Larry Wall, primary author of Perl, on productizing Perl 6

raiph · 2012-05-24T02:05:45.561494+00:00

Getting threads right is non-trivial, especially with a high-level dynamic language. The simple question of what semantics the system should have doesn't even have one obviously correct answer.

Nezperdia · 2 days

What happens when a large company pollutes an individuals property and the company is only willing to have the case heard by a few select judges?

In Rothbard's structure for free market courts, the defendant doesn't get to reject a judge (court firm) except by not showing up to the trial. So you simply go to a court firm with a strong enough reputation, get a default judgment, and then the target company is basically forced to participate in the appeal. If they don't, they'll have to deal with things like trade sanctions from anyone who has justice contracts with the mainstream court firms.

Nezperdia · 2 days

We don't have "private judges," but in a recent case with Massey Coal, they just backed a friendly judge in the local election that would rule in their behalf.

As long as there's a state-enforced monopoly on judges, that strategy works great. In a competitive market, not so much

Nezperdia · 2 days

We can't perfectly solve all the worlds problems in every last detail beforehand in our minds. You might as well say that there's no way to distribute cars in a free market because the guy promoting free market cars can't say where every dealership will be and who will run them.

Nezperdia · 2 days

Regulation, in the real world, is always a compromise deal. For polution, the compromise is generally "we'll emit less polution as long as the regulation says we aren't liable for damages caused by 'normal' pollution levels."

Bemuzed · 5 days

The problem is your focus on GDP growth rather than some wealth measure. It's like if you measured your personal financial success by spending: It would be correlated with success if your finances were otherwise healthy, but if you optimize for spending in isolation you end up doing really dumb things.

If you want to get an honest valuation of the effects of the tsunami, you need to put the damage and the expenditure to repair it on the negative side of the ledger. Anything else is just dishonest accounting. Straight GDP simply ignores both the damage and the repair costs.

Bemuzed · 5 days

I'm more focused on what now can't happen. The savings that were burned replacing things destroyed in the disaster now can't be spent on any new value. That wealth is gone. Destroyed.

Bemuzed · 6 days

Spending forced now is spending that can't occur more productively later. Investment in repairs uses up resources that won't now be spent on legitimately new things.

Bemuzed · 6 days

If your car never broke down there would be less reason to develop more fuel efficient cars as there would be less people in the market for cars.

But you'd be able to pay off your car and have a car payment less worth of bills every month. Then maybe you could pay off your student loans and start that small business you always wanted to try instead of slaving away as an debt collection associate calling people about their unpaid mortgages.

More spending whatever the cost is good only for banks, not people.

Bemuzed · 6 days

Money saved will be invested. Concrete resources not wasted rebuilding could have been allocated to productive tasks.

Bemuzed · 6 days

The broken window fallacy is the assertion that the increased transaction level after a window is broken is economically beneficial. Unfortunately, "growth" measures raw transaction volume, causing it to misinterpret broken windows exactly as the fallacy describes. This means that "growth" is not a sufficient single metric for measuring economic health.

Imagine someone told you that gaining weight was a sign of improving physical health. This is a good approximation in a lot of cases - for children, appropriate weight gain is good. After prolonged illness, appropriate weight gain is good. But that doesn't mean that being sick is good because it will cause weight gain afterwards.

BamVegas · 7 days

Nobody's going to do your homework. Meta-homework isn't any different.

radbrad7 · 7 days

LG Electronics

I was dumb enough to buy their high end T-Moble Android tablet, the G-Slate immediately when it came out. Not only did it not get any updates for like six months, the one update they did ship locked down the previously-unlocked bootloader. It was like a personalized fuck you note, "not only will we not update your tablet, now you can't either".

Duthos · 8 days

If there were better numbers, Duthos would have used them. But, very simply, better numbers aren't needed. The topic at hand doesn't need to cater to your precision fetish.

spif · 8 days

Unlikely. It's hard to break ext2 so that fsck won't rescue you.

Chandon · 9 days

Technically, no. The appropriate word for that is actually "shawn". For example, "Yesterday, I shawn two dogs running down the street."

davidreiss666 · 10 days

The way this issue is marketed annoys the crap out of me. Comparing thirsty people in a desert in Africa to kids having fun at a water park in southern New Hampshire, that's just incoherent nonsense. New Hampshire manages its relatively abundant fresh water just fine, and you couldn't economically ship it to Africa if you wanted to.

If you want to talk about fountains in Vegas and then show sad Native Americans by a dried out Colorado River, great. There's something to talk about there. I'd say the thing to talk about is farmer water subsidies rather than the fountains that pay fair market value for the water, but that's actually part of the coherent debate. Cross-continent water supply comparisons are not.

One thing to keep in mind through all of this is that desalinized water is comparatively cheap if you're near the ocean. And a lot of these deserts are near the ocean. This means that the water problem is mostly a solvable local issue rather than some sort of global warming type world-wide catastrophe.

neonomicon · 10 days

That depends on the details of the Unity license, exactly which "pro" features were used in the game, to what extent you could down-license by removing "pro" features, and whether you could get the codebase into a state such that you could legally redistribute pre-built packages of your fork under the demo license.

In the end I imagine it would end up basically dead like most "nearly" open source projects. The legal overhead simply ends up being too much to make it worth it and any code added tends to get stuck in the mess.

vikingurin · 10 days

In an arms race, the argument makes slightly more sense, since what you're accounting with dollars is "technical lead" rather than some absolute figure.

neonomicon · 10 days

Which would mean that forks effectively can't be developed.

obvioustroll · 10 days

LLVM was sponsored by Apple largely so they wouldn't depend on a GPL-licensed toolchain. There's no direct legal reason why this matters, but they want to move as far away from the GPL as possible because it conflicts with locked-down iPhones.

The other half of the story is that LLVM is built to be more modular than GCC, so for some applications (like JIT compilers) it's much easier to integrate.

lepercq · 10 days

That's actually worse, because you end up with a horribly mixed up hodgepodge of policies :/

Stop and think for a second. If a state tried to censor the internet, what would happen?

bperki8 · 13 days

Humans have sound judgment.

Dogs have the power of perception of the senses and, as far as we can tell, consciousness.

bperki8 · 13 days

Nah. Star Trek makes everyone get it wrong, but I meant "sapient". Check a dictionary for the lolz.

bperki8 · 13 days

By using SPP techniques like Kickstarter. Your team builds chapter 1 in their free time and holds chapter 2 hostage until enough people pay.

The scarce element is author / developer time. You can't get a new Harry Potter book from J.K. Rowling unless she uses her time and writes it.

Chandon

TROPHY CASE

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