"Working for an ISV helped me realise that downloading and using software from small indie developers without paying for it benefits no one but myself. It certainly doesn't benefit the indie developer in any way!"
Sure, but that doesn't also mean that someone not pirating would benefit you either. It will likely just mean they go for say, a cheaper, or free competitor, or just do without your product. So why worry about it? I like you work as a software developer but worrying about piracy is pointless, it's a waste of time, it achieves nothing. It's better to just accept piracy exists, and focus on producing a product people want to pay for so that you can earn money from those who have both the money to pay, and the willingness to pay. If your product can't find enough of those people it's meaningless blaming piracy, you can only accept that your product was financially viable.
"Nothing sinister. No **AA involved. Just honest, hard working developers with a passion for building products that help people get things done."
So if passion is your driving motivation then why do you care about how many people buy it? why not just release your product free and develop it in your spare time like many millions of other freeware developers have over the years? or are you saying that passion isn't your motivating factor?
"We know that piracy hurts our business - at least to a certain extent"
No you don't, you think it does, you claim it does to justify your failing product, but you certainly do not know.
"but that seems to be lost on people who consider anyone with a website and products to sell to be in the same league as $$MEGA_CORPORATION$$"
Or more likely it seems you simply don't understand their argument. Their argument is generally that that I have stated above - that people have a finite pool of cash, and that they can't buy everything. They will prioritise what they buy based on how much they like the product, those they like most they will pay for, those they would like to use, but are low enough down their "like" list to be past the point they've run out of disposable income, are the ones they will pirate.
In this respect you are just like the mega corporations, you're failing to understand that you're in competition with everyone else out there to be the firm that gets the user's money. You, like the RIAA et. al. don't understand that your product just isn't high enough a priority to justify purchase.
You may well find that as people grow older, and increase their income as their career develops, that your product then edges into the region of their prioritised list of what you like whereby they still have disposable income to pay for it, you might not.
But one thing is for sure that no matter how many anti-piracy measures come along, this wont magically move you up this list, this wont magically mean people will have an infinite pool of money with which they can buy everything, this wont magically solve anything. Your product will still be far enough down the list that people can't justify paying for it, in the worst case, they'll just do without because they still wont have the money to pay for it after they've bought everything else regardless.
It's a highly competitive market, particularly if you happen to be in the realm of entertainment - DVDs, Blurays, Music CDs, Alcohol, Bowling, Cinemas, Eating out, Computer games, cell phone apps - you've got all that kind of thing to compete against. Don't assume your product is somehow good enough to be better than all the other things people could be spending their money on and the reason they're not spending money on yours is just because they're a cash-hoarding scrooge. That's not the case, people buy what they can in order of the priority they want it, it's upto you to make your product a higher priority for them. If you can't, you have failed with your business model, piracy is really irrelevant to that fact, as it's still the inevitable outcome regardless of how many people pirated your product. All people pirating your product tells you is that they see value in it if it's free, not that they necessarily see value in it if they have to pay something for it, you cannot assume it is a lost sale.
Will it ever work though? Can you really scare a fanatic who is willing to die for his or her cause?
The only people who seem to get screwed are those who are innocent. It's not a very good metric, as the sample size is so small, but since 9/11 every attempt at getting a bomb on the plane has actually succeded at bypassing security - the shoe bomber, and underwear bomber, the bombs on DHL planes from Africa. We were saved from their attempts only by the fact that their bombs failed to detonate in both cases.
If it's a psychological warfare campaign, it seems as fundamentally flawed as it would be as the security campaign it's sold as.
All the others that have been prevented have been prevented before they even got to airport security by good old fashioned intelligence work.
Yep, it's the single sign in that would screw you.
To be fair it's better than it was, you used to actually have to recover your account each time you moved between XBox's, or carry your profile around on a USB stick - you couldn't have it active on 2 XBox's at once, and recover your account could take an hour or two so it was unrealistic. They've at least fixed that now so you can have your account on 2 live connected XBox's at once, even if you can only log into one, but I can't see them allowing multiple signons ever.
Fair use really has been destroyed in gaming, yet most gamers seem to not only not care, but even actively defend it. Some of the arguments in defence I've seen are "Yeah but Steam let's me download my game and play it on different computers" as if this is a miracle benefit of DRM which makes no fucking sense. I could always do that with Quake too, because it didn't have any DRM!
Slashdot used to be vocal if even a byte of their hardware was used to store some DRM thing that had no benefit to them, nowadays a lot of people seem to think it's somehow to their benefit, it's quite disturbing how badly some have been brainwashed into accepting less, whilst often paying more.
No it's not an issue of multiple consoles. The issue is that the game gets tied to your account, so actually only one person can play the full game that you've legitimately paid for.
One might argue that from a technical point of view, more people can still play the game by sharing an account, but from a practical point of view this is not true if the other account holder wants to play something else or use other live content at the same time on a different console. Even from a pedantic technical point of view it's not technically even true, because sharing accounts is against the ToS anyway.
So both technically, and practically, for many households, you're not buying a game to run on one console, but to be used by only one person. Practically, a single game effectively forces you to take it in turns to use an entire account's worth of content if you all want to enjoy the full game, technically, more than one person isn't even allowed to play the full game. I cannot play Battlefield on my account and my console, nor can I even play much offline content that requires Live validation if my girlfriend wants to play NfS online on her console.
That's absolutely the best way forward for consumers, but will they do it?
As I say I'm not convinced for one moment "activation" is about piracy. It's exactly the same thing the music industry has been dreaming of and trying to peddle for years - it's about trying to force people to always have to buy first hand, and to force households to rebuy the same content as many times as possible.
I sincerely hope I'm proven wrong, Valve will be deserving of a massive amount of kudos if they do this.
"Assuming you mean online multiplayer, the developer/publisher provides the service that allows the multiplayer to happen. It's underhanded, true, but also understandable, as (usage of) the service is licensed separately to the game itself."
Does it? XBox Live costs me £40 a year and multiplayer on every single game I've played bar Battlefield 3 is peer to peer. I don't disagree with you if we're talking about something like WoW where there is significant server overhead, I don't even disagree with something like BF3, though ironically with BF3 not only have they introduced a subscription service, they've actually stopped providing 99.99% of their servers and instead charge people to run their own. I guess I can't fault them as it works, but certainly on consoles there's negligible expenditure on multiplayer costs - the bulk of it is paid for by Microsoft by way of the Live infrastructure rather than the games companies themselves.
It's frustrating too, because me and my girlfriend both enjoyed Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, we both have an XBox, and we both have a Live subscription, yet because of the activation code she can't play multiplayer whilst I'm playing a different game on my console without paying yet another £10 despite the fact we already paid for the game first hand.
Effectively we've reached a point now where you have to actually buy a copy of many games for every person in the house that wants to play multiplayer, rather than where you'd just need a copy per household previously. We're quick to criticise the music industry because they've been trying to make us rebuy content we've already paid for for years now, but we seem to have sleepwalked into allowing games companies to get away with exactly this.
I wonder if this has any implications for game developers?
I've always though the tactic of enabling multiplayer (and nowadays even some single player) via a code that's become prevalent in just about every console game over the last year or two really stank of a complete breach of the precedent of the right to sell your content on second hand.
Similarly, I wonder if it has any implications for Valve, with whom you're forced to activate some games with to prevent resale?
I know a lot of people here will defend Valve etc., but really, computer software is about the only product I know of whereby you're artificially prevented from selling on in the same working manner you can consume it in second hand. Toasters, clothes, cars, music CDs, DVDs, books, plants, furniture, washing machines - just what other products are there other than games that have these artificially restrictions in place to prevent resale? Should they really be allowed to get away with it by simply claiming they're anti-piracy measures when we all know the pirates nearly always get their copies earlier precisely because they don't contain these measures?
But create a website the Americans don't like? That's it, off to the US with you!
Apparently a controversal programme is enough human rights grounds to prevent extradition of a paedophile, but the high potential for suicide (McKinnon) or the fact a guy will have his life ruined, and run a high risk of rape in a US jail despite having committed no crime in the US (O'Dwyer) isn't.
It's worth noting though that even getting your resume right is a topic in itself, and can be quite a minefield.
I've seen companies that want you to basically just provide them a list of all the buzzwords you can think of, companies that don't give a shit about that but want you to write some blurb about your underlying development philosophy and background, and others who throw a hissy fit if you dare describe experience with anything other than the specific technology they use alongside what they use.
You're absolutely right that a good resume is a key starting point, but I certainly don't think there is a one size fits all resume. I think the key is to just write as best a resume as you can, and any companies that don't like it figure that you probably weren't going to fit in there anyway. Some companies will whinge about CVs being too long, others too short, some too detailed, some not detailed enough, some containing too little description of technologies you've worked with, some too many. Part the problem is that again, whilst you're right, a good CV is important, there's also many companies out there that couldn't spot a good CV if it slapped them round the face.
Then of course there are the companies who are looking for some god programmer on a junior programmer's wages, despite advertising much higher wages to get you to interview and then whinge repeatedly about how there is a "skills shortage" because they've not been able to find anyone to fill their post in 3 years, and well, I wont even get started on the differing levels of interview quality.
I've never had any problem getting interviews and getting jobs, but I have had a few companies turn me down based on my my CV so weren't interested whilst others loved it for the exact reason those companies said they hated it with some of the most absurd reasons on earth for rejection. One example is a company that said that they weren't interested because I'd mentioned I had some past experience with Java and they were after a pure.NET developer even though my 3 years prior experience had been 100%.NET as if somehow having had breadth of experience with different technologies and having depth of experience in a specific technology or two are mutually exclusive things - they're not. Most other companies appreciated the fact I had much broader experience than other candidates whilst maintaining the depth of experience needed in the specific technologies they were looking for.
Then there are companies who do technical tests, companies who don't, companies who want past work, companies who only care about what you want to work on. Similarly with technical tests I've had companies do none at all, I've had ones I've completely flunked because it was on some technology I made it clear before the interview even that I had absolutely no experience in and I've had ones where they've expected me to sit a 3 hour online exam, whom I've politely declined pointing out that there are many other companies out there offering me interviews without expecting me to dick around like that before I even get an interview.
I suppose one thing is true though, good companies do recognise good CVs, so I guess my point would be to add to yours the caveat that even with a good CV you may suffer rejections based purely on your CV that are related more to the recruiting company's ineptitude than anything you've done inherently wrong, but don't worry about it because again, the good ones will recognise a good CV. Ultimately you'll also find that though it may be tiresome interviewing here and there, rejecting some, and being rejected by others, that you'll know the right employer when you find it. The interview wont feel like an interview, it'll feel like a nice chat with some genuinely decent and competent people.
One final point I'd add is that it's wrong to prejudge a job also, I had two interviews in one day, one for a software house, one for an engineering firm. I was really interested in the software house one
The problem I have with TFA is use of the term completely safe. Some studies have shown there is risk (something like 1 in 2million) but they have weighted this in the context of the relative increase in cancer incidents being negligible compared to the existing chance of getting cancer.
This is a fair and valid argument, but where I believe it falls down is that the risk of getting cancer from T-Ray scanners is then non-negligible compared to the chance of dying or being injured by a terrorist attack prior to their introduction.
So sure, the chance of any harm from them is so absolutely tiny so as not to be worried about it, but the chance of harm from a terrorist attack is even smaller. So the question remains, why bother with the expense of them? Why bother with the increased risk at all, no matter how small? Why bother when they don't even necessarily work as there are still a number of ways to slip things past them?
Fundamentally it's because terrorist incidents cause a number of deaths in a small timeframe in a single place so trigger the nonsensical shock reaction people are prone to, whereas deaths from this sort of thing are spread far and wide over a longer period.
Still, this is just regarding airport scanners, as a tool for doctors and dentists they should do far more to save people's lives than risk them, by a few orders of magnitude no doubt so would be well worthwhile in this context.
Google were already in talks with them at that point, it's most likely that that was a bargaining chip to push the price up.
Google had obviously already made their decision as to why by then so this can't have been a factor in it. All it can have done is increase the urgency of purchase and/or price they were willing to pay which as I say, was almost certainly precisely the point.
Things like this have always gone hand in hand with negotiations anyway.
War, economic sanctions, and now cyber-attacks. They're all just there to try and weaken the oppositions negotiating hand.
Over issues like this, there's never been such thing as mere negotiations, there's always been pressure applied (by both sides) to improve the strength of their hand. You see it often with North Korea for example - when they're not getting what they want from talks they threaten a nuclear test, or a missile test, then the US responds by cutting aid or whatever to try and counter it and vice versa.
Sometimes it's not even intentional, a bad story can coincide with strengthening ones hand and be used as propaganda to strengthen further. An example of this is with the Taliban, talks with the Taliban have gone hand in hand with increased US raids on suspected militants etc. to try and up the pressure. Similarly, the Taliban up their attacks to try and strengthen the urgency of talks with them. When the US somewhat recently ran into issues for example with the news breaking of burning Korans, the Taliban pulled back from peace talks, knowing the pressure at this point was on the US to give more concessions to bring them back to the table with the danger that if they don't, it may make it difficult to pull out of Afghanistan without a new seed being born for another 9/11.
Aggressive actions alongside negotiations are nothing newsworthy, it's likely been that way since man first figured out the concept of negotiation. Cyber attacks are just another tool in the box for that age old purpose.
People have guns in most parts of Europe, the difference is the people there don't have wild fantasies of some revolution that they're never actually going to fulfil, but like to pretend somehow gives them extra freedom when it doesn't precisely because they wont fulfil it.
When American citizens actually take up arms and use them to claw back some of the freedoms they've lost since 9/11, then they can come back and tell us all how awesome their guns are as tools in defence of liberty. Until then it's just wild fantasy.
"Name the American law that makes criticism of the US government a crime."
Whichever US law it is that's been used to detain people who have only been guilty of giving a negative opinion of the US in Guantanamo and who hadn't actually carried out any physical insurgent activity? Whichever law it is that was used to force Visa/Mastercard in cutting off Wikileak's funding stream which is defacto censorship? Whichever law it was that was used to ban various tourists from the US for being critical of the US government? Or is it only censorship when an American voice is silenced?
Or perhaps that's the problem, the US doesn't bother with actual laws for things like this, it just does it regardless of what's on the statute books, and often in spite of them.
"There may be jingoist idiots in America, but that is a far cry from China, where the government actually employs people to decide which websites should be blocked."
Who do you think decides on the ICE seizures? Pixies? Fairies? Elves? No, I'm pretty sure you'll find it's government employees.
"Be glad that the Chinese government does not have a say in global Internet policies, because as bad as the American approach is, the Chinese approach is far worse."
How would we know? They've never had a voice on that, even if they did, why are you so certain it'd pass? I've not seen the Chinese use the ITU or UPU to censor my telephone calls or post internationally. I have however seen the US censor the global internet.
"How about the fact that we do not arrest journalists for criticizing our government?"
Yet America tried to censor wikileaks.
"How about the fact that it is considered outrageous for us to torture people who are not even US citizens?"
Yet America still did exactly that, and reelected a government that did exactly that.
"How about the fact that, even with the world's largest prison population, American prisons are a far cry from the sort of prisons in the middle east or Russia, or even several European nations?"
Yet still closer to the prison conditions of those nations than to the nations with more progressive, and more successful penal institutions, and fundamentally, as you pointed out yourself, still with the largest prison population.
"American human rights violations are bad, sure. They are lightweight compared to the violations that we have seen out of other countries. "
So that makes it okay?
"In America, when you go to prison, your family knows where you are, the maximum length of your sentence, your physical condition, and so forth. In many countries, people simply disappear when they go to prison; their families have no idea how they are doing or even where they are."
A bit like Bradley Manning, or those in Guantanamo then really.
"I can criticize the government in America without disappearing in the middle of the night."
Unless you're an Afghan in your home country.
"That is because no other nation has the power to do so. Don't think for a moment that China would hesitate to stifle foreign websites about Tibet, if they had the power to do so."
I don't doubt they would either, but that's why I'd prefer it be handled by an international organisation, staffed by pretty bright academics, and where consensus would never be reached on something like global censorship unless the US supported it, which is probably the biggest threat - it has after all tried to push exactly that with ACTA. As I've said before though, there is no harm in the US at least entertaining and discussing the proposals, if it doesn't get proposals that ensure a majority, or a super majority is required to push through controversial measures then it doesn't have to give up control does it? As someone else pointed out, the rules with the ITU currently are that no new rules for the ITU can infringe on the wills of a sovereign nation, so censorship wouldn't even be possible at the ITU anyway because that's not what the ITU is - it isn't some control structure, it merely faci
"Really? Are you sure? Why don't you go and think over what you've just said there a bit more and get back to us."
Which post? the one explaining what the ITU does to a far right nationalist conspiracy theorist kook that received between it about 10 upmods, and 10 downmods?
If you really think that post was "troll" or overrated I can't believe you've ever read a post on Slashdot before, it was about as tame as they come, and fully informative of the sorts of things the UN is responsible for.
"Maybe (s)he is, but then again, you're drunk on your own bullshit too."
You can call it bullshit if you wish but Asian/Europeans were agreeing with me, as I say the downmods only come when the Americans wake up and enter the game. You'll have to excuse me if I'd rather judge the correctness of posts I write that are critical of America on the thoughts and feelings of people who aren't part of the problem, rather than people who are.
"This is the same case from the start. Its just taken several rounds for you to see why you can't use a single hierarchy."
But I've done exactly that. I've given you a solution. You're using a really weak argument here.
"I don't want a taxes data structure I want hundreds of methods and objects having to do with imported vs. domestic. Imported objects may have far service offices. They have shipping times. They may have multiple conflicting law sets that apply to them."
Sure, and all this can be represented as I say. You just need to know in your analysis from the outset what kind of level of flexibility you're planning for. You can't plan for no flexibility, then complain when you can't flex the system, sure, I agree, OO will never deal with that kind of abysmal planning, but few if any systems will. If however you have some degree of understanding of the problem domain though all this can be modelled using OO without MI in a perfectly logical and sensible manner as I have continued to prove by providing you examples.
"If I have to go back to dealing with the data of an object and not the method I've just broken the whole OO paradigm and then I am doing procedural code."
I don't even think you get the OO paradigm at all, when I mention that you can store the taxes against an object, I'm not suggesting a raw array of floats or whatever, I'm talking about implementing tax objects. You're at least aware that objects can have has-a relationships with other objects right?
"No it wasn't. I was citing Meyer's Object Oriented Software Construction. I'd like a cite for your position about the origins of OO. Of course OO is computer oriented, it is a computer language design paradigm. I way of designing programming languages."
You can cite a book that came out the best part of 30 years after the foundations for OO were laid all you want, but I'm not sure why you'd think it would be the stand out definition, more so than say, the accounts from the people who were around during the much earlier developments of OO such as here:
I guess you missed the whole reason why we decided to try and move away from computing-oriented paradigms.
"Why would it be likely to be reusable? The reason is because it is generic, abstract. It is the abstraction processes not the object hierarchy that creates reusability."
But the more you bundle into a function, the less generic it comes, which is precisely why it's better to break something down into less functions to ensure more components of the whole are generic, rather than writing a single monolithic function to do one single thing in a completely non-reusable manner.
"What's a property? A property in the OO sense has to respond to a method call. if x is a type of frog I want x.acceptableTemperature() to be a method. I don't want to do: x.origination.acceptableTemperature() otherwise I suddenly need to understand the internal structure of x and then I might as well just do:"
Yet again you show a complete failure to understand proper OO design, and yet again you're expanding a case that has previously been analysed with a set of given conditions to say "Hey, look, it's wrong now!". If you want to find out information about a climate zone, then you make that climate zone a more detailed data structure, or an object in itself that can tell you the temperature range. This makes sense because in your example you're saying it's really the climate zone that defines the temperature, so it should be the climate zone from which you find the temperature range, however this is a really dumb examples as species still have different temperature requirements even in existing climate zones, so more realistically you'd just set acceptableTemperature against the species anyway.
"Optimally you Toyota to inherit from dozens of classes:"
No you don't, that's absolutely horrendous design and yet
"The US has not even been able to establish a rudimentary national firewall because of the uproar; does that really seem worse than the Chinese government to you?"
Judging by the fact I took about 20 downmods the second American primetime hit for daring to engage in sensible debate, I'd say that absolutely it sounds worse than the Chinese government.
Americans certainly seem to have no respect for opposing viewpoints and seem horrendously quick to censor. I'm not new to this point, as I've seen it before where you can have a decent discussion during European/Asian prime times when the Americas are asleep, then as soon as America wakes up the moderation system goes to hell, but fundamentally it illustrates the point - it highlights the utter hypocrisy of America, it claims to be the pinnacle of justice, to be a defender of freedom, it extolls the virtues of free speech, but Americans are always first to scream for extradjudicial killings of figures they hate, the worst offender in the last decade for kidnapping of foreign citizens and removal of it's own citizen's freedoms, and first to try and silence people they don't agree with.
I'll admit I do struggle to see how Americans can even begin to criticse other countries for anything relating to human rights.
"At least the US has not tried to force people to respect the national firewalls of countries like China."
Still, let me help you out. Only one nation to date has actually forced it's internet censorship on other nations, and that's America. If you think ICE seizures are anything but, then you're so drunk on America's own bullshit that you're past even helping yourself. America has already created it's defacto international firewall equivalent - by outright removing DNS entries for sites it disagrees with. The technology may be different, but the net effect is the same. You can't even argue the US as having the censorship moral high ground anymore, that argument has long walked.
Yes, unfortunately this story was posted at a bad time - just as US prime time was beginning.
Unfortunately when such stories happen you get the ultra-right wing tea-party jizz fest croud on Slashdot who have a circle jerk over anything xenophobic they can find.
So what this means in practice is that what people like you and me say - people like us who actually have an understanding out of whatever redneck hickville these nobodies crawl out of - will fall on deaf ears.
Ultimately they can say and mod however they want because it doesn't matter - they'll still be wrong, and the rest of the world will still disagree with them. Their views will still continue to drag America down, and America will still ultimately have to give up it's dictatorial control of the internet and hand it over to a much fairer organisation, but in the meantime they can at least satisfy themselves because they live in America, fuck yeah!
Well I don't know if it's worth me replying because you're obviously pretty dumb for not really getting my last post.
My point wasn't that democracy was bad, but that some democracies are hardly legitimate representations of the people. WIPO in contrast was representative of the member states as it was one vote per member, majority rules.
That is much better than say the "democracy" we have in the UK where 30% of the vote can give you 100% of power.
But if in your mind all democracies are equal then you're not smart enough to understand the point. Fundamentally I don't care if something is a democracy or a dictatorship, I only care that whatever method of rule it has, that method of rule is supported by a majority of it's constituents. Democracy in countries like the UK does not have that, WIPO did.
It's not about the electoral system stupid, it's about representation.
"And with that structure how do you handle a GM or a Brooks Brother's Suit? You can't have Import as a base class for Car because not all cars are imports. You can't have Cars fork into Import and Domestic because you also need Import / Domestic for Suits and no Suits are Cars."
This is the problem though, you can keep on adding cases until you break a solution and say "Hey look, I told you multiple inheritance was the solution!" but you're still completely wrong. In this case you need to then question whether import even needs to be a class, or whether you just have, say, a product class with a country of origin property from which you can derive if it's imported, or just have an isImport property if you want, and a taxes data structure that includes the import taxes in it. It's still just as trivially implemented in OO without any need for MI. This particular solution would be more generic and cater to far more things you can throw at it, but that's the sort of thing you have to decide if you need when you do your analysis of the problem.
"Why do you think programmers wanted to "represent data in terms of objects"? There was no desire to do this originally, the desire came from wanting to build complex trees of types."
Because it's a more natural representation of how the world works, rather than how computers work. That was always the driving force.
"Programmers wanted reusability. They wanted reusability for saving in time and reduction of errors."
Programmers always want reusability, in everything they do and every solution they seek, it's not an OO specific trait or a driving force for OO, it's merely just a factor that was taken into account with OO, just like any other well developed software paradigm. Any new paradigm will always try and improve these fundamental traits like reusability, but that doesn't mean they're the initial driving force behind the creation of a new paradigm.
You have a very computer oriented view of what OO was designed to be which is ironically precisely what OO was about moving away from.
"Because I want software extensible. And that means that the vast majority of my code, hopefully 90% or more is not specific to the problem but is very general."
That's irrelevant to the point. A broken down problem is no less extensible, and no less reusable, it's arguably more so because a broken down component is far likely to be reusable.
"Your point in the side comment "Well a Frog is an Animal and an Amphibian so it should inherit from both!" isn't what's being talked about. A better analogy is a "Well a Tropic Frog is an Amphibian and a tropical animal"."
This just demonstrates that you still don't get OO. You would simply have a property that defines where an animal originates/lives - tropical, temperate, etc.
The world needs people like you - people who understand the functional side of things well, the side of things that's much more closely associated to the way the hardware does things, but it doesn't mean you understand OO well.
That's if you have the rather ethnocentric view that democracy is the only way a country's government can be legitimate.
You know that in China, despite the fact it's a totalitarian regime, most Chinese still support it, hence it's still a legitimate representation of the people?
Compare this to Russia, which is a democracy, but where it's likely Putin and his cronies don't actually have a majority support, and it shows that simply being a democracy is an invalid measure of whether a government is a legitimate representation of it's people. Some may even argue that the US is an illegitimate representation of it's people, and the UK most commonly certainly has been. Under the UK's first past the post system for example groups have regularly ruled the country with as low as only 30% of the popular vote.
Democracy within a country tells us nothing about whether it's representative of the people. Democracy in the UN at least tells us every country has an equal say, whatever that say is. Still, your comment implies you think that for example, African nations voting against IP laws that prevent them getting medicine was done for self interest of the government. Are you really sure about that? It's a theory that doesn't make any real sense.
"I'm fairly certain entities other than the UN are responsible for mail and international calls. Air traffic control, likewise, falls under the auspices of each nation, individually, not the UN."
You can be fairly certain all you want, but you're still wrong.
"I have to re-implement the entire imported structure again.
A Mini has properties of Car (like wheels) and properties of imports (like international duites)"
So do as I said, if an import sits below a car, then have Import as your base class, so:
Import -> Car -> Mini Cooper
Import -> Suit -> Gucci
Stick your international duties in import, your wheels in car. This only further serves to demonstrate the point that most people think they need MI when they fail to grasp proper OO structure.
"True, but the whole idea of object orientation in terms of encouraging reuse is to make that easy. If I have to do that sort of analysis why not just use a procedural language?"
No, the whole idea of object orientation is to allow you to represent data, and actions on data in terms of objects. It does not do your job for you.
"The whole idea of object orientation is that I can casually inherit without having to have a deep understanding of what I'm inheriting and just use the properties I want."
No this is still completely false, to use OO you still have to understand it. Not understanding it does not make OO bad, it just means it's a tool you do not understand how to use properly.
I guess from your comments such as your mention of Haskell that you're a functional or procedural programmer and that's fine, but as always it seems to be the case that when most people think they need MI the real problem is that they simply don't understand OO. It goes back to my original comments - there are very few situations where MI is useful, where people think it is useful they generally just do not get object oriented architecture, and having to break a problem down doesn't breach OO principles, on the contrary it's a large part of them. I don't know why you'd ever favour great hulking monolithic functions rather than breaking down the problem, not only does this increase scope for errors, but it also reduces testability, it reduces reusability.
It goes back to the point that was made well in this post and my subsequent reply:
That it's about understanding relationships between objects. It's about recognising that it's rarely ever the case that something is ever two things. As I say it's not that MI isn't useful in some cases, but those cases are extremely rare and misuse is thousands of times more prominent that sensible use.
Yes, because if it weren't for the UN America would be a bastion of transparency and honesty without any corruption whatsoever. It's obvious that the UN causes corruption in America, and not vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
"Working for an ISV helped me realise that downloading and using software from small indie developers without paying for it benefits no one but myself. It certainly doesn't benefit the indie developer in any way!"
Sure, but that doesn't also mean that someone not pirating would benefit you either. It will likely just mean they go for say, a cheaper, or free competitor, or just do without your product. So why worry about it? I like you work as a software developer but worrying about piracy is pointless, it's a waste of time, it achieves nothing. It's better to just accept piracy exists, and focus on producing a product people want to pay for so that you can earn money from those who have both the money to pay, and the willingness to pay. If your product can't find enough of those people it's meaningless blaming piracy, you can only accept that your product was financially viable.
"Nothing sinister. No **AA involved. Just honest, hard working developers with a passion for building products that help people get things done."
So if passion is your driving motivation then why do you care about how many people buy it? why not just release your product free and develop it in your spare time like many millions of other freeware developers have over the years? or are you saying that passion isn't your motivating factor?
"We know that piracy hurts our business - at least to a certain extent"
No you don't, you think it does, you claim it does to justify your failing product, but you certainly do not know.
"but that seems to be lost on people who consider anyone with a website and products to sell to be in the same league as $$MEGA_CORPORATION$$"
Or more likely it seems you simply don't understand their argument. Their argument is generally that that I have stated above - that people have a finite pool of cash, and that they can't buy everything. They will prioritise what they buy based on how much they like the product, those they like most they will pay for, those they would like to use, but are low enough down their "like" list to be past the point they've run out of disposable income, are the ones they will pirate.
In this respect you are just like the mega corporations, you're failing to understand that you're in competition with everyone else out there to be the firm that gets the user's money. You, like the RIAA et. al. don't understand that your product just isn't high enough a priority to justify purchase.
You may well find that as people grow older, and increase their income as their career develops, that your product then edges into the region of their prioritised list of what you like whereby they still have disposable income to pay for it, you might not.
But one thing is for sure that no matter how many anti-piracy measures come along, this wont magically move you up this list, this wont magically mean people will have an infinite pool of money with which they can buy everything, this wont magically solve anything. Your product will still be far enough down the list that people can't justify paying for it, in the worst case, they'll just do without because they still wont have the money to pay for it after they've bought everything else regardless.
It's a highly competitive market, particularly if you happen to be in the realm of entertainment - DVDs, Blurays, Music CDs, Alcohol, Bowling, Cinemas, Eating out, Computer games, cell phone apps - you've got all that kind of thing to compete against. Don't assume your product is somehow good enough to be better than all the other things people could be spending their money on and the reason they're not spending money on yours is just because they're a cash-hoarding scrooge. That's not the case, people buy what they can in order of the priority they want it, it's upto you to make your product a higher priority for them. If you can't, you have failed with your business model, piracy is really irrelevant to that fact, as it's still the inevitable outcome regardless of how many people pirated your product. All people pirating your product tells you is that they see value in it if it's free, not that they necessarily see value in it if they have to pay something for it, you cannot assume it is a lost sale.
Will it ever work though? Can you really scare a fanatic who is willing to die for his or her cause?
The only people who seem to get screwed are those who are innocent. It's not a very good metric, as the sample size is so small, but since 9/11 every attempt at getting a bomb on the plane has actually succeded at bypassing security - the shoe bomber, and underwear bomber, the bombs on DHL planes from Africa. We were saved from their attempts only by the fact that their bombs failed to detonate in both cases.
If it's a psychological warfare campaign, it seems as fundamentally flawed as it would be as the security campaign it's sold as.
All the others that have been prevented have been prevented before they even got to airport security by good old fashioned intelligence work.
Yep, it's the single sign in that would screw you.
To be fair it's better than it was, you used to actually have to recover your account each time you moved between XBox's, or carry your profile around on a USB stick - you couldn't have it active on 2 XBox's at once, and recover your account could take an hour or two so it was unrealistic. They've at least fixed that now so you can have your account on 2 live connected XBox's at once, even if you can only log into one, but I can't see them allowing multiple signons ever.
Fair use really has been destroyed in gaming, yet most gamers seem to not only not care, but even actively defend it. Some of the arguments in defence I've seen are "Yeah but Steam let's me download my game and play it on different computers" as if this is a miracle benefit of DRM which makes no fucking sense. I could always do that with Quake too, because it didn't have any DRM!
Slashdot used to be vocal if even a byte of their hardware was used to store some DRM thing that had no benefit to them, nowadays a lot of people seem to think it's somehow to their benefit, it's quite disturbing how badly some have been brainwashed into accepting less, whilst often paying more.
No it's not an issue of multiple consoles. The issue is that the game gets tied to your account, so actually only one person can play the full game that you've legitimately paid for.
One might argue that from a technical point of view, more people can still play the game by sharing an account, but from a practical point of view this is not true if the other account holder wants to play something else or use other live content at the same time on a different console. Even from a pedantic technical point of view it's not technically even true, because sharing accounts is against the ToS anyway.
So both technically, and practically, for many households, you're not buying a game to run on one console, but to be used by only one person. Practically, a single game effectively forces you to take it in turns to use an entire account's worth of content if you all want to enjoy the full game, technically, more than one person isn't even allowed to play the full game. I cannot play Battlefield on my account and my console, nor can I even play much offline content that requires Live validation if my girlfriend wants to play NfS online on her console.
That's absolutely the best way forward for consumers, but will they do it?
As I say I'm not convinced for one moment "activation" is about piracy. It's exactly the same thing the music industry has been dreaming of and trying to peddle for years - it's about trying to force people to always have to buy first hand, and to force households to rebuy the same content as many times as possible.
I sincerely hope I'm proven wrong, Valve will be deserving of a massive amount of kudos if they do this.
"Assuming you mean online multiplayer, the developer/publisher provides the service that allows the multiplayer to happen. It's underhanded, true, but also understandable, as (usage of) the service is licensed separately to the game itself."
Does it? XBox Live costs me £40 a year and multiplayer on every single game I've played bar Battlefield 3 is peer to peer. I don't disagree with you if we're talking about something like WoW where there is significant server overhead, I don't even disagree with something like BF3, though ironically with BF3 not only have they introduced a subscription service, they've actually stopped providing 99.99% of their servers and instead charge people to run their own. I guess I can't fault them as it works, but certainly on consoles there's negligible expenditure on multiplayer costs - the bulk of it is paid for by Microsoft by way of the Live infrastructure rather than the games companies themselves.
It's frustrating too, because me and my girlfriend both enjoyed Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, we both have an XBox, and we both have a Live subscription, yet because of the activation code she can't play multiplayer whilst I'm playing a different game on my console without paying yet another £10 despite the fact we already paid for the game first hand.
Effectively we've reached a point now where you have to actually buy a copy of many games for every person in the house that wants to play multiplayer, rather than where you'd just need a copy per household previously. We're quick to criticise the music industry because they've been trying to make us rebuy content we've already paid for for years now, but we seem to have sleepwalked into allowing games companies to get away with exactly this.
I wonder if this has any implications for game developers?
I've always though the tactic of enabling multiplayer (and nowadays even some single player) via a code that's become prevalent in just about every console game over the last year or two really stank of a complete breach of the precedent of the right to sell your content on second hand.
Similarly, I wonder if it has any implications for Valve, with whom you're forced to activate some games with to prevent resale?
I know a lot of people here will defend Valve etc., but really, computer software is about the only product I know of whereby you're artificially prevented from selling on in the same working manner you can consume it in second hand. Toasters, clothes, cars, music CDs, DVDs, books, plants, furniture, washing machines - just what other products are there other than games that have these artificially restrictions in place to prevent resale? Should they really be allowed to get away with it by simply claiming they're anti-piracy measures when we all know the pirates nearly always get their copies earlier precisely because they don't contain these measures?
Yes well, we wont extradite a child rapist either who actually committed a crime in the US:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9362298/Paedophile-spared-extradition-to-US-on-human-rights-grounds.html
But create a website the Americans don't like? That's it, off to the US with you!
Apparently a controversal programme is enough human rights grounds to prevent extradition of a paedophile, but the high potential for suicide (McKinnon) or the fact a guy will have his life ruined, and run a high risk of rape in a US jail despite having committed no crime in the US (O'Dwyer) isn't.
It's worth noting though that even getting your resume right is a topic in itself, and can be quite a minefield.
I've seen companies that want you to basically just provide them a list of all the buzzwords you can think of, companies that don't give a shit about that but want you to write some blurb about your underlying development philosophy and background, and others who throw a hissy fit if you dare describe experience with anything other than the specific technology they use alongside what they use.
You're absolutely right that a good resume is a key starting point, but I certainly don't think there is a one size fits all resume. I think the key is to just write as best a resume as you can, and any companies that don't like it figure that you probably weren't going to fit in there anyway. Some companies will whinge about CVs being too long, others too short, some too detailed, some not detailed enough, some containing too little description of technologies you've worked with, some too many. Part the problem is that again, whilst you're right, a good CV is important, there's also many companies out there that couldn't spot a good CV if it slapped them round the face.
Then of course there are the companies who are looking for some god programmer on a junior programmer's wages, despite advertising much higher wages to get you to interview and then whinge repeatedly about how there is a "skills shortage" because they've not been able to find anyone to fill their post in 3 years, and well, I wont even get started on the differing levels of interview quality.
I've never had any problem getting interviews and getting jobs, but I have had a few companies turn me down based on my my CV so weren't interested whilst others loved it for the exact reason those companies said they hated it with some of the most absurd reasons on earth for rejection. One example is a company that said that they weren't interested because I'd mentioned I had some past experience with Java and they were after a pure .NET developer even though my 3 years prior experience had been 100% .NET as if somehow having had breadth of experience with different technologies and having depth of experience in a specific technology or two are mutually exclusive things - they're not. Most other companies appreciated the fact I had much broader experience than other candidates whilst maintaining the depth of experience needed in the specific technologies they were looking for.
Then there are companies who do technical tests, companies who don't, companies who want past work, companies who only care about what you want to work on. Similarly with technical tests I've had companies do none at all, I've had ones I've completely flunked because it was on some technology I made it clear before the interview even that I had absolutely no experience in and I've had ones where they've expected me to sit a 3 hour online exam, whom I've politely declined pointing out that there are many other companies out there offering me interviews without expecting me to dick around like that before I even get an interview.
I suppose one thing is true though, good companies do recognise good CVs, so I guess my point would be to add to yours the caveat that even with a good CV you may suffer rejections based purely on your CV that are related more to the recruiting company's ineptitude than anything you've done inherently wrong, but don't worry about it because again, the good ones will recognise a good CV. Ultimately you'll also find that though it may be tiresome interviewing here and there, rejecting some, and being rejected by others, that you'll know the right employer when you find it. The interview wont feel like an interview, it'll feel like a nice chat with some genuinely decent and competent people.
One final point I'd add is that it's wrong to prejudge a job also, I had two interviews in one day, one for a software house, one for an engineering firm. I was really interested in the software house one
The problem I have with TFA is use of the term completely safe. Some studies have shown there is risk (something like 1 in 2million) but they have weighted this in the context of the relative increase in cancer incidents being negligible compared to the existing chance of getting cancer.
This is a fair and valid argument, but where I believe it falls down is that the risk of getting cancer from T-Ray scanners is then non-negligible compared to the chance of dying or being injured by a terrorist attack prior to their introduction.
So sure, the chance of any harm from them is so absolutely tiny so as not to be worried about it, but the chance of harm from a terrorist attack is even smaller. So the question remains, why bother with the expense of them? Why bother with the increased risk at all, no matter how small? Why bother when they don't even necessarily work as there are still a number of ways to slip things past them?
Fundamentally it's because terrorist incidents cause a number of deaths in a small timeframe in a single place so trigger the nonsensical shock reaction people are prone to, whereas deaths from this sort of thing are spread far and wide over a longer period.
Still, this is just regarding airport scanners, as a tool for doctors and dentists they should do far more to save people's lives than risk them, by a few orders of magnitude no doubt so would be well worthwhile in this context.
Google were already in talks with them at that point, it's most likely that that was a bargaining chip to push the price up.
Google had obviously already made their decision as to why by then so this can't have been a factor in it. All it can have done is increase the urgency of purchase and/or price they were willing to pay which as I say, was almost certainly precisely the point.
Things like this have always gone hand in hand with negotiations anyway.
War, economic sanctions, and now cyber-attacks. They're all just there to try and weaken the oppositions negotiating hand.
Over issues like this, there's never been such thing as mere negotiations, there's always been pressure applied (by both sides) to improve the strength of their hand. You see it often with North Korea for example - when they're not getting what they want from talks they threaten a nuclear test, or a missile test, then the US responds by cutting aid or whatever to try and counter it and vice versa.
Sometimes it's not even intentional, a bad story can coincide with strengthening ones hand and be used as propaganda to strengthen further. An example of this is with the Taliban, talks with the Taliban have gone hand in hand with increased US raids on suspected militants etc. to try and up the pressure. Similarly, the Taliban up their attacks to try and strengthen the urgency of talks with them. When the US somewhat recently ran into issues for example with the news breaking of burning Korans, the Taliban pulled back from peace talks, knowing the pressure at this point was on the US to give more concessions to bring them back to the table with the danger that if they don't, it may make it difficult to pull out of Afghanistan without a new seed being born for another 9/11.
Aggressive actions alongside negotiations are nothing newsworthy, it's likely been that way since man first figured out the concept of negotiation. Cyber attacks are just another tool in the box for that age old purpose.
People have guns in most parts of Europe, the difference is the people there don't have wild fantasies of some revolution that they're never actually going to fulfil, but like to pretend somehow gives them extra freedom when it doesn't precisely because they wont fulfil it.
When American citizens actually take up arms and use them to claw back some of the freedoms they've lost since 9/11, then they can come back and tell us all how awesome their guns are as tools in defence of liberty. Until then it's just wild fantasy.
"Name the American law that makes criticism of the US government a crime."
Whichever US law it is that's been used to detain people who have only been guilty of giving a negative opinion of the US in Guantanamo and who hadn't actually carried out any physical insurgent activity? Whichever law it is that was used to force Visa/Mastercard in cutting off Wikileak's funding stream which is defacto censorship? Whichever law it was that was used to ban various tourists from the US for being critical of the US government? Or is it only censorship when an American voice is silenced?
Or perhaps that's the problem, the US doesn't bother with actual laws for things like this, it just does it regardless of what's on the statute books, and often in spite of them.
"There may be jingoist idiots in America, but that is a far cry from China, where the government actually employs people to decide which websites should be blocked."
Who do you think decides on the ICE seizures? Pixies? Fairies? Elves? No, I'm pretty sure you'll find it's government employees.
"Be glad that the Chinese government does not have a say in global Internet policies, because as bad as the American approach is, the Chinese approach is far worse."
How would we know? They've never had a voice on that, even if they did, why are you so certain it'd pass? I've not seen the Chinese use the ITU or UPU to censor my telephone calls or post internationally. I have however seen the US censor the global internet.
"How about the fact that we do not arrest journalists for criticizing our government?"
Yet America tried to censor wikileaks.
"How about the fact that it is considered outrageous for us to torture people who are not even US citizens?"
Yet America still did exactly that, and reelected a government that did exactly that.
"How about the fact that, even with the world's largest prison population, American prisons are a far cry from the sort of prisons in the middle east or Russia, or even several European nations?"
Yet still closer to the prison conditions of those nations than to the nations with more progressive, and more successful penal institutions, and fundamentally, as you pointed out yourself, still with the largest prison population.
"American human rights violations are bad, sure. They are lightweight compared to the violations that we have seen out of other countries. "
So that makes it okay?
"In America, when you go to prison, your family knows where you are, the maximum length of your sentence, your physical condition, and so forth. In many countries, people simply disappear when they go to prison; their families have no idea how they are doing or even where they are."
A bit like Bradley Manning, or those in Guantanamo then really.
"I can criticize the government in America without disappearing in the middle of the night."
Unless you're an Afghan in your home country.
"That is because no other nation has the power to do so. Don't think for a moment that China would hesitate to stifle foreign websites about Tibet, if they had the power to do so."
I don't doubt they would either, but that's why I'd prefer it be handled by an international organisation, staffed by pretty bright academics, and where consensus would never be reached on something like global censorship unless the US supported it, which is probably the biggest threat - it has after all tried to push exactly that with ACTA. As I've said before though, there is no harm in the US at least entertaining and discussing the proposals, if it doesn't get proposals that ensure a majority, or a super majority is required to push through controversial measures then it doesn't have to give up control does it? As someone else pointed out, the rules with the ITU currently are that no new rules for the ITU can infringe on the wills of a sovereign nation, so censorship wouldn't even be possible at the ITU anyway because that's not what the ITU is - it isn't some control structure, it merely faci
"Really? Are you sure? Why don't you go and think over what you've just said there a bit more and get back to us."
Which post? the one explaining what the ITU does to a far right nationalist conspiracy theorist kook that received between it about 10 upmods, and 10 downmods?
If you really think that post was "troll" or overrated I can't believe you've ever read a post on Slashdot before, it was about as tame as they come, and fully informative of the sorts of things the UN is responsible for.
"Maybe (s)he is, but then again, you're drunk on your own bullshit too."
You can call it bullshit if you wish but Asian/Europeans were agreeing with me, as I say the downmods only come when the Americans wake up and enter the game. You'll have to excuse me if I'd rather judge the correctness of posts I write that are critical of America on the thoughts and feelings of people who aren't part of the problem, rather than people who are.
"This is the same case from the start. Its just taken several rounds for you to see why you can't use a single hierarchy."
But I've done exactly that. I've given you a solution. You're using a really weak argument here.
"I don't want a taxes data structure I want hundreds of methods and objects having to do with imported vs. domestic. Imported objects may have far service offices. They have shipping times. They may have multiple conflicting law sets that apply to them."
Sure, and all this can be represented as I say. You just need to know in your analysis from the outset what kind of level of flexibility you're planning for. You can't plan for no flexibility, then complain when you can't flex the system, sure, I agree, OO will never deal with that kind of abysmal planning, but few if any systems will. If however you have some degree of understanding of the problem domain though all this can be modelled using OO without MI in a perfectly logical and sensible manner as I have continued to prove by providing you examples.
"If I have to go back to dealing with the data of an object and not the method I've just broken the whole OO paradigm and then I am doing procedural code."
I don't even think you get the OO paradigm at all, when I mention that you can store the taxes against an object, I'm not suggesting a raw array of floats or whatever, I'm talking about implementing tax objects. You're at least aware that objects can have has-a relationships with other objects right?
"No it wasn't. I was citing Meyer's Object Oriented Software Construction. I'd like a cite for your position about the origins of OO. Of course OO is computer oriented, it is a computer language design paradigm. I way of designing programming languages."
You can cite a book that came out the best part of 30 years after the foundations for OO were laid all you want, but I'm not sure why you'd think it would be the stand out definition, more so than say, the accounts from the people who were around during the much earlier developments of OO such as here:
http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html
I guess you missed the whole reason why we decided to try and move away from computing-oriented paradigms.
"Why would it be likely to be reusable? The reason is because it is generic, abstract. It is the abstraction processes not the object hierarchy that creates reusability."
But the more you bundle into a function, the less generic it comes, which is precisely why it's better to break something down into less functions to ensure more components of the whole are generic, rather than writing a single monolithic function to do one single thing in a completely non-reusable manner.
"What's a property? A property in the OO sense has to respond to a method call. if x is a type of frog I want x.acceptableTemperature() to be a method. I don't want to do: x.origination.acceptableTemperature() otherwise I suddenly need to understand the internal structure of x and then I might as well just do:"
Yet again you show a complete failure to understand proper OO design, and yet again you're expanding a case that has previously been analysed with a set of given conditions to say "Hey, look, it's wrong now!". If you want to find out information about a climate zone, then you make that climate zone a more detailed data structure, or an object in itself that can tell you the temperature range. This makes sense because in your example you're saying it's really the climate zone that defines the temperature, so it should be the climate zone from which you find the temperature range, however this is a really dumb examples as species still have different temperature requirements even in existing climate zones, so more realistically you'd just set acceptableTemperature against the species anyway.
"Optimally you Toyota to inherit from dozens of classes:"
No you don't, that's absolutely horrendous design and yet
"The US has not even been able to establish a rudimentary national firewall because of the uproar; does that really seem worse than the Chinese government to you?"
Judging by the fact I took about 20 downmods the second American primetime hit for daring to engage in sensible debate, I'd say that absolutely it sounds worse than the Chinese government.
Americans certainly seem to have no respect for opposing viewpoints and seem horrendously quick to censor. I'm not new to this point, as I've seen it before where you can have a decent discussion during European/Asian prime times when the Americas are asleep, then as soon as America wakes up the moderation system goes to hell, but fundamentally it illustrates the point - it highlights the utter hypocrisy of America, it claims to be the pinnacle of justice, to be a defender of freedom, it extolls the virtues of free speech, but Americans are always first to scream for extradjudicial killings of figures they hate, the worst offender in the last decade for kidnapping of foreign citizens and removal of it's own citizen's freedoms, and first to try and silence people they don't agree with.
I'll admit I do struggle to see how Americans can even begin to criticse other countries for anything relating to human rights.
"At least the US has not tried to force people to respect the national firewalls of countries like China."
Still, let me help you out. Only one nation to date has actually forced it's internet censorship on other nations, and that's America. If you think ICE seizures are anything but, then you're so drunk on America's own bullshit that you're past even helping yourself. America has already created it's defacto international firewall equivalent - by outright removing DNS entries for sites it disagrees with. The technology may be different, but the net effect is the same. You can't even argue the US as having the censorship moral high ground anymore, that argument has long walked.
Yes, unfortunately this story was posted at a bad time - just as US prime time was beginning.
Unfortunately when such stories happen you get the ultra-right wing tea-party jizz fest croud on Slashdot who have a circle jerk over anything xenophobic they can find.
So what this means in practice is that what people like you and me say - people like us who actually have an understanding out of whatever redneck hickville these nobodies crawl out of - will fall on deaf ears.
Ultimately they can say and mod however they want because it doesn't matter - they'll still be wrong, and the rest of the world will still disagree with them. Their views will still continue to drag America down, and America will still ultimately have to give up it's dictatorial control of the internet and hand it over to a much fairer organisation, but in the meantime they can at least satisfy themselves because they live in America, fuck yeah!
Still, at least some Americans genuinely get it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cBiOTvxXcY
It's just a shame they're by a far minority in their country now, if they weren't, it wouldn't be in such a bitter self-destructive decline.
Well I don't know if it's worth me replying because you're obviously pretty dumb for not really getting my last post.
My point wasn't that democracy was bad, but that some democracies are hardly legitimate representations of the people. WIPO in contrast was representative of the member states as it was one vote per member, majority rules.
That is much better than say the "democracy" we have in the UK where 30% of the vote can give you 100% of power.
But if in your mind all democracies are equal then you're not smart enough to understand the point. Fundamentally I don't care if something is a democracy or a dictatorship, I only care that whatever method of rule it has, that method of rule is supported by a majority of it's constituents. Democracy in countries like the UK does not have that, WIPO did.
It's not about the electoral system stupid, it's about representation.
"And with that structure how do you handle a GM or a Brooks Brother's Suit? You can't have Import as a base class for Car because not all cars are imports. You can't have Cars fork into Import and Domestic because you also need Import / Domestic for Suits and no Suits are Cars."
This is the problem though, you can keep on adding cases until you break a solution and say "Hey look, I told you multiple inheritance was the solution!" but you're still completely wrong. In this case you need to then question whether import even needs to be a class, or whether you just have, say, a product class with a country of origin property from which you can derive if it's imported, or just have an isImport property if you want, and a taxes data structure that includes the import taxes in it. It's still just as trivially implemented in OO without any need for MI. This particular solution would be more generic and cater to far more things you can throw at it, but that's the sort of thing you have to decide if you need when you do your analysis of the problem.
"Why do you think programmers wanted to "represent data in terms of objects"? There was no desire to do this originally, the desire came from wanting to build complex trees of types."
Because it's a more natural representation of how the world works, rather than how computers work. That was always the driving force.
"Programmers wanted reusability. They wanted reusability for saving in time and reduction of errors."
Programmers always want reusability, in everything they do and every solution they seek, it's not an OO specific trait or a driving force for OO, it's merely just a factor that was taken into account with OO, just like any other well developed software paradigm. Any new paradigm will always try and improve these fundamental traits like reusability, but that doesn't mean they're the initial driving force behind the creation of a new paradigm.
You have a very computer oriented view of what OO was designed to be which is ironically precisely what OO was about moving away from.
"Because I want software extensible. And that means that the vast majority of my code, hopefully 90% or more is not specific to the problem but is very general."
That's irrelevant to the point. A broken down problem is no less extensible, and no less reusable, it's arguably more so because a broken down component is far likely to be reusable.
"Your point in the side comment "Well a Frog is an Animal and an Amphibian so it should inherit from both!" isn't what's being talked about. A better analogy is a "Well a Tropic Frog is an Amphibian and a tropical animal"."
This just demonstrates that you still don't get OO. You would simply have a property that defines where an animal originates/lives - tropical, temperate, etc.
The world needs people like you - people who understand the functional side of things well, the side of things that's much more closely associated to the way the hardware does things, but it doesn't mean you understand OO well.
That's if you have the rather ethnocentric view that democracy is the only way a country's government can be legitimate.
You know that in China, despite the fact it's a totalitarian regime, most Chinese still support it, hence it's still a legitimate representation of the people?
Compare this to Russia, which is a democracy, but where it's likely Putin and his cronies don't actually have a majority support, and it shows that simply being a democracy is an invalid measure of whether a government is a legitimate representation of it's people. Some may even argue that the US is an illegitimate representation of it's people, and the UK most commonly certainly has been. Under the UK's first past the post system for example groups have regularly ruled the country with as low as only 30% of the popular vote.
Democracy within a country tells us nothing about whether it's representative of the people. Democracy in the UN at least tells us every country has an equal say, whatever that say is. Still, your comment implies you think that for example, African nations voting against IP laws that prevent them getting medicine was done for self interest of the government. Are you really sure about that? It's a theory that doesn't make any real sense.
"I'm fairly certain entities other than the UN are responsible for mail and international calls. Air traffic control, likewise, falls under the auspices of each nation, individually, not the UN."
You can be fairly certain all you want, but you're still wrong.
Mail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
International calling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union
Air transport: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_Organization
Maritime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Maritime_Organization
"Now, can you give the reasons why similar regulations couldn't be imposed on the Internet?"
Because you'd need international agreement?
"What reason does the ITU have in supporting the Internet as it is today?"
The fact it's been a major factor in global economic growth and increasing globalisation?
"Please, keep regulatory bodies out of the Internet."
It's a bit late for that.
"We should be working to return control of the Internet to its users, not to increase regulations on the Internet."
How does keeping it under US control assist in that goal when the US is going in the opposite direction?
"I do not want the Chinese government deciding how the Internet is governed, or having any say in the rules of the Internet."
Sure, and other people say the same about the US. Difference is that there is far more of them.
"I have to re-implement the entire imported structure again.
A Mini has properties of Car (like wheels) and properties of imports (like international duites)"
So do as I said, if an import sits below a car, then have Import as your base class, so:
Import -> Car -> Mini Cooper
Import -> Suit -> Gucci
Stick your international duties in import, your wheels in car. This only further serves to demonstrate the point that most people think they need MI when they fail to grasp proper OO structure.
"True, but the whole idea of object orientation in terms of encouraging reuse is to make that easy. If I have to do that sort of analysis why not just use a procedural language?"
No, the whole idea of object orientation is to allow you to represent data, and actions on data in terms of objects. It does not do your job for you.
"The whole idea of object orientation is that I can casually inherit without having to have a deep understanding of what I'm inheriting and just use the properties I want."
No this is still completely false, to use OO you still have to understand it. Not understanding it does not make OO bad, it just means it's a tool you do not understand how to use properly.
I guess from your comments such as your mention of Haskell that you're a functional or procedural programmer and that's fine, but as always it seems to be the case that when most people think they need MI the real problem is that they simply don't understand OO. It goes back to my original comments - there are very few situations where MI is useful, where people think it is useful they generally just do not get object oriented architecture, and having to break a problem down doesn't breach OO principles, on the contrary it's a large part of them. I don't know why you'd ever favour great hulking monolithic functions rather than breaking down the problem, not only does this increase scope for errors, but it also reduces testability, it reduces reusability.
It goes back to the point that was made well in this post and my subsequent reply:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2921227&cid=40354171
That it's about understanding relationships between objects. It's about recognising that it's rarely ever the case that something is ever two things. As I say it's not that MI isn't useful in some cases, but those cases are extremely rare and misuse is thousands of times more prominent that sensible use.
Yes, because if it weren't for the UN America would be a bastion of transparency and honesty without any corruption whatsoever. It's obvious that the UN causes corruption in America, and not vice versa.