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Comments · 185
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Famous misquotations
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The review at Danny Yee's beings with a famous misquotation.
"Starting with Acton's dictum that power corrupts, Information Liberation explores the corruptions and abuses of information power . .
Lord Acton's quote was : "power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely"
This is precisely the same difference (from the mis quotation, in meaning and effect) between those I see who take copyright and trademark laws and use them for tactical gain (please note, all you trendy IP lawyers, I see no bill or statute headed "Intellectual Property", which are words I think created to make this sound the birth right of anyone who merely posesses a brain and uses it), and those who, on the other side say that rights such as copyright should be abandoned because bully boy tactics hurt a number of the innocent.
I ended up arguing this point at length last night in this post (which is very long so I'll excerpt the relevant bit here) :
Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response.
Having just read Chapter 3, "Against intellectual property". I'm fear that Slashdotters who read this book hoping to arm themselves with a credible arsenal against abusers of "IP concepts" (ugh, sorry but that jargonism just slipped in there and covers the relevant sins
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Re:Q. Summary of extinction theories?For an excellent presentation of the "Deccan Traps" volcanism theory, try Courtillot's Evolutionary Catastrophes .
Danny.
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good book in this areaA good survey of the solar system's bodies and their composition and surfaces is The New Solar System . This has a good chapter on Ganymede and Callisto.
Danny.
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"sex" on GoogleThere are occasional glitches in Google's database rebuilds... for about 15 hours yesterday, my page http://dannyreviews.com/s/sex.html was in the top ten results for a Google search on "sex" - that was great for traffic!
Unfortunately the database seems to have returned to normal, and that page is now at number 26 for "sex" - still a reasonable traffic generator.
Danny.
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The French Idea of FreedomOk, so it's ancient history, but some of the reasons the French think differently about this kind of thing go back further than the Second World War. The absolutist tradition of the Ancient Regime contributed more to modern French political thought than is sometimes accepted. See The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and The Declaration of Rights of 1789 for an interesting book on the subject.
Danny.
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reviewsHeh, I'll have to get a copy and write my own review. My reviews of some of Banks' earlier books can be found here.
Danny.
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Background readingSome good books on English as a global language are David Crystal's English as a Global Language and Tom McArthur's The English Languages .
Danny.
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Background readingSome good books on English as a global language are David Crystal's English as a Global Language and Tom McArthur's The English Languages .
Danny.
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Re:darwinian perspectiveOntology doesn't actually recapitulate phylogeny. The truth is more complex than that.
For background reading on "punk eek", I recommend The Dynamics of Evolution .
Danny.
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Re:darwinian perspectiveOntology doesn't actually recapitulate phylogeny. The truth is more complex than that.
For background reading on "punk eek", I recommend The Dynamics of Evolution .
Danny.
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Re:Good novel coverage of possible disasters
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Re:Good novel coverage of possible disasters
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The Outer Reaches of LifeJohn Postgate's The Outer Reaches of Life is an excellent read on microbial life in extreme environments.
Danny.
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'bots can be a quarter of all traffic!With my book review collection, around 20% of all traffic is from search engine spiders or other automated fetches. (For the month to date, analog reports 105 000 page accesses, excluding 28 000 "unwanted logfile entries" which are mostly excluded because the Agent string matches a spider.)
This may explain part of the discrepancy between monitoring measures and logfile analysis - did the Brittanica people exclude automated fetches from their stats?
Danny.
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They missed their chance...They missed their chance to rename Python 1.6 as Python 6.0, which would have decisively beaten Perl in the race for "a version 6 scripting language"! (cf Slackware 7)
I don't know what they would have called Python 2.0 if they'd done that, though
Danny- reviews of Programming Python and Python Essential Reference )
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They missed their chance...They missed their chance to rename Python 1.6 as Python 6.0, which would have decisively beaten Perl in the race for "a version 6 scripting language"! (cf Slackware 7)
I don't know what they would have called Python 2.0 if they'd done that, though
Danny- reviews of Programming Python and Python Essential Reference )
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the Slashies?A Deepness in the Sky was ok, but I wouldn't have picked it as a Hugo winner. (I preferred A Fire Upon the Deep
But how about Slashdot starts an sf competition of its own (or make it a horror competition, and call 'em the "Slashies"
Danny.
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the Slashies?A Deepness in the Sky was ok, but I wouldn't have picked it as a Hugo winner. (I preferred A Fire Upon the Deep
But how about Slashdot starts an sf competition of its own (or make it a horror competition, and call 'em the "Slashies"
Danny.
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A Conversation with Einstein's BrainThis reminds me of the great story "A Conversation with Einstein's Brain" by Douglas Hofstadter. It's one of his Achilles and the Tortoise dialogues in which we are asked to imagine a book encoding all the information in Einstein's brain, down to the cellular level.... Check it out, it's one of works in The Mind's I (edited by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett), which has a pile of great stuff in it.
Danny.
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It will be interesting to look back in ten years.If this had happened two years ago, we'd probably be looking at one major desktop environment desk. Now we have two of roughly equal popularity and quality... I can't say if that's a good thing or a bad thing, though.
In ten years we'll be able to look back at this episode in the history of computing with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps in the way we can now look back at the history of Unix - there are still arguments, but they are a lot more subdued.
Danny.
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DON'T PANIC - watch the volcanoesVincent Courtillot's book Evolutionary Catastrophes pretty much convinced me that mass extinctions on Earth have been due to volcanic events, not meteorite impacts.
I don't know if that makes me feel more secure, though, at least we can see the asteroids coming, but our understanding of mantle dynamics isn't up to predicting Deccan Traps style volcanic events yet...
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why stick to one browser?Heh, does anyone still use Mosaic? I keep copies of that and Netscape 1.1 and Netscape 2.02 around just for fun (and testing web pages), and I still use Netscape 3.04 for most things myself (it's what I'm in now), because there are a few key aspects of its interface I prefer to Netscape 4. I fire up that and Mozilla or galeon for testing pages that use stylesheets.
And what about lynx? Sometimes when I'm at home and want to read a bit
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Re:Don't they exist?A good popular account of things gravitational is Jayant Narlikar's The Lighter Side of Gravity .
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Damn it, no longer eligibleNow my book reviews are in
And the Australian National Library wouldn't issue me an ISSN, because I didn't have formal issue numbers
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Damn it, no longer eligibleNow my book reviews are in
And the Australian National Library wouldn't issue me an ISSN, because I didn't have formal issue numbers
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Quiz answerThe answer is English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Indonesian is spoken by more than a hundred million people, but not as a first language (and there are only about 75 million speakers of Javanese).
Portuguese is probably the tricky one for most peopple - most of the speakers of Portuguese live in Brazil.
Of the Chinese languages other than Mandarin, Yue or Cantonese has about 70 million speakers, while Wu has about 80 million. (I recommend Ramsey's The Languages of China for anyone interested in Chinese languages and linguistics.)
A great source for linguistic facts is Ethnologue.
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Quiz answerThe answer is English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Indonesian is spoken by more than a hundred million people, but not as a first language (and there are only about 75 million speakers of Javanese).
Portuguese is probably the tricky one for most peopple - most of the speakers of Portuguese live in Brazil.
Of the Chinese languages other than Mandarin, Yue or Cantonese has about 70 million speakers, while Wu has about 80 million. (I recommend Ramsey's The Languages of China for anyone interested in Chinese languages and linguistics.)
A great source for linguistic facts is Ethnologue.
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Quiz answerThe answer is English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Indonesian is spoken by more than a hundred million people, but not as a first language (and there are only about 75 million speakers of Javanese).
Portuguese is probably the tricky one for most peopple - most of the speakers of Portuguese live in Brazil.
Of the Chinese languages other than Mandarin, Yue or Cantonese has about 70 million speakers, while Wu has about 80 million. (I recommend Ramsey's The Languages of China for anyone interested in Chinese languages and linguistics.)
A great source for linguistic facts is Ethnologue.
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Quiz answerThe answer is English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Indonesian is spoken by more than a hundred million people, but not as a first language (and there are only about 75 million speakers of Javanese).
Portuguese is probably the tricky one for most peopple - most of the speakers of Portuguese live in Brazil.
Of the Chinese languages other than Mandarin, Yue or Cantonese has about 70 million speakers, while Wu has about 80 million. (I recommend Ramsey's The Languages of China for anyone interested in Chinese languages and linguistics.)
A great source for linguistic facts is Ethnologue.
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Quick QuizWhat are the eight languages with more than a hundred million native speakers? I'll post the answers in a reply to this.
(I got this from David Crystal's Language Death).
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reading on English as a global languageIf you're interested in English's spread as a global language, and its regionalisation into multiple "Englishes", I recommend David Crystal's English as a Global Language and Tom McArthur's The English Languages.
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reading on English as a global languageIf you're interested in English's spread as a global language, and its regionalisation into multiple "Englishes", I recommend David Crystal's English as a Global Language and Tom McArthur's The English Languages.
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Usability 101It's not just ALT tags - there are other things wrong with the Olympics site as well. For example, the bogus implementation of frames, making it impossible to link to many pages directly.
This is all really basic stuff, Usability 101, and there's no excuse for getting it wrong on a really high-profile site. Heck, they ought to have a full-time usability expert for a site like that!
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To make things clear
- First of all, this is not a paper: it's a chapter of Martin's book, "Information Liberation".
- It's hosted in Danny Yee's site site; he proofread it. The rest of the Free Software Advocacy section has other interesting things. He also has a review of the book.
- I've been repeatedly trying to submit this to Slashdot, and it got rejected again and again! What was that all about? Jesus.
- Finally, considering the above, am I the only one who thinks it's ironic that only one chapter of the book is actually "liberated"?
- First of all, this is not a paper: it's a chapter of Martin's book, "Information Liberation".
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Another reviewMy own review of Calculating God can be found here.
Danny.