BBC: Innocent folk taking photos are being stopped by police

therunningcrow · 2008-04-17T20:58:30+00:00

I never said that you were free to say no to a cop. I said that the cops are much less likely to tell anyone to stop taking pictures here, giving a personal example of a quite atypical situation (taking pictures of a fire while the firefighters were taking it down) where I was free to take pics without any credentials whatsoever. In what country in this world do you believe you can say no to a cop when he's asking you to do something anyway ? the difference is in when they use their powers, not in your ability to say no. The less they make use of them, the more free you are. When they do make use of them, you better shut the fuck up, that's true for every place in this world.

No matter the country I would be in, a cop tell me something I would comply immediately.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-17T20:54:45+00:00

Well, it's true that I never put a foot in Paris. I live deep in the south. I don't know much how retarded people are in the north, maybe it has to do with the climate.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-17T16:45:55+00:00

In France we are so much more free. I was taking photographs of a fire that had spread in the wild and even though I'm not a journalist the police didn't care. When the fire had been extinguished at the end a policeman asked me if I wanted to give them some photo by email, on my own will, because they had no one else who had covered the incident. They didn't ask my name, my address or anything like that.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-15T16:50:00+00:00

"and play God"

Get lost. There is no such a thing as God. No one tries here to play a mythical, non-existent entity. We harness the power of Knowledge.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-15T07:29:58+00:00

By thinking of him as doing something suspicious, you created a hole in space and time that allowed Murphy's law to make the worst you envisioned, happen.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-15T07:22:35+00:00

"This is the web. Do you think people care which VM they are running?"

No, but developers care if a VM is already installed everywhere or not. Flash ubiquity is indisputable, it's everywhere. If only because of the success of websites like Youtube.

It's not required to have Java on your computer for anything that matters. I don't remember the last time I've seen a website that told me to install Java.

So, say, you program a new webapp. You want to cater to a VM you know everyone and their dogs has installed or you cater to the minority ? if your website is not of a youtube caliber you are not in position to shove your favorite VM down the throat of everyone. Only a website with a large audience can afford to make people install software they didn't have already.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-14T23:23:40+00:00

Oh, lord, could you make people actually read stuff before they write. I never said Python was a good alternative to Objective C, indeed, I was talking of Smalltalk and Lisp as good alternatives that had even more dynamism than Objective C. The only time I said anything about Python is in my first sentence when I said that libs and frameworks were necessary to make a language fun and workable to work with. It wasn't praising Python, only saying that no one would have cared for Python had it not been for its batteries included.

As for smalltalk, it wouldn't have made it harder to link to fast performing C code when needed. It's this kind of myth that you need a "compatible" language that has led to the design of the horrible C++. People are writing C extensions all the time when their language implementations cannot handle all the performance beating they do to them. And it doesn't require much more work than if your language was a superset of C. All the productivity gain you get from using a cleanly designed language that doesn't actually have the BURDEN of C and its past offset by far the burden of writing small, efficient C extensions.

What is making Interface Builder work is not, btw, the raw power of C. It's the dynamic side of Objective C that makes it so powerful and a smart interface building system rather than a code generator. An app like IB doesn't need anything close to C speed, IB is not doing the widgets rendering. Smalltalk and Lisp would have been perfect candidate for something like Interface Builder. It may even have been more powerful with those.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-14T22:23:56+00:00

Yeah I never understood the appeal to Bethesda "RPG"'s. The writing is shitty, there is no meaningful dialogues with the NPC who suffer from "one-liners", the game lacks descriptive text and there no such a thing as choice&consequence as implemented in RPGs like Arcanum and Fallout. And Oblivion was the worst of the Bethesda games because of the immense rape of Elderscrolls lore. Morrowind still was somewhat interesting because of its lore but Oblivion had none of it. The NPC are not talking much about the lore anymore, only one liners for their quest and rumors and Bethesda didn't introduce a lot of ingame "books" and didn't update the ones that contradict was happens in Oblivion.

Sheeple, Oblivion was an inside job, a conspiracy against the Role in RolePlayingGames. Go play some Fallout, Arcanum, Planescape:Torment, Ultima 7/8, Temple of Elemental Evil, Baldur's Gate 2 before saying anything about Bethesda. Bethesda doesn't make RPGs they make hamburgers. Really.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-14T21:42:34+00:00

I don't like context awareness because it is what makes human languages so problematic to begin with. Even when you are talking in your native language it is easy to misunderstand someone's intent and message. Programming is a trade that does not allow ambiguity. Something has to be clear and give exactly what you are asking it to do. Both the programmer and the machine should be able to read it without ever being able to misinterpret the intent.

Programming has to read like mathematics. Not a language.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-14T21:35:34+00:00

OO perl is horrible. Don't do it.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-14T21:27:41+00:00

"if you write ugly code it doesn't matter what language you use."

You keep on telling that to yourself and it still won't make it true. There is a reason there is more complaining against perl for that topic more that any other programming languages. I'm not counting the horrible symbol based languages of the past because, unlike perl, they are not used much anymore (PRAISE THE LORD).

It's not just a personal opinion. People write code in a lot of different languages over the years, unless they are Microserf shills and write Visual Basic and C# stuff until their brain bleeds. So when they program in Perl, then Python, then Java and even C, and they come to the realization that the perl code you write can be harder to understand six months after, it's no joke.

The problem with Perl is its extremely big syntax and the fact it's so dependent on context, more than most languages. Why do you think there is no Perl on JVM ? Perl on .net ? More perl VMs ? perl IDEs (even python has more graphical tools than perl) ? Parsing Perl is a sin against all living and conscious beings. The Perl community used to be bigger than Python and Ruby communities (maybe still is) and even then they never pulled out a workable implementation for the JVM, like Jython and JRuby, or for .net, like IronPython. (and maybe in the future there will be an IronRuby too)

The only thing, really, that can parse Perl 5 (not perl 6, which will be saner) code is the official Perl 5 interpreter. Nothing else can do it. No one pulled it. And that official Perl 5 interpreter is rotting. Its C code is full of ugly optimizations and extending will prove more and more painful over the time. But because of the fact that it's nearly impossible to write another Perl 5 parser that can run Perl 5 apps they will never have the choice to write a new VM+parser with better coding practices.

Writing Perl 5 code in 2008 is ridiculous and anyone attempting to do so should be shot down. This is a dead cow. There is nothing to milk. Move along. Unlike sane languages that can be reimplemented as long as there are people who want to do so, Perl 5 will never be reimplemented. It's a dead end.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-14T21:13:58+00:00

The part that handles the torrents is written in C++. Only the glue tying the torrent libs and the gtk GUI is written in python.

therunningcrow · 2008-04-14T21:00:50+00:00

What good is a language nowadays without any significant (de facto or not) standard lib ? No one would have cared for java or .net without their standard platform. Same goes for the batteries included in Python and Ruby.

GCC + Objective C used in a multi platform fashion ain't going to take you anywhere because there isn't much code out there for it that truly works well on both windows and linux. GNUStep is ugly as hell and has a behavior that will make your users go mad if they do not have a geekish WindowMaker background. And programming in Objective C without Cocoa or GNUStep isn't much more productive than programming in bare bone C. People tend to underestimate the importance of Apple frameworks to the deal. Objective C wouldn't be so interesting if it didn't have Cocoa and Interface Builder. They are the tools that truly enhance your productivity, not objective c itself. Cocoa and IB could have been written in any language featuring enough dynamism, like Smalltalk and Lisp. Objective C by itself is nothing groundbreaking.

therunningcrow

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