Slashdot Mirror
Sweet, Sweet Mathworld Is Gone
Jon Wild writes: "Eric Weisstein's online encyclopedia of mathematics, originally located at http://www.treasure-troves.com among Eric's other encyclopedias, and most recently hosted by Wolfram Research, has for some time been the most complete and reliable mathematical resource on the web. Now Wolfram has yanked it due to a lawsuit by CRC Press, the publishers of a print edition of the encyclopedia. See the announcement at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."
They have every right to expect a fair profit from a book they have contracted, but this is ridiculous. In my email I suggested that a better strategy would be to ask Wolfram to insert a small ad for the printed book on the site. I for one didn't know it even came in a printed version.
I really hope this gets resolved. It was one of the Internet's better points of reference.
-John
IIRC, they can't copyright a mathematical formula, they can only copyright the words they use to explain it. Should be possible to copy all the formulas you want, but provide your own explanations.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This may have been true once upon a time, and is probably still true for many older scientists, but consider this:
Would you rather gain prestige with the old crowd (who will be dead in 20-30 years) by killing trees, or with the young crowd (who will still be in their prime 20-30 years from now) by making valuable information available for free with frequent updates? Which is the investment in the future and which to the past?
Were there any mirrors ?
This is precisely why I make local copies of several of my favourite reference sites and put them on CD. I'm sick and fucking tired of sites disappearing on me when they were a great resource. I've got stuff from 1992 hanging around somewhere, just watiting for the time when I need that bit of information that I had the instinct to back up before it disappeared from the face of the local BBSes.
Maybe I'm just an information packrat but I'm sick to the teeth of shit disappearing on me. The pages of the 'net need to be written in indellible ink.
This very summer a began writing my proof for one of those $million math problems. (Which one, I am not yet willing to disclose, but you'll likely hear soon!) It took only two weeks to "see" the solution, but four months to type it up in a format that is useful to math journals. (That four months included teaching myself the LaTeX layout language from scratch.) Already written into this proof is a grateful acknowledgement to Weisstein and his contributors for the resource provided at mathworld.wolfram.com .
I almost bought the CD edition before this news broke... but now those guys are costing themselves another customer! Eric Weisstein will get his acknowledgement whether or not this is resolved. It is for authors, not distributors, that the incentives of copyright were created. If the publishers' hunger for money only costs themselves sales, it will be poetic justice.
What we need is a P2P math exchange program: Mathster! Trade your favorite equations, theorems, proofs and computations with like-minded individuals.
Then us math junkies and scientists could get our Math for free. We would also be screwing the onerous, monopolistic Math empires who sell Math at egregiously high prices, and profit off of poor, starving mathematicians who are stuck with terrible contracts.
Remember, Math wants to be free!
Vive le Math!
:)
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
These are the same people that make the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" - *THE* crypto book (for doing real work) available on the web:
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
That's the *whole* book. I know everyone will flame CRC for this, on the assumption that if they do this one thing that looks pretty stupid, they must be entirely clueless, but here is at least one example of them not being the embodyment of evil.
my 0.02,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Regardless, why is it the obligation of the accused to remove the content until proven innocent?
(IANAL) If an ISP deletes potentially infringing content first and asks questions later, DMCA says it's 100% immune to liability.
This seems somewhat backwards to me...
So does the rest of DMCA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Too bad the cache is completely useless for this website, none of the links are rewritten and none of the images are cached. Not to be hostile and belligerent but why don't you try your own links before posting them?
Email them anyway.
Every second faceless corporate website I look at seems to provide next to no contact details for anything other than "Order Enquiries". CRC's website seems to be one of them. The only email even remotely close was orders@crcpress.com so I've sent them off a polite message telling them that I am a both a book nut and a technical person and that I will never buy another one of their books ever if they proceed with this lawsuit.
In the meantime I'm doing my bit through google's cache like has been suggested.
:wq
Whatever happened to migrating toward 'paperless environments'... Is all of U.S. laws driven by one simple motto - greed, and nothing but?
Sad, it truly is... patenting knowledge, patenting one-clicks, copyrighting knowledge that's been there in excess of 200 years, patenting the sound of the Harley-Davidson... what's next? Patenting quarks because someone proved they're there first while working at Mega-greed-corp. Inc.???
--
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
But, if you can browse it, we can have it. eWatch goes to extreme lengths to defeat such measures by any normal standard, but give me the teeming millions of bored sysadmins with a perl or python interpreter, a /29 or better to their name, and some desire to do it and we can make 'em look like the pikers they are.
If everybody who frequented the site with any regularity makes a tarball of their browser cache RIGHT NOW, probably including summary database files, and we get those collected someplace we can surely reconstruct the site. In fact, how's this: Somebody whip up a program to comb your browser cache for, and save out, URL's matching a pattern. Put it on freshmeat, get a followup posted here, and I'll volunteer to at least collect the results and attempt reconstruction.
Or we could wait a few days until the site comes back on its own, at two words and 30 banner ads to the page and all new "intellicast.com"(TM)(R)(F-'em) type delivery assurance tricks.
It's clear you never saw the site, or the book. It's not the fact that it had a lot of equations that made it so great. It's the fact that every single one was hand-edited by Eric himself, and that the explanations are extremely clear as far as math books go. Not to mention the hundreds of illustrations, Mathematica source code, thousands of hyperlinks, and tens of thousands of bibliographic entries. A community of people could produce something containing more stuff (though that would take a while) but only with the dedication of a single person will you get a work so unified, complete, and consistent.
I have it in hardcover and sometimes open it up to a random page and read just for fun. For example, Eric's story of Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most enjoyable, complete, and also concise descriptions I have ever read, and it's also totally accessible to someone with only a small background in math. Amazing!
The server had a pretty sophisticated script that would detect people who were attempting to download the entire book in bulk, and lock them out. It would have been difficult to get around, probably requiring a highly distributed "attack" over a long period of time.
Ditto. Mathworld was the greatest. Better than porn even!
[...]
I didn't keep a copy of the form, but I'm almost certain that I assigned copyright over my entries to CRC.
I hope you don't mind my asking, but why? A freebie book is a pretty cheap price to put on something you contributed to an effort to build a useful public resource.
does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created??
I dunno. Maybe you should ask Frank Zappa, Aimee Mann, and Don Fogerty about what it's like to be sued by the very company that sells your music. In Fogerty's case, he was accused of plagarising himself.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
I can't imagine how you can replace the CRC handbook of physics and chemistry, but for math I suggest documenting and contributing to the GSL (GNU Scientific Library).
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What if Pythagora, Euler, Pascal and Minkowski sued this editor for publishing their works without paying any royalties to their descendants.
Come on : Science is Public Domain.
There's no valid ethical reason to restrict its diffusion by patenting its presentation.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Buy it used! Then they don't make any money off you.
How so? Does calling for a boycott of your publisher negate their obligation to pay your royalties? Is this something written into these kinds of contracts?
This reminds me of something. I have a professor who has co-authored a niche book about computational solutions of partial differential equations. The book sells for over $100. He says he gets only a few dollars per book sold, and that it has sold in the low thousands, although it has become canonical for advanced post-graduate study in the field. It was written in TeX, although the publisher had it re-typeset when it was published (since typesetters need to get paid), and thus, MANY errors were introduced.
Basically, we talked about it in class, and I asked if the monetary compensation was worth all the frustration, or whether he would rather have just published the TeX source on the web, where the errors were fewer, and could be updated. He thought about it and said that, in retrospect, the money wasn't worth it, and that he would have preferred to just publish his correct, up-to-date version. The prestige of publishing an accurate version of such an important work, would likely more than make up for the lost royalty revenue, just in increased consultation fees.
Something to consider, if you plan to publish a book for a small niche.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Eric sold the rights to the Math treasure trove to CRC, although I'm not sure what the terms were.
*However*, the treasure trove was built up over many years and largely user-contributed. So it is not clear that Eric had claim to the rights in the first place. It's much like the CDDB case.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
These days, it seems that American capitalists have embarked in a struggle against the free flow of information on the Internet, by filing lawsuits, "inventing" new on-line services that you have to pay for, etc. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but this could lead us one day to a proprietary Internet where the only free information is the advertisements.
We all know that the best way to get rid of all this nonsense is to host free content and services in countries other than the U.S. and the core E.U. This will also have the wonderful site-effect of boosting the education level of the people of such countries. Imagine mirror farms in paces considered by many as "third world", serving knowledge to the entire humanity. Free software, free education, free books, music and movies, free communication for all.
Unfortunately, no one has done this at a large scale, yet. Why? Don't know. The only thing I know is that if I had some money (to set up the servers and buy an E1 line) and some help, I'd be glad to do it myself.
Anyone interested?
skillos@yahoo.com
A politely worded commemnt to him may have better results.
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
CRC just screwed up with me, a potential customer. I wont buy their works now, It is to the copy machine with them. And I can, legally, because I have that educators umbrella over copyright law. Too bad for you CRC. Besides, the CRC didnt even think up their work, like physical constants to 9 digits.
I was expecting to see the book priced at
$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not something that was popular enough to
be De-CsSed and mirrorred around the globe
*before* this happened. It's up to the community
to make it impossible for this to happen.
Well, what I mean is, Weisstein could have
complied with the order without the web losing
the resource altogether.
Screw the web for publishing. It's not free enough, in it's current form, to be revolutionary.
Somebody invent the next thing please. You know,
the thing that makes the Web of today look like the Web makes the internet before 1993 look. Or something.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Royalties are based on the number of books sold, no? If there is a boycott of the book, fewer copies will be sold, no? So you will get fewer royalties, no? So, encouraging a boycott of your own book/publisher hurts you financially, no?
I could explain it again if you want....
Relating to open-source textbooks, there's a very good, anti-copyrighted text on applied mathematics here. It was written over the author's many years of TAing the required applied math course at Caltech.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
There is a CD-ROM version, so if one were so inclined, I believe it is HTML and could be posted.
Another great resource is "http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathland_archives.htm l"
The truth shall set you free!
One solution, it seems to me would be to set up a similar website, with each useful equation taken from a source other than CRC. Ie derive it yourself OR better yet, look in an old math book for which the copyright has expired, perhaps one in Germany or something.
I realize this requires work, but if everyone supplied one equation..... Well just a suggestion...Disclaimer: I never got to see the site sadly....
I was using this site as a primary text for the graph theory class I was taking. It was much less obtuse than the textbook for the course (it's always good to use more than one source anyway).
Math students everywhere are feeling this pain!
--8<--
--8<--
The idea was to eliminate typesetting-introduced errors.
Funny that history repeats itself, again, and again, and again...
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Going back to who owns the copyright of the individual entries, a lot of entries on the properties of sequences of integers were submitted by Steven Finch of MathSoft. Steven still maintains a website with this material on, so I wonder if CRC will start chasing him? (Maybe he has a separate agreement with CRC, though - I don't know.)
Incidentally, some academic journals in mathematics allow for authors to have an electronic version of their papers on their homepages. The AMS is one example, where you will often see in the copyright notice on a paper `copyright retained by author'. A lot of other journals turn a blind eye. (As you might expect, the copyright notice in the CRC Encyclopedia is the standard `it's ours so hands off' one: no reproducing or transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, etc etc.)
My own feelings are that the best place for the encyclopedia is on the web. Some of the entries are mathematically wrong, and many are misleading. This is not a criticism of Eric, who obviously put a lot of work into the project, it's just a fact that a book containing so much material will contain many many errors. (See the (often extrmely rude) posts from about 5 years ago on sci.math.research complaining about the lack of mathematical precision in the treasure trove!) Having the treasure trove on the web would and should have allowed the project to grow, both in terms of the accuracy and the number of the entries. Sadly, the only way that such errors could be corrected in the printed version would be for CRC to issue a second edition - something I would imagine Eric is now unlikely to want to get involved in...
To: General Contact
To: Bob Stern <bstern@crcpress.com>
To: David J. Packer <dpacker@crcpress.com>
To: Cindy Carelli <rpowers@crcpress.com>
CC: Eric Weisstein <e.weisstein@wolfram.com>
To CRC Press:
I am extremely disappointed to hear that the MathWeb site has been taken down due to a lawsuit filed by CRC press. This website is a treasure -- one which I browse from time to time in order to expand my mind, and to which I have referred curious high-school students. I believe (though I have little but my own convictions to go on) that this wonderful site can only HELP sales of the book version CRC published, by making a great number of people aware of its existence. I also believe (and I am much more sure of this, as I will play my own role in it) that the bad press and poor public opinion that CRC earns by closing down a site as well-respected as MathWeb's will FAR outvalue any possible increased sales of this single book.
Finally, I would argue that even if you DID hope to profit from this lawsuit, that it is nonetheless inappropriate on purely moral grounds. A resource like Eric Weissteins MathWeb should be made available to every middle-income black child in South Africa, every underpaid inner-city Chicago schoolteacher, and every assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton -- of the three, only one has a realistic opportunity to purchase your book.
I sincerely hope that you consider these issues and decide to withdraw your suit against Eric and others, allowing MathWeb to be reinstated. If you do so, please write me at mcherm@destiny.com to let me know.
-- Michael Chermside
Eric's work in college was tremendous, we seem to agree on that. After college, though, if he wanted to continue improving the site he needed to make money. He found a place in Wolfram that would pay him to continue his work and leave him largely autonomous and unrestricted. You think he could have done this as well part-time as hobby? No way! He didn't sell out and he wasn't greedy, he found a means to mold his work and not starve. I guarantee he isn't getting rich off this endeveour and calling him greedy is just wrong.
I have used Weisstein's encyclopaedia many times over the years and found it very useful. But one problem I always had with it was that Eric didn't always seem to understand what it was he was writing entries about. It seemed to me that he was just copying equations out of textbooks sometimes. In places he was copying from rather ancient texts and was using pretty non-contemporary notation. One day I was expecting another author to come chasing after him for stealing their text. My concern came true but not in quite the way I expected! Sad though, it was a hell of a useful site.
--
-- SIGFPE
The John Fogerty case is particularly interesting because it more closely resembles a trademark issue than a copyright issue.
John was sued because his later works were similar, not neccessarily plageristic, but sytlisticly similar. i.e., you could tell they were works by John Fogerty.
It's as if Mark Twain were sued for writting and publishing Huck Finn by the publishers of Tom Sawyer.
CRC didn't walk up to the web host and say, "you're hosting illegal content". They walked up to the American company whose site it was and said, "you're distributing illegal content".
It doesn't matter whether it's hosted in your office, or in the Cayman Islands. The lawyers aren't going to try to physically shut down your server. The lawyers are not usually even going to call your hosting company. They're going to send you a cease and desist, and your corporate lawyers will say "better listen to them".
Besides that, this isn't some great moral crusade. This is a published book that the author wanted to distribute online, probably (I'm assuming) in violation of his contract with the publisher.
I assume that CRC Press does in fact own the rights to most of the material found in Mathworld. Then the right thing to do would be for Wolfram to pay CRC Press for the rights to publish Mathworld online (I would be surprised if CRC isn't willing to work out some sort of licensing deal with Wolfram).
Wolfram is after all a commercial enterprise, and obtains considerable publicity and prestige from the publication of the material; it would be unreasonable to expect CRC to allow Wolfram, a rival publisher, to benefit from this without benefit to itself.
I've been a long-time fan (and occasional would-be mirrorer) of Eric's treasure trove, and I must say he's brought some on himself. First by selling the rights away and then by agressively fighting mirrorers (detecting them and banning them by IP). Eric gave us a wondering and complete Single Point of Failure, and now it has failed.
That said, the Treasure Trove project was a Herculean effort, and I really loved his work. I don't blame him for "selling out", I'm just saddened that things worked out the way they did.
More than anything, I think that we need a good bit more info on the CRC lawsuit. "Existence of a threatened lawsuit" isn't a whole lot of information to work off of, and that's all I can get from the appology at the wolfram site.
ominous rumblings
If, as some people have said, the wolfram site didn't have any pointers to the CRC site, I would expect to find that this problem has been brewing for quite some time. I mean, what author wouldn't provide pointers to his (supposedly) royalty-generating publisher from his very popular web site? There needs to be a reason for this, and I doubt that it's going to be pretty.
If we're going to respond intelligently to this incident, it would be valuable to have some more info on the real history of this dispute. It's much easier to ride a horse if you know which way it's pointed.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Cool. You can get student-written course notes, from the Cambridge maths degree course, with varying free-ish licenses from http://www.cam.ac.uk/Ca mbU niv/Societies/archim/notes.htm.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
When you transfer your copyright to a publisher, you lose control over what's going on. In retrospect, Eric Weisstein should have kept the copyright of MathWorld for himself, but how could you know? Are there any publishers out there that will let you keep the copyright of your work?
Particularly troubling is the fact that at least some of the content was contributed by people who most likely intended it to be online where others could get great benefit from their work. Did they give away ownership by contributing?
And finally, where can we direct our well written statements of objection to this action by CRC?
Bleh!
Math is *not* the basis of science (experimentation is) -- however, math is, of course, a very useful tool for analysing scientific data, and for creating models and simulations, as well as being interesting as a subject in its own right.
It is obvious that a scientific theory can't be proved because tomorrow, a new experiment could be performed that would disprove the theory. This happens all the time in science -- old theories are thrown out almost daily; what was thought to be true is now thought to be false. In math, however, once a theorem is proved it is true forever. The two fields can't be more different.
It doesn't seem rediculous at all.
After all, the website is a free competition to the book! Who would buy the book when it was available for free online?
It's drekky logic. I would buy a copy of Encyclopaedia Brittanica in dead-tree form even though an inevitably more accurate version was available on the web.
I am not always near a phone line, and my skills at liberating access are (REDACTED).
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Rich O'Hanley
Christian Kirkpatrick
John Wyzalek
David J. Packer, Publisher
Cindy Carelli
Gerald Papke
Nora Konopka
Bob Stern, Publisher
Sunil Nair
Kirsty Stroud
Bob Stern
Barbara Norwitz
Becky McEldowney
Carol Hollander
John Sulzycki
Fequiere Vilsaint
John Lavender,
Bill Feldman
Chris Richardson, Director
Arline Massey,
David Packer,
Drew Gierman, Publisher
CRCweb_feedbaca
Or here are the raw addresses for cut and pasting into your mail program.
rohanley@crcpress.com
ckirkpatrick@crcpress.com
jwyzalek@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
rpowers@crcpress.com
gpapke@crcpress.com
nkonopka@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
snair@crcpress.com
kstroud@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
bnorwitz@crcpress.com
bmceldowney@crcpress.com
chollander@crcpress.com
jsulzycki@crcpress.com
fvilsaint@crcpress.com
j.lavender@uk.crcpress.com
newsdiv@crcpress.com
crichardson@crcpress.com
amassey@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
dgierman@crcpress.com
jlavender@crcpress.com
I have not yet sent my own letter (I will in a few minutes), so please do not blame me if any of these bounce. Enjoy.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Can anyone fill in on the whole story? What is the basis of the CRC press suit? Was there copyrighted material on the web site or is this groundless?
Rich O'Hanley
Christian Kirkpatrick
John Wyzalek
David J. Packer, Publisher
Cindy Carelli
Gerald Papke
Nora Konopka
Bob Stern, Publisher
Sunil Nair
Kirsty Stroud
Bob Stern
Barbara Norwitz
Becky McEldowney
Carol Hollander
John Sulzycki
Fequiere Vilsaint
John Lavender,
Bill Feldman
Chris Richardson, Director
Arline Massey,
David Packer,
Drew Gierman, Publisher
CRCweb_feedbaca
Or here are the raw addresses for cut and pasting into your mail program.
rohanley@crcpress.com
ckirkpatrick@crcpress.com
jwyzalek@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
rpowers@crcpress.com
gpapke@crcpress.com
nkonopka@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
snair@crcpress.com
kstroud@crcpress.com
bstern@crcpress.com
bnorwitz@crcpress.com
bmceldowney@crcpress.com
chollander@crcpress.com
jsulzycki@crcpress.com
fvilsaint@crcpress.com
j.lavender@uk.crcpress.com
newsdiv@crcpress.com
crichardson@crcpress.com
amassey@crcpress.com
dpacker@crcpress.com
dgierman@crcpress.com
jlavender@crcpress.com
I have not yet sent my own letter (I will in a few minutes), so please do not blame me if any of these bounce. Be polite, but do not pull your punches. Enjoy.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
While most contributors will probably accept a parallel print version to the project they contribute to, I can't imagine they would be happy if the original purpose of their contributions, to share it with the community on the web, is not honored anymore.
Does anyone know whether these people have any legal rights? Shouldn't they get part of the royalties? Could they sue CRC to take out all passages contributed by them unless it is published again openly? It would seem to me as though it is impossible to take such a work of many people out of the public domain without either completely rewriting it or getting everyones permission...
> The prestige of publishing an accurate version
> of such an important work, would likely more
> than make up for the lost royalty revenue, just
> in increased consultation fees.
Unfortunetely, you gain a lot more brownie points in scietific cicles for publishing anything on dead tree than publishing it online. Even if neither version are peer-reviewed, the dead-tree version counts for more. It doesn't matter that the online version is of higher quality or have more readers.
It is also more accepted to quote from dead-tree sources than from online sources, which is a further incitament for authors to publish on dead tree.
Anyway, this is really a tragic loss. Maybe we can convince CRC Press to open-source Calculus? Then Richard Stallman can calculate the area under his curves.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
Math *is* a member of the humanities -- it isn't a science. In science, it is impossible to prove anything -- theories can only be disproved (well, what about Computer Science you ask? Well, that's just bad naming. CS really is a branch of applied math)
The print edition is titled the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, which implies that CRC either takes great pride in publishing it or owns significant rights to it. Eric Weisstein is prominantly listed as the author, which implies that he was either hired to edit it or sold them rights to publish it. So, the question is:
Who owns the Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics? Did CRC Press hire Eric to edit it, or did he approach them to publish it, and, if so, did he give them copyright (or any exclusive rights)?
If Mr. Weisstein owns it, his publisher dosen't have a legal leg to stand on unless it was granted exclusive electronic rights to the work. On the other hand, if it does have exclusive rights, CRC probably has the legal right to force the site down, regardless of whether it's morally right. If, when CRC bought the right to publish the Encyclopedia, it also bought the copyright, then Eric Weisstein is differently (and more) screwed unless he retained certain rights when transferring ownership. The most he can do is stop updating the work, start working on a new encyclopedia of mathematics, and encourage a boycott of his publisher (which will hurt him financially - he won't get any more royalties from the sale of the current book).
Where does all the NSF and other government grants go to? A mere fraction of those grants would be sufficient to make such a nice resource open to the public.
HavenCo!
= -
Man, will HC ever go live so we can stop reading about all these precious web jewels being trounced upon by lawyers?
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I'm not sure who holds the copyrights on this stuff, though; the ability to publish on line might be a part of the agreement when you have one of these journals publish your stuff, or they might just do it anyway and nobody complains because it's so useful.
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Math *is* a member of the humanities -- it isn't a science. In science, it is impossible to prove anything -- theories can only be disproved (well, what about Computer Science you ask? Well, that's just bad naming. CS really is a branch of applied math)
Interesting post; I wish I had moderator points.
There's a stereotype that geeks don't do humanities, because they don't like anything that involves shades of gray or requires evaluating alternatives from multiple viewpoints. The fact is that most of the passionate arguments geeks engage in (C vs. C++; GPL vs. BSD; Closed Source vs. Open Source vs. Free Software) are exactly the kind of multifaceted and nuanced issues that you are supposed to need advanced humanities training to tackle.
Contrary to the stereotype, geeks have the intellectual equipment to address the humanities, and in many cases may have important practical knowledge to bring to bear on issues.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That said, the Treasure Trove project was a Herculean effort, and I really loved his work. I don't blame him for "selling out", I'm just saddened that things worked out the way they did.
Well, folks do need to eat.
Programmers don't have to worry about people copying their work, because programs are never finished and there will always be somebody who needs is willing to pay for something to be added. The more free copying, the more revenue opportunity.
Writers have a tougher time. The more free copying, the less revenue.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Unless CRC claims to have invented some of the math contained in their volume, which could not have been profitably produced without the protection of their copyright.
Google has your mirror right here.
Will I retire or break 10K?