That argument makes little sense. Of course people get paid for their work. The TBP operates in the pipeline _after_ people already got paid. Movies or whatnot don't get made without people getting paid. The carpenters who build sets and models get paid. The costume designers get paid. The extras get paid, the camera people, etc.

It's best to think of piracy as a form of spoilage. The example is harvesting apples. That's a lot of work, and the pickers must get paid, but once the apples are put in storage, some percentage of the apples will spoil. You don't see farmers being ideologically opposed to spoilage, do you? It's not an ideology or an ethical problem. It's a natural part of the lifecycle of apples. There are ways to minimize it, but it gets expensive and often is not worth it.

Media have a lifecycle too. Once enough people got to see them, some people will make copies, using cams or otherwise. With news it's even worse. Once enough people hear about the latest terrorist bombing, they'll paraphrase using their mouths. That's piracy: It's only a matter of numbers, and of probabilities.

Economically in fact, piracy is a good thing just like any form of spoilage. Imagine if you bought 10,000 apples and they never, ever, spoiled? You'd still be eating those apples when you were 80 years old. You'd never have bought another apple in your life. You'd have expensive storage costs over 80 years. The farmer would be out of business already, since after everyone bought a lifetime's worth they wouldn't buy any more. And apple prices would be much higher in a futile bid to compensate.

Same with movies and media. The myth of a piracy free hollywood is a nightmare in disguise. Don't waste your time believing their lies.

I never wanted the linux laptop. The linux desktop was fine the way it was, until Lennart and the merry band of free desktop people turned it into an unusable piece of shit for idiots who don't know the dirrerence between an icon that says "Internet" and the internet itself. Pardon my french.

Because. If you want 10 geniuses in the world, you neet 10,000 also rans. These are people who work hard, and think they could be geniuses but fail. If you want 10 also rans, then you'll get NO geniuses.

It sucks to not make the cut for people, but that's no reason to stop encouraging them to be better than they are. I say, let's push everyone to their limits and let's collect a harvest of talented, hard working individuals in all types of endeavours, who can compete with the geniuses of the past on absolute terms, none of that nurturing feel good bullshit where everyone gets a prize just for trying.

Essentially, they should never be used at all. If you're going to have an unrecoverable error, it's trivial to design the system to exit without using exceptions anyway.

Probably the most useful side effect of exceptions is printing the stack trace, and that's not something where the overhead (both performance wise, and logical complexity wise) of exceptions is needed. And you should really be doing logging rather than relying on cryptic exception traces.

The one theoretical case where exceptions are sometimes argued to be superior is if you don't know what to do locally about an error, and you're hoping that a higher level part of the program might know how to recover. Classic example is a read error, and then asking the user to put a usb stick in.

But guess what? That's not how nontrivial programs work. The higher level simply can't know fully the effect of handling an exception that bubbled up, because the low level details that matter can and often do have unpredictable consequences in terms of program correctness, especially when you're reasoning at a higher level. When an exception is thrown, your program state is wonky. Only trivial programs are like the usb stick example. Real programs become subtly wrong if you try to recover a partially completed, partially incomplete, multi statge operation, especially if you're not the guy who wrote the code, but feel you're doing the right thing at a higher level.

Your greatest chance of correctly handling errors is a few lines above or below where the error actually occurs. Anything else sounds good but is worse.

But then again, as long as customers still buy without complaining, why bother with quality?

Because then the terrorists win.

Seriously, bugs imply exploits imply security breaches imply more terrorists thinking they have a shot at blowing stuff up.

Exceptions are absolutely the right way to do error handling.

Really? You have no clue.

Exceptions are utterly wrong, they are Gotos Considered Harmful: An exception is basically a nonlocal jump and that's exactly the wrong way to do error handling, because it cause spaghetti logic, where pieces end up all over the place without any simple way to check what the code does besides unravelling the whole mess. And when multiple people maintain the code, it guarantees failures of logic.

The correct way to do error handling is _locally_, right where the failure occurs. It's the _nonlocal_ nature of exceptions which is evil because it causes brittle code and broken logic. Robust code requires that you handle all contingencies correctly. And you simply can't do that correctly way up the callchain except in trivial cases. But you can always do so at the site of the error. It's just very tedious and longwinded. But that's the difference between well written professional code and amateur hour anyway.

If you knew anything about building construction, you would know that the first humans that built an accurately square large structure must have known Pythagorean Theorem as it is the simplest and only way to set out the structure.

You're either a troll or a moron, pardon my French. The simplest way to construct a square is to take a piece of string, fold it into four identical lengths, and tie it into a ring. Now take four people and pull at the corners until the four sides are taut.

Instead of self-glorifying episodic re-writes, how about discussing continuous, progressive and well reasoned contributions to culture and civilization?

While that's an admirable thought, the reality is that modern mathematics owes very little to the prehistoric findings pre ca 1500. The breakthroughs that transformed mathematics into the tool we use today occurred mostly in Europe during the Renaissance period and later. Perhaps the only significant (*) contribution before then is Euclid's tour de force (**), technically also in Europe.

(*) to modern mathematics

(**) I'm talking of course of the logical structure, not the actual geometrical results.

Modern mathematics only became possible by inventing a language in which abstractions can be precisely and economically stated. Before this happened, mathematical ideas could only be expressed in analogies, with very lenghty, hard to interpret, paragraphs. It took until the Renaissance for mathematicians to understand that.

Think about legalese. That's exactly what old mathematical documents are like. Over time, symbols with precise meanings were invented. This is how future generations of mathematicians are able to completely assimilate, and then surpass, in a very short time, the discoveries of their teachers.

Incidentally, the lack of such a development in the legal world is one reason why there is so much confusion and irrationality in that world. It's literally at the same primitive stage that pre-Renaissance mathematics used to be, but without so much even as Euclid's Elements for a guide.

Before the modern European era, mathematical ideas were sporadic, and highly subject to interpretation. Where one scholar sees a universal theorem, another only sees a single numerical example, clumsily expressed. More often than not, generalizations were just wishful thinking. Once the modern era began around the time of Descartes, these old results could be rediscovered easily enough by anyone using the modern mathematics.

That's the power of the new mathematical language, and that's also the reason that the old results, while mildly amusing to read about, are not important milestones for modern mathematics.

I'll just wait until next week, when the much more stable version 27.0 comes out.

Like, maybe it's(*) just missing a comma?

(*)The sentence, stupid!

No, I'm the millionth user to log in. It says so right here on my screen! *I* want this imposter whipped with a pussy willow!

Data is racist.

I agree. Just last week I was interviewing for an engineering job with a Nascar team, and all they could talk about was fuel data this, weight data that, etc. I told them that's not how I roll. I'm writing my congresscritter right now to stop this despicable behavior.

[...] and to make all this available to everyone, without any restrictions on use and reuse.

The fundamental problem remains, however. Even if scientists curate the data honestly and comprehensively, what's to stop people from taking the material, editing/changing it, and publishing/claiming their version is correct? The only way to protect against this is to make the data read-only downstream, eg only credentialed scientists will get to create or modify data - and that's a pretty fundamental restriction on use and reuse.

Basically, the idea seems contradictory.

Incorrect. The Frankish kingdom was located in what is now occupied by France. It is true that Charlemagne ruled a much larger domain, including modern Germany, Italy, and parts of eastern Europe, but these peoples are not considered Franks. Moreover, after Charlemagne died, his territories were split up among his three sons, which resulted in the plethora of countries composing Europe.

In any case, the frankish tongue spoken in the days of the kingdom of the Franks was closer to Latin than modern French or German. The lingua franca before modern English was modern French. For example, the language of modern diplomacy worldwide is often still French, although English is now preferred.

ignoring the fact it was his fault for associating his real name with his post in the first place.

Uh, what? The FAULT for the real name fiasco is GOOGLE's and FACEBOOK's and their insistence on making accounts with real identifying information. They are the technology trendsetters and API providers, who turned the internet into a giant fishbowl where people can be easily stalked by anyone.

Ten to fifteen years ago, before they got their grubby ad ridden paws on the web, it was common knowledge and standard operating procedure for people to post things anonymously, and keep their internet usernames well separate from their real world personas.

You can blame the guy for being ignorant, but you can't blame him for acting the way most people are forced to act by those two companies' evil(*) behaviours over the last 10 years or so. The current web is way too unfriendly to anonymity for regular people.

(*) don't be evil my ass.