I'd be very curious to hear some examples of other unexplored paradigms. Personally, I agree that OO is no mecca. No language/design paradigm can turn bad ideas into good ones. However, at least for a substantial number of problems, OO is the most effective, clear, and straightforward method of solving them. Just to name one, ray-tracing is inherently and fundamentally object-oriented, and I really doubt it could be approached more beautifully or elegantly in any other paradigm.
One would think a Slashdot reader, of all people, would realize how dated this concept is. Land may be the ultimate resource in terms of overall human welfare (though I contest that), but that does not make it a meaningful measure of power or social stratification. I am a member of the American elite in a number of ways (white, male, upper-class, well-educated), and by any sane measure I have a disproportionate amount of power in this country (or will, once I get out of college:-)), and yet I am likely to never own any more land than my house covers, if that. Land may be where food comes from, but it sure isn't where influence or power comes from. 3% of America probably does hold most of the power in this country, but it's not the 3% that owns 95% of the land, it's the 3% that has 95% (or however much) of the money. And believe me, they're not the same 3%. Bill Gates isn't a big landowner. Neither is Larry Ellison. The only man to get notably rich off land lately is Donald Trump, and he did that in real estate, which isn't really the same thing.
As for the demand issue, demand for land grows at an exponential rate only within the confines of simple-minded mathematical models (trust me: the population of this planet is not a first-order DE in one variable) and scare headlines in the media. It is now very clear that the world population will stabilize within 40-60 years. Even the most panicky and irrational of the estimates for the world's eventual maximum population permit that entire population to fit on the eastern seaboard of the United States, at the population density of San Francisco, with plenty of farmland left over to feed them. Moreover, the world's food supply is currently growing faster than its population. Overpopulation is bunk.
In the US more than 95% of the privately held land is owned by only 3% of the population.
And more than 95% of the cattle is owned by less than 1% of the population. What's your point? Why does absolutely everything have to be equally distributed? If your statistic referred to money it would make more sense, but land ownership is about as relevant to the modern world as cattle ownership
James Cameron has been (deservedly) been taking a lot of flack lately, but once upon a time he was a really talented filmmaker. The new DVD edition of The Abyss is the most incredible DVD special edition I have ever seen, and wonderfully showcases this very good movie, and the incredible story of its making.
While it is technically only two discs, it is easily the equal of the Criterion Collection's Brazil DVD. The Abyss also features two versions (the theatrical release, and the substantially longer, much better special edition), but through the magic of seamless branching, both versions are incorporated onto a single disc. The sound and video are both superb- this movie has never looked or sounded so good.
Where it really shines, though, is the special features on disc two. I spent literally days exploring this disc, and at the end I was still discovering new features (a testament to the thoroughness of this disc, if not its user-interface design). There is a very impressive making-of documentary, of course, and the usual complement of trailers for The Abyss and other Cameron movies. What really knocked my socks off, though, was something relatively new for a DVD edition. This disc contains an entire book's worth (literally) of making-of material. It is mostly in the form of pages of text, but also features a whole slough of images, video clips, and other miscellany. One nice aspect of the interface: this 'book' can be read cover-to-cover, as it were, or can be acessed by topic through an alternate set of menus. Just to round things out, this disc also includes Cameron's original treatment, the complete shooting script, and all 600+ storyboards. All this for only $20!
I heartily reccomend this disc to anyone who likes Cameron's work, wants to see a good movie, or has any interest at all in how movies are made. This disc is the bomb.
Sad to say, invalidating that patent will not shoot themselves in the foot in any real way. All the people who are likely to be outraged by Amazon's patent policy already are, so there's no PR loss. Legally, there is no connection between Amazon's patents and these bozos'. If the court overturns this patent, it will not somehow be retroactively applied to all dumb patents; this patent will be overturned (or not), and that will be the end of it. I suppose we can hope for an activist judge to issue a very broad ruling that overturned a broad class of patents, but this is a very unlikely outcome- most likely the ruling, if it is in Amazon's favor, will be in terms of the specific merits of this case, and not an alteration of patent law. Moreover, is there any way of defining such a ruling legally so that it covers both Amazon and this case? For one thing, Amazon has been criticized for patenting business models, something totally unrelated to this case. More generally, this isn't something that can be corrected judicially by one broad ruling. Most of these either violate current legal definitions of patentability (non-obviousness, prior art, etc), or cannot be legally distinguished from legitimate patents. Thus, the only way to deal with these patents is to A. reform the patent system so that invalid patents don't get granted in the first place, and/or B. challenge them in the courts on a case-by-case basis. No broad ruling can alter the status of already illegitimate patents. Think about it. "This court rules that all invalid patents are hereby invalid." Hmmm...
It ain't happening. No way in heaven or hell is MS porting Office to Linux until it has absolutely no choice (and even then, Gates would probably rather go down fighting).
It isn't the office suite monopoly that maintains MS' dominance. It's not even the OS monopoly. It's the combination of them that is so lethal. It's like that classic hack where you get two intruder processes running as root. Whenever the sysadmin kills one of them, the other immediately restarts it. The only way to kill them is to kill them both simultaneously (not as easy as it sounds) or reboot. The two together are orders of magnitude stronger than either alone.
In the same way, Windows and Office together are literally orders of magnitude stronger than either alone. Whenever Office is seriously threatened by a competitor, MS comes out with a new version of Windows with shiny new features, and a companion version of office using all those new features. By the time the competitor manages to catch up with the new OS, it's all over. Similarly, Office enforces the presence of Windows in literally every computer workplace in America- Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations are the lingua franca of the modern business world, and no self-respecting business user can be without them if they want to communicate with anyone else. All those who have been asked for a resume in Word format raise your hands. I thought so.
The proof is Macintosh- MS Office for Mac, when MS decides to sell it (which is far from always), has always been at least one major version behind the Windows equivalent. This, probably more than any other factor, is what killed the Macintosh as a business product and what will sooner or later kill it entirely.
Mac once accounted for over 10% of the desktop market. Linux now accounts for about 4%. The only concievable reason for MS to sell Office for Linux would be for the revenue, which could hardly amount to more than a few tens of millions. Linux is the most credible threat to MS's dominance in the last 5 years at least. Let's think about this. Is MS going to shatter their iron triangle of software dominance in exchange for an additional 4% of a market they already completely dominate? If you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you for a really great price...
I'd love to see Office on Linux. I really would. But don't hold your breath.
Miramax shares its parent company, Buena Vista, with Disney, so it is, albeit indirectly, involved with the MPAA. As for why support them even indirectly, it's beacause movies are *fun*! I want to be entertained, so I'll gladly pay my $7 to go see a good movie, or my $30 to own a good movie- they provide a great service, and I pay for it. If they then start telling me what I can and can't do with the DVD I paid good money for, that's where I get off, and go download DeCSS.
Most political campaigning, like most advertising, involves a one-way flow of information- the candidate makes statements, gives soundbites, and buys advertisements, and the only way the individual can communicate back is by voting, or writing a letter which will be immediately filed away and ignored by campaign staffers. Such is the nature of mass-media- TV, newspapers, and radio do not facilitate 2-way communication. One of the consequences of this is the public's widespread disinterest in and apathy about politics, because they see no connection between themselves and those who represent them, and no way of truly having a voice.
The internet provides an incredible opportuinty to fundamentally change this dynamic. I feel like I know in some way and am communicating with internet celebrities such as CmdrTaco and Bruce Perens simply by participating in Slashdot. In this community, unlike in national politics, I believe I have a voice, however small it may be. My question is, can the internet bring this sort of connection to politics? How can you, and how are you, leveraging the unique two-way nature of internet media? Can the internet become a conduit for true communication between a politician and those he represents, or will we just see more TV ads and sound bites in HTML format?
I really like this idea. There are a couple problems with it, though.
First of all, it is essential that the penalty not go to the USPTO, or else they will have an incentive to deny patents and trademarks, even if they are valid. The money would have to go back to the US Treasury.
Second, and more difficult to resolve, is the following. Rules have to be uniform, by definition, so if such a rule applies to huge companies, it must apply equally to everyone who applies for patents and trademarks, including small businesses, and individuals with good ides. Such individuals do not have the resources to throughly research the validity of their claim, the existence of prior use, and so fourth. Thus, we are caught between a rock an a hard place. If the penalty is substantial enough to make any difference to a huge corporation, it would be so big that individuals and small businesses simply could not afford the risk of applying for patents or trademarks. Thus, big corporatrions would actually come out better for a rule like this, since they get to exploit the unpatented ideas and uncopyrighted trade names of their smaller competitors. I'm not sure if there is any way around this.
One could try to qualify it by saying that there is a penalty for intentionally applying for an ineligible mrak or patent, but proving intent is incredibly difficult even in a court of law, and with the case load the USPTO has to deal with, it would be totally impossible. One could also try applying different penalties based on ability to pay, but there are a number of legal problems with that- government services charge uniform fees rgardless of ability to pay. Lawsuits are the only case I know of in which ability to pay plays a role, but the USPTO does not have the resources to bring lawsuits over such matters, and does not have the legal authority to act as a court in its own right. Fundamentally, the problem is that although it is obvious to us that the application was ineligible, there is no way of legally defining obviousness.
Seriously, I'm not sure we ever see Hardin say that line directly, but it is attributed to him in several Foundation stories (You mention "The Merchant Princes," but it is also brought up in "The Traders," the 4th story in "Foundation." Thus, I felt justified in attributing it to Hardin. You must admit, it is exactly the sort of thing he would say, even if he didn't actually say it. And no, I hadn't seen the paralell to Mallow's trade tactics, but now that you mention it, it makes sense.
But it is still illegal, and would be regarded as piracy by any court in the country, and probably most courts in the world. As such, I think my use of the term is justified. And, to be realistic, that isn't going to change any time soon. If it were legal to duplicate and use someone else's intellectual property without paying them, all hell would break loose, and the movie, music, (closed source) software, and book industries would all spend their last penny to prevent that from happening. Don't know if you're into the GPL or not, but if you are you have a reason to support intellectual property, because without it, the GPL, like all licenses, looses its force.
Don't get me wrong, I have a small collection of mp3s myself, so I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou. I just don't delude myself into thinking that what I'm doing is legal or ethical.
Yeah, probably, but the Hardin quote is my signature, and I have yet to see a Slashdot story for which it is not at least moderately appropriate. Mallow didn't have Hardin's way with words, anyway.
There are some major differences between now and 5-10 years ago, which make this a much bigger issue than it was then.
Copying of movies and music certainly existed then (which is why even really old videos have that FBI warning on them), but it was limited in several respects. First of all, the media you mention, like all media back then, was analog, and duplication of analog media produces an irreducible loss of quality. To a lesser extent, even playback damages them. This means that one can only copy a tape a certain number of times before it becomes useless. Futhermore, real movie/music buffs won't settle for anything less than top quality, which means the original tape as sold by the studio or label.
This changed with the advent of CD and (recently) DVD. With digial media, one can easily make an exact copy of the original, and digital media generally don't wear out either. This is what terrifies the studios about DVD, and what bothered the labels about CD when it first came out- not the prospect of copying, but the prospect of perfect digital copying.
More importantly, the difference lies in distribution. 5 years ago, even though CD writers did exist, piracy wasn't a huge problem, except from large, organized pirating operations. This is because there is an irreducible cost contained in the physical media, and the shipping of that media. 5 years ago, if I wanted a song without paying for it, I would have to put in some effort, and a nonzero amount of money, to get ahold of it, whether paying for a blank CD or tape, or making the effort of locating someone with the song to copy from. On top of that, it involved a per-copy cost to the original owner- he must spend the time and effort to make each and every copy. The economic term for this is that there was a nonzero marginal cost for each additional copy. This put a practical limit on piracy- any given disc sold would be unlikely to produce more than, say, 5 pirated copies, and very few discs were pirated at all to begin with, so the problem was small. Imagine trying to pirate a DVD today. DVD CCA smokescreen aside, it's pretty much impossible- you have to find a copy of the movie, a DVD burner, and buy a blank DVD, which costs more than the legit movie does.
The internet is changing this situation rapidly. With mp3, the cost of distributing a pirated CD is essentially zero. There is a small bandwidth cost, but it is quite manageable thanks to MPEG compression. And, thanks to internet distribution, a single CD could easily spawn thousands of pirated copies, because once the disc is ripped, the marginal cost of giving the mp3s to someone is essentially zero, and so pirates became willing to give even complete strangers copies. On the other end, if I want a pirated song, I can get it for no more than the cost of my time searching for it, with no additional effort or cost to physically ship it or get it into playable form. This has led to a radical explosion of piracy.
Sooner or later, the same thing will probably happen to DVD. Right now, this is prevented by the combination of a high bandwidth cost and the absence of any software capable of playing a movie directly from a file stored on disc. The CSS crack will address the second relatively soon, leaving only the first. As the mp3 experience shows, that point is probably a lot closer than one might think- only a few years ago, distribution of CD-quality music over the 'net was unthinkable.
Sorry, missed whatever thread you're referring to. I'm not really interested in beating this into the ground again, but the shock (honor?) of recieving a response from someone who has written several of the books on my reference shelf compels me to defend my comments. Feel free to ignore this if you've had this argument too many times already.
I absolutely agree that spaghetti code sucks in any language, and certainly can be written in any language. The fact that the Slash code is uncommented is poor form, language aside. However, the fact that it's in Perl adds some additional complications. Perl's primary virtue, to my mind, is its flexibility- no language I have encountered has come close to Perl in its ability to empower the programmer to do whatever the hell she wants to do, no questions asked. You can write poetry that compiles, for crying out loud! This flexiblity comes at a price, however. If the programmer is coding intelligently and obeying principles of good coding style and form, Perl is as legible as any other language- it is flexible enough to be totally readable. However, it is also flexible enough to be totally illegible. A quick and dirty get-the-job-done hack is by definition messy, and I get the impression Slash falls under that category. The problem is that Perl gives the programmer a lot of lattitude to be messy if she isn't careful. If I am trying to make sense of a piece of C or Java, there are certain basic elements I can count on- a main() enclosed in brackets, explicit variable declarations, functions which explicitly declare the arguments they take, etc. In Perl, none of these are required, and are often left out when one is in a hurry. This flexibility can make the code that much harder to understand. This is why languages which are explicitly designed for multi-programmer projects (e.g. Java) generally enforce much stricter rules of structure and syntax.
None of this is intended as a slam against Perl. Far from it, in fact; Perl is my favorite language, precisely because the aforementioned flexibility makes it so much fun, and I most emphatically agree that that flexibility is a feature, not a bug. I think most Slashdot readers would agree that freedom is worth the occasional hassles which it imposes, in language design as well as in real life. However, it is important to be aware of those hassles, so as to avoid them as much as possible. In the case of Perl, having been bittten a couple times by being unable to read my own code, I am now doubly careful to comment and otherwise behave myself when I am coding in Perl.
I was, perhaps, guilty of exaggeration in my previous comments- Perl is by no means write-only by definition- but my point was not about Perl, so I did not worry too much about the accuracy of my comments as far as Perl is concerned.
Bull. Nothing in the interview says anything remotely to the effect that nobody can understand the source but them. That's why the phrase was "dozens." They expect more than "dozens" of people to get the source, but the reality is that when you give away software, regardless of any diclaimers of responsibility, people expect you to support it and will start bombarding you with questions. A few of the people who d/l the source will certainly start asking about compiling mod_perl and tuning Apache and so fourth. While I can't speak to this personally, I am sure that the guys already have enough crap filling up their mailboxes. It's easy for us to say "refuse to support them" from the outside, but the reality is that this stuff does take time to deal with, if only to read enough of the mail to see that it's headed for the round file.
Furthermore, it's easy to get offended at the implication that we might not understand their code, but have you ever tried reading uncommented Perl written by someone other than yourself? Perl's a wonderful language to write in, but its flexibility makes in nearly incomprehensible unless the writer has the same Perl style as you. Now add the fact that it's written for a specific website, on specific hardware, with specific cooperating software, and you have code that I bet even they can't read half the time. And the reality is that there are tons of people out there who would just jump at the chance to roast Malda et al for putting out lousy code. Many of them are the same people currently barbecuing them for not releasing the code right now.
They're not saying everyone's too dumb to read their code. They're saying dumb people exist, who will make things very unpleasant if the code isn't clean and useable when it's released. They've got people flaming them now for not releasing, they'll get people flaming them for releasing lousy code if they do release, so where's the advantage for them in releasing now?
The Slashdot crew is working its collective ass off for one of the world's most demanding and unforgiving audiences. I'm glad they're having fun, but I wouldn't trade places with them no matter what they paid me. I think they deserve to be cut a little slack.
Well, really, you can have the Big Boom without E=MC^2. Yes, it is what makes the Bomb's energy yield possible, but A. Einstein didn't have Quantum Mechanics or atomic science in mind when he came up with that equation, and B. the Bomb doesn't really leverage E=MC^2- you get only a miniscule fraction of the mass of the bomb back as energy. Now, an antimatter bomb, on the other hand...
Einstein didn't contribute to the bomb effort in any really meaningful way- it was done by quantum physicists and engineers, and he was neither. Relativity has essentially zero relevance to the bomb. Fermi did, of course, help with the bomb, as did Feynman, though he was by no means an important scientist at the time. The biggest name who actually worked on the Manhattan project was probably Bohr.
Of course, as it turned out, it wasn't either us or them- Germany was defeated entirely without the help of atomic power. And while the bomb certainly shortened the war with Japan, it was never a life-or-death issue (for the US, anyway).
I hope you will forgive the Holocaust angle, I realize that bringing up Nazis is often the easy way out of an argument. I was not trying to attack flamers by equating them with Nazis, and I tried to make clear that the former are, of course, orders of magnitude more extreme and dangerous. However, I think Nazi Germany is in this case an instructive example- very rarely in recent memory has rational thought been so thoroughly abandoned by such a large group of people.
I will try to be more creative with my historical references in the future.
I most emphatically disagree with your take on this. First of all, this specific situation. Your argument is a classic post hoc argument, and is quite groundless. You have no evidence at all that the Slashdot flameage had anything to do with eToys' descision. For all we know, this could have ended weeks ago, and only eToys' frustration with the flames kept it going this long. In fact, they say that it was the artistic community's response (not, be it noted, the technology community's response) that led to the dropping of the suit. Furthermore, it seems far more likely that what provoked eToys' withdrawal was not either communities' response, but simple damage control. This was always simply an intimidation measure, to try and force eToy to relinquish their domain name. eToy, to their credit, refused to be bullied, and eToys had to face the possibility of spending a huge amount of money on a possibly unwinnable suit, and facing eToy's countersuit. In the face of these dangers, it is entirely predictable that they would back down, flamers or no flamers. On the whole, there is no reason to believe that Slashdot flameage had anything to do with this.
Furthermore, in general terms, nobody is advocating a Spock-like devotion to pure reason, and few people (least of all me) would argue for the supression of emotion. Emotion is a powerful, and often useful, motivating force. Anger and indignation, both emotions which Slashdot posessed in the extreme, can cause us to rise up and oppose wrongs which a purely rational being might not, regarding the battle as unwinnable or not sufficiently relevant to his or her self-interest. Emotion can be a powerful motivator for good.
However, it can also be a powerful force for evil. The problem with anger, and especially its close relative, hate, is that it is morally and intellectually neutral. It is as easy to become angry over a right as over a wrong- anger has no judgement. In fact, historically, much evil, and very little good, has come of large-scale anger and hatred. The Holocaust is a classic case of what anger and hate can do, and I presume no-one here will try to tell me that was righteous, justified anger.
The point is that rational argument, even rational argument backed by intense passion, could never have led to the Holocaust- there simply isn't an even remotely plausible argument by which exterminating 6 million people makes sense. Some people would believe such an argument, but they would be by far the minority. As long as an environment exists in which opposing ideas are tolerated, intelligent discussion is encouraged, and rationality and judgement are the ground rules, the majority would never permit the Holocaust. The Holocaust came about because the Nazis created an environement in which the above conditions did not apply- dissention was viewed with suspicion and hostility, intelligent discussion was criticized as head-in-the-clouds academic (Spock-like?) nonsense, and above all, the ground rules were hatred and fear. Once that happened, all was lost, and it took the utter defeat of WW2 to bring Germany to its senses.
To return to the more prosaic matter of Slashdot flameage, the same principles apply, although the stakes are (obviously) far lower. Let us suppose that it really was the avalanche of flames that beat eToys into submission. If so, it was not the truth of our arguments that brought this about, but our anger, and their fear and frustration. We would have become the bully in our eagerness to defeat the bully. The Slashdot community may have been in the right in this case, but that may not always be true. Surely you can accept the possibility that Slashdotters, for whatever reason, may someday be on the wrong side of an important judgement. In such a case, the flames would be exactly as effective as if Slashdot were in the right. You said it yourself- "We win every time" (reformattted for legibility, of course). This is what I mean by anger being morally and intellectually neutral- the power of a flame does not in anyway depend on the correctness of the view expressed. The objective of any sort of argument or discussion is (or at least ought to be) the selection of a more-or-less correct course of action. This is why rational discussion is so important. If matters were decided by shouting matches, we might as well roll dice, for all the difference it makes in terms of the correctness of the outcome. Rational discussion is the only form of argument which is in any way biased in favor of right over wrong.
In short, the point I am making is that the goal of an argument is not to win, but to arrive at a solution. Flaming and anger support the former, but rational argument supports the latter, and it is for that reason, and not out of some Vulcan shame of my emotions, that I value a strong rational argument infinitely more than any amount of seemingly righteous anger.
Anyone who compares open-source developers to slaves has either a severely twisted view of open-source software, or a delusionally romantic notion of what slavery is. Red Hat never locked Linus in chains, beat him, or sold his children to get the kernel made. There's a difference between giving and stealing.
Yeah, this is why I regard the GPL with a certain degree of suspicion. I suppose the idea is that the software is free (as in speech, not beer), rather than the user. The analogy would be with human rights- human beings are born free, and governments and other entities are subject to a number of restrictions as to what they can do with us without violating our freedom.
IANAL, especially a not a French lawyer, but this is just nuts. No way in hell is this suit going to go in Leonardo Finace's favor. First of all, there is ample evidence that Leonardo Arts was there long before Leonardo Finance's trademark, and that alone should invalidate the case. The fact that Leonardo is a name of a person further invalidates it. If this suit succeeds, I will no longer be able to have any respect for the french legal system. Frankly, I would hope that this be thrown out the first time a judge takes a look at it.
Moreover, this suit cannot succeed on PR grounds. Not even CNN-style obfuscation as with the eToy issue can cover up the egregious stupidity of this suit. Leonardo Finance is clearly the bad guy here, and will certainly appear so if this gets any media coverage. Leonardo Finance's only hope is that this won't get any attention, because any attention it gets will be bad for them. With any luck, and some help from Slashdot (media people! we know you're reading this!), this will get lots of attention.
In fact, this is so obviously grounds-less that it seems to me it must be an intimidation tactic. Leonardo Finance is hoping that it can scare Leonardo Arts into backing down and settling in a manner agreeable to Leonardo Finance. Leonardo Arts is calling their bluff, and Leonardo Finance is going to have to back down very fast or be at risk of looking like a fool, wasting money on an unwinnable court battle, and possibly exposing themselves to countersuit (Is this possible under French law?).
Not at all. 'Pirating' just means duplicating and distributing software in violation of its license agreement. The only software you can't do that with is public-domain software, which has no license and isn't the same thing as free software at all. Free software, as embodied by the GPL, is under a number of license restrictions on its distribution and use, and can therefore be pirated. E.g. if a company takes a GPL'd piece of software, modifies it, and sells it without the source, that would be piracy, or something similar, under the terms of the GPL.
Even more interesting, as the author noted, was how Micros~1 managed to get the NYPD to knock on this guy's door to retreive the package even 'though no crime was committed. Do they really have that much clout? God help us all if so:)
The news report I read (and let us keep in mind that the above-linked article is not a news report) said that fould play *was* suspected, that someone may have deliberately relabeled the box in order to steal it. Even if they have eliminated that possibliltiy now, it was clearly a possibility at the time, and thus the involvement of the NYPD in securing what might have been stolen property was entirely proper. Of course, one could suppose that MS knew from the beginning that there was no crime involved, and made it appear that a crime was involved in order to get the NYPD's help, but there's no indication of inappropriate behavior on the NYPD's end. In other words, they don't have to definitively establish that a crime was committed before they start helping recover the missing item- they are, after all, an investigative body as well as a law-enforcement organization.
I, likewise, both agree and disagree. I'll take your word for it that Virtua Cop et. al. provide no training insofar as professional shooting/marksmanship is concerned. However, I would speculate (never having fired a gun at a target or a person) that Virtua Cop, at least, might emulate the skills needed for a Columbine-style massacre, in which marksmanship isn't nearly so much of an issue. Both Virtua Cop and a Columbine-style shooting spree involve hitting a lot of moving and stationary targets at medium-to-close range, with comparatively little need to protect oneself. This is analogous to the "Dwarf! Grenade!" situation you describe- it gives one a certain degree of reflexes which could be useful. Of course, it doesn't, as I said, simulate weight, recoil, reloading, and the various other odds and ends of handling a gun, so it may be of limited value.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be very curious to hear some examples of other unexplored paradigms. Personally, I agree that OO is no mecca. No language/design paradigm can turn bad ideas into good ones. However, at least for a substantial number of problems, OO is the most effective, clear, and straightforward method of solving them. Just to name one, ray-tracing is inherently and fundamentally object-oriented, and I really doubt it could be approached more beautifully or elegantly in any other paradigm.
One would think a Slashdot reader, of all people, would realize how dated this concept is. Land may be the ultimate resource in terms of overall human welfare (though I contest that), but that does not make it a meaningful measure of power or social stratification. I am a member of the American elite in a number of ways (white, male, upper-class, well-educated), and by any sane measure I have a disproportionate amount of power in this country (or will, once I get out of college :-)), and yet I am likely to never own any more land than my house covers, if that. Land may be where food comes from, but it sure isn't where influence or power comes from. 3% of America probably does hold most of the power in this country, but it's not the 3% that owns 95% of the land, it's the 3% that has 95% (or however much) of the money. And believe me, they're not the same 3%. Bill Gates isn't a big landowner. Neither is Larry Ellison. The only man to get notably rich off land lately is Donald Trump, and he did that in real estate, which isn't really the same thing.
As for the demand issue, demand for land grows at an exponential rate only within the confines of simple-minded mathematical models (trust me: the population of this planet is not a first-order DE in one variable) and scare headlines in the media. It is now very clear that the world population will stabilize within 40-60 years. Even the most panicky and irrational of the estimates for the world's eventual maximum population permit that entire population to fit on the eastern seaboard of the United States, at the population density of San Francisco, with plenty of farmland left over to feed them. Moreover, the world's food supply is currently growing faster than its population. Overpopulation is bunk.
In the US more than 95% of the privately held land is owned by only 3% of the population.
And more than 95% of the cattle is owned by less than 1% of the population. What's your point? Why does absolutely everything have to be equally distributed? If your statistic referred to money it would make more sense, but land ownership is about as relevant to the modern world as cattle ownership
James Cameron has been (deservedly) been taking a lot of flack lately, but once upon a time he was a really talented filmmaker. The new DVD edition of The Abyss is the most incredible DVD special edition I have ever seen, and wonderfully showcases this very good movie, and the incredible story of its making.
While it is technically only two discs, it is easily the equal of the Criterion Collection's Brazil DVD. The Abyss also features two versions (the theatrical release, and the substantially longer, much better special edition), but through the magic of seamless branching, both versions are incorporated onto a single disc. The sound and video are both superb- this movie has never looked or sounded so good.
Where it really shines, though, is the special features on disc two. I spent literally days exploring this disc, and at the end I was still discovering new features (a testament to the thoroughness of this disc, if not its user-interface design). There is a very impressive making-of documentary, of course, and the usual complement of trailers for The Abyss and other Cameron movies. What really knocked my socks off, though, was something relatively new for a DVD edition. This disc contains an entire book's worth (literally) of making-of material. It is mostly in the form of pages of text, but also features a whole slough of images, video clips, and other miscellany. One nice aspect of the interface: this 'book' can be read cover-to-cover, as it were, or can be acessed by topic through an alternate set of menus. Just to round things out, this disc also includes Cameron's original treatment, the complete shooting script, and all 600+ storyboards. All this for only $20!
I heartily reccomend this disc to anyone who likes Cameron's work, wants to see a good movie, or has any interest at all in how movies are made. This disc is the bomb.
Sad to say, invalidating that patent will not shoot themselves in the foot in any real way. All the people who are likely to be outraged by Amazon's patent policy already are, so there's no PR loss. Legally, there is no connection between Amazon's patents and these bozos'. If the court overturns this patent, it will not somehow be retroactively applied to all dumb patents; this patent will be overturned (or not), and that will be the end of it. I suppose we can hope for an activist judge to issue a very broad ruling that overturned a broad class of patents, but this is a very unlikely outcome- most likely the ruling, if it is in Amazon's favor, will be in terms of the specific merits of this case, and not an alteration of patent law. Moreover, is there any way of defining such a ruling legally so that it covers both Amazon and this case? For one thing, Amazon has been criticized for patenting business models, something totally unrelated to this case. More generally, this isn't something that can be corrected judicially by one broad ruling. Most of these either violate current legal definitions of patentability (non-obviousness, prior art, etc), or cannot be legally distinguished from legitimate patents. Thus, the only way to deal with these patents is to A. reform the patent system so that invalid patents don't get granted in the first place, and/or B. challenge them in the courts on a case-by-case basis. No broad ruling can alter the status of already illegitimate patents. Think about it. "This court rules that all invalid patents are hereby invalid." Hmmm...
It ain't happening. No way in heaven or hell is MS porting Office to Linux until it has absolutely no choice (and even then, Gates would probably rather go down fighting).
It isn't the office suite monopoly that maintains MS' dominance. It's not even the OS monopoly. It's the combination of them that is so lethal. It's like that classic hack where you get two intruder processes running as root. Whenever the sysadmin kills one of them, the other immediately restarts it. The only way to kill them is to kill them both simultaneously (not as easy as it sounds) or reboot. The two together are orders of magnitude stronger than either alone.
In the same way, Windows and Office together are literally orders of magnitude stronger than either alone. Whenever Office is seriously threatened by a competitor, MS comes out with a new version of Windows with shiny new features, and a companion version of office using all those new features. By the time the competitor manages to catch up with the new OS, it's all over. Similarly, Office enforces the presence of Windows in literally every computer workplace in America- Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations are the lingua franca of the modern business world, and no self-respecting business user can be without them if they want to communicate with anyone else. All those who have been asked for a resume in Word format raise your hands. I thought so.
The proof is Macintosh- MS Office for Mac, when MS decides to sell it (which is far from always), has always been at least one major version behind the Windows equivalent. This, probably more than any other factor, is what killed the Macintosh as a business product and what will sooner or later kill it entirely.
Mac once accounted for over 10% of the desktop market. Linux now accounts for about 4%. The only concievable reason for MS to sell Office for Linux would be for the revenue, which could hardly amount to more than a few tens of millions. Linux is the most credible threat to MS's dominance in the last 5 years at least. Let's think about this. Is MS going to shatter their iron triangle of software dominance in exchange for an additional 4% of a market they already completely dominate? If you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you for a really great price...
I'd love to see Office on Linux. I really would. But don't hold your breath.
Miramax shares its parent company, Buena Vista, with Disney, so it is, albeit indirectly, involved with the MPAA. As for why support them even indirectly, it's beacause movies are *fun*! I want to be entertained, so I'll gladly pay my $7 to go see a good movie, or my $30 to own a good movie- they provide a great service, and I pay for it. If they then start telling me what I can and can't do with the DVD I paid good money for, that's where I get off, and go download DeCSS.
Most political campaigning, like most advertising, involves a one-way flow of information- the candidate makes statements, gives soundbites, and buys advertisements, and the only way the individual can communicate back is by voting, or writing a letter which will be immediately filed away and ignored by campaign staffers. Such is the nature of mass-media- TV, newspapers, and radio do not facilitate 2-way communication. One of the consequences of this is the public's widespread disinterest in and apathy about politics, because they see no connection between themselves and those who represent them, and no way of truly having a voice.
The internet provides an incredible opportuinty to fundamentally change this dynamic. I feel like I know in some way and am communicating with internet celebrities such as CmdrTaco and Bruce Perens simply by participating in Slashdot. In this community, unlike in national politics, I believe I have a voice, however small it may be. My question is, can the internet bring this sort of connection to politics? How can you, and how are you, leveraging the unique two-way nature of internet media? Can the internet become a conduit for true communication between a politician and those he represents, or will we just see more TV ads and sound bites in HTML format?
I really like this idea. There are a couple problems with it, though.
First of all, it is essential that the penalty not go to the USPTO, or else they will have an incentive to deny patents and trademarks, even if they are valid. The money would have to go back to the US Treasury.
Second, and more difficult to resolve, is the following. Rules have to be uniform, by definition, so if such a rule applies to huge companies, it must apply equally to everyone who applies for patents and trademarks, including small businesses, and individuals with good ides. Such individuals do not have the resources to throughly research the validity of their claim, the existence of prior use, and so fourth. Thus, we are caught between a rock an a hard place. If the penalty is substantial enough to make any difference to a huge corporation, it would be so big that individuals and small businesses simply could not afford the risk of applying for patents or trademarks. Thus, big corporatrions would actually come out better for a rule like this, since they get to exploit the unpatented ideas and uncopyrighted trade names of their smaller competitors. I'm not sure if there is any way around this.
One could try to qualify it by saying that there is a penalty for intentionally applying for an ineligible mrak or patent, but proving intent is incredibly difficult even in a court of law, and with the case load the USPTO has to deal with, it would be totally impossible. One could also try applying different penalties based on ability to pay, but there are a number of legal problems with that- government services charge uniform fees rgardless of ability to pay. Lawsuits are the only case I know of in which ability to pay plays a role, but the USPTO does not have the resources to bring lawsuits over such matters, and does not have the legal authority to act as a court in its own right. Fundamentally, the problem is that although it is obvious to us that the application was ineligible, there is no way of legally defining obviousness.
Any ideas?
This is probably as good a place as any to plug the Star Wars on DVD campaign, which has an on-line petiton up. Go sign it.
Linking in comments seems to be broken at the moment, so the URL is http://www.dvdfile.com/interactive/guestbook/addgu est.html
I'm touched :-)
Seriously, I'm not sure we ever see Hardin say that line directly, but it is attributed to him in several Foundation stories (You mention "The Merchant Princes," but it is also brought up in "The Traders," the 4th story in "Foundation." Thus, I felt justified in attributing it to Hardin. You must admit, it is exactly the sort of thing he would say, even if he didn't actually say it. And no, I hadn't seen the paralell to Mallow's trade tactics, but now that you mention it, it makes sense.
But it is still illegal, and would be regarded as piracy by any court in the country, and probably most courts in the world. As such, I think my use of the term is justified. And, to be realistic, that isn't going to change any time soon. If it were legal to duplicate and use someone else's intellectual property without paying them, all hell would break loose, and the movie, music, (closed source) software, and book industries would all spend their last penny to prevent that from happening. Don't know if you're into the GPL or not, but if you are you have a reason to support intellectual property, because without it, the GPL, like all licenses, looses its force.
Don't get me wrong, I have a small collection of mp3s myself, so I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou. I just don't delude myself into thinking that what I'm doing is legal or ethical.
Yeah, probably, but the Hardin quote is my signature, and I have yet to see a Slashdot story for which it is not at least moderately appropriate. Mallow didn't have Hardin's way with words, anyway.
There are some major differences between now and 5-10 years ago, which make this a much bigger issue than it was then.
Copying of movies and music certainly existed then (which is why even really old videos have that FBI warning on them), but it was limited in several respects. First of all, the media you mention, like all media back then, was analog, and duplication of analog media produces an irreducible loss of quality. To a lesser extent, even playback damages them. This means that one can only copy a tape a certain number of times before it becomes useless. Futhermore, real movie/music buffs won't settle for anything less than top quality, which means the original tape as sold by the studio or label.
This changed with the advent of CD and (recently) DVD. With digial media, one can easily make an exact copy of the original, and digital media generally don't wear out either. This is what terrifies the studios about DVD, and what bothered the labels about CD when it first came out- not the prospect of copying, but the prospect of perfect digital copying.
More importantly, the difference lies in distribution. 5 years ago, even though CD writers did exist, piracy wasn't a huge problem, except from large, organized pirating operations. This is because there is an irreducible cost contained in the physical media, and the shipping of that media. 5 years ago, if I wanted a song without paying for it, I would have to put in some effort, and a nonzero amount of money, to get ahold of it, whether paying for a blank CD or tape, or making the effort of locating someone with the song to copy from. On top of that, it involved a per-copy cost to the original owner- he must spend the time and effort to make each and every copy. The economic term for this is that there was a nonzero marginal cost for each additional copy. This put a practical limit on piracy- any given disc sold would be unlikely to produce more than, say, 5 pirated copies, and very few discs were pirated at all to begin with, so the problem was small. Imagine trying to pirate a DVD today. DVD CCA smokescreen aside, it's pretty much impossible- you have to find a copy of the movie, a DVD burner, and buy a blank DVD, which costs more than the legit movie does.
The internet is changing this situation rapidly. With mp3, the cost of distributing a pirated CD is essentially zero. There is a small bandwidth cost, but it is quite manageable thanks to MPEG compression. And, thanks to internet distribution, a single CD could easily spawn thousands of pirated copies, because once the disc is ripped, the marginal cost of giving the mp3s to someone is essentially zero, and so pirates became willing to give even complete strangers copies. On the other end, if I want a pirated song, I can get it for no more than the cost of my time searching for it, with no additional effort or cost to physically ship it or get it into playable form. This has led to a radical explosion of piracy.
Sooner or later, the same thing will probably happen to DVD. Right now, this is prevented by the combination of a high bandwidth cost and the absence of any software capable of playing a movie directly from a file stored on disc. The CSS crack will address the second relatively soon, leaving only the first. As the mp3 experience shows, that point is probably a lot closer than one might think- only a few years ago, distribution of CD-quality music over the 'net was unthinkable.
Sorry, missed whatever thread you're referring to. I'm not really interested in beating this into the ground again, but the shock (honor?) of recieving a response from someone who has written several of the books on my reference shelf compels me to defend my comments. Feel free to ignore this if you've had this argument too many times already.
I absolutely agree that spaghetti code sucks in any language, and certainly can be written in any language. The fact that the Slash code is uncommented is poor form, language aside. However, the fact that it's in Perl adds some additional complications. Perl's primary virtue, to my mind, is its flexibility- no language I have encountered has come close to Perl in its ability to empower the programmer to do whatever the hell she wants to do, no questions asked. You can write poetry that compiles, for crying out loud! This flexiblity comes at a price, however. If the programmer is coding intelligently and obeying principles of good coding style and form, Perl is as legible as any other language- it is flexible enough to be totally readable. However, it is also flexible enough to be totally illegible. A quick and dirty get-the-job-done hack is by definition messy, and I get the impression Slash falls under that category. The problem is that Perl gives the programmer a lot of lattitude to be messy if she isn't careful. If I am trying to make sense of a piece of C or Java, there are certain basic elements I can count on- a main() enclosed in brackets, explicit variable declarations, functions which explicitly declare the arguments they take, etc. In Perl, none of these are required, and are often left out when one is in a hurry. This flexibility can make the code that much harder to understand. This is why languages which are explicitly designed for multi-programmer projects (e.g. Java) generally enforce much stricter rules of structure and syntax.
None of this is intended as a slam against Perl. Far from it, in fact; Perl is my favorite language, precisely because the aforementioned flexibility makes it so much fun, and I most emphatically agree that that flexibility is a feature, not a bug. I think most Slashdot readers would agree that freedom is worth the occasional hassles which it imposes, in language design as well as in real life. However, it is important to be aware of those hassles, so as to avoid them as much as possible. In the case of Perl, having been bittten a couple times by being unable to read my own code, I am now doubly careful to comment and otherwise behave myself when I am coding in Perl.
I was, perhaps, guilty of exaggeration in my previous comments- Perl is by no means write-only by definition- but my point was not about Perl, so I did not worry too much about the accuracy of my comments as far as Perl is concerned.
Bull. Nothing in the interview says anything remotely to the effect that nobody can understand the source but them. That's why the phrase was "dozens." They expect more than "dozens" of people to get the source, but the reality is that when you give away software, regardless of any diclaimers of responsibility, people expect you to support it and will start bombarding you with questions. A few of the people who d/l the source will certainly start asking about compiling mod_perl and tuning Apache and so fourth. While I can't speak to this personally, I am sure that the guys already have enough crap filling up their mailboxes. It's easy for us to say "refuse to support them" from the outside, but the reality is that this stuff does take time to deal with, if only to read enough of the mail to see that it's headed for the round file.
Furthermore, it's easy to get offended at the implication that we might not understand their code, but have you ever tried reading uncommented Perl written by someone other than yourself? Perl's a wonderful language to write in, but its flexibility makes in nearly incomprehensible unless the writer has the same Perl style as you. Now add the fact that it's written for a specific website, on specific hardware, with specific cooperating software, and you have code that I bet even they can't read half the time. And the reality is that there are tons of people out there who would just jump at the chance to roast Malda et al for putting out lousy code. Many of them are the same people currently barbecuing them for not releasing the code right now.
They're not saying everyone's too dumb to read their code. They're saying dumb people exist, who will make things very unpleasant if the code isn't clean and useable when it's released. They've got people flaming them now for not releasing, they'll get people flaming them for releasing lousy code if they do release, so where's the advantage for them in releasing now?
The Slashdot crew is working its collective ass off for one of the world's most demanding and unforgiving audiences. I'm glad they're having fun, but I wouldn't trade places with them no matter what they paid me. I think they deserve to be cut a little slack.
Well, really, you can have the Big Boom without E=MC^2. Yes, it is what makes the Bomb's energy yield possible, but A. Einstein didn't have Quantum Mechanics or atomic science in mind when he came up with that equation, and B. the Bomb doesn't really leverage E=MC^2- you get only a miniscule fraction of the mass of the bomb back as energy. Now, an antimatter bomb, on the other hand...
Einstein didn't contribute to the bomb effort in any really meaningful way- it was done by quantum physicists and engineers, and he was neither. Relativity has essentially zero relevance to the bomb. Fermi did, of course, help with the bomb, as did Feynman, though he was by no means an important scientist at the time. The biggest name who actually worked on the Manhattan project was probably Bohr.
Of course, as it turned out, it wasn't either us or them- Germany was defeated entirely without the help of atomic power. And while the bomb certainly shortened the war with Japan, it was never a life-or-death issue (for the US, anyway).
Oh, dear me... Humblest apologies.
I hope you will forgive the Holocaust angle, I realize that bringing up Nazis is often the easy way out of an argument. I was not trying to attack flamers by equating them with Nazis, and I tried to make clear that the former are, of course, orders of magnitude more extreme and dangerous. However, I think Nazi Germany is in this case an instructive example- very rarely in recent memory has rational thought been so thoroughly abandoned by such a large group of people.
I will try to be more creative with my historical references in the future.
I most emphatically disagree with your take on this. First of all, this specific situation. Your argument is a classic post hoc argument, and is quite groundless. You have no evidence at all that the Slashdot flameage had anything to do with eToys' descision. For all we know, this could have ended weeks ago, and only eToys' frustration with the flames kept it going this long. In fact, they say that it was the artistic community's response (not, be it noted, the technology community's response) that led to the dropping of the suit. Furthermore, it seems far more likely that what provoked eToys' withdrawal was not either communities' response, but simple damage control. This was always simply an intimidation measure, to try and force eToy to relinquish their domain name. eToy, to their credit, refused to be bullied, and eToys had to face the possibility of spending a huge amount of money on a possibly unwinnable suit, and facing eToy's countersuit. In the face of these dangers, it is entirely predictable that they would back down, flamers or no flamers. On the whole, there is no reason to believe that Slashdot flameage had anything to do with this.
Furthermore, in general terms, nobody is advocating a Spock-like devotion to pure reason, and few people (least of all me) would argue for the supression of emotion. Emotion is a powerful, and often useful, motivating force. Anger and indignation, both emotions which Slashdot posessed in the extreme, can cause us to rise up and oppose wrongs which a purely rational being might not, regarding the battle as unwinnable or not sufficiently relevant to his or her self-interest. Emotion can be a powerful motivator for good.
However, it can also be a powerful force for evil. The problem with anger, and especially its close relative, hate, is that it is morally and intellectually neutral. It is as easy to become angry over a right as over a wrong- anger has no judgement. In fact, historically, much evil, and very little good, has come of large-scale anger and hatred. The Holocaust is a classic case of what anger and hate can do, and I presume no-one here will try to tell me that was righteous, justified anger.
The point is that rational argument, even rational argument backed by intense passion, could never have led to the Holocaust- there simply isn't an even remotely plausible argument by which exterminating 6 million people makes sense. Some people would believe such an argument, but they would be by far the minority. As long as an environment exists in which opposing ideas are tolerated, intelligent discussion is encouraged, and rationality and judgement are the ground rules, the majority would never permit the Holocaust. The Holocaust came about because the Nazis created an environement in which the above conditions did not apply- dissention was viewed with suspicion and hostility, intelligent discussion was criticized as head-in-the-clouds academic (Spock-like?) nonsense, and above all, the ground rules were hatred and fear. Once that happened, all was lost, and it took the utter defeat of WW2 to bring Germany to its senses.
To return to the more prosaic matter of Slashdot flameage, the same principles apply, although the stakes are (obviously) far lower. Let us suppose that it really was the avalanche of flames that beat eToys into submission. If so, it was not the truth of our arguments that brought this about, but our anger, and their fear and frustration. We would have become the bully in our eagerness to defeat the bully. The Slashdot community may have been in the right in this case, but that may not always be true. Surely you can accept the possibility that Slashdotters, for whatever reason, may someday be on the wrong side of an important judgement. In such a case, the flames would be exactly as effective as if Slashdot were in the right. You said it yourself- "We win every time" (reformattted for legibility, of course). This is what I mean by anger being morally and intellectually neutral- the power of a flame does not in anyway depend on the correctness of the view expressed. The objective of any sort of argument or discussion is (or at least ought to be) the selection of a more-or-less correct course of action. This is why rational discussion is so important. If matters were decided by shouting matches, we might as well roll dice, for all the difference it makes in terms of the correctness of the outcome. Rational discussion is the only form of argument which is in any way biased in favor of right over wrong.
In short, the point I am making is that the goal of an argument is not to win, but to arrive at a solution. Flaming and anger support the former, but rational argument supports the latter, and it is for that reason, and not out of some Vulcan shame of my emotions, that I value a strong rational argument infinitely more than any amount of seemingly righteous anger.
Anyone who compares open-source developers to slaves has either a severely twisted view of open-source software, or a delusionally romantic notion of what slavery is. Red Hat never locked Linus in chains, beat him, or sold his children to get the kernel made. There's a difference between giving and stealing.
Yeah, this is why I regard the GPL with a certain degree of suspicion. I suppose the idea is that the software is free (as in speech, not beer), rather than the user. The analogy would be with human rights- human beings are born free, and governments and other entities are subject to a number of restrictions as to what they can do with us without violating our freedom.
IANAL, especially a not a French lawyer, but this is just nuts. No way in hell is this suit going to go in Leonardo Finace's favor. First of all, there is ample evidence that Leonardo Arts was there long before Leonardo Finance's trademark, and that alone should invalidate the case. The fact that Leonardo is a name of a person further invalidates it. If this suit succeeds, I will no longer be able to have any respect for the french legal system. Frankly, I would hope that this be thrown out the first time a judge takes a look at it.
Moreover, this suit cannot succeed on PR grounds. Not even CNN-style obfuscation as with the eToy issue can cover up the egregious stupidity of this suit. Leonardo Finance is clearly the bad guy here, and will certainly appear so if this gets any media coverage. Leonardo Finance's only hope is that this won't get any attention, because any attention it gets will be bad for them. With any luck, and some help from Slashdot (media people! we know you're reading this!), this will get lots of attention.
In fact, this is so obviously grounds-less that it seems to me it must be an intimidation tactic. Leonardo Finance is hoping that it can scare Leonardo Arts into backing down and settling in a manner agreeable to Leonardo Finance. Leonardo Arts is calling their bluff, and Leonardo Finance is going to have to back down very fast or be at risk of looking like a fool, wasting money on an unwinnable court battle, and possibly exposing themselves to countersuit (Is this possible under French law?).
Not at all. 'Pirating' just means duplicating and distributing software in violation of its license agreement. The only software you can't do that with is public-domain software, which has no license and isn't the same thing as free software at all. Free software, as embodied by the GPL, is under a number of license restrictions on its distribution and use, and can therefore be pirated. E.g. if a company takes a GPL'd piece of software, modifies it, and sells it without the source, that would be piracy, or something similar, under the terms of the GPL.
Even more interesting, as the author noted, was how Micros~1 managed to get the NYPD to knock on this guy's door to retreive the package even 'though no crime was committed. Do they really have that much clout? God help us all if so :)
The news report I read (and let us keep in mind that the above-linked article is not a news report) said that fould play *was* suspected, that someone may have deliberately relabeled the box in order to steal it. Even if they have eliminated that possibliltiy now, it was clearly a possibility at the time, and thus the involvement of the NYPD in securing what might have been stolen property was entirely proper. Of course, one could suppose that MS knew from the beginning that there was no crime involved, and made it appear that a crime was involved in order to get the NYPD's help, but there's no indication of inappropriate behavior on the NYPD's end. In other words, they don't have to definitively establish that a crime was committed before they start helping recover the missing item- they are, after all, an investigative body as well as a law-enforcement organization.
I, likewise, both agree and disagree. I'll take your word for it that Virtua Cop et. al. provide no training insofar as professional shooting/marksmanship is concerned. However, I would speculate (never having fired a gun at a target or a person) that Virtua Cop, at least, might emulate the skills needed for a Columbine-style massacre, in which marksmanship isn't nearly so much of an issue. Both Virtua Cop and a Columbine-style shooting spree involve hitting a lot of moving and stationary targets at medium-to-close range, with comparatively little need to protect oneself. This is analogous to the "Dwarf! Grenade!" situation you describe- it gives one a certain degree of reflexes which could be useful. Of course, it doesn't, as I said, simulate weight, recoil, reloading, and the various other odds and ends of handling a gun, so it may be of limited value.