It sounds like your exposure to Americans has all been from either soldiers, or hosting young people. They are not a representative sample of the population at large.
Then your concept of culture is limited, apparently, to what goods you find for sale. How shallow. The way people think, talk, and what they do for recreation are all part of culture as well, and THOSE things do differ (and yes, terrain matters for this.)
There is no reason to do an asignment in an if() statement.
I used to see this all the time in C:
if( fp = fopen(....) ) { }
Meaning, "open the file, get the file handle, and oh, by the way, only do the following block of stuff if the attempt to do all that actually worked and gave a non-null pointer back."
I rather liked it. The problem was it couldn't be used consistently in C because too many functions were designed to return zero on success and nonzero on failure, which is the opposite of what you want, and adds confusion to the readability if you try to treat it like a boolean. (I really hated seeing people say: if( !strcmp(...) ) Which has the opposite of the meaning it *looks* like it should have. When using that kind of function (where zero is success) I would never use '!' to negate it, but rather I'd use " == 0" as the check. Granted, it ends up meaning the same thing, but without the chance for extra confusion.
The problem is that some syntatic sugar doesn't actually increase readability. Consider operator overloading. If your language has that, you can never again know what on earth is going on when you see x = y + z, unless you are aware of every operator overload which was used. Let's say y is a char* and z is an integer. Normally then the expression (y+z) would mean in C++ "a char pointer which points at the character at index 'z' of the string stored in y." But with operator overloading in the language, you can never be too sure. Maybe somewhere in the code the programmer thought it would be a good idea to say that char* plus int really means "convert the string to integer with atoi(), then add the integer second argument to it, then convert back to string form and return that."
pre and post increment operators present on most CPUs
It's been ages since I did anything in ML or assembler, so my knowlege is rusty there, but why on earth would there be two seperate operators for increment in a CPU - one for pre and one for post? I would think all increment operators would operate on a single operand - either a register or memory location. They don't really "return" things like an expression in a high level language does, so the notion of a CPU instruction "returning" the incremented value or the pre-incremented value makes no sense to me. The notion of throwing a return value onto the stack after the operation is finished is a more high-level concept than the CPU deals with, or so I would think. CPU instructions operate on registers and memory locations in-place. Thus the difference between pre and post increments is what order instructions get called, not which instructions get called. For example:
(foo++)
load foo to accumulator
push accumulator on stack
increment accumulator
store acculutator to foo
(++foo)
load foo to accumulator
increment accumulator
push accumulator on stack
store accumutator to foo
I'd say that "++x" is actually the "best" way because it puts things in verb-noun order, which I'm used to as an English speaker. "x++" is noun-verb, which feels strange to me. "++x" reads as "increment X", while "x++" reads as "x. increment it".
(Just goes to show there will be differences of opinion and no such thing as "the" right way. Here's another example:
if( x == 5 ) { do something } versus if( 5 == x ) { do something }
Some prefer the second way because it puts the term which cannot be a valid lvalue on the left side, thus if you make the common typo of "=" instead of "==", you will get a compile error from it, which wold not happen for x = 5. But, it looks very odd to write it 'backward' like that, so some say the readability of doing it the 'dangerous' way makes it worth doing it that way.
There is no such thing as "the" best way, not even in Java.
As someone who lives in "flyover country" let me say...well....you're pretty right. There isn't much here. But it is a mistake to assume it is all uniform. It can be quite boring, but it's boring in different ways in different places. But to claim that, say, Pennsylvania and Louisiana have no relevant differences would be very wrong. Not a lot of Cajuns are living in Pennsylvania, and not a lot of Amish are living in Louisiana. I doubt anyone in Minnesota goes shrimping, and I doubt anyone in Mississippi goes snowmobiling in winter.
And unless they were from Nebraska, your average american probably couldn't tell you either.
Actally, most Americans do learn the geography of the states, and could tell you that Lincoln is the capital of Nebraska, and could point out where Nebraska is, right in the middle of the US. The current governor, on the other hand, most people wouldn't know since that information has the chance to change once every (typically) 4 years, for each of the 50 states, and thus would have to be re-memorized to keep current - so nobody bothers.
If you ever been to the states you know it all looks alike, doesn't matter whether you were in Minnesota, Ohio or Nebraska.
First: Having ONE culture is not the same as having NO culture. Second: It's just uniform because unlike Europe, there is no long history here of major urban population that predates fast travel times. So there are no entrenched old ways. Everything is rather recent. Third: Minnesota, Ohio, and Nebraska most definately do not "look alike". They have similar culture, but Nebraska is a plains state with nothing but flat farmland - so it tends to have an agricultural society with a rural population spread. Ohio has a mix of farming and industry, and thus a mix of cultures that goes with that, and a much denser population. Minnesota has a mix of farming and wooded wilderness with lakes - giving it a back-woods tourism culture that is very different from anything in Nebraska or Ohio. In Minnesota, most holiday trips involve some kind of boating, camping, fishing, and so on. That's not as common in Ohio or Nebraska. There is a difference, but if the only kind of "culture" you are used to seeing is stodgy old museums and ancient archetecture, then yes they all look the same. But that's a very trivial way to look at things.
Most people from the US is quite nice and all that.. but they show a disturbing lack of knowledge of the rest of the world.
And you derive that from one conversation with one person? Besides, it sounds like the complaint was a definitional one, not one of ignorance. (He actually knew were Scandanavia was on a map, knew which countries it contained, but disagreed over what the word "Europe" really refers to. That's not any different than people debating whether the UK is part of Europe or not. Depeding on context, "Europe" could be referring to a geographical area or a cultural area. "North America" on the other hand, is only ever used to refer to a geographical area, so your Florida example is not a good analogy.
The problem with this is... Most e-mails, even the non-spam ones aren't "solicited". Let's say I see a post on a usenet group and decide to reply by an e-mail conversation with the author because I feel what I'm going to talk about is a bit off-topic for the group. So I do so. Ta-Da that e-mail is unsolicited. The other person never contacted me and said, "please send me e-mail." Let's say I finally find the e-mail address of my sister that I've been searching for for weeks, and I send her a "how's it going" message. That's unsolicited. She never contacted me and said, "please send me this e-mail."
There's a real chicken-and-egg problem here. If only solicited e-mails are allowed, then how do you send the first e-mail to begin an exchange?
Getting rid of spam is a fine goal, but trying to define spam in a way that doesn't also cover legitimate uses of e-mail is impossible.
If they actually knew the full consequences of what they are asking for, they'd understand why it's a bad idea. Unfortunately the explanation of what those effects are takes longer than most people's attention spans can tolerate when it comes to computers.
Then if that's the case, the law is using English in a way almost but not quite entirely unlike English.
Theft includes the connotation that something was removed from the original owner. Here nothing was removed - it was copied. It's not like stealing a car. It's like aiming a magic cloning ray at a car, making a second copy of the car, and then driving off in that second copy. It's still a problem, but it's not the same kind of problem.
Lawyers are not the final arbitrators of what words in English mean.
Perhaps you missed the part of my post where I *SAID* it was a crime, duh......I'm just disputing what KIND of crime it is. It's not theft because the original owner didn't have his copy removed. He still has it.
"Would you like me to be able to support the system from home when I get called after hours with a problem instead of having to wait for me to drive in to sit at the console and do it? Then scripts like this are a necessity."
The point is that the feature that makes Windows e-mail security suck so much is not tied to the underlying technology. It could very well become commonplace to send linux executable files as attachments, and it could become commonplace to make these attachments easy to execute automatically. The problem stems from stupid users wanting stupid features they should not be wanting - like auto-executing attachments. There's nothing about linux that prevents this feature from existing in the future. It just isn't commonplace like it is in windows.
The proposal doesn't work that way. The proposal is that if your legal team costs more than the opponent, you can only be compensated for as much as the opponent spent. So you *can* spend money on higher-priced lawyers than your opponent, but then it comes out of your own pocket. So in the case of a murder trial where the defendant's legal team cost a buck fiddy, the government prosecuting the case can still pay for an expensive plantif lawyer team, of which $1.50 can be reimbursed. Keep in mind that under the current system the government sucks up the cost entirely in criminal cases like this, so this isn't that different.
It makes a difference only in civil cases, like this one.
Let's call a spade a spade. It's stealing. We all do it, but it's stealing.
It is not stealing. Copyright infringement is NOT STEALING. It is a crime. It is wrong. But it is a different kind of crime from stealing. Calling it stealing is like charging and assailant with murder when nobody actually died from the event in question.
Hey, idiot. I use file sharing to find out what's out there, and then buy the stuff I like from the artists I like. Thus I can find out about people who aren't part of the RIAA, and support artists directly. I buy MORE CD's than I otherwise would - because file sharing lets me preview what's out there even if it's not popular enough to make radio airplay.
And *that* is what the RIAA is so worried about. The new technology cuts out the middleman. And they're the middleman. Their entire industry depends upon information about what music is available being a scarce resource they control. The SIX TO SEVEN HUNDRED PERCENT markup the RIAA enjoys when they sell a CD for $15 is an inflated profit only possible because artists can't sell direct to the customer. Until NOW, that is. Recording labels are a thing of the past. The music economy SHOULD be based on the following model now that the technology exists to do it: step 1 - band records in a studio. 2 - band puts up work on a site that pays the artist per-download. 3 - band (if any good) becomes popular and well known, WITHOUT NEEDING A MIDDLEMAN. 4 - profit.
No, sorry, that's not true. Read some of my other posts in this thread. (They're easy to spot. They're the ones everybody disagrees with.)
I have no problem with people wanting to post as anonymous coward, but realize that this prevents you from making a statement like the above. I doubt you wrote all the anonymous coward posts in this thread to which many people disagreed.
I explain in great detail why..
No. You asssert such. (Assuming you are the Anonymous Coward I'm guessing you are.)
Believe it or not, this is an improvement over their earlier statements, not a worsening of them as the article poster implied. By claiming they have a specific example, they have moved the argument into the realm of the provable (and disprovable). Their earlier argument was that it's impossible for open source hobbyists to ever achieve any quality as quickly as they did. That was not only insulting, but if it held up in court it would have set a precedent that people best not develop OSS projects quickly lest they be accused of stealing code. Only CSS projects are allowed to finish quickly.
This is better. By concentrating on some specific code snippet, they can be rightly thrashed if they're just making it up.
The difference is that I can't copy a statue quickly and easily. I can't copy a working automobile by plugging a blueprint into a machine and turning it on. I *CAN*, however, copy a bunch of text fairly fast with minimal effort. To label copying as theft is incorrect. The law might not see it that way, but the law isn't the final arbitrator of what words actually mean. In English, "copy" is something completely different from "steal". Copyright law exists specifically because the printed word is reproducable in mass quantities in ways nothing else was before the gutenberg press was invented, and so it needed different laws applied to it. With most things, it was sufficient to state that you can't steal it from someone. With written words, someone making copies of your work can devalue your work fairly fast, so something more was needed - hence copyright law. NO it's not about stealing your work - if someone steals your manuscript *and* makes copies without your permissions then two completely seperate crimes have just taken place, a theft and a copyright violation. the other person was right. Copyright is about granting temporary monopoly over all copies of your work - long enough to make money off it but not long enough to keep it out of the public domain forever.
Directories like/,/boot,/home,/usr should contain such a prompt.
No. The list of prompted directories should be configurable, and it should be up to the distribution to configure it so/,/boot,/home, and/usr are typically in the default configuration for it. (I don't like hardcoding which directories are protected. In keeping with one of the *good* parts of the unix philosophy, such things should be open-ended, lest the directory structure change some day. (Maybe you'll be working on a system where/opt/bin contains stuff just as important as/usr/bin some day, and on that system/opt should be in the list too.).)
The other important thing to remember is that in Unix, the command shell is BOTH an interactive tool and a program interpeter, so such rules need to be carefully considered - do you want the rm command to be asking a shell script if it is sure it wants to delete the/usr directory?
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It sounds like your exposure to Americans has all been from either soldiers, or hosting young people. They are not a representative sample of the population at large.
Then your concept of culture is limited, apparently, to what goods you find for sale. How shallow. The way people think, talk, and what they do for recreation are all part of culture as well, and THOSE things do differ (and yes, terrain matters for this.)
There is no reason to do an asignment in an if() statement.
I used to see this all the time in C:
if( fp = fopen(....) )
{
}
Meaning, "open the file, get the file handle, and oh, by the way, only do the following block of stuff if the attempt to do all that actually worked and gave a non-null pointer back."
I rather liked it. The problem was it couldn't be used consistently in C because too many functions were designed to return zero on success and nonzero on failure, which is the opposite of what you want, and adds confusion to the readability if you try to treat it like a boolean. (I really hated seeing people say: if( !strcmp(...) ) Which has the opposite of the meaning it *looks* like it should have. When using that kind of function (where zero is success) I would never use '!' to negate it, but rather I'd use " == 0" as the check. Granted, it ends up meaning the same thing, but without the chance for extra confusion.
The problem is that some syntatic sugar doesn't actually increase readability. Consider operator overloading. If your language has that, you can never again know what on earth is going on when you see x = y + z, unless you are aware of every operator overload which was used. Let's say y is a char* and z is an integer. Normally then the expression (y+z) would mean in C++ "a char pointer which points at the character at index 'z' of the string stored in y." But with operator overloading in the language, you can never be too sure. Maybe somewhere in the code the programmer thought it would be a good idea to say that char* plus int really means "convert the string to integer with atoi(), then add the integer second argument to it, then convert back to string form and return that."
pre and post increment operators present on most CPUs
It's been ages since I did anything in ML or assembler, so my knowlege is rusty there, but why on earth would there be two seperate operators for increment in a CPU - one for pre and one for post? I would think all increment operators would operate on a single operand - either a register or memory location. They don't really "return" things like an expression in a high level language does, so the notion of a CPU instruction "returning" the incremented value or the pre-incremented value makes no sense to me. The notion of throwing a return value onto the stack after the operation is finished is a more high-level concept than the CPU deals with, or so I would think. CPU instructions operate on registers and memory locations in-place. Thus the difference between pre and post increments is what order instructions get called, not which instructions get called. For example:
(foo++)
load foo to accumulator
push accumulator on stack
increment accumulator
store acculutator to foo
(++foo)
load foo to accumulator
increment accumulator
push accumulator on stack
store accumutator to foo
Same instructions, different order.
I'd say that "++x" is actually the "best" way because it puts things in verb-noun order, which I'm used to as an English speaker. "x++" is noun-verb, which feels strange to me. "++x" reads as "increment X", while "x++" reads as "x. increment it".
(Just goes to show there will be differences of opinion and no such thing as "the" right way. Here's another example:
if( x == 5 ) { do something }
versus
if( 5 == x ) { do something }
Some prefer the second way because it puts the term which cannot be a valid lvalue on the left side, thus if you make the common typo of "=" instead of "==", you will get a compile error from it, which wold not happen for x = 5. But, it looks very odd to write it 'backward' like that, so some say the readability of doing it the 'dangerous' way makes it worth doing it that way.
There is no such thing as "the" best way, not even in Java.
As someone who lives in "flyover country" let me say...well....you're pretty right. There isn't much here. But it is a mistake to assume it is all uniform. It can be quite boring, but it's boring in different ways in different places. But to claim that, say, Pennsylvania and Louisiana have no relevant differences would be very wrong. Not a lot of Cajuns are living in Pennsylvania, and not a lot of Amish are living in Louisiana. I doubt anyone in Minnesota goes shrimping, and I doubt anyone in Mississippi goes snowmobiling in winter.
And unless they were from Nebraska, your average american probably couldn't tell you either.
Actally, most Americans do learn the geography of the states, and could tell you that Lincoln is the capital of Nebraska, and could point out where Nebraska is, right in the middle of the US. The current governor, on the other hand, most people wouldn't know since that information has the chance to change once every (typically) 4 years, for each of the 50 states, and thus would have to be re-memorized to keep current - so nobody bothers.
Culture? WHAT culture?
If you ever been to the states you know it all looks alike, doesn't matter whether you were in Minnesota, Ohio or Nebraska.
First: Having ONE culture is not the same as having NO culture.
Second: It's just uniform because unlike Europe, there is no long history here of major urban population that predates fast travel times. So there are no entrenched old ways. Everything is rather recent.
Third: Minnesota, Ohio, and Nebraska most definately do not "look alike". They have similar culture, but Nebraska is a plains state with nothing but flat farmland - so it tends to have an agricultural society with a rural population spread. Ohio has a mix of farming and industry, and thus a mix of cultures that goes with that, and a much denser population. Minnesota has a mix of farming and wooded wilderness with lakes - giving it a back-woods tourism culture that is very different from anything in Nebraska or Ohio. In Minnesota, most holiday trips involve some kind of boating, camping, fishing, and so on. That's not as common in Ohio or Nebraska. There is a difference, but if the only kind of "culture" you are used to seeing is stodgy old museums and ancient archetecture, then yes they all look the same. But that's a very trivial way to look at things.
Most people from the US is quite nice and all that..
but they show a disturbing lack of knowledge of the rest of the world.
And you derive that from one conversation with one person? Besides, it sounds like the complaint was a definitional one, not one of ignorance. (He actually knew were Scandanavia was on a map, knew which countries it contained, but disagreed over what the word "Europe" really refers to. That's not any different than people debating whether the UK is part of Europe or not. Depeding on context, "Europe" could be referring to a geographical area or a cultural area. "North America" on the other hand, is only ever used to refer to a geographical area, so your Florida example is not a good analogy.
The problem with this is ... Most e-mails, even the non-spam ones aren't "solicited". Let's say I see a post on a usenet group and decide to reply by an e-mail conversation with the author because I feel what I'm going to talk about is a bit off-topic for the group. So I do so. Ta-Da that e-mail is unsolicited. The other person never contacted me and said, "please send me e-mail." Let's say I finally find the e-mail address of my sister that I've been searching for for weeks, and I send her a "how's it going" message. That's unsolicited. She never contacted me and said, "please send me this e-mail."
There's a real chicken-and-egg problem here. If only solicited e-mails are allowed, then how do you send the first e-mail to begin an exchange?
Getting rid of spam is a fine goal, but trying to define spam in a way that doesn't also cover legitimate uses of e-mail is impossible.
And that's assuming "the system" has been so messed up that you can't telnet in without that magic script.
So, again, what does perl have to do with it?
Oh, I don't know - perhaps you'd actually like to get something accomplished after telnetting in.
And I never said perl on linux only, by the way, so stop arguing against that strawman.
If they actually knew the full consequences of what they are asking for, they'd understand why it's a bad idea. Unfortunately the explanation of what those effects are takes longer than most people's attention spans can tolerate when it comes to computers.
Then if that's the case, the law is using English in a way almost but not quite entirely unlike English.
Theft includes the connotation that something was removed from the original owner. Here nothing was removed - it was copied. It's not like stealing a car. It's like aiming a magic cloning ray at a car, making a second copy of the car, and then driving off in that second copy. It's still a problem, but it's not the same kind of problem.
Lawyers are not the final arbitrators of what words in English mean.
Perhaps you missed the part of my post where I *SAID* it was a crime, duh... ...I'm just disputing what KIND of crime it is. It's not theft because the original owner didn't have his copy removed. He still has it.
And when you are admistrating the machine from afar, that "popup" comes up exactly where?
Unix server: a machine for which a keyboard and monitor are optional wastes of money.
"OK, so how often will I need that perl script?"
"Would you like me to be able to support the system from home when I get called after hours with a problem instead of having to wait for me to drive in to sit at the console and do it? Then scripts like this are a necessity."
The point is that the feature that makes Windows e-mail security suck so much is not tied to the underlying technology. It could very well become commonplace to send linux executable files as attachments, and it could become commonplace to make these attachments easy to execute automatically. The problem stems from stupid users wanting stupid features they should not be wanting - like auto-executing attachments. There's nothing about linux that prevents this feature from existing in the future. It just isn't commonplace like it is in windows.
The proposal doesn't work that way. The proposal is that if your legal team costs more than the opponent, you can only be compensated for as much as the opponent spent. So you *can* spend money on higher-priced lawyers than your opponent, but then it comes out of your own pocket. So in the case of a murder trial where the defendant's legal team cost a buck fiddy, the government prosecuting the case can still pay for an expensive plantif lawyer team, of which $1.50 can be reimbursed. Keep in mind that under the current system the government sucks up the cost entirely in criminal cases like this, so this isn't that different.
It makes a difference only in civil cases, like this one.
Let's call a spade a spade. It's stealing. We all do it, but it's stealing.
It is not stealing. Copyright infringement is NOT STEALING. It is a crime. It is wrong. But it is a different kind of crime from stealing. Calling it stealing is like charging and assailant with murder when nobody actually died from the event in question.
Hey, idiot. I use file sharing to find out what's out there, and then buy the stuff I like from the artists I like. Thus I can find out about people who aren't part of the RIAA, and support artists directly. I buy MORE CD's than I otherwise would - because file sharing lets me preview what's out there even if it's not popular enough to make radio airplay.
And *that* is what the RIAA is so worried about. The new technology cuts out the middleman. And they're the middleman. Their entire industry depends upon information about what music is available being a scarce resource they control. The SIX TO SEVEN HUNDRED PERCENT markup the RIAA enjoys when they sell a CD for $15 is an inflated profit only possible because artists can't sell direct to the customer. Until NOW, that is. Recording labels are a thing of the past. The music economy SHOULD be based on the following model now that the technology exists to do it: step 1 - band records in a studio. 2 - band puts up work on a site that pays the artist per-download. 3 - band (if any good) becomes popular and well known, WITHOUT NEEDING A MIDDLEMAN. 4 - profit.
No, sorry, that's not true. Read some of my other posts in this thread. (They're easy to spot. They're the ones everybody disagrees with.) I have no problem with people wanting to post as anonymous coward, but realize that this prevents you from making a statement like the above. I doubt you wrote all the anonymous coward posts in this thread to which many people disagreed. I explain in great detail why.. No. You asssert such. (Assuming you are the Anonymous Coward I'm guessing you are.)
Believe it or not, this is an improvement over their earlier statements, not a worsening of them as the article poster implied. By claiming they have a specific example, they have moved the argument into the realm of the provable (and disprovable). Their earlier argument was that it's impossible for open source hobbyists to ever achieve any quality as quickly as they did. That was not only insulting, but if it held up in court it would have set a precedent that people best not develop OSS projects quickly lest they be accused of stealing code. Only CSS projects are allowed to finish quickly.
This is better. By concentrating on some specific code snippet, they can be rightly thrashed if they're just making it up.
The difference is that I can't copy a statue quickly and easily. I can't copy a working automobile by plugging a blueprint into a machine and turning it on. I *CAN*, however, copy a bunch of text fairly fast with minimal effort. To label copying as theft is incorrect. The law might not see it that way, but the law isn't the final arbitrator of what words actually mean. In English, "copy" is something completely different from "steal". Copyright law exists specifically because the printed word is reproducable in mass quantities in ways nothing else was before the gutenberg press was invented, and so it needed different laws applied to it. With most things,
it was sufficient to state that you can't steal it from someone. With written words, someone making copies of your work can devalue your work fairly fast, so something more was needed - hence copyright law. NO it's not about stealing your work - if someone steals your manuscript *and* makes copies without your permissions then two completely seperate crimes have just taken place,
a theft and a copyright violation.
the other person was right. Copyright is about granting temporary monopoly over all copies of your work - long enough to make money off it but not long enough to keep it out of the public domain forever.
Directories like
No. The list of prompted directories should be configurable, and it should be up to the distribution to configure it so
The other important thing to remember is that in Unix, the command shell is BOTH an interactive tool and a program interpeter, so such rules need to be carefully considered - do you want the rm command to be asking a shell script if it is sure it wants to delete the