When I went to the review of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in Newsweek, to which Larry Lessig’s blog pointed, I anticipated some illuminating remarks about what made the film so weak (I haven’t seen it; I’m just reflecting the preponderance of critical response that I’ve heard). I didn’t expect to see so simple and compelling a case for the importance of the public domain.
But Brad Stone lays it out: with a rich public domain, our cultural imagination expands and nourishes itself (and us); with a constricted public domain (in the name of, but almost never to the benefit of, creators), we all suffer from the artificial poverty of limited imaginative resources.
Posted by AKMA at July 22, 2003 10:46 AM | TrackBackThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Dorothy at January 13, 2004 12:29 PMBut some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.
Posted by: Theodosius at January 13, 2004 12:29 PMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Erasmus at January 13, 2004 12:30 PM