"Redaction" is taking source material and bringing it together into a particular (usually written) form. It can imply editing or revision of the text for publication, including abridgement. I think this latter meaning is where the confusion arises: redacting a text can mean cutting it down through summary or deletion, but this meaning is secondary to the main idea of making something readable or publishable. Originally, in fact, "redact" didn't apply specifically to texts - one could redact (i.e. combine) cities by bringing them together under a single ruler, or redact (i.e.reduce) a person to poverty.
Translation: "I don't understand a lot of what these people say, but I am reluctant to believe that there could be anything missing in my own education or intelligence, therefore I will ridicule the authors instead."
Many of the works we consider "great", and part of our cultural heritage, were produced before copyright, and many were also produced without the prospect of payment in the artist's lifetime. Even those who made a living through their work generally earned no more than a modest salary. The "impoverished artist" is a cliche, but it was the norm for a very long time. And yet, these painters, authors, and musicians produced their work because they had talent and drive, and a love of their chosen medium. Now, if you can't be bothered to write a novel because you won't get megabucks for it, then clearly you neither love writing, nor do you feel any particular drive to do it. So why should I care if you never write your novel?
And, by the way, books were being pirated centuries ago - and probably before that, too. Dublin was a big centre of pirated books in the eighteenth century, for example - and yet somehow the book industry has survived that, as well as the Xerox machine, the scanner, the library, and the good old "here, I've finished this - you have it". This is not a new "problem" - whereas the culture of making obscene incomes from little or no real work is becoming the defining problem of the modern world.
No, the ISPs are the people who build and maintain the roads on which murderers travel to their victims' houses. Or maybe they're the people who sell cooking knives. Or maybe they're the people who provide alcohol to unstable people who then get mad and murder someone.
Equally, you could say that the ISPs are like the owners of Xerox machines, which allow people to make unauthorised copies of copyrighted materials. Or maybe they're like libraries, which allow people to read copyrighted material for free.
The point, I think, is that there is no good analogy for the roles of the parties in this kind of "crime" because it's the result of a pretty much unprecedented set of circumstances related to advances in technology.
I'm not necessarily talking about the sciences. I'm an academic in the humanities, and it's an accepted fact that some publishers have better editing and proofreading than others, some are better at procuring good-quality research than others, and some just turn out any old crap in order to meet some kind of quota. So I definitely take the publisher into account when deciding whether or not to spend a hundred dollars or more on a book for work.
When it comes to books for leisure, I would tend to avoid self-published works unless they look wildly interesting or I have a recommendation from someone I trust. This doesn't apply to anything published on the internet, of course - if I'm not paying for it, I don't really mind if it turns out to be rubbish!
The question of reputation is central in academic publishing. The same book will be at an advantage if it is published by Macmillan rather than brought out by an unknown press, or published online. The large and respected presses carry an automatic sense that their books are likely to be well-written and worth reading. Once an author has a good reputation, maybe they can start publishing under Creative Commons licences or the like. Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain have both done this - but only after spending a long time building up their reputations and writing a lot of other books under - presumably - the usual contracts. And their books come out with "big-name" publishers like Penguin and Yale alongside being freely available to download.
You just can't ignore the cachet of the publisher when it comes to books. It's one of the factors that academics use to evaluate whether a new book is worth their time or not, and that in itself often reflects the fact that the good publishers provide invaluable services in reviewing and editing.
I'm not defending Macmillan's move, btw - just pointing out that it's not quite as easy as it might seem to write the publishers out of the process.
Because students don't have rights to anonymity or free speech?
Come on - the privacy policy of the site states that personal information won't be shared with third parties. That applies whether the site user is a child or an adult, unless there's some good legal reason. A teenager posting the word "pussy" is not, as far as I'm aware, a crime in the US, so why on earth would it be okay to report them to their school if they did that?
You're not entirely right there, you know. Bisexual people often have the added stigma of being hated by gay people who assume that they're either too scared to come out properly, or just having a laugh. I've had this discussion with a group of friends, and a surprising number of them (otherwise completely tolerant, liberal people) said they'd feel uncomfortable dating a bisexual person, simply because they're bisexual. So often the people who hate or avoid or dislike you for being bisexual wouldn't feel the same about you if you were gay.
Depends on the woman. I like funny, athletic men with very high IQs, who are preferably also very tall. I think anecdotal evidence and my dating history would back that up as the absolute truth. (They're incredibly hard to find, just so you know.) Not all women are game-playing bitches. Just most of them.
It's algorithmic, really. Look at the lists of men who are most commonly held to be attractive by large numbers of women. Consider the features which they tend to share. Those features are likely to be what most women find generically attractive.
If you want to know about an individual woman, same process, but more specific. Talk to her about her favourite people, TV characters and movie stars, work out what she likes about them, find the common features - if you share more than a few of those features, perhaps you have a chance with her! If you don't, maybe you have a chance anyway. People have a way of not sticking to the rules.
Filtering porn shouldn't really be the University's job, in my view. On their own machines, sure, but on private machines connected to the University network? Are they the thought police?
I'm lucky the College where I work isn't too restrictive. I was researching a paper on masculinity in modern film recently, and spent a while trawling for "gay barbarian porn" before it occurred to me that the IT guys might be wondering what the chick in Office 6/7 gets up to when she's working late...
Give OSS as an option. At my university, most of the public computers run Windows, and have MS software as the only options. If I'm lucky, I get to use Firefox instead of IE. A lot of people are used to using this stuff, so fine by me if the University wants to have it there for them. But it doesn't cost anything to install some open source stuff alongside the Microsoft programs. The problem you'll have, I would guess, is persuading people that this isn't going to involve lots of support costs in terms of training IT staff. Yeah, I know, but people are funny like that. They assume that anything open source will be arcane, virus-ridden, and completely impossible for the average user to understand.
I just picked up this book, which you can download if you want because it has a CC license. It's a good read, and talks about evil bastards like Monsanto in the context of freedom of expression and all that.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way affiliated with the publisher, or author. I just think it's an interesting book! And it's also a good example of how book publishing should ideally work. I will buy dead-tree copies for a couple of my friends, recommend it to people, and require my students to read it for one of my classes. I probably wouldn't have read it in the first place, though, if I hadn't been looking for CC licensed books for my e-reader.
Or get it from Project Gutenberg - free, without ads. No way is even Amazon going to persuade a court that they own the copyright on Dickens and that therefore free versions shouldn't be available.
For the less well-known stuff that isn't at Gutenberg, start at Google Books, and Internet Archive which has a load of stuff scanned. And if you or someone you know has access through a University account, you can get to databases like Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, which digitize print material from about 1500-1800. Currently, I'm reading a scan of a 1798 novel on my Sony eBook. It's surreal, but very cool.
You're right; he's a far better writer than Asimov. Not that I don't love Asimov, but Bradbury's mastery of language is light years ahead, and his imagination is far broader. I think his attitude towards the internet, if it really is as stated here, is pretty limited - but I'd also like to hear him talk about the reasons behind his view before dismissing it as the rantings of a lunatic.
The kid is five years old! You want to pack her off to school every morning with a rifle in her backpack? Sure, I agree that teaching your kids to stand up for themselves is imperative, but it's just not possible to make a child that young totally self-sufficient in unexpected situations.
You're lucky. It happened to me a few times, and I was just dropped off in the wrong place. Problem with being a kid is that, a lot of the time, adults don't listen to you because they assume you're lying/making trouble/confused, and that they know better than you do. They don't like to be told they're wrong by a kid, so they just tune it out.
We don't know how old the child is - if she's quite young, she doesn't need to be "abnormal" in order to need competent adults to get her where she's going. When I was a young schoolkid, getting on the bus was always hugely stressful - I lose count of the number of times I was put on the wrong bus, dropped off at the wrong stop, whatever. It can be quite traumatic for a young kid to feel lost, so some way for parents to be able to get to them quickly if they are lost is a good thing, in my view.
It's morally different, perhaps, but not in effect. The school accidentally places the child on the wrong bus; the child ends up who-knows-where without a parent at the other end to collect him/her. The child ends up unattended even though that was never the intention.
Also, try Terry Riley "A Rainbow in Curved Air" and "In C". I can work for hours and hours with this kinda thing playing - it persuades my brain that time has stopped.
Slashdot Mirror
"Redaction" is taking source material and bringing it together into a particular (usually written) form. It can imply editing or revision of the text for publication, including abridgement. I think this latter meaning is where the confusion arises: redacting a text can mean cutting it down through summary or deletion, but this meaning is secondary to the main idea of making something readable or publishable. Originally, in fact, "redact" didn't apply specifically to texts - one could redact (i.e. combine) cities by bringing them together under a single ruler, or redact (i.e.reduce) a person to poverty.
Translation: "I don't understand a lot of what these people say, but I am reluctant to believe that there could be anything missing in my own education or intelligence, therefore I will ridicule the authors instead."
Many of the works we consider "great", and part of our cultural heritage, were produced before copyright, and many were also produced without the prospect of payment in the artist's lifetime. Even those who made a living through their work generally earned no more than a modest salary. The "impoverished artist" is a cliche, but it was the norm for a very long time. And yet, these painters, authors, and musicians produced their work because they had talent and drive, and a love of their chosen medium. Now, if you can't be bothered to write a novel because you won't get megabucks for it, then clearly you neither love writing, nor do you feel any particular drive to do it. So why should I care if you never write your novel?
And, by the way, books were being pirated centuries ago - and probably before that, too. Dublin was a big centre of pirated books in the eighteenth century, for example - and yet somehow the book industry has survived that, as well as the Xerox machine, the scanner, the library, and the good old "here, I've finished this - you have it". This is not a new "problem" - whereas the culture of making obscene incomes from little or no real work is becoming the defining problem of the modern world.
So can alcohol - and that's a far more commonly-used and available drug.
Riiiiight... because it's obviously impossible to get exercise without using a Wii.
No, the ISPs are the people who build and maintain the roads on which murderers travel to their victims' houses. Or maybe they're the people who sell cooking knives. Or maybe they're the people who provide alcohol to unstable people who then get mad and murder someone.
Equally, you could say that the ISPs are like the owners of Xerox machines, which allow people to make unauthorised copies of copyrighted materials. Or maybe they're like libraries, which allow people to read copyrighted material for free.
The point, I think, is that there is no good analogy for the roles of the parties in this kind of "crime" because it's the result of a pretty much unprecedented set of circumstances related to advances in technology.
I'm not necessarily talking about the sciences. I'm an academic in the humanities, and it's an accepted fact that some publishers have better editing and proofreading than others, some are better at procuring good-quality research than others, and some just turn out any old crap in order to meet some kind of quota. So I definitely take the publisher into account when deciding whether or not to spend a hundred dollars or more on a book for work. When it comes to books for leisure, I would tend to avoid self-published works unless they look wildly interesting or I have a recommendation from someone I trust. This doesn't apply to anything published on the internet, of course - if I'm not paying for it, I don't really mind if it turns out to be rubbish!
Agreed - and it's the same in publishing.
The question of reputation is central in academic publishing. The same book will be at an advantage if it is published by Macmillan rather than brought out by an unknown press, or published online. The large and respected presses carry an automatic sense that their books are likely to be well-written and worth reading. Once an author has a good reputation, maybe they can start publishing under Creative Commons licences or the like. Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain have both done this - but only after spending a long time building up their reputations and writing a lot of other books under - presumably - the usual contracts. And their books come out with "big-name" publishers like Penguin and Yale alongside being freely available to download.
You just can't ignore the cachet of the publisher when it comes to books. It's one of the factors that academics use to evaluate whether a new book is worth their time or not, and that in itself often reflects the fact that the good publishers provide invaluable services in reviewing and editing.
I'm not defending Macmillan's move, btw - just pointing out that it's not quite as easy as it might seem to write the publishers out of the process.
Because students don't have rights to anonymity or free speech?
Come on - the privacy policy of the site states that personal information won't be shared with third parties. That applies whether the site user is a child or an adult, unless there's some good legal reason. A teenager posting the word "pussy" is not, as far as I'm aware, a crime in the US, so why on earth would it be okay to report them to their school if they did that?
You're not entirely right there, you know. Bisexual people often have the added stigma of being hated by gay people who assume that they're either too scared to come out properly, or just having a laugh. I've had this discussion with a group of friends, and a surprising number of them (otherwise completely tolerant, liberal people) said they'd feel uncomfortable dating a bisexual person, simply because they're bisexual. So often the people who hate or avoid or dislike you for being bisexual wouldn't feel the same about you if you were gay.
Depends on the woman. I like funny, athletic men with very high IQs, who are preferably also very tall. I think anecdotal evidence and my dating history would back that up as the absolute truth. (They're incredibly hard to find, just so you know.) Not all women are game-playing bitches. Just most of them.
It's algorithmic, really. Look at the lists of men who are most commonly held to be attractive by large numbers of women. Consider the features which they tend to share. Those features are likely to be what most women find generically attractive. If you want to know about an individual woman, same process, but more specific. Talk to her about her favourite people, TV characters and movie stars, work out what she likes about them, find the common features - if you share more than a few of those features, perhaps you have a chance with her! If you don't, maybe you have a chance anyway. People have a way of not sticking to the rules.
Filtering porn shouldn't really be the University's job, in my view. On their own machines, sure, but on private machines connected to the University network? Are they the thought police?
I'm lucky the College where I work isn't too restrictive. I was researching a paper on masculinity in modern film recently, and spent a while trawling for "gay barbarian porn" before it occurred to me that the IT guys might be wondering what the chick in Office 6/7 gets up to when she's working late...
Give OSS as an option. At my university, most of the public computers run Windows, and have MS software as the only options. If I'm lucky, I get to use Firefox instead of IE. A lot of people are used to using this stuff, so fine by me if the University wants to have it there for them. But it doesn't cost anything to install some open source stuff alongside the Microsoft programs. The problem you'll have, I would guess, is persuading people that this isn't going to involve lots of support costs in terms of training IT staff. Yeah, I know, but people are funny like that. They assume that anything open source will be arcane, virus-ridden, and completely impossible for the average user to understand.
I just picked up this book, which you can download if you want because it has a CC license. It's a good read, and talks about evil bastards like Monsanto in the context of freedom of expression and all that.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way affiliated with the publisher, or author. I just think it's an interesting book! And it's also a good example of how book publishing should ideally work. I will buy dead-tree copies for a couple of my friends, recommend it to people, and require my students to read it for one of my classes. I probably wouldn't have read it in the first place, though, if I hadn't been looking for CC licensed books for my e-reader.
Or get it from Project Gutenberg - free, without ads. No way is even Amazon going to persuade a court that they own the copyright on Dickens and that therefore free versions shouldn't be available.
For the less well-known stuff that isn't at Gutenberg, start at Google Books, and Internet Archive which has a load of stuff scanned. And if you or someone you know has access through a University account, you can get to databases like Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, which digitize print material from about 1500-1800. Currently, I'm reading a scan of a 1798 novel on my Sony eBook. It's surreal, but very cool.
You're right; he's a far better writer than Asimov. Not that I don't love Asimov, but Bradbury's mastery of language is light years ahead, and his imagination is far broader. I think his attitude towards the internet, if it really is as stated here, is pretty limited - but I'd also like to hear him talk about the reasons behind his view before dismissing it as the rantings of a lunatic.
The kid is five years old! You want to pack her off to school every morning with a rifle in her backpack? Sure, I agree that teaching your kids to stand up for themselves is imperative, but it's just not possible to make a child that young totally self-sufficient in unexpected situations.
You're lucky. It happened to me a few times, and I was just dropped off in the wrong place. Problem with being a kid is that, a lot of the time, adults don't listen to you because they assume you're lying/making trouble/confused, and that they know better than you do. They don't like to be told they're wrong by a kid, so they just tune it out.
We don't know how old the child is - if she's quite young, she doesn't need to be "abnormal" in order to need competent adults to get her where she's going. When I was a young schoolkid, getting on the bus was always hugely stressful - I lose count of the number of times I was put on the wrong bus, dropped off at the wrong stop, whatever. It can be quite traumatic for a young kid to feel lost, so some way for parents to be able to get to them quickly if they are lost is a good thing, in my view.
It's morally different, perhaps, but not in effect. The school accidentally places the child on the wrong bus; the child ends up who-knows-where without a parent at the other end to collect him/her. The child ends up unattended even though that was never the intention.
Doesn't the intro sequence to the Eric Bana Hulk movie have something very similar?
The British National Corpus and the Oxford English Dictionary disagree with you. "Wank off" is perfectly acceptable. (Linguistically, that is...)
Also, try Terry Riley "A Rainbow in Curved Air" and "In C". I can work for hours and hours with this kinda thing playing - it persuades my brain that time has stopped.
Any day!