Cruel and Unusual Punishment - <AUTHOR> https://harpers.org/archive/2019/02/cruel-and-unusual-punishment-2/ <comment><USER2> I think the most unsettling thing about this is not the expunging of someone's past achievements as punishment for some terrible act, but the fact that the mere _accusation_ of such can destroy someone.

The higher profile and more in the public eye you are, the higher the chance that someone will throw some mud at you (even anonymously, in some cases!) and that it'll stick, and there will be nothing you can do to repair the damage.

<comment><USER3> Aziz Ansari did get a lot of sympathy, suffered far less than many others, and had all reputable news publishers take a pass on the accusations that were floating around.

For Weinstein, as the counterexample, it seems like the public accusation was necessary to get the regular wheels of justice to turn.

And to add the argument that is almost as tired as yours: "Innocent until proven guilty" is for punishment by those with the monopoly on violence, i. e. the state/the courts.

If I can not watch a comedian because I don't find them funny (which is, unfortunately, not a crime), surely I can skip their HBO special because I believe their accusers?

<comment><USER4> > And to add the argument that is almost as tired as yours: "Innocent until > proven guilty" is for punishment by those with the monopoly on violence, i. > e. the state/the courts.

It's a legal requirement for the state/the courts, but it's a just and fair principle that the rest of us should still strive to embrace.

<comment><USER5> we ought to strive for it as an ideal, but admit practical compromises.

to make a contrived example: suppose you have a friend that several other people accuse of stealing. none of them can _prove_ that he stole from them, but each of them lost their wallets at separate gatherings where he was present.

you might not find this sufficient cause to confront him or cut him out of your life, but you would probably be a little more careful where you leave your wallet when he's around.

<comment><USER6> > you might not find this sufficient cause to confront him or cut him out of > your life, but you would probably be a little more careful where you leave > your wallet when he's around

This strikes me as socially unhealthy behavior. In the case described, one of two things is true: 1) The accusers are right, and your friend is a theif. You've implyed that if this were the case, you would confront them and/or cut ties with them (which is reasonable).

2) Your friend is being falsely accused of a serious crime by several people. In this case, he needs your support and trust more than ever.

In neither case is continuing to hang around him as normal, with added caution against his potential theivery, a useful behavior. If he is a theif then you continue to associate with a theif and to put youself at risk of theivery, albeit with some reduced risk on account of increased caution. If he is not a theif, then it's likely that your guarded actions and internal scepticism will be picked up on, and that your friend will notice that you doubt his innocence, which may well hurt your friendship.

That all said, I agree that "guilty until proven innocent" doesn't apply in the scenario that you described. This is because there is "trial". You assume innocence while trying to uncover the truth. So in your scenario, you would assume that your friend is innocent and investigate the wallet disappearances, question the accusers and accused, track down addition witnesses and character witnesses, before finally passing your personal judgement. From there you can confront/cut out the theif, or sympathise and emotionally support the falsely accused.

<comment><USER5> I agree that if you can confidently decide whether 1) or 2) is the case, the actions you laid out are the correct ones.

things are rarely so clear cut in my experience, especially when you only have the resources of a sole private citizen at your disposal.

my "contrived example" is actually lifted from a similar experience I had in college. I found it pretty suspicious at the time, because the gatherings where the other people lost their wallets were quite small. ultimately, I acknowledged privately that I could not conclude one way or the other, so publicly I defended my friend. at the same time, I was always a bit more careful of my stuff when we were hanging out (no idea whether they noticed this).

my point is that there is a difference between taking punitive action against a person and taking protective actions towards oneself. my position is that there is no inherent contradiction in being too uncertain to punish but certain enough to protect yourself, provided that it does not unduly harm the other person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An underlying theme I've noticed to this article and the response here is that of people's attitudes towards ex felons. It's as if you believe that they are permanently lesser people; that their moral fibre is beyond redemption and they should never be allowed to enjoy the comforts of life, let alone pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

You either punish and forgive your citizens, or else you admit that you're going to oppress them forever.

<comment><USER8> I think a huge part of why we so strongly censure these people socially is that most of them skipped the justice system entirely. For every Cosby or Weinstein who does face the music, there are a thousand Louis C.K.s, who — even when they _admit_ to masturbating in front of multiple women! — are never charged with anything.

I agree that the stigma around committing crimes is too strong and that we need to allow pathways to redemption. But people need to be brought to justice before they can be redeemed, and what we see now is a reaction to that mostly not happening.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry but I think it is horrible to put Louis CK in the same sentence with Bill Cosby. Maybe I don't fully understand the situation, but there have been no reports as far as I know that Louis CK drugged anyone or physically forced himself on anyone.

The case against Louis CK is purely that of abuse of power which is seen as a "white" crime as opposed to physically restraining someone. The distinction is important because "white" crimes are generally seen as better crimes and indeed when I started writing this comment I too felt it was ridiculous to hold Louis CK to the same standard as Bill Cosby.

I'll end like a broken record though. We in the software industry like to do "blameless postmortems" add they like to say in devops culture. However, as soon as we walk away from our jobs, we become the same primate as everyone else. Maybe we shouldn't blame the abuser. Maybe we should not blame individual district attorneys or prosecutors for failing to prosecute cases or for acting tough on cases that simply had no common sense not. Maybe we should not blame individual police officers for waking into someone's apartment and shooting to kill claiming they thought they were in their apartment and the person was an intruder.

Maybe we ought to treat the root cause of the problem — huge inequalities of power. But how?

<comment><USER10> Making Election Day a federal holiday, or at least moving Veteran's Day to be concurrent, would be a good move.

Removing the Electoral College would be a good move.

Increasing and broadening the base of the estate tax would be a good move.

Increasing the highest bracket of the income tax would be a good move.

This isn't intended to be political, those are very specific policy actions clearly designed to reduce the inequalities of power by a) giving citizens more power, and b) taking power from the rich, and particularly from the rich who believe there is profit in supressing the people.

<comment><USER11> How does removing the Electoral College help with inequity of power? Wouldn't it just concentrate decision making into the very powerful, densely populated areas. That's specifically what it's meant to combat.

<comment><USER10> > Wouldn't it just concentrate decision making into the very powerful, densely > populated areas

The value of a vote in Idaho would be equal to the value of a vote in Miami. Yes, that's what I mean. The system has clearly been corrupted in the other direction, where oligarchs have purchased, for very small sums, leverage over politicians from these population-small electoral areas. Maybe we could at least make them pay real money.

<comment><USER11> These are politically diverse areas that need equal representation. No one had a problem with the electoral college until their candidate lost in 2016, but that election proved that the electoral college is still relevant and useful. New York and California should not dominate US politics.

<comment><USER10> Barbara Boxer was formally taking action agains the electoral college at least as far back as 2004.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Naked Gun is funnier thanks to the unnerving experience of seeing OJ in it, but Cosby as "America's Dad" is creepy AF.

What's particularly off-base about this analysis is that Cosby _was_ always creepy. She raises this idea like it's an absurdity, but anyone who saw "Spanish Fly" should have understood Cosby was a creep pure and simple. This is kind of typical of the essay - it sprays around highly contentious snap judgements like the NYRB essay by Ghomeshi being "Weak-but-still-interesting", and Farrow's allegations being "dodgy" at a disturbing rate.

Buried in there there's a decent point (or two) struggling to get out. But there's a (possibly disingenuous) blurring of people ranging from Barr though Keillor through Louis CK through Cosby (i.e. obnoxious all the way up to criminally convicted) and a blurring of consequences (are we talking about 'ostracism' or 'erasure' or 'market based companies not wanting anything to do with you any more because you suck?).

Private companies failing to continue to propagate Cosby's work is in no way analogous to being 'disappeared' by the Soviet Union. I'm pretty sure it's still pretty easy to see most of the works by these people; they aren't getting systematically purged from the libraries.

<comment><USER7> Private companies ending Cosby's prior art is giving in to the mob. Had there not been such vitriolic outcry, they'd have happily continued making their profits.

No, the erasure is not on them; it's entirely our fault.

Our modern equivalents of the library are being purged, and you're happily cheering the flames.

<comment><USER13> > Our modern equivalents of the library are being purged

No, they aren't. Not in any way, shape, or form. Private companies don't have any obligation to continue showing anything. They don't have any such 'moral' obligations at all. They aren't going into libraries and purging books.

An actual purge would be something like systemically recalling, redacting, and deleting any remaining records of art that involve Cosby. Saying this is 'our libraries being purged' is completely alarmist and untrue.

<comment><USER4> > No, they aren't. Not in any way, shape, or form. Private companies don't > have any obligation to continue showing anything. They don't have any such > 'moral' obligations at all. They aren't going into libraries and purging > books.

What if the libraries are privatized?

> An actual purge would be something like systemically recalling, redacting, > and deleting any remaining records of art that involve Cosby. Saying this is > 'our libraries being purged' is completely alarmist and untrue.

No. An actual purge would consist of removing the work from circulation and locking the remaining copies in a restricted section in the library (a giftschrank). What you describe sounds like it's inspired by the _fictional_ total censorship regime shown in _1984_ [1] than by nonfictional examples.

[1] Which was probably lie even in the context of that fictional world; I wouldn't be surprised if the Inner Party actually had accurate archives kept in a giftschrank.

<comment> vertex-four > What if the libraries are privatized?

Then there's a serious issue with your society that needs to be resolved independent of anything else - libraries are a public good, not for the benefit of any individual entity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> She said:

      The question is whether we condition our consumption of what artists produce on their moral purity.

Here she answers it

      I want the stuff, and in truth I wouldn't be all that bothered if the director were an axe murderer.

For me things are not black and white like that. Art is a form of expression -that's my opinion. My assumption is that, artist's create art from out of their own convictions. With that mindset , if I find out that artist is a heinous person it automatically makes me think same about his art- may be that's a wrong way to think about it.

If Sorkin wrote a play and a would be serial killer was cast as the protagonist , I will have a hard time liking the play when the actualities play out. This is probably wrong and contradicts what i wrote before because i am attributing the integrity of the play with one single actors behavior.

Its not easy. Does some one have a better way to deal with this.

<comment><USER15> > Its not easy. Does some one have a better way to deal with this.

A boycott. Don't buy the stuff.

Seriously, the core of the problem is not moral judgement (although that may be worthy discussing at a second, non-fire emergency, time.

The problem is automatic moral contagion. A publisher may make the approximate market or moral guess that it should suspend its relationship with an author. But a literary agent doing the same at lightning speed is deferring moral judgement to the amorphous crowd, the "They". And the "They" is structurally incapable of thought, let alone moral thought. The consequence is bookstores getting caught in the wave and erasing traces of the author's existence.

I never thought Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, which seemed so overwrought and sanctimonious ten years ago, had this much wisdom about human nature. Search wikiquote for some choice rambling about "second handers".

It's really badly written too, so it's a shame human behavior is making it more prescient and deeper than, say, 1984.

<comment><USER16> See also Rand and William Hickman.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Edward_Hickman](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Edward_Hickman)

<comment><USER15> Rand's heros are bullshit, yes. In reality nothing happens from isolated individualistic initiative, everything takes place in the space between people. Howard Roark is a fictional version of Martin Shkreli.

That said, her acute pessimism about mob human behavior appears to be dead-on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find the line "You're exactly the sort of person this happens to" very telling.

When people are destroyed with "but an accusation", it's _very_ rare for the accusation to have been the whole of it. Roseanne, Louis C.K., Weinstein, Bill Cosby - it wasn't the accusation that destroyed these people, they had been undermining themselves for decades by hurting others. The accusation that took root only knocked out the lynchpin to the facade.

As to whether the author is actually a terrible person who has been hurting people for decades or not, I don't know, but that specific line definitely describes these people. They are exactly the sort of person whose lives get destroyed over an accusation - because they've built up enough previously- obfuscated proof to go with it.

<comment><USER18> Okay, then explain Tobuscus. Look him up. He lost arguably over a million dollars in deals with companies and with his publisher not to mention he stopped putting out videos because of the whole ordeal. The only bad history he had before was that had a drug addiction and he was "manipulative". However all his past girlfriends backed him up, and their was conclusive evidence that the accusation was false. Still, his life was pretty much wrecked.

<comment><USER19> suppose for a moment that this Tobuscus guy was indeed unfairly maligned — i don't know, but hey, could be. that in no way contradicts the parent commenter's point, which is this: all the hand-wringing over the celebrities whose careers were destroyed over "just an accusation" is wrong, because it was never just that one accusation.

rosanne barr is a good example. the author of the article goes into minute detail over the tweet that ended her show, yet somehow doesn't have a word to say about the decades of her bad behavior that preceeded it.

<comment><USER18> No. Tobuscus was a basic celebrity (youtube channel with over a million subscribers, one of the biggest in his prime), and was a reputable person with no real bad history. He was ruined by one accusation.

Furthermore, most people are not perfect. You can find a bad history for anyone i.e. James Gunn. That does not make an accusation destroying someone's career okay.

> Suppose for a moment that this Tobuscus guy was indeed unfairly maligned — i > don't know, but hey, could be.

That is why false rape accusations are so bad. You have to preface this by saying you don't know if he is a rapist or not, when there is physical evidence that proves he didn't, but the accusation is more important than the evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It depends somewhat on the transgression and how it relates to thr works.

Cosby's "lovable american Dad" character is incongruous with the crimes he committed and that really does diminish the work.

Rosanne's charcter is flawed by design along with the rest of the realistic family. Throwing in racism (or stupidity, if she didn't intend it in a racist way) fits just fine with the character and does not diminish the great series that it was.

<comment><USER7> Shouldn't that be a decision to be made by each consumer, rather than a mob of social justice warriors pressuring companies to prevent everyone from accessing it?

<comment><USER21> I agree with your opinions, and sympathize with the chronic downvoting and excessive moderating meted out here.

There's little difference between the left and right these days, they've moved so far extreme that their underlying philosophies have started to align.

One such is mob like bullying of corporations, and hysterical outrage. Be it Nike & Kapernick, or __corp_advertizer__ and Ben Shapiro, tribalism and herd behavior have been amplified by the internet. That has unleashed baser instincts of retribution, and when network effects and scale do to retribution what they do to the viral spread and adoption of Uber or Facebook, all hell is unleashed on the afflicted, regardless of the gravity of their crime.

The internet was supposed to free our minds, not pile-on the moderately guilty, at scales VCs salivate over.

<comment><USER7> This is mostly an American phenomenon. Outsiders tend to look on with bemusement, but it's actually a very serious problem due to America's historical ethical leadership (despite the failures), and their current global influence. Like it or not, their example has far reaching effects the world over.

I just hope that they can get out of this polar ideological warfare mindset before it goes too far. They may have lost the moral high ground, but they're still far removed from a rogue state. There's a real danger from Russian cyber campaigns to divide and confuse. These are far more dangerous to national security than the IP theft China engages in. Certain nations would love to help America fall from grace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sure, I get it, but when you tap into your empathetic side this article smacks of insensitity and whining. Assuming, as Lionel asks us to, that some of these things _are_ true—should we really be complaining about the inaccessibility of these works or should we perhaps think about what the victims might have experienced, and that in many cases the abuse they suffered was in part _enabled_ by the power the popularity of the so-called artist's (many of the examples in this article art not in fact what I'd call art but rather _entertainment_ ) works bestowed upon the artists—a lot of these people got away with stuff precisely because the wide scale distribution of their works elevated them to a position of social immunity. That's finally changing, and that's a good thing.

Just as it's the consumers choice to refrain from consuming its the distributors choice to refrain from distributing—publishers aren't some beacons of moral and political neutrality—they'll do whatever benefits the bottom line. To hold them to this weird demand that they be neutral and toss public opinion aside is predicated on a much different reality than the one we occupy. Changing the nature of distribution is a separate economic and political issue.

On the whole, this is a pretty infuriating article. So-called artists should not have some sort of special moral immunity—that's _precisely_ the problem that's finally being solved with some of these banishments—and yes it is a problem initimately tied to the popularity and avilabilty of their works, as this is what gave them a veneer of invincibility in the past. It's not some simple situation in which these people would have been served justice regardless—the dispatch of justice in these cases is often _hindered_ by the artist's success and notoriety.

Common approaches to morality weigh the bad more highly against the good. And yes the ideas and actions behind the art matter. The extreme logical extension of this argument is that you should be able to enjoy nazi artwork in a sort of epicurean way without having to admit of any of the implications enjoying such work might suggest and basically putting history, reality, and thought aside while you indulge in whatever it is about the work that appeals to you—it's a very shallow, one dimensional, solipsistic and childish approach to comprehending and consuming art.

</comment><comment><USER23> > _But that isn't the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of > progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on > display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review of > Books. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones in the United Kingdom, my > literary agent, my publishers in translation, and HarperCollins worldwide > would decide they could no longer afford association with a pariah. My > current manuscript wouldn't see print, nor would any future projects I'm > foolish enough to bother to bash out. Journalistic opportunities would dry > up. Yet what I most dread about this bleak scenario is my thirteen published > titles suddenly becoming unavailable—both online (gosh, would piracy sites > be morally fastidious, too?) and in shops._

McCarthyism never died, it just went moved leftwards.

Similarly to how the kind of puritanism and moral hysteria that got the Hayes code and "warning stickers" on CDs, thrives on under a progressive guise today.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great piece. To me, the strongest argument is that too often pieces of art are made by dozens to hundreds of artists, and we'll punish along the hundreds of innocents to get to the presumed guilty.

<comment><USER25> >pieces of art are made by dozens to hundreds of artists, and we'll punish along the hundreds of innocents to get to the presumed guilty.

Punishing people for association is a common means of striking fear into the people who don't care one way or another about your movement (most of the population doesn't care strongly about most issues) and getting them to at least half hardheartedly act as a force multiplier for your vocal minority.

I'm sure you can imagine why a business owner in 1870 Alabama might not want to get caught selling to black people or a white tradesman may not want to take on a job for said business or a publisher in 1922 might not want to publish a book by someone who's known to be a communist.

Same principal.

I'm sure we'll look back on it the same way we look back on the red scare. Regardless of whether the goal is a good one or not these sort of witch hunts where a majority of the population is kind of uneasy about how extreme they are almost never look like good ideas in hindsight.

<comment><USER24> Insightful. An artist will be less likely to look away from abuse that doesn't affect them, if it might cause their work to be erased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> While I appreciate that the author rightly calls out the cult-like mob justice of the progressive movement as overly cruel and destructive, the final section reveals an inherently selfish motive for this piece. He appears less concerned with artists being treated fairly or justly and more with whether he can enjoy what they made after the person has been destroyed.

IMHO, here's something devilish about seeing societal injustices, pretending it's futile to fight back, but then pleading for society to spare the art from their rampage. If we're going to let this be the new status quo, then protecting the art should be the least of our worries.

<comment><USER27> As the author gists at: what if we found out that Michealangelo uninvitedly touched a woman's bottom. Should we then deplatform him, remove his works, and paint over the Sistine Chapel in an appeasing off white so that no one else were to subject to his transgressions?

<comment><USER28> I think the equation changes a lot once they're dead.

<comment><USER21> Why? Why not stop at the legally stipulated punishment proportionate to the crime. Why is there a need to deplatform someone to the same degree, regardless of the gravity of their crime?

<comment><USER28> Networks don't necessarily stop reruns just to participate in the punishment of someone. They do it because the audience's perception of someone is changed. Bill Cosby's work and Roseanne weren't directly changed for example, but in their new contexts, many people are uncomfortable now. The networks want to run what people like. If they think people would generally like a different show now over those old reruns, then they're just keeping up with the market. They don't need a court's approval for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is why I read harpers.

</comment><comment><USER30> That painfully resembles the approach they used in the Soviet Union: "Yes, Ivan Ivanovich is a great poet, but is he a true communist?" And if the answer is no, then no, his book will never be printed.

It also helps that the definition of being "a true communist" is sufficiently vague to turn pretty much any situation in either direction.

</comment><comment><USER31> > I'm one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career > for good.

Yet Rod Liddle and Jeremy Clarkson continue to have a successful career, Trump makes it all the way to the white house, and netflix is filled with highly successful 'controversial' comedians.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would argue that _economics_ drives at least some of this because Hollywood and media in general have no shortage of talent waiting in the wings.

So new mechanisms for generating attrition will always find more fans (the underdogs) than opponents (the top dogs.)

In those milieu, everyone - even filthy rich producers, is expendable. Though expendable connotes a sense of usefulness, so maybe disposable works better.

</comment><comment><USER33> > For reasons that escape me, artists' misbehavior now contaminates the fruits > of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So > it's not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of > their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their > professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the > worst about your fallen idols, you're duty-bound to demolish the best about > them as well.

I'm not biting.

If we're talking about artists' misbehavior, let's take a well-known example. Plenty of comedians continue to talk about the importance of Bill Cosby _as a comedian_ , and to rate his influence up there with Richard Pryor, George Carlin, etc. These comedians profess this publicly, and I can probably find various examples from people like Seinfeld, Norm MacDonald, and many others. AFAICT it's crystal clear to their audience what they mean when they assess his comedy albums. In no way has his comedy gone down the "memory hole."

If you don't believe me, go on Amazon and search for "Bill Cosby albums" and look at the ratings. Here's the first line from the first review I found:

"No matter how you feel about Bill Cosby, given recent events, and where you might fall in your beliefs, it is sometimes necessary to separate the artist from the art."

Rando review person on Amazon gets it. Does that mean I should count Rando as a voice speaking out against the dangers of "progressive orthodoxy?"

I'd much rather count Rando as a voice repeating the thing I already knew before I started reading this article.

Seems to me the author is guilty of the same fallacy as the creationist who, when presented with new sets of fossils, only sees an exponentially increasing set of missing links. (Is there a name for this fallacy?)

</comment><comment><USER34> That's the first time I get not one but two JavaScript modal pop ups. Looks like I won't be reading this article and potentially upvoting it. This is getting crazy.

</comment><comment><USER35> [https://outline.com/av7RF8](https://outline.com/av7RF8)

</comment><comment><USER36> We've effectively hatched a Roko's Basilisk.

</comment><comment><USER37> What about replacing the collective work of several misogynistic and racist authors, especially since the work itself lead to heavy discrimination?

 _cough_ the US Constitution _cough_ :)

<comment><USER38> I thought that was the plan, but it is rarely mentioned in public forums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Good old reductio ad Hitlerium: we still show historical movies about Hitler and many countries do not outright ban his literary "work". (Others do.) It is still getting published. And it is a political piece, unlike just a mere association!

The problem is probably the lack of option due to centralization of publishing (esp. movie publishing) and enormous political pressure from there.

You cannot show Cosby if MPAA or whichever organization does not agree to it, nor you can sell them. The only bet is a media library which may have an exception in copyright, until that fades away in half a century or more.

</comment><comment><USER40> She needs to realise that times have changed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Underlying all of the points in this article is the idea that people are somehow entitled to success. Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby are _famous_ , dammit — how _dare_ people not promote their work or give them money!

Meanwhile, zero sympathy for the people who experienced professional repercussions after being harassed or assaulted. Before you're successful, people can harm your career or discriminate against you all they want. It's okay!

Would we have a problem with replacing an unknown actor if it were discovered that they were a serial sexual assaulter of minors and minor-adjacents? No? Then why do we care when it happens to Kevin Spacey?

<comment><USER36> No, that's not the point. This is not about any famous person being entitled to anything. Her point is that "the arts consumer" is entitled to make their own decision about what to read and watch and think. We are hampered in this by posturing platforms and by the mob's simplistic "by association" mental model of evil.

I can hold entertainers to any standard I like, or none at all. I can judge them for the subset of crimes that are topical to judge them for, or some other arbitrary subset of my choosing. Or, I can take the words "gratia artis" literally.

<comment><USER8> I understand her point, it's just not consistent. Where is my option to support people who would have had a career had it not been killed by some powerful abuser?

The choice isn't "art or no art". That choice is made for us when someone decides to wield their power over someone else. Our only choice is _which_ art we ignore: that of famous abusers or that of their victims. The "arts consumer" loses out either way.

<comment><USER36> > Where is my option...?

There is an established path for group action here:

1\. Vote

2\. Pass a law that says powerful abusers are bad

3\. When someone's convicted of wielding power in a mean way, the justice system will punish them by due process

4\. People learn what will get punished

5\. The artists you wish you could see will be less scared away

6\. You get the art you want!

Notice how throughout this entire process, you don't get to tell me, of the art that exists today, what I'm allowed to read or watch or listen to.

On the other hand, cheating that hangman and bullying the platforms feels a little bit like, how to say, wielding your power over someone else.

<comment><USER8> This would be a much more convincing argument if 3-6 weren't extremely rare despite 1 and 2 already existing.

It's not really "cheating the hangman". He's not doing his job, so we have to deal with it on our own.

Which sucks, because I agree: your proposal is way better.

<comment><USER36> > He's not doing his job, so we have to deal with it on our own.

Ah yes, this is how everyone starts to think after a long glut of too many superhero movies.

Criminal law has/will come down hard upon Cosby and Weinstein and such. Other alleged offenders will settle claims and lose out on future employment. Step 5 is looking way brighter in this generation than in the last. But step 3, not vigilantism, is really the best system we have for deciding between innocence and guilt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > the British barely right-of-center magazine (that's left-of-center, in > the United States) The Spectator

Um. No. The Spectator is solidly right-wing - it's on the right wing of the Conservative party, in fact. A piece in the Spectator's mirror-image, the left-wing New Statesman:

[https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2017/04/how- alex...](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2017/04/how-alexander- chancellor-s-magazine-became-home-british-alt-right)

They have a long-standing columnist who is cheerleading for Greek fascists:

[https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/spectator-editor-defends- colu...](https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/spectator-editor-defends-column- supporting-greek-far-right-party-golden-dawn/)

</comment><comment><USER42> on the positive side - despite all the mob power we still got the first openly "devil's triangle" Justice.

<comment><USER20> Not sure what the "devil's triangle" means.

The Kavanaugh case is interesting. It makes clear that some people want a new process for determining guilt, but nobody seems to make clear what that process should be.

A process is important because, in the face of uncertainty, we need an a priori agreement on how to settle it. After churning through the process we are supposed to unite around the result of it even of it's not what we hoped, and basically record it as a fact in the public record.

Leaving festering challenges to every fact just keeps us divided, eventually to the point everyone is working with their own set of facts.

It's also interesting because there _is_ such a process. I don't see any reason the Maryland DA can't refer the matter to a grand jury. The grand jury would either indict or not, and then I believe we could unite around that result.

<comment><USER43> It wasn't a criminal trial, it was a job interview.

<comment><USER32> It was a trial in the court of public opinion, from which there is no appeal. (thx to Machiavelli for that nugget of wisdom.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just like in 1984 where if you are vapourised you disappear completely as if you had never existed at all.

<comment><USER45> While I can understand and somewhat agree with his point that the works should be judged on their own merit. However, I find his attitude extremely callous. He even reiterated the point that even if the artist was an axe murderer he wouldn't care he just wants the goods.

It boils down to he's saying that the suffering of any of the victims doesn't matter to him. Literally at all... More over there is a pretty deep undercurrent that that has been the attitude for a long time and that the suffering of others has been ignored for equally long.

If you want justification for removing the works of the artists then consider it a form of ill-gotten gains. Would that work of art have been made if they're crime had been revealed or convicted?

<comment><USER7> Ok, let's go down this road. Suppose a crime is discovered long after the event. Does that mean you take their house? They probably wouldn't have gotten a job good enough to buy one. Their possessions? Gone. How about their family? Probably wouldn't have gotten married. Probably wouldn't have had those children. Erase erase erase!

Honestly, the response here is downright frightening, and I fear for our future...

<comment><USER45> The difference between all the things that you listed is that works of art are able to give royalties to a person. If you continue to buy or consume their products they still profit.

Obviously ex post facto law is bad for society. However, if an artist is receiving royalties for a work they made during which they raped several people, why should they still profit?

<comment><USER7> Because it's the job of the justice system to mete out punishment, not the modern day equivalent of a lynch mob.

<comment><USER36> > Because it's the job of the justice system to mete out punishment, not the > modern day equivalent of a lynch mob.

This should be so glaringly obvious.

A common problem when someone finishes serving their jail time as allotted by said justice system, the (much more low-key) lynch mob doesn't want to hire them just yet.

But what doesn't happen is this: the prisoner, by some stroke of luck, gets a job in a say a car factory, and suddenly everyone else in that factory should loose their job, and I'm a bad person for wanting to drive a car that the ex- felon worked on.

<comment><USER46> The difference is probably that the factory worker is not _seen_ by the car buyer - we wouldn't want to expose everyone's mind to the terrible sight of an ex-felon would we?

Now all that being said, this is probably just a pendulum swing. It looks like for decades sexual assault was shielded in the media industry - me too is overall still a positive movement IMO, it's just important to not letting it get too far (and I think those breaking forces are already acting).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It is all a fake, virtue signaling mess. I think of James Watson who had many honorary titles for his scientific work revoked for a supposedly "racist" observation. Other scientists who have produced complete garbage but make the right political noises get accolades and honorary doctorates.

</comment><comment><USER48> > I'm one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career > for good.

If that column involves you admitting to having sexually abused people, or making blatantly racist or bigoted statements, sure. But I fail to see how this is supposed to be a bad thing.

If such an event is so close to your normal behavior that you worry it might happen just about any day now, maybe you are the problem.

</comment><comment><USER49> Cry me a river. All of the offenses she lists have one thing in common: they are fundamentally someone with power using that power to subjugate ( to varying degrees ) someone who they have power over. Learn to treat others with dignity and respect. That's what this is about. It's not hard at all. People are just upset because it was previously acceptable, but these actions were always pretty gross.

<comment><USER36> Shriver's thesis is not that Spacey et al. are victims. She lays it out in the section that starts, "Which brings us to the party that really pays for the new puritanism:...".

Did the fans of House of Cards use their power to subjugate?

Did Louis C.K.'s co-stars use their power to subjugate?

Did Ian Buruma's editor?

Once you cast off whatever simplistic lens you might have, e.g. "it's all about power", it turns out the world is pretty interesting and complicated. Embrace the complexity.

<comment><USER49> I've seen this "separate the artist from the art" line of reasoning. I personally feel icky knowing that my money is going towards someone who has a pattern of bad action. Art is about culture and culture is about shared stories. The fact is that call-outs work because they change the story. This is what silent spring and the jungle did during the muck-raking era and it had the objectively positive effect of punishing companies for externalising costs at the expense of public health. Me too is just muck-raking for our modern era, focusing on interpersonal externalities.

<comment><USER36> Yup, it's your prerogative to feel icky. Personally, I'd feel icky artificially withholding money from these people's colleagues because they were unlucky enough to work on a movie set with someone who subsequently came under suspicion.

If the platforms didn't infantilize us, we'd be allowed to make up our own minds as to what's icky, because it turns out that not everyone has the same feelings.

Also: did anything in my comment follow the "separate the artist from the art" line of reasoning that you speak of? I'm pretty sure my comment wasn't about the naughty artists. I'm pretty sure it was about the actual victims.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


$120,000,000 lost productivity from iphone 4g lines - <AUTHOR> http://www.frutel.com/lost-productivity-calculator.php#iphone-4g

<comment><USER2> Well, the problem with this theory is that a fairly significant portion of the line crowd had their ipads/iphones and were working away. I, personally, cleared out a significant portion of my Jira queue, and triaged (and responded) to pretty much the entire day's email while I was in Line in Palo Alto. It was actually a very productive 90 minutes for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Much more is lost due to Hacker News. :-)

<comment><USER4> Fortunately, much is gained as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A real big stretch. Overnight hours normally spent sleeping shouldn't be factored in. And how many people took a vacation day for this?

</comment><comment><USER6> iPhone 4. There is no such thing as iPhone 4G.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't have the link, but apparently that's nothing compared to the time lost when google made their logo an interactive pacman game

</comment><comment><USER8> They'll make it up with multi-tasking.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, so as humans we should be productive every day, all day? Didn't realize if I took part of my day to wait for something I was excited about meant I was doing something wrong!

</comment><comment><USER10> Was looking at the line outside Oakfield Mall yesterday and asked an advisor if anyone had done this calc. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER11> Presuming the time would have been spent elsewhere productively?

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmmm, I would imagine the average hourly wage of 6000 people would be much lower than $50/hour....</comment>


Is there dark matter at the center of the Milky Way which also decays? - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-12-dark-center-milky.html <comment><USER2> This is a good article because it gives insight into how the scientific process works: nobody is "for" or "against" various dark matter hypotheses, an analysis that definitively supports _either_ direction can be very interesting, and people who think a lot about dark matter often publish papers showing that various effects _can 't_ be due to it.

Actually, this is the default situation in our field, and it's a good one. The only issue is that typically only the "hottest" stuff get popular exposure, which usually means the most blaring declarations of discovery, like the hundreds of fifth force articles we just got hit with.

(My one minor complaint is that the headline by itself is misleading. The question is whether there is dark matter at the center of the Milky Way _which also decays_ , leading to the signals mentioned in the article.)

<comment><USER3> Isn't it basically just matter that isn't detectable but has to exist because the known laws of nature told us it does? Instead some mystery goo that hides from our sight?

Yes, I am sure the mystery goo theories would get much more exposure. The pitfalls of pop-sci probably. I mean wich kid will get out of bed for a boring pulsar these days?

> "I was pretty excited, because I knew the implications were very big—it > meant that the dark matter explanation was back on the table"

I don't understand this. Isn't this basically feeding? Doesn't this just say we know less than we thought? Were we in danger of knowing everything?

<comment><USER4> >Isn't it basically just matter that isn't detectable but has to exist because the known laws of nature told us it does?

> Instead some mystery goo that hides from our sight?

Maybe. We assume "dark matter" has to exists because it interacts with/creates gravity. The only thing we know that can do so is matter.

However this besides detecting gravity interactions with normal matter, this dark matter cannot be seen, not in any wavelenghts, nor does it block any light or radiation from normal matter that's behind it.

It's not like it's just a bunch of normal matter that hides in a corner we cannot see by normal means.

<comment><USER5> > Maybe. We assume "dark matter" has to exists because it interacts > with/creates gravity. The only thing we know that can do so is matter.

This isn't really accurate. _Everything_ interacts via gravity, notably radiation and gravitational waves. (The latter hasn't been directly experimentally tested AFAIK.)

A major reason to think of dark matter as _matter_ is its equation of state, i.e. how it behaves when stretched or diluted. If you put 10g of light in one box (this is possible in principle — it's a _lot_ of light, and you need a box with impossibly shiny walls) and put 10g of cool gas in another, they gravitate identically. But, if you expand the boxes the same amount, the light gets diluted far more than the gas. That is, if you double the box's volume by moving one of the walls, you still have about 10g of gas but much less than 10g of light. If you had a third box full of 10g of dark energy and you double the box's volume, you end up with 20g of dark energy. Yes, this is really weird.

<comment> david-gpu Wow, really? Isn't energy conserved? I would expect that expanding the volume of the box would have a negligible effect on the mass of the contents, whether they are light or matter.

And I say negligible only because my understanding is that even vacuum has a tiny amount of energy in it due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, so a box twice as large would contain a tiny bit more energy even if it was equally empty in both cases.

What's the name of the phenomenon you describe? I'd like to learn more.

<comment><USER5> Energy is indeed conserved [0], but you have to take pressure into account. Suppose you build a cylinder with a piston, just like in a car engine or a bike pump. Start with the piston in a position that puts the interior of the cylinder at half its maximum volume. For simplicity, imagine that the outside of the cylinder is in a vacuum [1].

Now put some gas, light, or dark energy in the cylinder and then pull the piston out to its full extension. You've doubled the volume, but you're also done some work by pulling out the piston. If the cylinder is full of gas or light, the pressure is positive, so you did negative work (received energy) by pulling out the piston, and the energy in the cylinder decreases. For dark energy, the pressure is negative (crazy, I know), and you had to pull hard to extend the piston, so you put energy into the cylinder and, in fact, doubled the total energy in the cylinder.

[0] In general relativity, on large scales, conservation of energy is complicated.

[1] With a real bike pump or car engine, nothing fundamental changes if you have air outside the cylinder, but when you're talking about cosmology, you start considering that the whole universe is full of more or less the same stuff and it gets a bit more complicated. It all works out in the end, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks like a very healthy process, of people questionning their own results ! The scientific method, as it should be. beautiful

</comment><comment><USER7> It really seems to be very interesting and relevant work:

One of the authors vas a coauthor of the 2015 paper that was now disproven about its "it can't be dank matter" claim:

"My hope was that this would be just the first of many studies of the galactic center region using similar techniques. But by 2018, the main cross-checks of the method were still the ones we'd done in 2015, which made me pretty nervous that we might have missed something."

And the whole article about this new paper is informative.

<comment><USER8> > dank matter

<comment><USER9> Well, if the dark matter is also damp...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's an interesting approach.

More "debunking the debunking" studies like this are needed.

It seems there is a bias and "debunking with a weak method" is much more likely to be accepted than "proving with a moderate method". Ok, the null hypothesis might be more likely, but some methods are just inappropriate.

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avCGl2_6MQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avCGl2_6MQc)

</comment><comment><USER12> Slightly tangential. One thing I always wonder about, is there no dark matter around us, I mean here on earth?

<comment><USER13> There should be and we are looking for it. Several experiments are looking for WIMPs or other proposed particles on Earth or in the solar system.

But the amount us tiny, current estimates of the dark matter density in the Milky Way result in roughly 700 grams of DM in the Earths volume

<comment><USER14> I've read (elsewhere, I guess) that some 95% of the Milky Way's mass is estimated to be dark matter. If there are only 700g of it nearby, it can't be distributed the same way normal matter is. How can that be, since it interacts with normal matter gravitationally? Does the solar wind blow it away, or something like that?

I've also seen an article not long ago showing 'visualizations' of dark matter around a spiral galaxy, and it was mostly in teardrop-shaped lobes above and below the galaxy's center and aligned on the axis, rather than distributed through the disk. I didn't think of it at the time but now that I do, it seems like that distribution also indicates that light from the stars is pushing the dark matter away.

<comment><USER15> The reason why normal matter forms disks is because of electromagnetic repulsion: electromagnetic atoms naturally resist being in the same place as another atom. There becomes a tension between the repulsion to not stack up and gravity to compress things together. Since angular momentum is conserved, the matter will spin and flatten out: ie, a galaxy.

If dark mater is a particle, it rarely interacts with anything, including itself; so, it cannot collapse. Most of the particles will be in a constant state of free fall throughout the galaxy. Only if the particle just happens to have a nearly matching velocity would it get trapped in a star or planet. Even then, it would still be wobbling around with nothing to touch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's kind of impressive to me how much of modern science is really just people misapplying statistical models they don't understand to data that doesn't fit assumptions.

Snark aside, what's really interesting is the way that different fields respond to it when the model errors are discovered. Physics and Chemistry seem to be fairly (or at least comparatively) professional and receptive when they find out about mistakes. But mention a model error or data mismatch to someone in Neuroscience or Climatology? You're suddenly an anti-science heretic and probably murder kittens for fun.

<comment><USER17> For Climatology, there are a lot of crazy or disingenuous people who try to weigh in on topics. That makes everyone gun-shy and likely to lash out at criticism because they are so used to getting attacked by unsupported arguments.

<comment><USER16> This is excellent. Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


`dig Twitter.com mx` - <AUTHOR> http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3atwitter.com

<comment><USER2> I must be missing why this is important, shocking, or otherwise news-worthy.

I imagine a lot of companies use Google Apps, regardless of size - it's a reliable service that requires very little in the way of setup and a lot in the way of functionality.

If Twitter offered email, documents, calendars or competitors to any of the other core Google services then I could understand why this might be interesting. IMO this is no more significant than Twitter using Microsoft (or Apple) operating systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> So... <http://mail.google.com/a/twitter.com> ?

</comment><comment><USER4> This in known since that time when Twitter got hacked.</comment>


Ask HN: How to keep the information on your Macbook safe - <AUTHOR> Last year, my backpack with my Macbook was stolen in some pub. Yep, my fault for bringing it there. I got good travel insurance, so I had a new one the day after.<p>I'm good with backups, so no stuff was lost, but the person that stole my Macbook did of course have access to the source code of dozens of projects I was working on at that moment. What kind of precautions do you take to keep the data on your laptop safe? <comment><USER2> If you store source code on your personal laptop[1] you have to enable encryption. That should be like 'security 101'. Especially if you go to tech conferences where people who might steal your laptop actually _know_ what the "~/.aws/config" is and what "~/Work/<company-source>" might worth. I would be very skeptical of ppl running around with laptops containing proprietary source code without encryption on.

If you own a mac:

      * Enable FileVault
      * Enable 'require password immediately'
      * Choose a password with 8 or more chars
      * Never leave the keyboard unattended

You can lock your mac with: "open -a ScreenSaverEngine" or even better:

echo 'alias klock="open -a ScreenSaverEngine"' >> ~/.profile'

[1] If this is a work laptop then the company should have some kind of security policy and encrypting everything is where everyone would/should begin.

<comment><USER3> Easier way to lock your mac: ctrl-shift-power button

<comment><USER4> Or close it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1) Make sure your harddrive is encrypted using Filevault (It's actually firevault 2). Make sure that you require a password to login and that if you're away from your computer for 5 minutes that you need to login with a password. I believe that Mac's have a find your laptop/remote wipe your laptop.

If you're working for a company suggest setting up a MDM management system like Jamf or Fleetsmith (GSuite may also support macs, but I'm not sure). These will allow you to automate setups including the forcing of encryption. Jamf at least has the remote wipe ability built in.

</comment><comment><USER6> #1 Always ensure you have a password set on your computer. Whether first booting up or coming back from sleep, it should ask for a password. If they are going to steal your laptop, at least make them have to do some work of having to wipe your data.

#2 Glue all electronics to your hip. I don't care where you are or what you have to do. Get a backpack for all of your electronics and never let it out of your sight.

#3 I believe Apple was the first to do it with iPhone, might be available for Macbook, but if password is wrong 10 times, all data is wiped from phone, though I believe password is left intact.

<comment><USER7> In addition to these 3, make sure you enable FileVault. This will encrypt all of your data at rest

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also make sure that any media you use for backing up your MacBook is also secure. And use encrypted backups of course.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would not have helped in your situation, but at home I have a locking file cabinet, and I put everything in there and lock them up when I leave the house.</comment>


Why Hardware Development Is Hard, Part 1: Verilog Is Weird - <AUTHOR> http://danluu.com/why-hardware-development-is-hard/

<comment><USER3> Sorry to hi-jack this comment thread but I don't see many topics on h/ware design and whatever h/ware engineers are around here are likely to be reading this thread.

I'm a design/test engineer for Freescale Semiconductor and I definitely agree with this piece. In my group we have developed something that could be loosely described as 'Ruby on Rails for Semiconductors' and we use this to pre-compile our RTL where it gets marked up with ERB. It was definitely interesting to read here that other companies embed a scripting language in their Verilog - aside from being conservative h/ware companies definitely don't tend to share such information as freely as their s/ware counterparts do!

So thanks to the OP and I will definitely be keeping an eye on his blog.

Anyway with our tool, which we call RGen, we have our design team maintain Ruby models of the h/ware modules, this contains all meta-data about what makes each design unique - feature availability, bug presence, register and memory map information, etc. The marked up RTL can then be compiled against the different design models to generate derivative specific designs - <USER2> generally provides a much more structured and powerful approach to design management than anything offered by native Verilog.

What's really neat though is that this meta-data lives in what we call an RGen plugin (kind of like a Ruby gem) and so we can plug these models into downstream environments to generate design-specific documentation, test patterns, test program, bench code, etc. This means that all IP that is dependent on a design can be generated against a design-owned description of it which is very light weight and whihc doesn't require introducing a massive Verilog/testbench dependency into downstream environments.

In terms of test the framework provides Ruby APIs to generate pattern and test programs and basically wraps the ATE test platform in the same way as Rails' ActiveRecord wraps a database - so it provides a credible way to maintain your test IP in a way that is vendor-independent.

Now I feel that other companies are probably solving these problems in their own way, and particularly where test engineering is concerned all of the power currently lies with the vendors who have no incentive to drive standardization and to make it easy for companies to switch platforms. This is fueled by h/ware companies' general mindset of not sharing and collaborating across company boundaries.

Myself and all of the key RGen developers would like to make it open source and we are currently having these discussions with our management team, however as you might imagine the idea of this does not come easy to the semiconductor establishment and it will take quite some convincing to get a go ahead for it. The biggest spectre is the concern that we release it and one of our competitors takes it, get's an advantage, continues to develop it internally and never gives back to the community. I think we can assume that this will almost certainly happen in some cases, but it would help if I could get an idea if companies are out there that would in principle agree to supporting such a development model - basically the idea is that all of our source code and documentation development would move into the open where it would be run like Rails or one of the other main web s/ware frameworks and over time the core team would evolve to contain engineers from outside of Freescale.

So if any h/ware engineers are reading this, does this sound like something you can imagine using and more importantly contribute to?

If so would you mind disclosing who you work for?

Also if anyone knows of any large open source projects in the semi-conductor space that I could cite as examples to my management please provide details.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> I'd also be interested in open-source projects in either VHDL/Verilog, the best i've seen is opencores but it seems to have died a little.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what sort of project you're interested in, but we're currently building open source network taps using PHY ICs and an FPGA. As part of the project a USB 3.0 core is being developed to move captured data to a host system.

[https://github.com/mossmann/daisho](https://github.com/mossmann/daisho)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hardware engineer here, answering the blogger: this code is bad news to me: only constants should be on the right side of the assigns in the reset branch, so the tools should definitely be complaining.

Second, on the combinatorial always block. The rule is simple: unless you want latches to be inferred (which is usually never), use "always @(*)" so that the block is executed on changes to any of the right-hand-side signals. This is less tedious and error prone than listing each of the signals (there could be 100s in a large block).

VHDL and Verilog are semantically equivalent, so no particular advantage to either one (I prefer Verilog since its syntax is a bit more C like, and a bit less Ada like). I've seen many attempts over the years to make languages which make it easier for programmers to do chip designs, but they've all failed. (Most recent is openCL, but it's not a complete chip design language).

The coder really has to have some idea about the physical correspondence between his code and the chip. For example, you can easily fill even the largest FPGA with just a few lines of Verilog:

reg [10000000:0] foo; always @(posedge clk) foo <= foo + 1'd1;

(10 M flops.. will not fit).

<comment><USER7> Welcome to HN, Joe! (p.s. for anyone who didn't know, jhallenworld is the author of the classic lightweight, multiplatform editor "joe")

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Im an electrical engineer with 10 years FPGA and circuit design experience which includes teaching a few new-hires how to do hardware development.

The key to getting a synthesizer to produce a good circuit from any HDL, especially Verilog, is to understand that there is a synthesizeable subset of the language that should be used to describe the RTL (Register Transer Level) of abstraction. The rest of the language's constructs should be limited to simulation only.

Here are a couple of quickly googled sources just to cement the point: [http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~jhoe/course/ece447/handouts/LV.pdf](http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~jhoe/course/ece447/handouts/LV.pdf) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#Synthesizable_constructs_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#Synthesizable_constructs_and_VHDL_templates)

The synthesizable subset tends to be a very small number of constructs and once you know and understand them you will be one big step closer to much "easier" hardware development.

One should strive to understand RTL as a level of abstraction first though IMHO. I have some thoughts on how best to do that if anyone cares I can continue.

</comment><comment><USER9> Shameless promotion: MyHDL(Python library for hardware description) is well designed and feature rich. I recently pushed support for using class instances to group together signals/ports. So, class instances can be used as Interfaces. This is really cool since Verilog/VHDL don't support this feature natively but MyHDLs conversion creates synthesizable Verilog/VHDL. Although system verilog has Interfaces, I'm not sure if synthesis tools support it(Quartus doesn't)

Also, I'm currently working on uhdl, which simplifies a lot of things about using MyHDL such as CoSimulating with icarus/modelsim.

links:

[http://myhdl.org](http://myhdl.org)

[https://github.com/jck/uhdl](https://github.com/jck/uhdl)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing, looks interesting.

Would you mind commenting on the development model for something like this? Do you do this on your own time or company sponsored time?

I mentioned in another comment that I have a framework along similar lines that has been developed within the company that I work for (Freescale Semiconductor) and I am looking for examples of other semiconductor-related open source projects that I can cite in discussions with management about releasing it.

If this was something that you developed within a company could you comment on how you went about open sourcing it?

<comment><USER9> oops, I guess that comment insinuates that I'm the creator of MyHDL. The creator of MyHDL is actually Jan Decaluwe(Sigasi, Easics). I just implemented the interfaces feature and develop uhdl.

Rgen looks really interesting. I hope you do manage to get it opensourced so that I can play with it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous HN discussion on this article can be found here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347848)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry didn't found the old discussion in my (extremely short) search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, it is; and hardware development companies are _very_ conservative, so there's little room to launch a disruptive "Ruby for hardware" new language.

I have some ideas myself on what a better language would look like, but for the moment they're at the back of the ideas drawer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't worry, it's not better in Europe, VHDL is also weird.

<comment><USER13> Why is it weird? I find it quite elegant... But I'd write in RTL level thinking about the FPGA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Used Verilog in a digital systems course in college. Didn't think it was too bad but we didn't get too in depth with it.</comment>


Rate my startup: Ask My BrainTrust (Business Brainstorming Tool) - <AUTHOR> http://askmybraintrust.com/c/b

<comment><USER2> Who is behind this company? I would expect an "about page" or a blog post that gives your background and commitment level. You are asking for money and offering to store confidential information, prospects will want to know more about you. See

       http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/09/17/startups-should-sign-their-work/
       http://www.plansphere.com/blog/?p=624

How do you differentiate from a regular wiki service (e.g. pbwiki, CentralDesktop, Zoho)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow -- I can't believe I missed this one.. Sounds like we need one of these: <http://37signals.com/about>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> With respect to the visual aspects of the landing page, I quite liked the initial screen (title, visual slide, etc. look good). As I scroll down, I also like the concept behind the image vs image check mark for highlighting the strengths of your offering but I would strongly recommend improving the images. Nothing wrong with stick figures but I would redo them and make them more crisp.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback. The stick figures are definitely something we want to fix, but it keeps getting de-prioritized on our list ;)

<comment><USER4> just a note (as someone mention the images) they appear "broken" position wise on Chromium (running on Fedora 11).

The second image in each sequence is dropped under the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What kind of market do you see here? What features are offered over using a private forum?

I have to admit the idea doesn't "turn me on" all that much; but then I can see the appeal (though I think the pricing is way high).

On the presentation side of things: the sign up page is somewhat confusing with the cheap plan being placed above the others. I actually missed it for a second. Also you have several spelling mistakes hanging around.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're seeing a couple of markets here, the "business advisory board for the business owner" market being the most pormising one. It's too early to tell which ones will pan out.

This really falls into the category of "Forum 2.0" -- except we offer a fully hosted solution, no pain to set up, and most importantly, a much better user interface for having meaningful private discussions with the people you trust the most.

It also introduces the element of consensus building through voting, which Forums have no concept of today -- making your discussions not only a healthy debate but also one that is productive and helps reach an informed decision.

<comment><USER5> This would be useful - if it was free.

This feedback is of course just my two cents, but as a serial-entrepreneur I can't see this being useful after the first month. Otherwise, if a tool like this can be used for all decisions, its basically an asynchronous net-meeting with voting, which isn't anything other software (even the new disappointing Google Wave could do this), but certainly not for $20 a month.

I initial impression is this is something you wanted to build - and thought that because it was a complete idea that could be followed through on that it would convert into a good SaaS. A complete idea is necessary, but not sufficient.

I also think people hit the nail on the head - the privacy issue is huge. If people have their next super-awesome start up idea, they certainly aren't going to discuss it on a web application. They would be handing over their idea to the developers (have you given them a solid reason to trust you?), and even unintentional exploits/loopholes/bugs could expose the business IP of all of your users.

The UI/site looks very well put together. The designers definitely have that department down. But overall it seems like you're trying to sell a solution to a problem that's either already been solved for free many times over, is not that big of a problem, or providing only marginal organizational value-add for your price.

Again, just my 0.02, good work so far!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting idea, although I would personally prefer to use Gmail, as I often do when asking a handful of friends for advice.

Small bits of advice: I don't love the idea of giving up my card for a free trial - that seems a bit much. Also I'd recommend FB Connect so that it's easier to get my friends on board.

</comment><comment><USER7> Your Forum appears to be blank with only one piece of information in it from 5 months ago. I would perhaps seed it with FAQ questions that users have asked, or take it off for now. The fact that the only post is really old would lead me to believe that the site isn't improving.

</comment><comment><USER8> privacy is an issue here (as with any SaaS tool). I guess the developers behind this tool would have to be part of my brain trust too.</comment>


Vigil: A programming language with eternal moral vigilance - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/munificent/vigil <comment><USER2> The underlying idea here is a contract system, first pioneered by Bertrand Meyer in the programming language Eiffel[1] and then augmented with the ability to describe higher-order functions by Robby Findler[2]. PLT also strongly advocated the use of blame with contracts -- the ability to blame the responsible party (function) when a contract fails. My Masters thesis under Robby Findler was on guided random testing using higher-order contracts.

I should note that an ordinary contract system does not delete your code...

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language)#D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_\(programming_language\)#Design_by_Contract)

[2] [http://www.eecs.northwestern.edu/~robby/pubs/papers/ho- contr...](http://www.eecs.northwestern.edu/~robby/pubs/papers/ho-contracts- techreport.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > I should note that an ordinary > contract system does not delete your > code...

Much to my dismay.

<comment><USER4> git commit before running, then git diff to see what code was bad.

<comment><USER5> Or comment out code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I rather enjoyed reading about the language, but was a bit disappointed that they made no attempt at static analysis, especially with such a rich set of assertions that the language enforces. I'd really like to see my entire program get deleted at compile-time rather than having to run it a bunch of times to delete all the faulty nested function calls one at a time.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The "deletes the function from your source code" part is amusing, but "swear" and "implore" are just like Python's "assert".

<comment><USER8> Not quite.

Implore asserts that a test passes (prototypically on a passed in parameter), but if that test fails the blame is on the calling function.

Swear on the other hand will assign blame to the current function if the test fails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope someone makes a C/C++ compiler that deletes functions from the source code when they trigger undefined behaviour.

It would still be compliant with the standard.

<comment><USER10> This compiler would probably delete all the code. See <http://blog.regehr.org/archives/761>

<comment><USER11> I think that website is confused about undefined behavior, they accuse LLVM and GCC of "executing undefined behavior" for the minimal empty-main C99 program because the default headers included in the compiler have UB code in them.

But only user code is required to be well-formed and have defined behavior, system headers could just as well be written in Forth as long as the actual behavior under the compiler they come with is correct.

<comment><USER12> John Regehr is an expert in undefined behavior in C compilers, so rather than assume his understanding is mistaken, I would first assume mine is.

He is not accusing the compilers of _executing_ undefined behavior. He is accusing them of _exploiting_ undefined behavior to "optimize" code.

His points are:

1\. Current compilers will perform optimizations based on undefined behavior. That is, during the optimization phase, they will say "Aha! That's not defined! I'll instead do this much, much faster thing as an optimization."

2\. Lots of real code has undefined behavior.

3\. The programs that result from these codes still produce the answers we expect, mostly.

4\. If we take point 1 to its logical conclusion, then point 2 means that point 3 will no longer be true. That is, if compilers aggressively and thoroughly sought out to find all instances of undefined behavior in C code, and just optimized it away, many (most?) programs would cease to do much at all.

<comment><USER13> Ironically enough, point #4 sounds very similar to how Vigil claims to work.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's irony, I think that's the very reason that qznc linked to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Supposedly an unreleased version of the GHC Haskell compiler had this feature first: <https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/116372971509121025>

<comment><USER15> GHC Haskell compiler = Glasgow Haskell Compiler Haskell compiler

<comment><USER9> Typical case of "redundant acronym syndrome syndrome"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome>

<comment><USER16> Slightly more severe than typical - two words are duplicated.

<comment><USER17> Worst I ever saw was an advertisement proclaiming that the car in question had "Advanced ABS Braking System".

I consider that an example of "Maximally Redundant MRAS Acronym Syndrome".

<comment><USER16> Isn't the A in ABS "Anti-lock"? In which case, it's comparable. I like your syndrome name, though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Eternal moral vigilance is the price of coding liberty!

This project clearly needs to be amended to integrate with version control.

<comment><USER19> Source control allows one to bypass the moral purity of Vigil by recovering arbitrary sinful code from the past. Moral purity can not be advanced while the sins of the past remain with us forever, uncleansed. One can only properly use Vigil without any sort of source control. Even copying files before the compiler tries to run it is an attempt to cheat the system; for that, Vigil would be justified in deleting your entire code base and all the copies it could find.

Or perhaps justified in deleting you instead, as it is you who has sinned, not the source code.

...

Certainly this approach leads to a more pure universe, but, I suspect, a rather sparsely populated one.

(Eliezer, do me a favor and keep munificent away from AI development....)

<comment><USER18> I was thinking that it would remove the offending source code from history -- a revisionist source control system, if you will, to show that we have always been at war with Eastasia.

<comment><USER20> You just have to set Damnatio_Memoriae = TRUE

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae>

<comment><USER21> If you push networked updates of the source tree, you can pull off a full Amalek on a function: "Blot out the name and memory of `class Amalek` from under the heavens!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If Vigil fails to punish a function, does it delete itself?

Or is it a Hobbesian sovereign?

<comment><USER23> > If Vigil fails to punish a function, does it delete itself?

1\. It is _wrong_ not to punish immoral code. 2\. You cannot punish all immoral code without a solution to the Halting Problem. 3\. You cannot solve the Halting Problem.

∴ Vigil must delete itself. QED.

<comment><USER24> I'm working on getting Vigil to be self-hosted. There's a bit of a "who watches the watchers" problem involved.

But, remember, Vigil only holds you to the oaths you yourself have sworn. If Vigil swears to punish a function, then it should be punished for failing to do so. But if it's given no oath to that effect, then it's off the hook.

You may reasonably ask yourself, "well, what oaths does Vigil swear to uphold?" The answer is a frightening "none", since Vigil is not currently written in Vigil (nor is the README, which is in Markdown, a decidedly sinful format).

<comment><USER22> This is the essence of the Hobbesian approach - Vigil is has unlimited power over the programmer's code. The programmer has no claim upon Vigil other than that it enforce morality upon their code.

I don't think you can have turtles all the way down.

<comment><USER25> Because chances are four of them are teenaged ninjas?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a submission to this month PLT Games "Testing the Waters" [1] which goal "is to create a language that is somehow related to automated testing". I hope we'll see more interresting stuff coming from this!

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5001504> (full disclosure: I'm the submitter of this link)

</comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of Guantanamo [1] - a tool I created 9 years ago. It removes code that isn't covered by tests.

[1] <http://docs.codehaus.org/display/ASH/Guantanamo>

</comment><comment><USER28> If you need a similar level of assurance in Ruby, <https://github.com/fxn/i-told-you-it-was-private> can do something almost the same.

</comment><comment><USER29> Code for the code gods, scrum for the scrum throne.

Seriously, this is some Imperium of Man PL research.

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks like Python, but it doesn't interpret... it executes.

</comment><comment><USER31> To make this actually useful, instead of deleting bad functions, it's probably better to make the offending functions throw a special exception when they are called, signaling the calling of a function known to be bad. This way, you can still inspect the code for the offending functions and fix the bugs.

Otherwise, the original code could just totally disappear after multiple runs. What good is non-buggy code if it does nothing? Failure to perform the user's requirement at all is also a bug. Not having the original code that you can at least edit to fix is rather pointless, especially when vigil doesn't indicate the callers of the offending functions, because next time you run vigil, those will get deleted. Besides, if foo()'s failure is completely due to bar()'s failure to fulfill its 'swear', it's foo()'s failure is not really its bug.

<comment><USER32> How will functions learn to stay in line if the compiler doesn't make an example every now and then?

On a serious note, what you're thinking of is contracts, like so[0]

[0] <http://disnetdev.com/contracts.coffee/>

<comment><USER33> projects like this are why coffeescript needs to support macros. There are so many coffeescript dialects out there that make minor changes to the language to accomodate one or two extra features, e.g. IcedCoffee. I don't want to have to use a separate, presumably less well supported language for this kind of stuff, just let me plug it in!

<comment><USER32> > The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript"[0]

Macros would be deviating from core JS too much to fit with CoffeeScript's goal. Just happens that the compiler is nicely hackable to allow for these projects.

Not to say I object to the idea of an expanded CoffeeScript, just that it should be a fork.

[0] <http://coffeescript.org/>

<comment><USER34> Macros will eventually be in core JS, see:

[http://disnetdev.com/blog/2012/10/14/hygienic-macros-for- jav...](http://disnetdev.com/blog/2012/10/14/hygienic-macros-for-javascript/)

and <http://brendaneich.github.com/Strange-Loop-2012/#/40> <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/State-JavaScript>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Developed with mutual antagonism by the Ayn Rand Institute and the Atlas Society under the special supervision of Leonard Peikoff.

<comment><USER36> That would be objectivist-c: <http://fdiv.net/2012/04/01/objectivist-c>

<comment><USER37> I award you one Internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think this is a fantastic concept with lots of potential! I especially loved the tongue-in-cheek humor -- "Eternal moral vigilance is no laughing matter."

In my opinion, deleting code is fine...however you should 1) be warned that it will happen in the near future if you do nothing about it and 2) it should be tied to some version control system (e.g. GitHub) where it pushes the deletes (maybe even creating a branch and remerging it so the changes are clear) so that code can be recovered if need be.

Vigil can maybe even have some logic built in if you revert deleted code it gets "angrier" and starts more aggressively purging code in the future :P

</comment><comment><USER39> Punished code deserves to be shamed and be made an example of. Vigil should make an image with the deleted code, such as it cannot be copy pasted and has to be rewritten in shame.

This idea seems actually quite awesome for a competition. Its truly a dungeon- crawler of programming.

Suggested extra hard-mode for short competitions: deletes all code.

<comment><USER40> It should also upload the image to imgur or some such site.

<comment><USER41> Or submit it to thedailywtf

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Excellent idea. Looks like it was co-designed by Kim Jong Un and the Taliban.

<comment><USER43> Failing to include mandatory ASCII art of the Dear Leader atop each source file is a punishable offence.

<comment><USER42> The Dear Leader himself, of course, is such a Real Programmer that the butterflies flap their wings without even needing to be directed.

Vigil reminds me a little bit of Intercal, with its "Programmer is insufficiently polite" errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As the creator of FuckItJS, I heartily approve of this destructive approach.

<comment><USER24> You're my inspiration! You are the wind beneath my wings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Code deletion reminds me of it <https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs>

</comment><comment><USER46> You know, I don't think this is a half bad idea. I mean, deleting offending code is a bit much, but shouldn't a code-by-contract language not allow code that failed a contract to be compiled until it changes? That would seem to make sense.

<comment><USER47> To explicate this, it would make sense that when you pass a source file to the compiler, it would:

1\. Parse the code into an AST (to strip away any pre-parse differences, like formatting or syntactic sugar usage), then hash that AST (recursively--replace any non-primitive function references with hashes of their own current ASTs)

2\. Run unit tests, fuzz, etc--taking the AST hashes of each function of the testing code as well (though using symbolic, rather than "hard", references to the implementation-code, so it can change without making the test's hash change)

3\. If a piece of code fails a test, add the pair (test AST hash, code AST hash) to some database (preferably an online, global database).

4\. From then on, before anything is allowed to be compiled, perform a lookup in said database, and refuse to compile anything if the database finds any known (test, failed code) pairs in your code.

\---

The interesting thing is that this system is very _conservative_ \--if a piece of code depended on by the code you wrote changes, then your code is given another chance (because maybe your code was just failing because it was expecting something of that other code, and that other code was wrong, and then it was fixed.)

Likewise, if you change the requirements, your code must be re-evaluated for conformance--code shouldn't be barred because it fails a "wrong test" like assert_equal(add_two_plus_two(), 5);.

But on the other hand, if you _add_ tests, the old barrings based on previous tests stay in effect as well--this actually incentivizes breaking unit tests into small, orthogonal functions that pass or fail separately.

I don't think there would actually be any problem doing real development under this "restriction". In practice, given the way we currently do software engineering, it would only catch problems within your own project that had been seen+caught before--because those would be the only tests you had included.

In theory, though, you could also import, say, a global "test set"--basically, AST hashes for every test of the current stable branch of all major open source projects, or something similar--and check your code against that as well, just in case you happened to write, say, an incorrect date-handling function that someone else had ever written in an AST-identical way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Someone should combine this with some kind of fast mutating genetic algorithm. Presto, procedurally generated solutions.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wow, I'm seriously considering adapting this for my shell scripts (with code recovery via mercurial, since I'm weak of will...). Actually, I bet there are already others doing the same, because code deletion in personal shell scripts probably turns out to be an unalloyed good.

Consider this: you've got some script that does a sequence of operations using the standard tools. Somewhere you change between imagemagick and graphicsmagick and some image doesn't get made thanks to syntax differences; after this you've used some clever shell filename expansion expression or regex to move/delete files, but the missing image changed your working context enough that suddenly you're in $HOME doing an rm -rf .! The environment is just too fragile and powerful to completely automate everything you might need without setting up enough safety mechanisms, confirmations, and sanity checks to largely nullify the value of scripting as a nearly zero development programming toolchain.

But if shell code were trivially spec'd for pre-/post- conditions and misbehaving code gets noisily deleted (noisily so everything isn't packed away into code versioning purgatory by cascading failures when a tool like rename is accidentally uninstalled)---especially if the shell of pre-and post conditions were left around stub code... Imagine the beauty of your scripts directory!

Replacing some slain block of code is trivial since the tools you need are already mostly written, and you've done something close to what you need before---plus the whole point of shell scripting is that it should be effortless and fast to produce.

If you've built a massive, multi-purpose utility, it deserves to live only as long as it runs flawlessly---after which, you should slice it down or replace it with an inevitably more reliable equivalent that was written for the same purpose years (or decades) ago.

Best of all the conditions that deleted your broken cruft even remind you exactly what you needed to do when you're re-implementing something, but often without pre-studying the entire system to ascertain what world state you are getting and what you need to produce. Brilliant!

This may have started out somewhat tongue-in-cheek (since most programming environments are at least somewhat stable and feature significant error detection and recovery facilities), but I think there's some dead serious application in the quick-and-dirty, often unchecked and fluid environment of traditional shell scripting. The more I think about it, the more I'm amazed my quarter million keystrokes of live scripts woven into my every task on my Linux desktop haven't produced more catastrophes (or any meaningful accidental data loss) or left a trail of silent failures for me to find only long after the causal bugs had manifested.

<comment><USER24> > somewhat tongue-in-cheek

Somewhat?

<comment><USER49> Well, from what I gather, the overarching criteria of the contest for which this was develped is "Does it do something novel to advance understanding and execution of software development?" While that kind of focus tends to bring out all kinds of wacky ideas, don't confuse defiance of the status quo for casting off all reason. When there's no shame in it, experimenters needen't rationalize or smooth over their deviation from expected norms.

<comment><USER24> > "Does it do something novel to advance understanding and execution of > software development?"

Shit, I probably should have read the rules before I entered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> CONSTANT NEVER-CEASING VIGILANCE!

<comment><USER50> Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the unclean.

<comment><USER21> That sounds like Death Eater talk to me.

<comment><USER51>
      "Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres!
      Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres!
      HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I like python-like languages, but the deleting of code seems rather extreme (and unlike the personality I'd expect from a python-like language). Boo provided a super extensible compiler pipeline and metaprogramming (<http://boo.codehaus.org/>), while Cobra provided built in unit test support and contracts (with keywords of ensure and require) (<http://cobra- language.com/>) -- neither destroy your work (even if it is WIP).

</comment><comment><USER53> This is the greatest thing ever... except... can it solve the halting problem?

<comment><USER19> Well, with probability 1 - epsilon, any non-trivial Vigil program halts, and _never runs again_. In theory this is not a solution to the halting problem, in practice it pretty much is. A very definitive solution.

<comment><USER54> Should thou neither swearest nor implorest thou shan't be punished

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Even better when you listen to this while coding: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w097Q0fZE-A>

:)

</comment><comment><USER56> How are the `implore` and `swear` keywords different from python's `assert`?

Even the implementation looks like it's just custom error text for `assert`.

<comment><USER56> Oh.

"If an oath is broken, the offending function (the caller in the case of implore and the callee in the case of swear) will be duly punished. ... it will be deleted from your source code"

Hahah, awesome.

Outsource-proof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a friend of mine put it, run an office pool on how long such a contract- testing system will take to delete _all_ your code!

</comment><comment><USER57> Proposal for the next release: Any code that gives a warning should either a) Print so many hail marys or b) Be half deleted

</comment><comment><USER58> Oops, I called fib(-1) on the example page :(

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow. Vigil needs its own LLVM compiler. We'll call it House of Cards. :-P

</comment><comment><USER59> IDK. Implore? Shouldn't there also be beg, cajole, plead, and grovel?

<comment><USER60> There is nothing morally upright about begging, cajoling, pleading or grovelling.

<comment><USER17> Imploring isn't really right either, because it seems too subservient to enforce a requirement on calling code.

It's more like the feudal lords obligation to his vassal - that he provide them with the use of the fief and protect them from others. If the function is the fief, then you provide the use of it only to those other functions that will swear fealty to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I was with it until the delete bit. Refuse point blank to run : I like this. Raise exceptions : ok (bit weak). But delete... esh imagine the cost!

<comment><USER62> You are apparently not aware that the author himself created it as satire as part of a programming competition/game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Nobody tell management about this.

</comment><comment><USER64> Good God, why would anybody try to re-invent COBOL?!

</comment><comment><USER65>
        illa 'quis et me' inquit 'miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu,
        quis tantus furor? en iterum crudelia retro
        fata vocant, conditque natantia lumina somnus.
        iamque vale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte
        invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas.'
        dixit et ex oculis subito, ceu fumus in auras
        commixtus tenuis, fugit diversa, neque illum
        prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa volentem
        dicere praeterea vidit; nec portitor Orci
        amplius obiectam passus transire paludem.

<comment><USER66> Virgil != Vigil

<comment><USER65> Oops, sure enough. Somehow I read "r"s into that whole Github page! I guess you see what you expect to see. You have to admit though that all its moral language sounds a lot like Aeneas. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Enclosing the public domain: The restriction of public domain books - <AUTHOR> http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4975/4089 <comment><USER2> They make it sound like all copies of the public domain book are being restricted. But reading the article it sounds like only the access to the repository's copy is restricted. Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean I have to give it away for free.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has there been a ruling on if the scanning creates a derivative work in New Zealand? The crazy argument in the US has been that the digital scanned copy is a new derivative work that gets copyright based on the scan date.

<comment><USER2> Copyright is about creativity. There is no creativity in scanning a work, therefore there can be no new copyright.

<comment><USER4> The cousin of that argument is you can't copyright a media change. Otherwise I'd own the copyright on a ripped CD/DVD. Or I'd own the copyright on anything I have ever photocopied. Or for that matter, a printing press owner would own the copyright of anything he ever printed, which is certainly not the case.

(edited to add, another good example, is if media changes could be copyrighted, every academic paper with a quotation I've ever written would mean I now own the primary quoted source, which creates a weird chicken and egg for plagiarism where I don't need to cite myself as the source of my own words, so I need not cite anything I quote because I'd own it as part of the act of quoting it... so you can not have plagiarism if you can copyright media changes)

<comment><USER5> First, you are ignoring that derivative works have copyright from both the original author and the person making the creative alterations.

Second, plagiarism is an ethical standard that exists independent of law. It does not need copyright to exist. If you didn't write it, you quote it. Even if the original writer assigned copyright to you and you alone.</comment></comment></comment></comment>