This may shock you, but you are the one who gets to decide which laws you obey and which you disobey. You may use your morals, your "democratic principles," or even a coin flip to decide this, as you see fit. Of course, the law isn't going to give you a get-out-of-jail-free card for any of these reasons.
Why should Nigeria build its own helicopters instead of buying them from a country that's already good at making them? That's like saying I should build my own cars instead of buying them from Toyota.
Nigeria should produce whatever it has a comparative advantage in and trade for the rest, just like the rest of the world does. Attempting to do a little bit of everything would only stunt its economic growth.
And that's why MacOS X and Windows win, because MacOS has Genie Effects (this is the carrot) but it also has Spotlight, and iTunes, and iPhoto, and Quicktime, and all the other stuff people want and need every day (this is the stick). Where MacOS has a soft, warm and inviting stick, brandished by a really hot chick in leather and a penchant for candle wax, Linux's stick has a poo on the end, and is brandished by a 300lb atheist liberal.
That has to be one of the most tortured analogies I have ever heard. Do you even know what the phrase "carrot and stick" means?
Unfortunately this causes problems with domains & cookies. A cookie set by foo.domain.com is invisible to domain.com, so if you login while viewing 'games.slashdot.org' you aren't necessarily logged in to 'slashdot.org'.
That's why you should be using slashdot.org/games instead of games.slashdot.org, man.
Actually, you can put everything at the top of the list, if you randomize the order each time someone views the ballot. In fact, that's standard practice to avoid exactly the problem your user was complaining about: results tend to get biased towards the beginning of the list of options.
If you look at the memory usage of a java program, it's about as bad as a c program that does nothing but leak memory. Practically speaking, java does little to free memory until it has *run out of memory*. Then when it does run out of memory and it needs to clean things up, things get slow as hell.
I don't think this is actually true; if you have hard numbers, I'd like to see them. As far as I know, Java garbage-collects memory as soon as it's no longer reachable from the main program, which has nothing to do with running out of memory.
While I'm not especially a fan of garbage collection, it seems to me what you're ranting about is reference counting, not all garbage collection. Tracing garbage collectors, like Java's, have none of those problems.
You can NOT be held for perjury just for filing a bogus DMCA takedown notice. The other party would have to show that you KNEW it was bogus at the time you filed it, which is rather difficult. Would you care to point out some cases where someone has been convicted of perjury for a bogus DMCA takedown notice?
As for sending a "vague legal sounding threatening letter" to an ISP, the ISP would be free to ignore it until a court forces the takedown. Allowing the force of law to be wielded by members of the public without so much as the approval of a judge (which even the police require in the form of a warrant when searching private property) is just a bad idea.
And you haven't answered my other points yet, namely "your business model is not our problem," and "stop using logical fallacies."
I also can't say too many nice things about iTunes.
This confused me; normally when one says "I can't say too many nice things about X," it means that X is really good (because "too many" here means "more than X deserves," which implies that X deserves to have an infinite number of nice things said about it).
The claim that your business model depends on the DMCA does not justify that law; in other words, your business model is not our problem.
Furthermore, I don't think your business model depends on the DMCA at all: pirating your games would still be illegal without it. Yes, it might be a bit more difficult for you to go after infringers, but I think that's exactly what this discussion is about: it's become too easy to abuse copyright law using tools like the DMCA. And I haven't even mentioned the really problematic parts of the DMCA, like the reverse-engineering clause!
Not only is it possible to be anti-DMCA without being anti-copyright, but it's also possible to be anti-copyright without being "anarchist / communist." You need to lay off the false dilemmas, straw men, and ad hominem attacks.
The Anonymous Coward you responded to is NOT Bill Dube; he just quoted the man's comments. I'm pretty sure Bill Dube is not going to see your comments here.
And your comment about being a "role model" is inane. Are you saying no one should take any risks because stupid people might copy them? Berate the man for endangering his own safety if you wish, but get off your high horse.
I'm a programmer, I make my living writing applications for various companies, and I get paid pretty well to do it because I posses specialized knowledge. I should point out also that at this time I don't work for a "software" company, but I'm writing applications for internal use. Assuming copyright was abolished, this would effectively kill off the entire software industry.
As I interpret the above, you are using your position as a member of the software industry to support your claim about copyright, essentially saying, "I write software, so you should believe me when I say that abolishing copyright would kill off the entire software industry." This is a logical fallacy, namely an appeal to authority: the fact that you are a programmer is irrelevant to this argument.
You may be right that abolishing copyright would eliminate much of the existing software industry, but it's entirely possible that other business models would grow to fill these new "gaps." Models like software-as-service and OSS+support already exist, so they are clearly viable; and in cases where those models do not suffice, there would be great incentives for people to come up with new, functional business models. In any case, given how much open source software already exists despite the existence of copyright, your claim about returning to an "industrial civilization" is pretty ludicrous.
As for games specifically, it's quite possible that the market would shrink significantly. Indeed, it seems unlikely that a game the scale of Halo 3 could exist under a no-copyright system. Is that so bad? Clearly there would still be games, and in any case I don't see why "there would be fewer games" is a compelling argument for a system as broken and invasive as copyright.
The fact that different people have different conceptions of "good" and "evil" does not in any way prove that there is no such thing as objective good and evil. That the moral rightness or wrongness of an action depends on the intent of its actor also does not prove this; it simply means that the "action" in question comprises both the physical actions taken and the intent with which they were taken, e.g. killing someone in self-defense vs. killing in cold blood.
You have confused the intent of an action with its purpose, I think: in the case of a terrorist attack, the purpose may be a good one (e.g. stopping a war), but the intent of the action itself is to take the life of uninvolved bystanders, which makes the action inherently evil. That some people disagree with this assessment is irrelevant, just as it's irrelevant that some people believe the world is actually flat.
1. Calm down.
2. It's irrelevant that you didn't mention Malthus specifically by name.
I was pointing out that you seem to be espousing the same views that Malthus did, namely that our economic growth (a generalization of food production) is unsustainable in relation to our population growth. You may not have predicted famine specifically, but your "Atlantis" comment pretty clearly implies that you think some sort of catastrophe is imminent.
As for the laws of thermodynamics, we're nowhere close to the limits set by those laws, which leaves plenty of room for technology to improve our efficiency at using resources. We are not as dependent on oil as you imply; as it becomes more expensive, we will develop more efficient ways of making use of it, and find alternatives where possible.
You Malthusians never learn, do you? Malthus' predictions turned out wrong, but that doesn't stop people like you from repeating his doomsday warnings every few decades, with slightly different causes and dates. The fact that we have not run out of resources yet is not a fluke, and our growth is not unsustainable. The Earth has far more resources than you imagine, and as our demand increases, we find new resources and develop technology to make more efficient use of the resources we have. And long before we truly begin to exhaust the Earth's resources, we will be mining asteroids and colonizing other planets.
But don't take my word for it. You just keep on stockpiling canned foods while waiting for the new Dark Ages to come and vindicate you. Personally, I'm betting on human ingenuity.
There is no solution to this problem that does not involve society as a whole somehow coercing the individual -- in other words, regulation.
None that you can imagine, you mean. I can imagine one: if a single source is polluting a lot (say, a factory near your home), you sue the factory owner. If a large number of sources are polluting a little, then the response depends on the circumstances. Take cars for example: it certainly would be impractical for me to go around suing every car owner within (say) twenty miles. However, I can sue the owner of the roads for the pollution that comes out of his land. Then the owner will be forced to do one of two things: contain the pollution so it does not affect my land, or impose extra fees on drivers to cover the liability caused by that pollution. Thus the market takes into account the so-called "negative externalities" without the need for regulation.
And before you object that suing someone requires "society as a whole somehow coercing the individual," that is not necessarily true. That subject requires a bit more explanation than I'm willing to get into right now, but there are many interesting arguments already out there, such as this and this.
You're right: your point is invalid. Why did you think making a completely uninformed statement about a feature you thought Linux lacked (on Slashdot, of all places) was a good idea? Actually, I think I just answered my own question.
But in case you're not a troll, nearly all Linux distributions have come with package management systems for some time, and most of those have GUI front-ends for them. Admittedly some of those GUIs are difficult to use, but your comment is still quite ironic given that neither Windows nor Mac OS has such a feature. (Windows has a unified uninstall feature and a semi-standard installation tool, but that's a joke compared to what you get with a real package manager.)
That's the same thinking that makes people believe it "helps the economy" when the government pays people to dig ditches all day and then fill them in at night. That the wages go "back into" the economy does not contradict the fact that it's a huge waste of the public's money.
Now, I'm not saying that what NASA does is necessarily a waste of funds (though it is, compared with how cheaply private firms could be doing it); but your reasoning is faulty. Not that you're alone in that regard...
So as long as a white-collar criminal stashes his money away where the government can't get at it, there should be no punishment?
If the government wants, it can probably get at the assets of someone who lives in the country it governs, unless virtually everything that person owns (including his house, physical possessions, etc.) is located in some other country. Does it seem remotely likely to you that someone would live like a hobo for the sole purpose of committing economic crimes with impunity?
Maybe not in this case, no, but your blanket statement just doesn't work in all blanket cases.
Sorry, but I just can't see jail time as an appropriate penalty for stealing bedsheets (har har).
The second is the expressive power argument. Life is too short to be using programming languages with primitive, error-prone control flow constructs, functions that aren't first-order entities, no syntactic support for common data structures, crude macros, header files, etc.
"Primitive, error-prone control flow constructs"? Such as? C++ has the same if/then statements and for/while/do loops that most other languages have, along with exceptions for error handling. Nobody forces you to use switches and gotos (I'm guessing that's what you're referring to) if you don't want to. Foreach would be nice, yes, but it's hardly essential (Java programmers seemed to get along fine without it until recently).
As for functions not being "first-order entities," that's a consequence of C++ being a statically-typed language that puts performance first (and no, functions in Java are not "first-order," since the RTTI stuff you can do with them is horribly clunky and slow). Not to mention that you have things like functors that can turn functions into real objects with only a class wrapper as code overhead.
"No syntactic support for common data structures"? I'm not even sure what you're talking about here. What kind of syntactic support do you think C++ lacks? It has operator overloading for things like matrix transformations, associative arrays, string concatenation, etc.
You don't need to use any "crude macros" unless a library forces you to, and if that's so then you should be complaining about the library, not C++. Macros are generally unnecessary when you have templates at your disposal.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should Nigeria build its own helicopters instead of buying them from a country that's already good at making them? That's like saying I should build my own cars instead of buying them from Toyota.
Nigeria should produce whatever it has a comparative advantage in and trade for the rest, just like the rest of the world does. Attempting to do a little bit of everything would only stunt its economic growth.
Actually, you can put everything at the top of the list, if you randomize the order each time someone views the ballot. In fact, that's standard practice to avoid exactly the problem your user was complaining about: results tend to get biased towards the beginning of the list of options.
While I'm not especially a fan of garbage collection, it seems to me what you're ranting about is reference counting, not all garbage collection. Tracing garbage collectors, like Java's, have none of those problems.
Don't you mean the smartest sentient being for the job?
You can NOT be held for perjury just for filing a bogus DMCA takedown notice. The other party would have to show that you KNEW it was bogus at the time you filed it, which is rather difficult. Would you care to point out some cases where someone has been convicted of perjury for a bogus DMCA takedown notice?
As for sending a "vague legal sounding threatening letter" to an ISP, the ISP would be free to ignore it until a court forces the takedown. Allowing the force of law to be wielded by members of the public without so much as the approval of a judge (which even the police require in the form of a warrant when searching private property) is just a bad idea.
And you haven't answered my other points yet, namely "your business model is not our problem," and "stop using logical fallacies."
The claim that your business model depends on the DMCA does not justify that law; in other words, your business model is not our problem.
Furthermore, I don't think your business model depends on the DMCA at all: pirating your games would still be illegal without it. Yes, it might be a bit more difficult for you to go after infringers, but I think that's exactly what this discussion is about: it's become too easy to abuse copyright law using tools like the DMCA. And I haven't even mentioned the really problematic parts of the DMCA, like the reverse-engineering clause!
Not only is it possible to be anti-DMCA without being anti-copyright, but it's also possible to be anti-copyright without being "anarchist / communist." You need to lay off the false dilemmas, straw men, and ad hominem attacks.
The Anonymous Coward you responded to is NOT Bill Dube; he just quoted the man's comments. I'm pretty sure Bill Dube is not going to see your comments here.
And your comment about being a "role model" is inane. Are you saying no one should take any risks because stupid people might copy them? Berate the man for endangering his own safety if you wish, but get off your high horse.
You may be right that abolishing copyright would eliminate much of the existing software industry, but it's entirely possible that other business models would grow to fill these new "gaps." Models like software-as-service and OSS+support already exist, so they are clearly viable; and in cases where those models do not suffice, there would be great incentives for people to come up with new, functional business models. In any case, given how much open source software already exists despite the existence of copyright, your claim about returning to an "industrial civilization" is pretty ludicrous.
As for games specifically, it's quite possible that the market would shrink significantly. Indeed, it seems unlikely that a game the scale of Halo 3 could exist under a no-copyright system. Is that so bad? Clearly there would still be games, and in any case I don't see why "there would be fewer games" is a compelling argument for a system as broken and invasive as copyright.
The fact that different people have different conceptions of "good" and "evil" does not in any way prove that there is no such thing as objective good and evil. That the moral rightness or wrongness of an action depends on the intent of its actor also does not prove this; it simply means that the "action" in question comprises both the physical actions taken and the intent with which they were taken, e.g. killing someone in self-defense vs. killing in cold blood.
You have confused the intent of an action with its purpose, I think: in the case of a terrorist attack, the purpose may be a good one (e.g. stopping a war), but the intent of the action itself is to take the life of uninvolved bystanders, which makes the action inherently evil. That some people disagree with this assessment is irrelevant, just as it's irrelevant that some people believe the world is actually flat.
1. Calm down.
2. It's irrelevant that you didn't mention Malthus specifically by name.
I was pointing out that you seem to be espousing the same views that Malthus did, namely that our economic growth (a generalization of food production) is unsustainable in relation to our population growth. You may not have predicted famine specifically, but your "Atlantis" comment pretty clearly implies that you think some sort of catastrophe is imminent.
As for the laws of thermodynamics, we're nowhere close to the limits set by those laws, which leaves plenty of room for technology to improve our efficiency at using resources. We are not as dependent on oil as you imply; as it becomes more expensive, we will develop more efficient ways of making use of it, and find alternatives where possible.
You Malthusians never learn, do you? Malthus' predictions turned out wrong, but that doesn't stop people like you from repeating his doomsday warnings every few decades, with slightly different causes and dates. The fact that we have not run out of resources yet is not a fluke, and our growth is not unsustainable. The Earth has far more resources than you imagine, and as our demand increases, we find new resources and develop technology to make more efficient use of the resources we have. And long before we truly begin to exhaust the Earth's resources, we will be mining asteroids and colonizing other planets.
But don't take my word for it. You just keep on stockpiling canned foods while waiting for the new Dark Ages to come and vindicate you. Personally, I'm betting on human ingenuity.
And before you object that suing someone requires "society as a whole somehow coercing the individual," that is not necessarily true. That subject requires a bit more explanation than I'm willing to get into right now, but there are many interesting arguments already out there, such as this and this.
You're right: your point is invalid. Why did you think making a completely uninformed statement about a feature you thought Linux lacked (on Slashdot, of all places) was a good idea? Actually, I think I just answered my own question.
But in case you're not a troll, nearly all Linux distributions have come with package management systems for some time, and most of those have GUI front-ends for them. Admittedly some of those GUIs are difficult to use, but your comment is still quite ironic given that neither Windows nor Mac OS has such a feature. (Windows has a unified uninstall feature and a semi-standard installation tool, but that's a joke compared to what you get with a real package manager.)
Sigh.
That's the same thinking that makes people believe it "helps the economy" when the government pays people to dig ditches all day and then fill them in at night. That the wages go "back into" the economy does not contradict the fact that it's a huge waste of the public's money.
Now, I'm not saying that what NASA does is necessarily a waste of funds (though it is, compared with how cheaply private firms could be doing it); but your reasoning is faulty. Not that you're alone in that regard...
Newlines work if you choose "Plain Old Text" (though I often just use
instead).
You really need to sprinkle some paragraph breaks in there for readability.
You can download YouTube videos with a tool like this, then play them with mplayer. Yeah, not terribly convenient, but at least it works.
As for functions not being "first-order entities," that's a consequence of C++ being a statically-typed language that puts performance first (and no, functions in Java are not "first-order," since the RTTI stuff you can do with them is horribly clunky and slow). Not to mention that you have things like functors that can turn functions into real objects with only a class wrapper as code overhead.
"No syntactic support for common data structures"? I'm not even sure what you're talking about here. What kind of syntactic support do you think C++ lacks? It has operator overloading for things like matrix transformations, associative arrays, string concatenation, etc.
You don't need to use any "crude macros" unless a library forces you to, and if that's so then you should be complaining about the library, not C++. Macros are generally unnecessary when you have templates at your disposal.
I'll give you header files, though.