You have many excellent points and I do not intend to respond to them. (Hey, I even agree with many of them.)
My point was and remains that I could not correct a fact which had not been asserted. Not that facts which had not been asserted were relevant to the overall argument (obviously they are).
I was not trying to defend Office 2007 (although I do use it). I was simply trying to promote rational argument, as I seem to be as well.
I think this discussion has reached its conclusion.
I have re-read my comment, and yours, and I really don't think my characterisation was unfair. Certainly I omitted some of the facts that you included (though not all of them). But there were a great money other things that I did not include that you seem to have no objection to.
For instance you do not discuss that Word 2007 can read/write in the following formats:
.html .mhtml .txt .rtf
etc
I would list some of the file formats for OpenOffice but I do not have a working install on this sytem.
I stand by my failure to include this details, and I think you'll find it was because they are irrelevant.
Also it seems a very long bow to say that Open Office 3 better than Microsoft Office 2007 simply because it can open more files.
(I assume your non-standard inequality meant much greater, I don't know perhaps I am wrong?)
Fact check:
Office 2007 can save as pdf with the download of a free plugin from microsoft.com.
Also OOo can apparently read and write Office Open XML but only with the help of a plugin authored by Microsoft but licensed under a BSD license. I think it can natively read (but not write) Office Open XML.
If anything, that could be used to highlight the potential of widely adopted gun ownership to save lives because criminals are deterred by the possibility of getting shot.
Or perhaps we should conclude that it is very difficult to making any meaningful conclusion from the numbers at all.
Surely, it would be more sensible to compare the total number of gun related civilian deaths per 100,000 in Iraq and in the Chicago area.
If for some reason we were desperate to salvage these numbers we should at least look at the risk of an American serving in Iraq dying as against the risk of a Chicagoan dying as the result of a firearm injury. But hey, why let facts get in the way of opinion.
Disclosure: As a non-gun owner and non-American I find the attitude of some Americans towards gun ownership very hard to understand.
As I understand the RIAA is not complaining about the content of his blog but that, in their view, he brings groundless claims against the RIAA which would unnecessarily consume court resources and the resources of the RIAA. It has nothing to do with the content of his blog. The blog is mentioned but, so far as I can tell, only to bolster their argument that the claims might be devoid of legal merit.
I should add the usual rider that I am not a lawyer and this may be utter nonsense.
While I think this discussion is long past its used by date [and I have conceeded that the original usage may have been reasonable]. Common knowledge is not attributed not because it would 'severely mitigate it's fluid usage and appeal' but because the reasonable reader would be well aware that it was not the writer's idea or formulation. This then of course renders your example unhelpful - did you think I coined the word 'meme'.
The question is then was the phrase common knowledge and perhaps, in this community, it was.
And incidentally, you might want to know that the preposition 'with' usually follows 'intermingle' not 'into'.
My point was not that s/he stole the idea of typing strings into google, my point was that s/he appropriated the phrase 'died in a blogging accident'. If you had actually read the complete comic you might have realised this.
I do not object at all to your use of 'My Hobby' meme; I considered this an appropriate allusion. But it is not sufficient attribution for your use of 'died in a blogging accident'. That usage was in my view, an appropriation. You intermingled the work of another with your own such that the it would be taken as your own.
It is unreasonable to expect a reader to share the encyclopaedic knowledge of xkcd that you and I possess. The reasonable reader would have taken 'died in a blogging accident' to be the product of your intellect just as they took 'why does it hurt when I read' to be the product of your intellect.
I readily admit that I was somewhat immature in the style in which I drew slashdot's attention to your appropration but your response was no less immature.
Perhaps I am wrong, I don't think I am; but if I am I would like to hear why. Please do show me the courtesy of a reasonable response.
Getting the fewest possible google results above 0 with a quoted string.
"interspecies gangbang": 6
"hot topic meets disney world": 2
"died in a blogging accident": 15,300
"can boys make babies": 4
"why does it hurt when I read": 1
This is not really much of a solution. How often do you think fraud is committed at a physical bank location. I have encountered many examples eg Bank Managers (innocently) asserting that an imposter is not an imposter, allowing the transfer of a property title or accepting plainly forged signatures. In my view online banking is orders of magnitude safer [I don't have hard data but my gut feeling is that it exists].
You might say that the negative outcomes are the result of actions by third parties and a customer using the bank him- or herself would not increase the likelihood of such things occurring
I, therefore, propose a solution: allow customers to opt out of IRL banking just as they allow customers to opt in to internet/phone banking. I realise this is a somewhat irregular solution not without its difficulties (eg what do you do when you forget or lose your access credentials) but I think it merits further discussion. And I certainly think that internet banking can be and is far superior to IRL banking.
To put it as nerdily as I can, the union of the set of people who care about a filesystem and the legal system is an empty set.
Or more efficiently the people who care about file systems and the people in the legal system are disjoint sets. But I'm not altogether sure you are right; while there may be a negative relationship between the two sets there are of course some people who are involved in both, though perhaps not many of these people occupy the criminal justice section of the legal system.
I think the point is that two of them facing off would end up with just as much money as they started with over the long run.
I don't think this is correct. If two perfect players play against each other for a long time, the average return per hand will approach zero for both players; but the total return is a random walk and will diverge from the mean (ie zero) so one player could make a substantial win and the other a substantial loss. But my understanding of random walk's is incomplete I would be grateful if someone could complete it!
There's also a failure mode where structured investment vehicles are constructed in such a way that they have a high probability of a continual small gain coupled with a small probability of a big loss, for a negative expectation overall. (See "Long Term Capital Management".) I don't believe this was true of LTCM. Their problem (to simplify horribly) was that short term volatility in leveraged positions exhausted their capital resources. In the long run they would have made money (if they had sufficiently large resources) and therefore each bet had positive expectation. In fact the institutions that bailed out LTCM made a small profit on the LTCM positions.
They insist that the small number of side effects in the small number of children is far better than the massive side effects (like death) of having to treat the diseases in large populations including children. While I am completely in favour of vaccination you should be aware that adverse reactions to vaccination can include death: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/vaccination/reactions-vacc-clinic.asp.
Slashdot Mirror
You have many excellent points and I do not intend to respond to them. (Hey, I even agree with many of them.)
My point was and remains that I could not correct a fact which had not been asserted. Not that facts which had not been asserted were relevant to the overall argument (obviously they are).
I was not trying to defend Office 2007 (although I do use it). I was simply trying to promote rational argument, as I seem to be as well.
I think this discussion has reached its conclusion.
-miraboo
I have re-read my comment, and yours, and I really don't think my characterisation was unfair. Certainly I omitted some of the facts that you included (though not all of them). But there were a great money other things that I did not include that you seem to have no objection to.
.html
.mhtml
.txt
.rtf
For instance you do not discuss that Word 2007 can read/write in the following formats:
etc
I would list some of the file formats for OpenOffice but I do not have a working install on this sytem.
I stand by my failure to include this details, and I think you'll find it was because they are irrelevant.
Also it seems a very long bow to say that Open Office 3 better than Microsoft Office 2007 simply because it can open more files.
(I assume your non-standard inequality meant much greater, I don't know perhaps I am wrong?)
Fact check: Office 2007 can save as pdf with the download of a free plugin from microsoft.com. Also OOo can apparently read and write Office Open XML but only with the help of a plugin authored by Microsoft but licensed under a BSD license. I think it can natively read (but not write) Office Open XML.
If anything, that could be used to highlight the potential of widely adopted gun ownership to save lives because criminals are deterred by the possibility of getting shot.
Or perhaps we should conclude that it is very difficult to making any meaningful conclusion from the numbers at all. Surely, it would be more sensible to compare the total number of gun related civilian deaths per 100,000 in Iraq and in the Chicago area.
If for some reason we were desperate to salvage these numbers we should at least look at the risk of an American serving in Iraq dying as against the risk of a Chicagoan dying as the result of a firearm injury. But hey, why let facts get in the way of opinion.
Disclosure: As a non-gun owner and non-American I find the attitude of some Americans towards gun ownership very hard to understand.
As I understand the RIAA is not complaining about the content of his blog but that, in their view, he brings groundless claims against the RIAA which would unnecessarily consume court resources and the resources of the RIAA. It has nothing to do with the content of his blog. The blog is mentioned but, so far as I can tell, only to bolster their argument that the claims might be devoid of legal merit.
I should add the usual rider that I am not a lawyer and this may be utter nonsense.
While I think this discussion is long past its used by date [and I have conceeded that the original usage may have been reasonable]. Common knowledge is not attributed not because it would 'severely mitigate it's fluid usage and appeal' but because the reasonable reader would be well aware that it was not the writer's idea or formulation. This then of course renders your example unhelpful - did you think I coined the word 'meme'.
The question is then was the phrase common knowledge and perhaps, in this community, it was.
And incidentally, you might want to know that the preposition 'with' usually follows 'intermingle' not 'into'.
Hmm. Perhaps I was wrong. You have done your duty, sir: http://xkcd.com/386/ .
pfft. So they both type strings into google? WOW HE SO MUST HAVE STOLEN IT!!!!
By that logic, xkcd stole it from Dave Gorman.
My point was not that s/he stole the idea of typing strings into google, my point was that s/he appropriated the phrase 'died in a blogging accident'. If you had actually read the complete comic you might have realised this.
Come on mods this is funny, its xkcd ( http://xkcd.com/331/ ). And as we know this is slashdot and allusions to xkcd automatically go to +5.
I do not object at all to your use of 'My Hobby' meme; I considered this an appropriate allusion. But it is not sufficient attribution for your use of 'died in a blogging accident'. That usage was in my view, an appropriation. You intermingled the work of another with your own such that the it would be taken as your own.
It is unreasonable to expect a reader to share the encyclopaedic knowledge of xkcd that you and I possess. The reasonable reader would have taken 'died in a blogging accident' to be the product of your intellect just as they took 'why does it hurt when I read' to be the product of your intellect.
I readily admit that I was somewhat immature in the style in which I drew slashdot's attention to your appropration but your response was no less immature.
Perhaps I am wrong, I don't think I am; but if I am I would like to hear why. Please do show me the courtesy of a reasonable response.
My hobby:
Getting the fewest possible google results above 0 with a quoted string.
"interspecies gangbang": 6
"hot topic meets disney world": 2
"died in a blogging accident": 15,300
"can boys make babies": 4
"why does it hurt when I read": 1
My Hobby
Attributing my sources: http://xkcd.com/369/
The link to the study is borked. Correct link: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/yoshi/papers/Tor/PETS2008_37.pdf
This is not really much of a solution. How often do you think fraud is committed at a physical bank location. I have encountered many examples eg Bank Managers (innocently) asserting that an imposter is not an imposter, allowing the transfer of a property title or accepting plainly forged signatures. In my view online banking is orders of magnitude safer [I don't have hard data but my gut feeling is that it exists].
You might say that the negative outcomes are the result of actions by third parties and a customer using the bank him- or herself would not increase the likelihood of such things occurring
I, therefore, propose a solution: allow customers to opt out of IRL banking just as they allow customers to opt in to internet/phone banking. I realise this is a somewhat irregular solution not without its difficulties (eg what do you do when you forget or lose your access credentials) but I think it merits further discussion. And I certainly think that internet banking can be and is far superior to IRL banking.
to the actual blog: http://mpdenforcer20.blogspot.com/
Your reasoning is incomplete. You need: good != evil. Assume Nothing.
To put it as nerdily as I can, the union of the set of people who care about a filesystem and the legal system is an empty set.
Or more efficiently the people who care about file systems and the people in the legal system are disjoint sets. But I'm not altogether sure you are right; while there may be a negative relationship between the two sets there are of course some people who are involved in both, though perhaps not many of these people occupy the criminal justice section of the legal system.
But my understanding of random walk's is incomplete
And apparently I don't understand how apostrophes work either!
I think the point is that two of them facing off would end up with just as much money as they started with over the long run.
I don't think this is correct. If two perfect players play against each other for a long time, the average return per hand will approach zero for both players; but the total return is a random walk and will diverge from the mean (ie zero) so one player could make a substantial win and the other a substantial loss. But my understanding of random walk's is incomplete I would be grateful if someone could complete it!