open-soure stack. That might become possible with hardware support, but then you've just traded obfuscated software for obfuscated hardware.
Yes - I for one can't wait until a future where vast tracts of our literary heritage are wiped out by some company's stupid IT department losing a key or going out of business. Or until you can't use a general-purpose computer to use material from the library.
If you actually read what he said, he was using nuking Baghdad as an exaggerated example of a weapon that is not viable for use against that (or really, any) target, not suggesting we do it.
By monitoring the actions of the young, say ages 5 to 12, I am sure an algorithm can be made that can predict with 95%+ certainty which people will end up commiting violent crimes. Society could protect itself by locking these people up before the violence.
Please for the love of god tell me you're not serious.
What of creative freedom for the game designers? When you design a game, you (ought to) have the freedom to decide how morals and ethics, if any, work in the game, and how, if at all, they will be enforced. Many games will rely more on in-game emergent punishments (ie, bad players punished by other players), and some will rely on enforcement from above - by banning players, etc. But this is something each game designer, not any government, should decide. If I design a virtual world in which it's illegal not to make a good-faith effort to kill your neighbor, steal his stuff, and covet his wife, and I kick any goodie-two-shoes players I see, I should be free to do that, and players should be free to play the game, without any government arresting either of us.
When you're an asshole in the real world, the consequences, if real society decides there should be consequences, occur in the real world. When you're an asshole in a virtual world, the consequences, if the virtual society (designers, players) decides there should be consequences, occur in the virtual world. Simple as that.
What you're neglecting to realize is that there are essentially two nested worlds. When you do unethical things in meatspace, and these things are called "illegal" by a government of the people, then society ensures that negative meatspace consequences ensue, to discourage illegal actions. For example, when you murder people, we put you in jail.
When you perform unethical actions in a game, and these things are considered bad by the people controlling and playing the game, negateve in-game consequences can ensue, to discourage such actions For example, in L2, when you PK, your karma goes negative and you turn red. (Until your karma goes to -INT_MAX, at which point it wraps to INT_MAX, until they fixed that.) Thus, other players are warned, and as a result of the coded rules of the game, they can PK you without consequence. And if you run a bot, you are in violation of the terms of service, which specify a remedy - you are kicked from the game.
When you sign up for a game, you are agreeing, implicity and also probably explicitly in the terms of service, that you will sometiese virtually 'possess' virtual objects, which you might be able to buy and sell on eBay, but that at any time, you can be PK'd, there can be a server error, the admins can decide they don't like you - and your 'possessions' will fall to someone else or disappear, and there's nothing you can do about it. You agreed to this. There's no reason for meatspace governments to start protecting people who have made this kind of agreement from the possible consequences of such an agreement.
There is a difference - who gives the value to the virtual objects. In gambling, either online or in meatspace, there is a house that has a pretty clear obligation to give you a fixed amount of money for a given number of chips. What you are playing for essentially is money, nothing less. In most online games, this is not the case - the real-monetary value in the objects comes from third parties, entirely independantly of the server operators, and often even in violation of their policies. Allowing obsessed third parties paying for virtual objects to turn something into gambling is a dangerous precedent. Is online checkers gambling? What if some nutter pays me for captured pieces?
Well, having one button would be a good idea, but the phone should be perfectly capable of knowing whether it's just called 911, and only transmit its location when it has.
It isn't too difficult for Google to fight the lock-in people have on other IM networks, because they already have significant share in the web email market. Google just needs to set it up so that your GMail username is the same as your GMessenger account. Then, they either need their own client or, better yet, add support to third party IM software (GAIM for example). If the next version of your IM client had GMessenger support, all you'd have to do would be to enter your name and password into the client. To build the network even faster, Google could integrate this with your GMail contacts list. When people see that one of their contacts has logged on, they might start IMing with them.
It would be difficult for a car to be so inefficient or polluting that it would be cheaper or better for the environment to throw it out and buy a newly-built one.
Like you say, some users want 2 spaces, some like 4, some like 8, and 3 is also common. But if you just use tabs, everyone can set their editors to display code according to their preference, and it just works. It's like CSS - it seperates content ("the code is indented x levels") from presentation ("it's displayed y chars from the right"). And every editor I've ever seen can be coaxed to output tabs, and display them as an arbitrary indentation.
If you have to break lines, then on the second line, put as many tabs as the first line has, then spaces until it lines up how you want - this way, when other people view it on editors that indent a different number of spaces, everything still lines up.
I do prefer most languages' approach of basically ignoring whitespace and relying on punctuation. But if you're going to use whitespace, you may as well do it right.
Maybe it's time some large company does launch a patent missile. Frankly I'd prefer a patent winter to what we have now. All the fallout might convince Joe Public to oppose software patents.
See, the thing is, Mutually Assured Destruction is a very non-optimial solution. It has worked in the nuclear arms race, (provided only sane governments get the bomb, a big if), but much better would be simply not having nuclear weapons. It's not possible to get all countries to stop building nukes, forget how, and destroy the ones they have. It is, however, possible to put an end to software patents. (Or in the short term, to keep them from proliferating.)
See, the big problem with that is that we really don't want to turn the IT industry into the medical industry, where some huge fraction of your wages has to go to malpractice or patent infringement insurance, and where innovation is difficult because of the legal risks involved.
It's interesting to me that what you describe is similar to something that is present in, at least, Qt, GTK, WxWindows(or whatever it's called now) and MFC - a signal-slot system. They let you connect events from widgets (button clicks, slider movements, etc) with either other widgets or slot/event handlers in code. Maybe that's not as encompassing as what you're suggesting, but it's a start. Maybe we need a multi-platform toolkit-independant thread/process/network transparent system for doing this.
A good argument against starting with Java? Simple - references are obvious if you understand pointers, but pointers aren't obvious if you understand references. And eventually you'll need to learn about pointers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to point out some other benefits of paper you seem to have missed. You can copy it, you can lend it to your friend, anyone can write on it, anyone can read it, and nobody can change or destroy what's written on other people's paper. These attributes exist for digital media now, but the same cable, telecom, internet, hardware, and software companies that are creating our entertainment nerve centers of the future are trying their hardest to remove these benefits.
Copies of 1984 being revoked is just the beginning - keep in mind that if DRM really takes off, 1984 can actually happen! Seriously - remember how they changed news articles and burned all the old copies? That's logistically difficult in meatspace, but simple with DRM.
DRM may not exclude any particular piece of hardware implicitly, but because it does ultimately depend on security by obscurity, it does exclude an entirely open-soure stack. That might become possible with hardware support, but then you've just traded obfuscated software for obfuscated hardware.
Yes - I for one can't wait until a future where vast tracts of our literary heritage are wiped out by some company's stupid IT department losing a key or going out of business. Or until you can't use a general-purpose computer to use material from the library.
If you actually read what he said, he was using nuking Baghdad as an exaggerated example of a weapon that is not viable for use against that (or really, any) target, not suggesting we do it.
Care to tell us what retarded store that was?
I would argue that no player has a "reasonable expectation to retain" posession of any virtual object in an online game. Read the terms of service.
Please for the love of god tell me you're not serious.
What of creative freedom for the game designers? When you design a game, you (ought to) have the freedom to decide how morals and ethics, if any, work in the game, and how, if at all, they will be enforced. Many games will rely more on in-game emergent punishments (ie, bad players punished by other players), and some will rely on enforcement from above - by banning players, etc. But this is something each game designer, not any government, should decide. If I design a virtual world in which it's illegal not to make a good-faith effort to kill your neighbor, steal his stuff, and covet his wife, and I kick any goodie-two-shoes players I see, I should be free to do that, and players should be free to play the game, without any government arresting either of us.
When you're an asshole in the real world, the consequences, if real society decides there should be consequences, occur in the real world. When you're an asshole in a virtual world, the consequences, if the virtual society (designers, players) decides there should be consequences, occur in the virtual world. Simple as that.
When you perform unethical actions in a game, and these things are considered bad by the people controlling and playing the game, negateve in-game consequences can ensue, to discourage such actions For example, in L2, when you PK, your karma goes negative and you turn red. (Until your karma goes to -INT_MAX, at which point it wraps to INT_MAX, until they fixed that.) Thus, other players are warned, and as a result of the coded rules of the game, they can PK you without consequence. And if you run a bot, you are in violation of the terms of service, which specify a remedy - you are kicked from the game.
When you sign up for a game, you are agreeing, implicity and also probably explicitly in the terms of service, that you will sometiese virtually 'possess' virtual objects, which you might be able to buy and sell on eBay, but that at any time, you can be PK'd, there can be a server error, the admins can decide they don't like you - and your 'possessions' will fall to someone else or disappear, and there's nothing you can do about it. You agreed to this. There's no reason for meatspace governments to start protecting people who have made this kind of agreement from the possible consequences of such an agreement.
There is a difference - who gives the value to the virtual objects. In gambling, either online or in meatspace, there is a house that has a pretty clear obligation to give you a fixed amount of money for a given number of chips. What you are playing for essentially is money, nothing less. In most online games, this is not the case - the real-monetary value in the objects comes from third parties, entirely independantly of the server operators, and often even in violation of their policies. Allowing obsessed third parties paying for virtual objects to turn something into gambling is a dangerous precedent. Is online checkers gambling? What if some nutter pays me for captured pieces?
I would think that any law that outlaws a book would be a violation of the First Ammendment of the US Constitution.
The original phrase for the google bomb was "miserable failure," and a Yahoo search for that does indeed turn up the biography.
Well, having one button would be a good idea, but the phone should be perfectly capable of knowing whether it's just called 911, and only transmit its location when it has.
It isn't too difficult for Google to fight the lock-in people have on other IM networks, because they already have significant share in the web email market. Google just needs to set it up so that your GMail username is the same as your GMessenger account. Then, they either need their own client or, better yet, add support to third party IM software (GAIM for example). If the next version of your IM client had GMessenger support, all you'd have to do would be to enter your name and password into the client. To build the network even faster, Google could integrate this with your GMail contacts list. When people see that one of their contacts has logged on, they might start IMing with them.
It would be difficult for a car to be so inefficient or polluting that it would be cheaper or better for the environment to throw it out and buy a newly-built one.
all \n and no
makes that a long line
all \n and no <br> makes that a long line
all \n and no <br> makes that a long line
If you have to break lines, then on the second line, put as many tabs as the first line has, then spaces until it lines up how you want - this way, when other people view it on editors that indent a different number of spaces, everything still lines up.
I do prefer most languages' approach of basically ignoring whitespace and relying on punctuation. But if you're going to use whitespace, you may as well do it right.
Maybe it's time some large company does launch a patent missile. Frankly I'd prefer a patent winter to what we have now. All the fallout might convince Joe Public to oppose software patents.
See, the thing is, Mutually Assured Destruction is a very non-optimial solution. It has worked in the nuclear arms race, (provided only sane governments get the bomb, a big if), but much better would be simply not having nuclear weapons. It's not possible to get all countries to stop building nukes, forget how, and destroy the ones they have. It is, however, possible to put an end to software patents. (Or in the short term, to keep them from proliferating.)
See, the big problem with that is that we really don't want to turn the IT industry into the medical industry, where some huge fraction of your wages has to go to malpractice or patent infringement insurance, and where innovation is difficult because of the legal risks involved.
What's the matter, don't want to risk patent infringement by using Copy-n-Paste?
It's interesting to me that what you describe is similar to something that is present in, at least, Qt, GTK, WxWindows(or whatever it's called now) and MFC - a signal-slot system. They let you connect events from widgets (button clicks, slider movements, etc) with either other widgets or slot/event handlers in code. Maybe that's not as encompassing as what you're suggesting, but it's a start. Maybe we need a multi-platform toolkit-independant thread/process/network transparent system for doing this.
A good argument against starting with Java? Simple - references are obvious if you understand pointers, but pointers aren't obvious if you understand references. And eventually you'll need to learn about pointers.