Not that I read many blogs, but my memory of him is that he was worst than most bloggers. Heck, Slashdot itself was (is) basically a blog. The other contributors back then were far, far better.
Katz always seemed to be some guy from the outside of a subculture who tried to be seen as an expert in it by declaring strongly held opinions. Bad enough, but the opinions were usually ingratiating, patronizing, and/or wrong.
I've long held this view myself. If we're serious about this, we should face it head on and defend the right to send files to one another as we please. The line I would draw is between commercial and noncommercial copying.
Copying someone else's work and making a profit off of it should be illegal. That, effectively, is what copyright law protected up until digital copying became a reality. Copyright violators used to be well-capitalized businessmen running their own printing presses. They were in it for the profit and could reasonably be said to be directly taking profit from the copyright holder.
Today, everyone is, or can be with trivial effort, a copyright violator. With that, the motive behind copyright violation has shifted from profiteering to sharing.
Not-for-profit sharing of copyrighted material should be legal. Such sharing results in wider dissemination of cultural works. It also does not directly take profit from the copyright holder: a free download is not equivalent to a sale.
As for the perceived threat to artists, you are right to point out that most of what we consder classic art did not depend on copyright for its creation. I would add two things:
Great artists are often driven to create. The popular image of a starving artist exists because many artists do do this: many artists ignore commercialism and wages entirely and live very poorly, simply to be able to devote their time to their work. Put another way, it is crass to assume that the quality or quantity of art produced is directly dependent on money that is spent on it.
Nevertheless, there exist ways for all types of art to make money. Many here have heard of these ideas, but here they are again:
Movies are better in theaters because of the screen & speakers, and the joy of the collective experience; people will always pay for that.
Music is fundamentally different when seen live; there will always be a market for live performances
Books are, to many, easier and better to read in the physical format. This may change, though, as e-readers improve
All cultural creators can still, of course, make money through the old methods: commissions, merchandising, as well as new methods, like self-publishing (Cory Doctorow has some interesting writings on his own experiences with this)
Fundamentally, though, we as a community have to move away from nit-picking takedowns like these, and address the issue head on. Copyright should be abolished for non-commercial copying.
Founder of wikipedia? Not so - co-founder would be more accurate. I'm sure Larry Sanger would appreciate it if you could make this small but important distinction in your press efforts.
I tried organizing textfiles for all the chapters and gifs, but it's much easier to just fork over the money and pay for the printed version. Paper makes for easier reading and browsing, too, like with any other book.
AOL's releasing of the data was a very good thing, in that it raised people's awareness of the sheer quantity and potentially embarassing nature of search-engine records. With this data being made publically availible, people can now make informed judgements regarding the tradeoff between privacy and national security (or whatever justification is used for the retition of this data).
This sort of lawsuit had to happen at some point; better soon rather than later, and, better that it come out of the incompetance of search-engine administrators rather than the abstract fears of the privacy-inclined.
I'm not as clear on this - take what follows with a grain of salt - but the answer has to do with the fact that the universe is expanding. The Hubble constant states that an object 1Mpc (megaparsec) away is moving away from us at 71km/s (an object at 2Mpc would be moving away at 2*71km/s). Thus, between the time that the object emitted the light and now, space has expanded, moving the object further away. 1Mpc is about 3 million light years. So if we see light that is 3 million years old, the object that emitted that light is (3E6ly + (365.26*24*60*60)(3E6)(71km)/(9.4605E12km/ly)) = 3000710 light years away rather than simply 3Mly away. As you can see, this caveat is only important when dealing with extremely distant objects. It gets worse: space expanding while the light was travelling, meaning that the light travelled more than 3Mly, too, though the expansion it experienced was less than the object.
The time it took the light to travel from there to here is derived from the redshift of the light; this is called the light travel time. The present-day distance is called the comoving radial distance. Light with a travel time of 12.4 bn years would imply a comoving radial distance of 25.7 bn light years.
This gets confusing; for distances where the expansion of the universe is an issue, astronomers simply give the redshift of the object; all other values can be derived from that.
Lastly, the expansion of the universe only occurs over very large distances (eg between galactic clusters); on smaller scales, gravity overwhelms this recession, and results in things like the Milky Way being on a collision course with Andromena.
You are right that you can estimate stellar masses in binary systems by observing the system's orbital period. However, that is only useful for binary systems that are close enough for our telescopes to resolve (visually) the space between them. There are other, non-viusal methods that are used, but you basically have a limit on how far away a binary system can be for it to be observed in this way.
The utility of type 1a supernovae is that they are all produced by white dwarf stars exploding. White dwarfs are roughly earth-sized stellar cores that have no thermonuclear reactions going on inisde - they are the remnants of stars between about 1 and 5 solar masses after the outer layers have been blown off.
The imporant point is that the gravity of the stellar core's mass is not counteracted up by the pressure of the thermonuclear reactions inside. Rather, something called degenerate electron pressure holds the white dwarf up and prevents it from collapsing. Degenerate electron pressure can only counteract gravity for masses up to 1.4 solar masses, meaning that any white dwarf that somehow grows to a mass greater than 1.4 solar masses (usually by grabbing mass from a companion star), it will collapse. The collapse catastrophically increases the pressure inside the white dwarf, re-igniting nuclear fusion, and produces a sudden violent explosion.
Because white dwarfs are all of the same mass when they explode - 1.4 solar masses (the Chandrasekhar (sp?) limit - they are all of roughly the same brightness (>10^9 times as bright as the Sun). Because of this, one only has to see a type 1a supernova to deduce from the apparent brightness the distance from earth to the explosion. If a type 1a supernova occurs inside a cluster of stars, it conveniently tells us the distance from here to that cluster of stars. Because the distances over which supernova can be observed is orders of magnitude greater than most other stellar phenomena, the are essential in determining distances to faraway objects (from 1 to 1000 megaparsecs away (1 parsec = ~3.2 light years)). Distances to other galaxies are determined this way.
They type of supernova being observed can be determined by the specatra of light coming from it. I can't recall the distinguishing characterisitics of type 1a supernova, but suffice it to say they can be distinguished from other types of supernova.
MacOS is becoming less refined with every release. The UI changes every time, behavior that was sensible and elegant from the Classic days is being forgotten (try this: open a Finder window, put another app's window over top of it, and then put a new finder window over the app's window. Switch back into the Finder. Close the top Finder window. What should happen? What does happen?*). Simple things, like making the list view (or icon view or column view) standard in all Finder windows is all but impossible. And Apple insists on putting marketing crap (eg iDisk) throughout the system. MacOS isn't what it used to be; I pine for the old days!
* What should happen is that the app's window comes into the foreground; what does happen is that the 2nd Finder window comes into the foreground
A great site I found a couple of years ago is http://english.sovmusic.ru/ . It's got thousands of mp3s taken from Soviet LPs and such, going back to the 1930s. Really amazing stuff. And it's run by a communist with a real to-each-according-to-his-need point of view, so everything there is free to download.
here. Stallman spoke to the security guards on the street outside the office, was denied entry, then unrolled the (very long) petition of concerned citizens in the gutter as a symbolic gesture. He didn't rant and rave and try and push his way into some gilded office.
Mozilla already has this software - at least in Seamonkey, there is a roaming access feature (never tried it myself) that puts pretty much all the profile data you want onto a server you specify. The only thing I see Google bringing to the table is the free server space.
I like the new look overall, but I have a couple complaints:
- The 'Sections' header in the sidebar should not open up a (kludgy) preferences window. People only change that kind of thing once in a blue moon; there's no need for it to be on the front page. I'd much rather it be a link (like the 'Vendors' header), pointing to the search page or something - The open/collapsed state of the lefthand sidebar seems to be preseved between browser sessions, but only on the front page: Once you enter a story, it defaults to the open state for all items in the sidebar - The comment score should not be on the extreme right - The [blink] tag is used far too sparingly
But 'Check for duplicate songs' only checks the ID3 tag. If you have two versions of a song, one live and one studio, with the same artist and title (and maybe album name too) it will single them out in 'check for dupes'. They could make it so itunes checks an MD5 of the song, but even then you'd have a problem if you had two versions of the same song, one at 160 kbps and another at 192 kbps.
Looks like I was wrong. I'm so used to seeing Alexa in AdAware logs that I lumped it in with all the other scumware out there. So far as I can tell, there have been two Alexa products: one that is bundled with IE as the 'Related Sites' feature (a Reg key that AdAware detects & removes, but which is reinstalled when the user repairs/reinstalles IE) and the toolbar. The toolbar seems well-behaved from all I've read.
Alexa - Tricks users into installing its software, or installs itself without permission - Actively tries to stop users from uninstalling it, forcing people to use a third-party app to remove it (Ad-Aware, etc.) - Tracks users
The first two make it scumware, the last makes it spyware. Google toolbar does track users, but warns them before doing so and only installs when users want it installed.
Why not either - compile the libraries in with the binary, leaving one binary and one conf file for each application
or
- keep the libraries seperate from the binary, but store a copy of whatever libraries the binary expects in its own folder (/usr/bin/foo/lib)
Disk space and RAM are both cheap. This kind of thing would suck on systems where resources are limited, but otherwise it would simplify things dramatically
the task is to represent the majority (scientific) view as the majority view and the minority (sometimes pseudoscientific) view as the minority view (emphasis original)
If there's a minority view that the earth is flat (which I am sure there is), why _dosen't_ wikipedia discuss flat-earth ideas?
Secondly, a lot of the edits on wikipedia are done by students and faculty of academic institutions.
Yeah, but most (according the the grandparent) are done by a small cabal of losers. What's your point?
Finally, I'll note that you didn't actually address the charge that wikipedia is a community rather than an encyclopedia.
Will the images of cities as they appear on the world map accurately refelect the developments in the cities? That is, if you build a courthouse in a city, will you be able to see that courthouse when you're at the regular zoomed-out view of the world? I always thought this would be a visually neat, and actually useful addition to the game; useful, because it would remove the need to zoom into a city to see what you've built in them.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I read many blogs, but my memory of him is that he was worst than most bloggers. Heck, Slashdot itself was (is) basically a blog. The other contributors back then were far, far better.
Katz always seemed to be some guy from the outside of a subculture who tried to be seen as an expert in it by declaring strongly held opinions. Bad enough, but the opinions were usually ingratiating, patronizing, and/or wrong.
Even Michael Sims wasn't as bad!
Don't I know it.
There's a discussion about a fork over here.
somenickname (1270442) has registered some domain names that could be used (http://bangslashdot.org|.com|.net) (eg !/.)
Slashdot Beta ruins the foundation of Slashdot, the discussion system.
Dice: listen to your users and abandon the project. Accept your losses and move on before your users move on to other sites.
slashcode is free
Someone should start something anew. Run it themselves, like Taco used to do.
I don't have the energy or time or personality to run the thing, but I'd be a happy viewer and contributor.
There's enough of a market for it it to pay for the running costs. Someone just has to step up.
+6 Insightful
I've long held this view myself. If we're serious about this, we should face it head on and defend the right to send files to one another as we please. The line I would draw is between commercial and noncommercial copying.
Copying someone else's work and making a profit off of it should be illegal. That, effectively, is what copyright law protected up until digital copying became a reality. Copyright violators used to be well-capitalized businessmen running their own printing presses. They were in it for the profit and could reasonably be said to be directly taking profit from the copyright holder.
Today, everyone is, or can be with trivial effort, a copyright violator. With that, the motive behind copyright violation has shifted from profiteering to sharing.
Not-for-profit sharing of copyrighted material should be legal. Such sharing results in wider dissemination of cultural works. It also does not directly take profit from the copyright holder: a free download is not equivalent to a sale.
As for the perceived threat to artists, you are right to point out that most of what we consder classic art did not depend on copyright for its creation. I would add two things:
Fundamentally, though, we as a community have to move away from nit-picking takedowns like these, and address the issue head on. Copyright should be abolished for non-commercial copying.
Founder of wikipedia? Not so - co-founder would be more accurate. I'm sure Larry Sanger would appreciate it if you could make this small but important distinction in your press efforts.
I tried organizing textfiles for all the chapters and gifs, but it's much easier to just fork over the money and pay for the printed version. Paper makes for easier reading and browsing, too, like with any other book.
c al-Manual/dp/0671704273
:)
Amazon has it for $25 here:
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Generation-Techni
Enjoy
AOL's releasing of the data was a very good thing, in that it raised people's awareness of the sheer quantity and potentially embarassing nature of search-engine records. With this data being made publically availible, people can now make informed judgements regarding the tradeoff between privacy and national security (or whatever justification is used for the retition of this data).
This sort of lawsuit had to happen at some point; better soon rather than later, and, better that it come out of the incompetance of search-engine administrators rather than the abstract fears of the privacy-inclined.
I'm not as clear on this - take what follows with a grain of salt - but the answer has to do with the fact that the universe is expanding. The Hubble constant states that an object 1Mpc (megaparsec) away is moving away from us at 71km/s (an object at 2Mpc would be moving away at 2*71km/s). Thus, between the time that the object emitted the light and now, space has expanded, moving the object further away.
1Mpc is about 3 million light years. So if we see light that is 3 million years old, the object that emitted that light is
(3E6ly + (365.26*24*60*60)(3E6)(71km)/(9.4605E12km/ly)) = 3000710 light years away
rather than simply 3Mly away. As you can see, this caveat is only important when dealing with extremely distant objects. It gets worse: space expanding while the light was travelling, meaning that the light travelled more than 3Mly, too, though the expansion it experienced was less than the object.
The time it took the light to travel from there to here is derived from the redshift of the light; this is called the light travel time. The present-day distance is called the comoving radial distance. Light with a travel time of 12.4 bn years would imply a comoving radial distance of 25.7 bn light years.
This gets confusing; for distances where the expansion of the universe is an issue, astronomers simply give the redshift of the object; all other values can be derived from that.
Lastly, the expansion of the universe only occurs over very large distances (eg between galactic clusters); on smaller scales, gravity overwhelms this recession, and results in things like the Milky Way being on a collision course with Andromena.
You are right that you can estimate stellar masses in binary systems by observing the system's orbital period. However, that is only useful for binary systems that are close enough for our telescopes to resolve (visually) the space between them. There are other, non-viusal methods that are used, but you basically have a limit on how far away a binary system can be for it to be observed in this way.
The utility of type 1a supernovae is that they are all produced by white dwarf stars exploding. White dwarfs are roughly earth-sized stellar cores that have no thermonuclear reactions going on inisde - they are the remnants of stars between about 1 and 5 solar masses after the outer layers have been blown off.
The imporant point is that the gravity of the stellar core's mass is not counteracted up by the pressure of the thermonuclear reactions inside. Rather, something called degenerate electron pressure holds the white dwarf up and prevents it from collapsing. Degenerate electron pressure can only counteract gravity for masses up to 1.4 solar masses, meaning that any white dwarf that somehow grows to a mass greater than 1.4 solar masses (usually by grabbing mass from a companion star), it will collapse. The collapse catastrophically increases the pressure inside the white dwarf, re-igniting nuclear fusion, and produces a sudden violent explosion.
Because white dwarfs are all of the same mass when they explode - 1.4 solar masses (the Chandrasekhar (sp?) limit - they are all of roughly the same brightness (>10^9 times as bright as the Sun). Because of this, one only has to see a type 1a supernova to deduce from the apparent brightness the distance from earth to the explosion. If a type 1a supernova occurs inside a cluster of stars, it conveniently tells us the distance from here to that cluster of stars. Because the distances over which supernova can be observed is orders of magnitude greater than most other stellar phenomena, the are essential in determining distances to faraway objects (from 1 to 1000 megaparsecs away (1 parsec = ~3.2 light years)). Distances to other galaxies are determined this way.
They type of supernova being observed can be determined by the specatra of light coming from it. I can't recall the distinguishing characterisitics of type 1a supernova, but suffice it to say they can be distinguished from other types of supernova.
You're right, I forgot about that. My problem has always been that there is no equivilant setting for opening all windows in list view.
I beg to differ! See http://torch.cs.dal.ca/~hannon/windowlayers.jpg. Finder on top of Quicktime on top of Finder.
* What should happen is that the app's window comes into the foreground; what does happen is that the 2nd Finder window comes into the foreground
A great site I found a couple of years ago is http://english.sovmusic.ru/ . It's got thousands of mp3s taken from Soviet LPs and such, going back to the 1930s. Really amazing stuff. And it's run by a communist with a real to-each-according-to-his-need point of view, so everything there is free to download.
= saintwar
If you want an idea of the mentality in Russa after the fascists attacked, listen to this:
http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/download.php?fname
here. Stallman spoke to the security guards on the street outside the office, was denied entry, then unrolled the (very long) petition of concerned citizens in the gutter as a symbolic gesture. He didn't rant and rave and try and push his way into some gilded office.
Mozilla already has this software - at least in Seamonkey, there is a roaming access feature (never tried it myself) that puts pretty much all the profile data you want onto a server you specify. The only thing I see Google bringing to the table is the free server space.
I like the new look overall, but I have a couple complaints:
- The 'Sections' header in the sidebar should not open up a (kludgy) preferences window. People only change that kind of thing once in a blue moon; there's no need for it to be on the front page. I'd much rather it be a link (like the 'Vendors' header), pointing to the search page or something
- The open/collapsed state of the lefthand sidebar seems to be preseved between browser sessions, but only on the front page: Once you enter a story, it defaults to the open state for all items in the sidebar
- The comment score should not be on the extreme right
- The [blink] tag is used far too sparingly
But 'Check for duplicate songs' only checks the ID3 tag. If you have two versions of a song, one live and one studio, with the same artist and title (and maybe album name too) it will single them out in 'check for dupes'. They could make it so itunes checks an MD5 of the song, but even then you'd have a problem if you had two versions of the same song, one at 160 kbps and another at 192 kbps.
Looks like I was wrong. I'm so used to seeing Alexa in AdAware logs that I lumped it in with all the other scumware out there. So far as I can tell, there have been two Alexa products: one that is bundled with IE as the 'Related Sites' feature (a Reg key that AdAware detects & removes, but which is reinstalled when the user repairs/reinstalles IE) and the toolbar. The toolbar seems well-behaved from all I've read.
Alexa
- Tricks users into installing its software, or installs itself without permission
- Actively tries to stop users from uninstalling it, forcing people to use a third-party app to remove it (Ad-Aware, etc.)
- Tracks users
The first two make it scumware, the last makes it spyware. Google toolbar does track users, but warns them before doing so and only installs when users want it installed.
Why not either
- compile the libraries in with the binary, leaving one binary and one conf file for each application
or
- keep the libraries seperate from the binary, but store a copy of whatever libraries the binary expects in its own folder (/usr/bin/foo/lib)
Disk space and RAM are both cheap. This kind of thing would suck on systems where resources are limited, but otherwise it would simplify things dramatically
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV#Pseudo science
the task is to represent the majority (scientific) view as the majority view and the minority (sometimes pseudoscientific) view as the minority view (emphasis original)
If there's a minority view that the earth is flat (which I am sure there is), why _dosen't_ wikipedia discuss flat-earth ideas?
Secondly, a lot of the edits on wikipedia are done by students and faculty of academic institutions.
Yeah, but most (according the the grandparent) are done by a small cabal of losers. What's your point?
Finally, I'll note that you didn't actually address the charge that wikipedia is a community rather than an encyclopedia.
I'm guessing from Adrien's name that he's related to Allah (aka John Carmack). Is all this drama a result of a feud between them?
Will the images of cities as they appear on the world map accurately refelect the developments in the cities? That is, if you build a courthouse in a city, will you be able to see that courthouse when you're at the regular zoomed-out view of the world? I always thought this would be a visually neat, and actually useful addition to the game; useful, because it would remove the need to zoom into a city to see what you've built in them.