Actually, I'll bet if the Huckabee staffers were accused of d/l'ing copyrighted music on BitTorrent, and the people suing were the RIAA instead of some journalists, the judges ruling would have been different!
I remember reading a Pragmatic Programmers article from a few years ago...they argued that while you should adhere to the XP principle of YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) as much as possible, you still always had to be wary of the principle of DOGBITE (Do it, Or Get Bitten In The End). The trick is knowing which one best applies to any given situation. I guess that's what we get paid the big bucks for.
The point is that, as in many things, balance is key.
I don't want to get all confrontational, since I'm hardly an expert in functional programming or Erlang, but if you want to check something non-completely-trivial out, look at this:
I did this as I was first learning Erlang...it's an implementation of the A-star pathfinding algorithm (used a lot in games). This was my first, non-trivial Erlang program, and also the first time I ever implemented A-star, so there are bound to be inefficiencies.
But what I do have here is a 176 line program that implements parallelizable & distributable time-bound A-star for any number of AIs that need pathfinding. There's some hard-coding in terms of the number of AIs right now and their goal destinations, but that's easily removed.
But they only way they could calculate the hash for an application is by reading the memory that the application is using.
And therefore, by Blizzard's rationale, I could distribute an application with a EULA that says that you can only use this program so long as you don't allow any external programs to read this program's memory. If you allow other programs to read the memory, your license to use this program is revoked, and any further use of this program constitutes copyright infringement.
Then I could sue Blizzard for selling software (Warden) that profits off of infringing my copyright. See, because unless I allow them to infringe my copyright, they can't "protect their game from cheaters", which affects their profits.
The main problem I see is that there is lack of focus in the functional arena.
Whoa whoa whoa! You may not like Erlang's implementation, but you can hardly attribute it to a lack of focus. The whole language was built with concurrency in mind. Heck, the concurrency even has built-in network awareness. And Erlang's been multi-core since last May.
Yeah, that doesn't say anything about your VM worries. I don't have those, though. Seamless multi-threading and a language paradigms designed for concurrency more than make up for the VM performance hit, imo. When I have to write non-trivial concurrent systems, I reach for the language that already has the plumbing excellently implemented. I'm sure it's better done than anything I could implement myself, and since the system is concurrent, cheap hardware is easily added to improve performance.
Man, this is the second time this week I've had to stick up for Erlang around here.
Why "besides Erlang"? Just curious. It even has a fancy new book! (well, ok, it's still in beta)
Granted, it's my first FP language (I've looked at Scheme, but not in a few years), so I can hardly speak to how amazing it is compared to others. But I was sold after seeing its concurrency / message-passing paradigm. Oh, and list comprehensions!
But, oddly enough, I've seen what the courts allow the RIAA & MPAA to submit as evidence (server logs with IP addresses) to prosecute people and, at least in those cases, that's all the evidence they need!
Okay, to explain what has probably been said on slashdot a million times already, the burden of proof in a CIVIL case, like the suits by the RIAA and the MPAA, is considerably lower then the burden of proof in a CRIMINAL case.
Grandparent wasn't asking about burden of proof. He was asking about admissibility of evidence. Are the standards for admissibility of evidence lower in civil court than they are in criminal court? I don't know, personally, but I'd be interested the answer. Any lawyers reading this?
Exactly, like when I used your card number to order all that stuff. It wasn't me who took the money from your account, it was the bank. I just typed in some numbers. Why are you so upset? Credit Card numbers are information and information wants to be free. How could anyone be upset about that?
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that you've described fraud above, not theft.
Well, I wasn't asking about what was promised, just whether this absolute freedom you seem to be describing actually existed anywhere. You know, the one in which impersonating a police officer and perjury aren't crimes.
But if you want to look at paper, the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no law _abridging_ the freedom of speech. "Abridging" mean "cutting short" or (in legal terms) "prior restraint". It makes no promises about what happens to people _after_ they speak, only that Congress shall not prevent them from doing so. This _literal_, black-and-white interpretation of the Constitution is what has been traditionally upheld by the courts (as far as I know, prior restraint is generally only implemented for "national security" reasons, not that I necessarily agree with those).
I don't generally care for "black-and-white" interpretations of the text of the Constitution, but I find it funny that they don't even often mean what their promoters think they do.
God I hate stupid people. Does your absolute, unconditional version of "free speech" exist _anywhere_ in the known universe? The kind of speech where, no matter what you say, there are no government-imposed consequences? Places where inciting a riot, impersonating a police officer, and lying on a witness stand are all legal?
If not, then how about we ignore your ridiculous interpretation of the phrase "free speech" and instead use one that, say, other people use? I don't really care which one. Wikipedia's will even do, for now.
Well, I can't speak for Firefox, but there is no such thing as Irish "Whisky". It's whiskey. Only the Scots, as far as I know, call their spirit Whisky. I'm sure that's googlable...I don't have a reference handy, but I've read it plenty of times during my extensive, er, studies of spirits. Or you can just check the bottles.
Re:The rest of the launch lineup can go to hell...
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
·
· Score: 3, Funny
And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
Well, IP rights are "mentioned" in the Constitution, but they are not "Constitutional Rights".
Articles I - III deal with the "rights" or powers that the government has. One of the powers granted to the Congress is to pass laws to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
So when looking at the Constitution by itself, there are no IP rights or copyrights. Those are allowed to be established by Congress through the regular "how a bill becomes a law" process, but Congress back in the 1700s could have just as easily said "to hell with them" and not passed such laws. Furthermore, Congress could repeal all copyright laws, and that would be the end of them.
"Constitutional Rights" are conferred upon us by the document itself in the appropriately named Bill of Rights. Short of the Constitutional amendment, those can't (aren't supposed to) be taken away.
Well, Mr. Literal Interpretationist, unfortunately for your argument, all the Bill of Rights says is that "Congress" has no right to pass laws abridging the freedom of speech. It says nothing about the State of Texas.
The corresponding portion of the TX Bill of Rights begins, "Every person shall be at liberty to speak, write or publish his opinions on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that privilege." So it sounds like in the Lone Star State, according to your arguments, you can be punished for speech.
Of course, I think your arguments are full of crap.
The implied question is, "If that sort of climate change was possible ten thousand years ago, what makes you so sure that humans are the cause of current climate change?"
Which is the same question I keep seeing get asked over and over again. Here's the answer: it doesn't freaking matter. Here are two questions that I think people should spend more time mulling over:
1) Do we, as a species, WANT global temperatures to reach levels not seen since the Holocene period ?
2) If the answer to the above is "No", is there anything that we, as a species, can do to help PREVENT that from occurring?
How we got here doesn't matter. What we do now does. Some think we're helpless and that the climate's gonna do what the climate's gonna do whether or not they buy an SUV, so they buy an SUV.
My favorite experience with this was when I was working right around Christmas of 2000. I'd been brought in on the project late in the game to help "relieve" one of the programmers who wasn't exactly working out. One day I had to fix a bug in his "Frequently Asked Questions" section of the website. There was an A-Z menu at the top of the screen that was acting finicky and I got to fix it.
Luckily for me, this programmer _had_ factored his menu code into functions. 26 of them, in fact!
Those problems, AND the fact that the latest drivers published by nVidia do NOT work on Dell Laptops (you have to wait for Dell to repackage them), are the reason I went with a configuration from Vicious PC. Arrived a little over a week ago and it runs like a champ. Came with very little pre-installed software, and whenever I want to get the lastest drivers for my GeForce GO 7800, I just download them from nvidia.com.
Java portability is important to a minority of server application developers. Java portability is also somewhat of a myth for anything but fairly simple applications
Count me in the minority. For years, I've worked with teams that write Java code on Windows workstations even when the final target platform is bigger iron Unix. I suspect that there are many more folks like me.
So maybe we're a "minority". But we're a sizable one.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant! Oh, except for the part where you don't actually patent ideas, but inventions. Big difference.
Man, people on /. used to know those kinds of things. Now we mod up those who don't.
Actually, I'll bet if the Huckabee staffers were accused of d/l'ing copyrighted music on BitTorrent, and the people suing were the RIAA instead of some journalists, the judges ruling would have been different!
Not to mention the extra whammy for the sexism. Here's hoping he doesn't ask this question of a 43-year old woman.
The Dynamic Graphics Project of the University of Toronto has released a pretty nifty 3D curve sketching system
I see a video and some links to bios and sample sketches, but no "released" software anywhere.
"A game is a toy. A different type of toy, but a toy none-the-less."
Hide-and-seek is a game. Hide-and-seek is not a toy.
A game is something you play. A toy is something you play with. See the difference?
I remember reading a Pragmatic Programmers article from a few years ago...they argued that while you should adhere to the XP principle of YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) as much as possible, you still always had to be wary of the principle of DOGBITE (Do it, Or Get Bitten In The End). The trick is knowing which one best applies to any given situation. I guess that's what we get paid the big bucks for.
The point is that, as in many things, balance is key.
I don't want to get all confrontational, since I'm hardly an expert in functional programming or Erlang, but if you want to check something non-completely-trivial out, look at this:
http://chi.valro.us/erlang/brain.erl
I did this as I was first learning Erlang...it's an implementation of the A-star pathfinding algorithm (used a lot in games). This was my first, non-trivial Erlang program, and also the first time I ever implemented A-star, so there are bound to be inefficiencies.
But what I do have here is a 176 line program that implements parallelizable & distributable time-bound A-star for any number of AIs that need pathfinding. There's some hard-coding in terms of the number of AIs right now and their goal destinations, but that's easily removed.
But they only way they could calculate the hash for an application is by reading the memory that the application is using.
And therefore, by Blizzard's rationale, I could distribute an application with a EULA that says that you can only use this program so long as you don't allow any external programs to read this program's memory. If you allow other programs to read the memory, your license to use this program is revoked, and any further use of this program constitutes copyright infringement.
Then I could sue Blizzard for selling software (Warden) that profits off of infringing my copyright. See, because unless I allow them to infringe my copyright, they can't "protect their game from cheaters", which affects their profits.
Uhm, how do you think that they're calculating that hash key?
If you can put Master of Magic next to Bejeweled, then you desperately need to try Puzzle Quest.
That's all I can say. I'd tell you more about it, but you can google it, and I need to get back to playing!
The main problem I see is that there is lack of focus in the functional arena.
Whoa whoa whoa! You may not like Erlang's implementation, but you can hardly attribute it to a lack of focus. The whole language was built with concurrency in mind. Heck, the concurrency even has built-in network awareness. And Erlang's been multi-core since last May.
Erlang goes multi-core
Yeah, that doesn't say anything about your VM worries. I don't have those, though. Seamless multi-threading and a language paradigms designed for concurrency more than make up for the VM performance hit, imo. When I have to write non-trivial concurrent systems, I reach for the language that already has the plumbing excellently implemented. I'm sure it's better done than anything I could implement myself, and since the system is concurrent, cheap hardware is easily added to improve performance.
Man, this is the second time this week I've had to stick up for Erlang around here.
Why "besides Erlang"? Just curious. It even has a fancy new book! (well, ok, it's still in beta)
Granted, it's my first FP language (I've looked at Scheme, but not in a few years), so I can hardly speak to how amazing it is compared to others. But I was sold after seeing its concurrency / message-passing paradigm. Oh, and list comprehensions!
But, oddly enough, I've seen what the courts allow the RIAA & MPAA to submit as evidence (server logs with IP addresses) to prosecute people and, at least in those cases, that's all the evidence they need!
Okay, to explain what has probably been said on slashdot a million times already, the burden of proof in a CIVIL case, like the suits by the RIAA and the MPAA, is considerably lower then the burden of proof in a CRIMINAL case.
Grandparent wasn't asking about burden of proof. He was asking about admissibility of evidence. Are the standards for admissibility of evidence lower in civil court than they are in criminal court? I don't know, personally, but I'd be interested the answer. Any lawyers reading this?
Exactly, like when I used your card number to order all that stuff. It wasn't me who took the money from your account, it was the bank. I just typed in some numbers. Why are you so upset? Credit Card numbers are information and information wants to be free. How could anyone be upset about that? IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that you've described fraud above, not theft.
Well, I wasn't asking about what was promised, just whether this absolute freedom you seem to be describing actually existed anywhere. You know, the one in which impersonating a police officer and perjury aren't crimes.
But if you want to look at paper, the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no law _abridging_ the freedom of speech. "Abridging" mean "cutting short" or (in legal terms) "prior restraint". It makes no promises about what happens to people _after_ they speak, only that Congress shall not prevent them from doing so. This _literal_, black-and-white interpretation of the Constitution is what has been traditionally upheld by the courts (as far as I know, prior restraint is generally only implemented for "national security" reasons, not that I necessarily agree with those).
I don't generally care for "black-and-white" interpretations of the text of the Constitution, but I find it funny that they don't even often mean what their promoters think they do.
Free speech is unconditional, or it isn't free.
God I hate stupid people. Does your absolute, unconditional version of "free speech" exist _anywhere_ in the known universe? The kind of speech where, no matter what you say, there are no government-imposed consequences? Places where inciting a riot, impersonating a police officer, and lying on a witness stand are all legal?
If not, then how about we ignore your ridiculous interpretation of the phrase "free speech" and instead use one that, say, other people use? I don't really care which one. Wikipedia's will even do, for now.
Well, I can't speak for Firefox, but there is no such thing as Irish "Whisky". It's whiskey. Only the Scots, as far as I know, call their spirit Whisky. I'm sure that's googlable...I don't have a reference handy, but I've read it plenty of times during my extensive, er, studies of spirits. Or you can just check the bottles.
And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
Well, IP rights are "mentioned" in the Constitution, but they are not "Constitutional Rights".
Articles I - III deal with the "rights" or powers that the government has. One of the powers granted to the Congress is to pass laws to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
So when looking at the Constitution by itself, there are no IP rights or copyrights. Those are allowed to be established by Congress through the regular "how a bill becomes a law" process, but Congress back in the 1700s could have just as easily said "to hell with them" and not passed such laws. Furthermore, Congress could repeal all copyright laws, and that would be the end of them.
"Constitutional Rights" are conferred upon us by the document itself in the appropriately named Bill of Rights. Short of the Constitutional amendment, those can't (aren't supposed to) be taken away.
Well, Mr. Literal Interpretationist, unfortunately for your argument, all the Bill of Rights says is that "Congress" has no right to pass laws abridging the freedom of speech. It says nothing about the State of Texas.
The corresponding portion of the TX Bill of Rights begins, "Every person shall be at liberty to speak, write or publish his opinions on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that privilege." So it sounds like in the Lone Star State, according to your arguments, you can be punished for speech.
Of course, I think your arguments are full of crap.
The implied question is, "If that sort of climate change was possible ten thousand years ago, what makes you so sure that humans are the cause of current climate change?"
Which is the same question I keep seeing get asked over and over again. Here's the answer: it doesn't freaking matter. Here are two questions that I think people should spend more time mulling over:
1) Do we, as a species, WANT global temperatures to reach levels not seen since the Holocene period ?
2) If the answer to the above is "No", is there anything that we, as a species, can do to help PREVENT that from occurring?
How we got here doesn't matter. What we do now does. Some think we're helpless and that the climate's gonna do what the climate's gonna do whether or not they buy an SUV, so they buy an SUV.
Personally, I disagree.
My favorite experience with this was when I was working right around Christmas of 2000. I'd been brought in on the project late in the game to help "relieve" one of the programmers who wasn't exactly working out. One day I had to fix a bug in his "Frequently Asked Questions" section of the website. There was an A-Z menu at the top of the screen that was acting finicky and I got to fix it.
Luckily for me, this programmer _had_ factored his menu code into functions. 26 of them, in fact!
Those problems, AND the fact that the latest drivers published by nVidia do NOT work on Dell Laptops (you have to wait for Dell to repackage them), are the reason I went with a configuration from Vicious PC. Arrived a little over a week ago and it runs like a champ. Came with very little pre-installed software, and whenever I want to get the lastest drivers for my GeForce GO 7800, I just download them from nvidia.com.
Obviously because Quantas never crash!
Java portability is important to a minority of server application developers. Java portability is also somewhat of a myth for anything but fairly simple applications
Count me in the minority. For years, I've worked with teams that write Java code on Windows workstations even when the final target platform is bigger iron Unix. I suspect that there are many more folks like me.
So maybe we're a "minority". But we're a sizable one.