You have been watching the sappy MPAA ads before the movies with all the sad stories of set designers and grips who had the bread stolen from them by those evil pirates. Next time you see that substitute in your mind instead of the grip/set designer a rich executive from Sony/BMG or Universal in his beach-side mansion talking how he will not be able to buy his 16 year old daughter a Ferrari anymore and she will be forced to drive just a Mercedes this new year.
The point is that most of the money is going into those rich executive's pockets and not to the grips and set designers and not even to the artists. If you really want to help the grips have a talk with the executives and ask them to share a part of their billions with the workers. I
How about the provision pushed by Bush a while ago that those sharing pre-releases should be felons and do actual prison time. WTF? - Breaking into a store with a ski mask and stealing a ton of DVDs will get you less time than sharing it on P2P. Or even better it turns out that in some states raping someone will get you less time than sharing a movie on P2P!
Know anyone who owns an island or a small country and is willing to donate the domain name? What would MPAA or RIAA do? They can't invade a country.
In the case of supernova they probably bribed the police into doing all this scaring tactics. As far as I know the police in Eastern Europe is not really interested in piracy and computer fraud, they got other things to worry about and besides, some countries don't even have good laws concerning computers and internet BUT for a large enough bribe the police in those countries will arrest and scare anyone regardless of the crime.
I see what you are saying and your system of ethics makes sense. But I think when you deal with a company or a state or a group of individuals it gets trickier.
In other words your ethical system works for your but that means that everyone else might have a different one. There will eventually be a conflict between one of your moral rules and someone else's. So if you think for example, that smoking is bad and it is bad for people to smoke as it harms themselves and others, some other indvidual might not think of smoking as bad and doesn't think it is bad for others. Now what happens if someone next to you starts smoking? It contradicts your ethical standards but not theirs.
Things get more complicated because there are also non-personal entities like companies and states that will also have some sort of ethical systems in form of guidelines and laws. These entities will be composed of groups of individuals and will have to somehow find a common set of ethical guidelines to be used as rules of the entity as a whole.
A company will implicitly say things like "we will allow our data to be shared on P2P network" (unlikely!) i.e. "sharing files is good" or "we will not give artists more than 5% of the profits" i.e. "company retains most of the profits". And then the state (government) will have laws like "sharing files is legal" i.e. "sharing files is good", or "the penatly for 1st deg. murder is life in prison" - i.e. "killing others is bad".
The ethical standards of governments and companies now can conflict with individual ethical standards. The government will take action against small groups individuals (say it will arrest the polygamists in Utah) or will arrest the people who share mp3 songs and movies over the P2P. The companies have no such power of the individual but what they have is what governments need - money. They will use the money to lobby and attempt to change the laws (i.e. ethical standards) of the country to conform to their liking.
If enough individual's ethical systems end up contradicting the goverment laws or company policies, those individuals can try to also lobby and modify the laws in their favor (Contact their Congressmen, join class-action suits and so on). So if enough people like you, who think file sharing should be "ok" can band together (the Internet can greatly help here) and lobby the government officials to overturn the anti-piracy laws lobbied by the companies. Here your interests (i.e. ethical guidelines) are in direct contradiction to the recording studios' interests (i.e. ethical guideline). And each side would greatly benefit from having the government on their side. So far the recording studios are winning...
Anyway that is how I view this whole distribution and interplay of rules, laws and ethical standards.
Ethics shouldn't be dictated by the whims of the majority, but instead on rational thought. So, if you believe there is nothing wrong with violating copyright in downloading music, justify your opinion with a reasonable explanation.
If ethics is something that should be based on rational thought, then you assume that rational thought will always end up producing good ethics. But don't you also think that one can come up with a rationalization for any ethics. In other words all the great genocides and a lot of crimes commited by states have been produced by what seemed rational thought at the time.
Stalin, for example, if you would listen to him, he would rationally justify his killing of millions of people, especially intellectuals and priests. He would tell you that, even though he might not have liked it personally, it would make _rational_ sense to eliminate them as they would be the first to challenge the authority of the regime.
If you were in Germany during late 1930s, you would have heard a lot of _rational_ arguments explaining why some people should be killed,some should be sterilized and some shouldn't even be born. Or would you say that everyone who listened and accepted Hitler's ideas were dumb as bag or rocks? I think they were some people among them who were seemingly _rational_
You cannot cheat and look back now and say "Damn, that was _irrational_ and _stupid_" you have to try to be honest and put yourself in the that time and place. I think a lot of people of present day America or Western Europe could have become members of the Nazi party or a Soviet Communist Party informer. Maybe they are a part of something now, and are just not aware of it....
Anyway, the point is that unless you believe in some higher power (God, Buddha, Mother Earth,.. Linus.(cough!) ) that dictates what is ethical and what is not, ethics then becomes just what the majority decides. In our society the ethics become manifest in legislature - by punishing someone for murder there is an implied ethical guideline : "killing is bad", or "stealing is bad" and so on.
BUT There is currently a dissonance between how people feel about downloading music and the laws concerning it. Because our system is screwed up and only those with large pockets can afford to lobby (or bribe) the Congress. Or let me ask, when is the last time you contacted your local Congressman?
Didn't MPAA scare everyone into accessing P2P networks? -Oh, wait! I guess it didn't.
It is one of those things that most people don't feel like it is a crime and there is nothing MPAA and RIAA can do. No amount of lawsuits, no amount of sappy ads before every movie in the theatres showing poor set designers that are now starving because those pirates stole the bread from their kid's table, is going to change that. Because people don't think it is such a big crime to share and download mp3 files and movies.
I am not saying whether it is good or bad, or that it is right to download music from P2P without paying for it - all I am saying is that most people don't see it as such a bad thing. As it turns out the order and peace and quiet in a most societies is not kept by police or any forceful tactics, but by the fact that the majority of the citizens like it that way. For example if tomorrow morning everyone got it into their heads that pillaging, vandalism, looting and killing each other is perfectly "ok" there will not be enough police or lawyers or soldiers to stop everyone acting in that manner.
I think the same goes for illegal file sharing, the majority of people don't see it as a particularly bad thing and they will continue to do it. In fact what people finally see is how Sony/BMG, Universal, EMI and friends have been screwing everyone all these years by selling crappy music for $15-$20 a disk. The artists weren't getting the money - it was all going into building vacation homes and buying Ferrari's for the executives of those production companies.
Now someone might say that the laws in our supposedly democratic society clearly reflect the attitudes and the will of the majority of people, so how come downloading is still illegal. I think it is because the laws today are created by those who have large amounts of accumulated wealth and can sponsor and lobby the Congress to make it pass whatever they want. Also, when is the last time any of us contacted our local Congressman and petitioned him for anything?
I think the best the recording companies can do is to bite the bullet and re-structure their business accepting that the old days when they could make billions by selling overpriced crap are coming to an end.
I used DVD Jon's software to remove DRM. I don't think that would work with the new iTunes though (ver. 6). I am not buying from iTunes anymore (I tried to play the music on my Linux box and couldn't so the music I payed for is useless to me now as I don't use Windows anymore).
My friend was talking on this discussion board about different assasination tactics and how it would be possible to assasinate Bush. He didn't say or didn't even imply any desire or plan to do so, just that it would be possible. It was a forum about politics and terrorism.
Well, anyway, FBI agents visited him at work then came to his home, looked through the house and talked to his wife and chilren. His one child was 6 and they asked her if "daddy is building bombs in the basement?" When we found out all I could say is WTF!
The point here is that 1st Ammendment is just there for the books and for show, the government and the secret services can and will do whatever they want to whomever they want -- exactly what was not supposed to happen according to the intention of the founders of this country.
I does get old. I have not bought a single CD for about 3 years now. I got some music off of iTunes, in rest I just listen to the radio, I found some free re-mixes of song of some of the band I like, and made some copies of the music my friends bought. I just refuse to sponsor the next beach mansions of Sony/EMI/Universal executives. If the bands I like would only sell the burnt CDs themselves and/or have a donation link via PayPal I would give them the $20.
I never thought they have complete vacuum inside instead they probably have some traces of gas that when ionized would interfere with the flow of electrons. It seems though that one would need a lot more gamma rays to disrupt a vacuum tube operation than to discrupt a semiconductor.
Besides, why would I pay them if I know they will pocket most of the money instead of giving it to the artist that I intend to support?
These companies should just face the truth that they are no longer able to sustain increasing profits from selling overpriced low quality shit. Sony, EMI and Universal executives will just have to settle with a new Mercedes this Christmas instead of a the usual Ferrari - out heart goes out to them.
All these years they have been running a scam and sustaining their multi-billion dollar livelyhood from it. Now that the CD (and consequently their business model) is dying they are resorting to desperate measures such as DRM rootkits and MPAA's "let's sue some elderly people and some children to scare the crap out of everyone and show them how big our guns are" tactics.
I use Netbeans for Java. I think in its latest incarnation it caught up with Eclipse in terms of refactoring and code completion, but I mostly use its Swing UI builder to make GUIs.
As far as Emacs, there is still something about it that people like. Once you learn (customize) the key bindings writing code is really fast when you don't have to touch the mouse and just keep your fingers on the main part of the keyboard.
Would the use of tubes in military equipment make it less susceptable to the effects of ionizing radiation? I have heard (more as a rumour) that some equipment in the military still uses tubes just for that reason. But to me ionizing radiation would also ionize the gas in the tubes...
None of the current popular browsers were developed in a few weeks, think more of a couple of years.
Besides it is faster and easier to buy Opera and slap the Google logo on it.
Personally I use Firefox because it is Open Source but I think Opera is more polished, is faster and has more features, so it seems like a pretty good decision on the part Google.
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Tried them all, but I found weave to be the best for me at this point. I can just say
import weave ...python code... pyvar1=stuff pyvar2=stuff code=""" ... c code... int cvar1, cvar2...; ...use pyvar1, pyvar2... return_val=stuff """ ...back to python code... output=weave.inline(code,['pyvar1', 'pyvar2'])
Easy to write and set up but might have to manipulate Python's internal data structure manipualtions in C.
As someone said: Pyrex tries to make C data look like Python data with language extensions, and weave makes Python data looks like C data inside the C inline code.
Psyco offers from 50% to 30% speedup - not near what a CPU bound tight C loop would but still very usefull.
PyPy isn't there yet for me, but is certainly interesting.
Also for those inclined to use Fortran there is f2py...
Service-oriented software is the future but basic HCI guidelines are still relevant and will be relevant as they are not focused on underlying implementation but rather on the visuals and behavior of the interface. For example "consistency" is important regardless if it is on a cell phone, desktop, browser or some other architecture/platform.
Besides, until everyone has access to a 2Mbit broadband and runs their office or spreadsheet off of Google's or Microsoft's server, the desktop is still here to stay. Qt/KDE is probably one of the better UI libraries out there as far as the learning curve and design is concerned but Gtk/GNOME desktop and application on the other hand look and work better for me (even though I wouldn't even dare to touch any Gtk or GNOME C code ).
Not sure though about the future UI language libraries. I personally like Python. Qt as well as wxWindows bindings for Python work very nice, not sure that will be the future direction though. Java Swing was horrible at first in terms of speed, it is better now but still there aren't that many large Java only applications with a fast and responsive UI (I can only think of Netbeans for now).
You are full of anger and immaturity. I don't think people like you should have anything to do with Linux. Are you also scared or embarrassed so you use AC to post your flame? Oh, well, hope you feel better...
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Python (and Ruby) at first seemed to me just like another Perl-like scripting language. I "played" with Python a little and was able to write a 10,000+ lines OO program that would have probably have taken me at least 3 times as much to write in Java or C++ so I made Python my best friend since (before I would say how scripting is for kids, 'real' men compile their programs). But the OO stuff + the power of scripting + having a dictionary (hashtable) as a base type + a great library of modules + the ability to inline C/C++ code with some 3rd party extensions made Python work for me. Ruby I think is pretty close but the library of modules is still not there.
The way I see it, Python is definetly slower at run time but is faster at developing time. The difference between Java bytecode speed (or even native compiled code) and Python at runtime is a constant factor. Sometimes could be as bad as 10x for tight CPU intensive computational loops (no I/O). That is pretty bad, but it is still a constant factor. In a couple of years Python will be as fast as Java is now. Of course Java will be even faster, maybe Swing might be actually usable;-) but today's applications that need Java for speed would run fine with Python. So I do see a bright future for scripting languages as the hardware gets faster.
(By the way did I mention that with some special modules like weave it already is pretty simple to inline C/C++ code in Python and I am experimenting with that for scientific computing and so far I am pretty impressed, it surely beats Java in my benchmarks.)
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that most of the money is going into those rich executive's pockets and not to the grips and set designers and not even to the artists. If you really want to help the grips have a talk with the executives and ask them to share a part of their billions with the workers. I
+5 Flaimbait - 3. Profit?
How about the provision pushed by Bush a while ago that those sharing pre-releases should be felons and do actual prison time. WTF? - Breaking into a store with a ski mask and stealing a ton of DVDs will get you less time than sharing it on P2P. Or even better it turns out that in some states raping someone will get you less time than sharing a movie on P2P!
In the case of supernova they probably bribed the police into doing all this scaring tactics. As far as I know the police in Eastern Europe is not really interested in piracy and computer fraud, they got other things to worry about and besides, some countries don't even have good laws concerning computers and internet BUT for a large enough bribe the police in those countries will arrest and scare anyone regardless of the crime.
In other words your ethical system works for your but that means that everyone else might have a different one. There will eventually be a conflict between one of your moral rules and someone else's. So if you think for example, that smoking is bad and it is bad for people to smoke as it harms themselves and others, some other indvidual might not think of smoking as bad and doesn't think it is bad for others. Now what happens if someone next to you starts smoking? It contradicts your ethical standards but not theirs.
Things get more complicated because there are also non-personal entities like companies and states that will also have some sort of ethical systems in form of guidelines and laws. These entities will be composed of groups of individuals and will have to somehow find a common set of ethical guidelines to be used as rules of the entity as a whole.
A company will implicitly say things like "we will allow our data to be shared on P2P network" (unlikely!) i.e. "sharing files is good" or "we will not give artists more than 5% of the profits" i.e. "company retains most of the profits". And then the state (government) will have laws like "sharing files is legal" i.e. "sharing files is good", or "the penatly for 1st deg. murder is life in prison" - i.e. "killing others is bad".
The ethical standards of governments and companies now can conflict with individual ethical standards. The government will take action against small groups individuals (say it will arrest the polygamists in Utah) or will arrest the people who share mp3 songs and movies over the P2P. The companies have no such power of the individual but what they have is what governments need - money. They will use the money to lobby and attempt to change the laws (i.e. ethical standards) of the country to conform to their liking.
If enough individual's ethical systems end up contradicting the goverment laws or company policies, those individuals can try to also lobby and modify the laws in their favor (Contact their Congressmen, join class-action suits and so on). So if enough people like you, who think file sharing should be "ok" can band together (the Internet can greatly help here) and lobby the government officials to overturn the anti-piracy laws lobbied by the companies. Here your interests (i.e. ethical guidelines) are in direct contradiction to the recording studios' interests (i.e. ethical guideline). And each side would greatly benefit from having the government on their side. So far the recording studios are winning...
Anyway that is how I view this whole distribution and interplay of rules, laws and ethical standards.
If ethics is something that should be based on rational thought, then you assume that rational thought will always end up producing good ethics. But don't you also think that one can come up with a rationalization for any ethics. In other words all the great genocides and a lot of crimes commited by states have been produced by what seemed rational thought at the time.
Stalin, for example, if you would listen to him, he would rationally justify his killing of millions of people, especially intellectuals and priests. He would tell you that, even though he might not have liked it personally, it would make _rational_ sense to eliminate them as they would be the first to challenge the authority of the regime.
If you were in Germany during late 1930s, you would have heard a lot of _rational_ arguments explaining why some people should be killed ,some should be sterilized and some shouldn't even be born. Or would you say that everyone who listened and accepted Hitler's ideas were dumb as bag or rocks? I think they were some people among them who were seemingly _rational_
You cannot cheat and look back now and say "Damn, that was _irrational_ and _stupid_" you have to try to be honest and put yourself in the that time and place. I think a lot of people of present day America or Western Europe could have become members of the Nazi party or a Soviet Communist Party informer. Maybe they are a part of something now, and are just not aware of it....
Anyway, the point is that unless you believe in some higher power (God, Buddha, Mother Earth,.. Linus.(cough!) ) that dictates what is ethical and what is not, ethics then becomes just what the majority decides. In our society the ethics become manifest in legislature - by punishing someone for murder there is an implied ethical guideline : "killing is bad", or "stealing is bad" and so on.
BUT There is currently a dissonance between how people feel about downloading music and the laws concerning it. Because our system is screwed up and only those with large pockets can afford to lobby (or bribe) the Congress. Or let me ask, when is the last time you contacted your local Congressman?
It is one of those things that most people don't feel like it is a crime and there is nothing MPAA and RIAA can do. No amount of lawsuits, no amount of sappy ads before every movie in the theatres showing poor set designers that are now starving because those pirates stole the bread from their kid's table, is going to change that. Because people don't think it is such a big crime to share and download mp3 files and movies.
I am not saying whether it is good or bad, or that it is right to download music from P2P without paying for it - all I am saying is that most people don't see it as such a bad thing. As it turns out the order and peace and quiet in a most societies is not kept by police or any forceful tactics, but by the fact that the majority of the citizens like it that way. For example if tomorrow morning everyone got it into their heads that pillaging, vandalism, looting and killing each other is perfectly "ok" there will not be enough police or lawyers or soldiers to stop everyone acting in that manner.
I think the same goes for illegal file sharing, the majority of people don't see it as a particularly bad thing and they will continue to do it. In fact what people finally see is how Sony/BMG, Universal, EMI and friends have been screwing everyone all these years by selling crappy music for $15-$20 a disk. The artists weren't getting the money - it was all going into building vacation homes and buying Ferrari's for the executives of those production companies.
Now someone might say that the laws in our supposedly democratic society clearly reflect the attitudes and the will of the majority of people, so how come downloading is still illegal. I think it is because the laws today are created by those who have large amounts of accumulated wealth and can sponsor and lobby the Congress to make it pass whatever they want. Also, when is the last time any of us contacted our local Congressman and petitioned him for anything?
I think the best the recording companies can do is to bite the bullet and re-structure their business accepting that the old days when they could make billions by selling overpriced crap are coming to an end.
it needs them, considering what has been happening to them recently...
I used DVD Jon's software to remove DRM. I don't think that would work with the new iTunes though (ver. 6). I am not buying from iTunes anymore (I tried to play the music on my Linux box and couldn't so the music I payed for is useless to me now as I don't use Windows anymore).
This is the same way revolution starts.. 1 becomes 2h,4h,8h, 10h,20h,40h,80h, 100h,200h,400h,800h, ... and so on and so forth.
Well, anyway, FBI agents visited him at work then came to his home, looked through the house and talked to his wife and chilren. His one child was 6 and they asked her if "daddy is building bombs in the basement?" When we found out all I could say is WTF!
The point here is that 1st Ammendment is just there for the books and for show, the government and the secret services can and will do whatever they want to whomever they want -- exactly what was not supposed to happen according to the intention of the founders of this country.
I guess the terrorists won after all...
I does get old. I have not bought a single CD for about 3 years now. I got some music off of iTunes, in rest I just listen to the radio, I found some free re-mixes of song of some of the band I like, and made some copies of the music my friends bought. I just refuse to sponsor the next beach mansions of Sony/EMI/Universal executives. If the bands I like would only sell the burnt CDs themselves and/or have a donation link via PayPal I would give them the $20.
These companies should just face the truth that they are no longer able to sustain increasing profits from selling overpriced low quality shit. Sony, EMI and Universal executives will just have to settle with a new Mercedes this Christmas instead of a the usual Ferrari - out heart goes out to them.
All these years they have been running a scam and sustaining their multi-billion dollar livelyhood from it. Now that the CD (and consequently their business model) is dying they are resorting to desperate measures such as DRM rootkits and MPAA's "let's sue some elderly people and some children to scare the crap out of everyone and show them how big our guns are" tactics.
As far as Emacs, there is still something about it that people like. Once you learn (customize) the key bindings writing code is really fast when you don't have to touch the mouse and just keep your fingers on the main part of the keyboard.
If the language is Turing complete it is equally powerful to C, Java, Python, machine code and, oh the horror! - even to Visual Basic and most others.
I can see the geeks saying:
Yesterday our battalion configured Apache and rebuilt kernels all day.
Would the use of tubes in military equipment make it less susceptable to the effects of ionizing radiation? I have heard (more as a rumour) that some equipment in the military still uses tubes just for that reason. But to me ionizing radiation would also ionize the gas in the tubes...
Besides it is faster and easier to buy Opera and slap the Google logo on it.
Personally I use Firefox because it is Open Source but I think Opera is more polished, is faster and has more features, so it seems like a pretty good decision on the part Google.
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.
Easy to write and set up but might have to manipulate Python's internal data structure manipualtions in C. As someone said: Pyrex tries to make C data look like Python data with language extensions, and weave makes Python data looks like C data inside the C inline code.
Psyco offers from 50% to 30% speedup - not near what a CPU bound tight C loop would but still very usefull.
PyPy isn't there yet for me, but is certainly interesting.
Also for those inclined to use Fortran there is f2py...
Besides, until everyone has access to a 2Mbit broadband and runs their office or spreadsheet off of Google's or Microsoft's server, the desktop is still here to stay. Qt/KDE is probably one of the better UI libraries out there as far as the learning curve and design is concerned but Gtk/GNOME desktop and application on the other hand look and work better for me (even though I wouldn't even dare to touch any Gtk or GNOME C code ).
Not sure though about the future UI language libraries. I personally like Python. Qt as well as wxWindows bindings for Python work very nice, not sure that will be the future direction though. Java Swing was horrible at first in terms of speed, it is better now but still there aren't that many large Java only applications with a fast and responsive UI (I can only think of Netbeans for now).
You are full of anger and immaturity. I don't think people like you should have anything to do with Linux. Are you also scared or embarrassed so you use AC to post your flame? Oh, well, hope you feel better...
The way I see it, Python is definetly slower at run time but is faster at developing time. The difference between Java bytecode speed (or even native compiled code) and Python at runtime is a constant factor. Sometimes could be as bad as 10x for tight CPU intensive computational loops (no I/O). That is pretty bad, but it is still a constant factor. In a couple of years Python will be as fast as Java is now. Of course Java will be even faster, maybe Swing might be actually usable ;-) but today's applications that need Java for speed would run fine with Python. So I do see a bright future for scripting languages as the hardware gets faster.
(By the way did I mention that with some special modules like weave it already is pretty simple to inline C/C++ code in Python and I am experimenting with that for scientific computing and so far I am pretty impressed, it surely beats Java in my benchmarks.)
You don't happen to go to the University of Cincinnati, do you?
You must be new here? That is called Slashdot moderation...