I do understand that the site is obviously competition to the book, but why is CRC only acting upon it now? The book was published in 1998. Something seems fishy. I'm hoping Weisstein wasn't naive enough to actually sign away all rights to it, but maybe I assume too much... What about contributors' additions to the web version? Was there a written policy about that on MathWorld's site?
Though we don't know the exact terms of the publishing contract Eric Weisstein made with CRC, does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created?? I'm sure there must have been some kind of clause allowing for the web version or else it wouldn't have survived this long. I find this very puzzling and disturbing. CRC won't be getting any of my business until this can be cleared up.
It's interesting to note U2's take on mp3's and Napster: Bono has said: "The Edge is actually very pro-Napster. He thinks that as long as people are using their computers for music, and not playing mindless games, that's good. My feeling is that it's cool for people to share our music - as long as no one is making money from the process. We tell people who come to our concerts that they can tape the show if they want. I think it's cool that people are so passionate about our music - especially about this new album, quite honestly." The Edge said in another interview: "It's new, it's out there, let's see where it goes, figure out how to get paid later." It's interesting to note that U2 is also one of the few bands that has full rights to all of their own music, in all formats (they were definitely thinking of the future).
Wow... talk about generalization! I'm sure Miyazaki would be quite surprised to be told that women are dissected in his anime. Anime is simply a medium. There's romances, horror/slasher flicks, epics, etc. Very very few mainstream anime movies display what you're talking about. Maybe you should actually watch some before you spout off about them?
"Have they even heard of shakespeare over there?" And you say you're not trolling?? Right... I believe you... Have you ever even bothered seeing _quality_ anime? Ever watched anything by Studio Ghibli? Any of Miyazaki's stuff... Grave of the Fireflies... but then you're just a troll, so why do I even bother trying to reason with you.
The sentence is a bit difficult to parse... read it as: "your standard (CD-ROM and iso9660 filesystem) support"... In other words, you only need the standard CD-ROM kernel options.
Lemme see... I've read 1984 at least 3 times, the first time in elementary school and the last time a few years ago in high school. I overuse ellipses in all my conversations, as any of my friends who I talk to on IM can confirm. It's just a bad habit of mine. And did you actually read the post I was responding to?? He called for a personal tracking device for _every_ person. And I don't know about you, but "surveillance really should be carried out by whatever means possible" sounds like a sweeping and general statement to me...
I see... you're one of those people who really loved _1984_ and was very sad when it didn't actually true. And you thought it's weird when people call the book a satire and not an instruction manual...
Whoa... am I reading correctly here?? Did I just get teleported to the Middle Ages or something?? Laws are meant to protect _everybody_. Heck, the way you put it, we might as well just shoot anybody that we think might have committed a crime. They don't have any rights, right? So they automatically forfeit their right to life too. The definition of crime evolves like everything else. It was only forty odd years ago when sitting in the front of the bus was criminal for certain classes of people. Do you think everybody that protested then should have personal tracking chips implanted in them?
Huh? I don't see at all how DNA Computing "literally removes every advantage the human brain presently enjoys over silicon CPU's in the way of problem solving." All DNA computing introduces is massive parallelism. The human brain doesn't have much parallelism at all. Just try and add 2+2 and 3+3 at the same time in your head... The advantage of the human mind is intuition, a "feel" for problems. Knowing instinctively what solution just might work. And that's something that won't be able to be emulated for a long time (if ever).
Have you read some of the other comments? If linking to an illegal site is illegal, then by transitivity you've pretty much got the entire Internet as illegal. Not to mention if, say, you link to a site that's perfectly normal, but the maintainers of that site then put illegal material on their page, then *wham* you're screwed.
Actually, GIF and PNG give better compression than JPEG on images with relatively few colors or big blocks of the same color. JPEG is excellent for pictures and the sort, but GIF/PNG is usually superior for simple logos or line drawings, etc. Now take what I've said with a grain of salt, since I'm not an expert on image compression formats by any means, but this has been my experience.
But the key issue here is that Napster and Gnutella are not specifically designed to trade pirated material. There's no check to make sure the material isn't copyrighted because it's impossible to do so. It's not like Napster is a huge repository of copyrighted mp3s. It's just a server. I think this case is just like the cases of ISP's being help responsible for their user's actions... ridiculous.
But in the "real world", you have to be able to "politic" if you want to get things done. Politics doesn't have to be about taking and giving bribes or the other nasty things usually associated with it. If you can't interact well with others, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, nobody's gonna listen to you.
Just wanted to defend U2 a bit here. The reason Island Records (not U2) went after Negativland was not because they released a parody of U2, but because they released it with packaging designed to make it look like a U2 record, and just before a U2 record was supposed to come out. A music critic even mistakenly picked it up thinking it was the new U2 record. They were also infringing on the U2 trademark. That's what they were mad about. U2 told Island Records to back off, but they weren't going to pay the court costs (with justification). What if some company put out a "parody" of say, Red Hat, with packaging that mimiced the Red Hat packaging, down to "Red Hat Linux" being emblazoned in big letters across the front. Oh, but there's a tiny "Negativsoft" logo on it too, so it would be perfectly fine, right?
As far as I know, text-to-speech software that blind people use does _not_ work very well with programs like Netscape or IE. Enter Lynx. Not to mention Lynx is not a "_very_ old browser" at all. I still use it for everything unless I absolutely have to use Netscape, simply because I could do without 300K graphics and useless Java/Javascript most of the time.
Um... they're trolls. They're hardly representative of the geek community, and I seriously doubt they're members at all. I'm not saying there are no racist geeks, but just don't take these trolls as proof.
Of course, the thing that I find funny is your absolute lack of reading comprehension and paranoia. Geeze people... it was a joke. And where the bloody hell was the racism?!?
Um... no... the truth is, scientists and philosophers had known the earth was round since the times of the ancient greeks. Probably first discovered by Thales of Miletus, who lived around 600 BC. Eratosthenes, who lived around 200 BC, even made a rather accurate measurement of the circumference of the Earth. The only ones who preach that Columbus discovered the earth was round are those who like to think of him as a saint that could do no wrong.
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I do understand that the site is obviously competition to the book, but why is CRC only acting upon it now? The book was published in 1998. Something seems fishy. I'm hoping Weisstein wasn't naive enough to actually sign away all rights to it, but maybe I assume too much... What about contributors' additions to the web version? Was there a written policy about that on MathWorld's site?
Though we don't know the exact terms of the publishing contract Eric Weisstein made with CRC, does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created?? I'm sure there must have been some kind of clause allowing for the web version or else it wouldn't have survived this long. I find this very puzzling and disturbing. CRC won't be getting any of my business until this can be cleared up.
It's interesting to note U2's take on mp3's and Napster:
Bono has said: "The Edge is actually very pro-Napster. He thinks that as long as people are using their computers for music, and not playing mindless games, that's good. My feeling is that it's cool for people to share our music - as long as no one is making money from the process. We tell people who come to our concerts that they can tape the show if they want. I think it's cool that people are so passionate about our music - especially about this new album, quite honestly."
The Edge said in another interview: "It's new, it's out there, let's see where it goes, figure out how to get paid later."
It's interesting to note that U2 is also one of the few bands that has full rights to all of their own music, in all formats (they were definitely thinking of the future).
Wow... talk about generalization! I'm sure Miyazaki would be quite surprised to be told that women are dissected in his anime. Anime is simply a medium. There's romances, horror/slasher flicks, epics, etc. Very very few mainstream anime movies display what you're talking about. Maybe you should actually watch some before you spout off about them?
"Have they even heard of shakespeare over there?" And you say you're not trolling?? Right... I believe you... Have you ever even bothered seeing _quality_ anime? Ever watched anything by Studio Ghibli? Any of Miyazaki's stuff... Grave of the Fireflies... but then you're just a troll, so why do I even bother trying to reason with you.
The sentence is a bit difficult to parse... read it as: "your standard (CD-ROM and iso9660 filesystem) support"... In other words, you only need the standard CD-ROM kernel options.
Almost all major music artists receive royalties as well as advances.
Um... the link is an HTTP link. Just because the server name starts with 'ftp' doesn't mean you can't use HTTP with it...
Lemme see... I've read 1984 at least 3 times, the first time in elementary school and the last time a few years ago in high school. I overuse ellipses in all my conversations, as any of my friends who I talk to on IM can confirm. It's just a bad habit of mine. And did you actually read the post I was responding to?? He called for a personal tracking device for _every_ person. And I don't know about you, but "surveillance really should be carried out by whatever means possible" sounds like a sweeping and general statement to me...
I see... you're one of those people who really loved _1984_ and was very sad when it didn't actually true. And you thought it's weird when people call the book a satire and not an instruction manual...
Whoa... am I reading correctly here?? Did I just get teleported to the Middle Ages or something?? Laws are meant to protect _everybody_. Heck, the way you put it, we might as well just shoot anybody that we think might have committed a crime. They don't have any rights, right? So they automatically forfeit their right to life too. The definition of crime evolves like everything else. It was only forty odd years ago when sitting in the front of the bus was criminal for certain classes of people. Do you think everybody that protested then should have personal tracking chips implanted in them?
Huh? I don't see at all how DNA Computing "literally removes every advantage the human brain presently enjoys over silicon CPU's in the way of problem solving." All DNA computing introduces is massive parallelism. The human brain doesn't have much parallelism at all. Just try and add 2+2 and 3+3 at the same time in your head... The advantage of the human mind is intuition, a "feel" for problems. Knowing instinctively what solution just might work. And that's something that won't be able to be emulated for a long time (if ever).
Um... try looking up killall. Be careful though... SysV systems like Solaris have killall's that behave quite differently. :P
Have you read some of the other comments? If linking to an illegal site is illegal, then by transitivity you've pretty much got the entire Internet as illegal. Not to mention if, say, you link to a site that's perfectly normal, but the maintainers of that site then put illegal material on their page, then *wham* you're screwed.
Actually, GIF and PNG give better compression than JPEG on images with relatively few colors or big blocks of the same color. JPEG is excellent for pictures and the sort, but GIF/PNG is usually superior for simple logos or line drawings, etc. Now take what I've said with a grain of salt, since I'm not an expert on image compression formats by any means, but this has been my experience.
But the key issue here is that Napster and Gnutella are not specifically designed to trade pirated material. There's no check to make sure the material isn't copyrighted because it's impossible to do so. It's not like Napster is a huge repository of copyrighted mp3s. It's just a server. I think this case is just like the cases of ISP's being help responsible for their user's actions... ridiculous.
But in the "real world", you have to be able to "politic" if you want to get things done. Politics doesn't have to be about taking and giving bribes or the other nasty things usually associated with it. If you can't interact well with others, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, nobody's gonna listen to you.
Just wanted to defend U2 a bit here. The reason Island Records (not U2) went after Negativland was not because they released a parody of U2, but because they released it with packaging designed to make it look like a U2 record, and just before a U2 record was supposed to come out. A music critic even mistakenly picked it up thinking it was the new U2 record. They were also infringing on the U2 trademark. That's what they were mad about. U2 told Island Records to back off, but they weren't going to pay the court costs (with justification).
What if some company put out a "parody" of say, Red Hat, with packaging that mimiced the Red Hat packaging, down to "Red Hat Linux" being emblazoned in big letters across the front. Oh, but there's a tiny "Negativsoft" logo on it too, so it would be perfectly fine, right?
As far as I know, text-to-speech software that blind people use does _not_ work very well with programs like Netscape or IE. Enter Lynx. Not to mention Lynx is not a "_very_ old browser" at all. I still use it for everything unless I absolutely have to use Netscape, simply because I could do without 300K graphics and useless Java/Javascript most of the time.
Um... they're trolls. They're hardly representative of the geek community, and I seriously doubt they're members at all. I'm not saying there are no racist geeks, but just don't take these trolls as proof.
You might want to read a bit before moderating... this was the only decent post in this thread. And it's _factual_. Get it?
They're called trolls. They're as prevalent in stories about China as they are in all other stories. Just ignore them.
Of course, the thing that I find funny is your absolute lack of reading comprehension and paranoia. Geeze people... it was a joke. And where the bloody hell was the racism?!?
Er? It was a joke... get over it. Not to mention, space missions in China are most definitely an enterprise of the government.
Um... no... the truth is, scientists and philosophers had known the earth was round since the times of the ancient greeks. Probably first discovered by Thales of Miletus, who lived around 600 BC. Eratosthenes, who lived around 200 BC, even made a rather accurate measurement of the circumference of the Earth. The only ones who preach that Columbus discovered the earth was round are those who like to think of him as a saint that could do no wrong.