... is like traditional folk music which can't be copyrighted.
Actually it can.
If you discovered a previously "undocumented" foreign folk song, the system usually allowed you to publish and put your dibs on it. The justification for copyrightability was that was that the new owner was making material accessible to people in the copyright system's realm of influence that hadn't previously been available there, and that documenting these old pieces was valuable work, and the people making these discoveries deserved to be able to make a buck out of it.
Anyhow, another twist on "prior art"... I think there may be some rules whereby the US doesn't accept prior art as legitimate if it wasn't available within US borders, so if you did a tour of, say, Hungary finding previously undocumented folk songs, you could probably try copyrighting them in the US. But a whole bunch of European composers tapped into this scam about century ago, so there's probably not much left to nick.
...
Some Asian and S. American countries are increasingly getting a bit pissed off at the idea that US corporations are able to patent other countries' local public-domain solutions on the grounds that they can be regarded as "novel" inside the US, especially when those patents then get applied and enforced outside the US. If they legally have to respect US intellectual property rights thanks to things like the WTO agreements, but US businesses can register rights to their indigenous inventions and crops with no reference to local "prior art", then it feels to local activists as if the WTO et.al. are part of a conspiracy to **** them over i n ways that allow them no legal recourse.
This has complicated attempts to preserve and document biodiversity. You get seed-banks and universities sending researchers abroad to try to preserve records of local crop strains, supposedly in the interests of wider humankind, and the locals cooperate and share seed. And then when the researchers get the material back home, anything that seems to be potentially commercial gets patented by a corporation affiliated with the organisation, that supplies funding in exchange for a slice of the intellectual property rights on anything that turns up that has potential commercial applications.
Some of these countries have started to regard visiting Western academic researchers as essentially patent scouts working for US corporations.
It's getting especially fraught with plant strains. Many economically-important strains in the West are legally protected, and the people who developed particular strains are considered to have a monopoly on those strains, and on any new strains that are developed from them. So where does a commercial organisation find new strains to use in order to to develop new breeds, that aren't already owned by their competitors? They go outside the US and Europe, and collect samples of what's being grown there, and then they register the new offspring strains as theirs. Some other countries aren't too pleased to find that an increasing proportion of the genetic content of their indigenous food crops is being registered and/or patented by foreign corporations.
It's not just for text. It's also for icons and colour-coding.
Suppose that you're doing video editing or graphic design, or using your 'puter to produce music commercially. The keyboard then ends up being used more for navigation and shortcuts than for actual typing. You might have hundreds of individual context-specific actions that you could perform on a section of audio or video, or on a file, most of which will probably already have little assigned icons. But unless you have a multi-screen setup, you probably won't have all those icons on-screen at the same time.
So, with an OLED keyboard, you can have those icons (and maybe a few characters of tiny text) set up to appear on keys, and have the setup automatically switching when you move between different screens, or menus, or in response to your actions. Maybe when you highlight a section of the file, a block of keys goes blue, and gives all your cut/copy/paste/export/reverse/normalise/filter/etc... options. When you select a file, the block goes yellow and gives you load/save/rename/revert/etc options, and an adjacent block goes green and gives you options for changing the file's tags for author/category/copyright/embedded icon/notes/etc. If you click one of those options, the icons disappear and the keyboard goes back into QWERTY mode.
This could be fun for more everyday applications, too. It could seriously improve the speed at which you get used to a new piece of software. Think of all the keyboard shortcuts that a wordprocessor has, and how different wordprocessors use different shortcuts. You move from MSWord to OpenOffice, and suddenly the keys do different things! Arrgh!
So, wouldn't it be nice if, when you held down Ctrl or Ctrl-Shift, the keys suddenly changed to colour-coded representations of their shortcut functions?
A web browser could have the keyboard jump into QUERTY mode when you select a menu bar or dialog box or embedded textbox, but betweentimes show thumbnails or FavIcons for of your web-page history, and/or your favourites, and/or and/or the pages currently open in tabs. The Enter/Escape keys could go red when a two-button dialog box is open. The function keys could tell you exactly what they do on the currently-active program.
You could use whatever media player program you liked best without having to constantly relearn which keys each one uses for transport controls.
Sorry, I think we've passed into the-moon-landing-was-faked territory. I don't see anything further coming out of this conversation.
No, it's just that when someone says that a scientific theory works "extremely well", I expect them to be able to back up their case with some sort of argument or example. There should be some sort of evidence of a objective assessment process having taken place. Pure assertion doesn't cut it.
As you'll know if you've studied the history of GR, some of the early claims made for the theory's wonderful accuracy were seriously overblown. Some of these might have been honest mistakes, some might have been down to "cheerleading", and some, doubtless, were made honestly by people who'd been misinformed by authority-figures that they trusted, and who were just repeating what they'd been told in good faith.
When Einstein presented gravitational shifting as the third key test of general relativity, he may have been honestly unaware that the effect had already been predicted by Michell back in the Eighteenth Century. When the effect was "definitively established" in ~1924 it was with a dubious experiment by Adams that later led to suspicions of fraud. All the claimed verifications of GR's gravitaitonal redshifts performed before the 1960's are now considered to be basically junk science. People's enthusiasm for "proving" the theory tended to overrride more boring scientific considerations.
When proper verifications were finally carried out (Pound-Rebka-Snider, 1960's), the relief that we finally had a proper verification of gravitational shifting then led to another round of over-enthusiastic claims - an outcome that was indistinguishable from a reworking of Michell's 1783 calculations somehow got presented as "proving" Einstein's GR, to umpteen decimal places. Modern texts now acknowledge that this class of test is more correctly considered a verification of the equivalence principle, rather than of something GR-specific.
However, as late as the 1990's I was still coming across GR guys who'd try to convince me that Pound-Snider was a definitive proof of GR. But I'd worked through the math with a pocket calculator, and they hadn't.:(
Things aren't all bad. There are a few GR people out there who, as well as knowing current GR, have also checked out the background history and the experimental evidence, and who do try to represent current GR honestly, warts-and-all. Cliff Will springs to mind as the prime example.
But there are a whole raft of other people out there who are still working from wildly optimistic statements about GR that were supposed to have been squashed half a century ago, and who think that they still hold. These things may have been told to them by their lecturers, who in turn may have been told them by their lecturers, but they ain't true.
Most of the ambiguity over these tests isn't GR's fault, because in the sort of range that we typically use for "the three tests", GR1915 or any successor theory would be likely to produce indistinguishable or nearly-indistinguishable results.
What it does mean though, is that anyone championing Einstein's general theory today is expected to know this history and be more careful than past writers about not making inflated claims.
...
I should probably repeat that I do like the idea of a general theory of relativity, and I really do like the idea of modelling relativistic physics as spacetime curvature. I think that general relativity, as a subject is very cool, and that the fundamental idea is spot-on.
But I think that any comments still being made in 2007 that the current version of the theory doesn't need revising when applied to more extreme situations, because it already works "extremely well" are misguided, and I'd invite anyone who believes that current GR is in a good state to go back and check the theory's history and its historical predictio
I think you're greatly overstating the problems with GR. In fact it works EXTREMELY well,
Says who? The experts and textbook writers who are trying to protect their field, and attract the best and the brightest students to it? How do we judge success? GR has been described as a theorist's paradise but an experimenter's nightmare, and the difficulty of actually demonstrating that the theory is any good has led to some truly rotten misrepresentations.
I'm a fan of most of the basic arguments used to construct current GR, but I think it was a premature implementation of a basically good idea, and the levels of BS I've encountered over the years from from some GR experts have been mind-boggling. I'll accept that general relativity is cool, if we take "GR" to mean a general field of study, or a broad inclusive subject whose predictions are liable to change and evolve as we learn more about it, but "Einstein's general theory" as described in textbooks, treated as an individual scientific theory really does suck in some respects. There are too many areas where it simply doesn't work properly. Where GR1915 is successful, the theory's predictions don't seem to be distinguishable from the results of applying more general arguments, and in the cases where current GR does make new predictions, those usually seem to turn out to be wrong.
As far as experimental verification is concerned, we have three main proofs of GR, none of which actually require GR1915: (1) Gravitational shifts and time dilation, which Einstein showed in 1911 could be calculated from Newtonian principles, and which can be folded back into the Newtonian calculations to bring other NM predictions into line with GR. Since GTD gave us time-warpage as well as space-warpage, and since both seemed to give basically same predictions for, say the gravitational deflection of light, the only thing we needed to pin down to find the approximate shape of spacetime around the Sun was whether these two calculations should be considered as "equivalent" or "cumlative". If we decided to use the known anomaly in Mercury's orbit (2) as a guide, then the two light-bending effects had to be cumulative, and this then gave us the stronger "GR" predictions for the gravitational deflection of light skimming the Sun (3). The decision to take a geometrical approach, plus the 1911 "gravitational time dilation" idea, plus a guess that Mercury's orbital oddity was relevant, will give us the three "GR" results even if we happen to think that textbook GR is the wrong theory. These three results suggest that some of the initial ingredients used to construct the theory seem to be right, they don't necessarily mean that the theory's other components or construction are correct, or that its extrapolations made from this baseline are going to be valid.
The rest of textbook GR is more flakey.
GR1915's assumed reduction to SR means that it can't deal with acoustic metrics, so technically it isn't a truly general theory. It successfully predicts gravitomagnetic effects, but these aren't compatible with the theory's underlying SR equations of motion, which assume that velocity-dependent distortions don't exist. GR1915 also can't be used as a method to apply the "curvature" paradigm to moving particles, for the same reason, the incompatibility of these distortion effects with an assumed underlying Minkowski metric. This makes our standard theory of curvature incompatible with particle physics, and with quantum mechanics.
As a theory of the very large, GR1915 was originally used to explain why the universe wouldn't show a distance-dependent redshift effect (as we'd expect from the cumulative effects of gravitation), just a few years before we discovered that the Hubble shift did actually exist. We reacted by dropping Einstein's "cosmological constant" and saying that the theory had been right all along, just misapplied. We retrospectively redefined the theory and its pre
Scientists sometimes speak less rigorously for convenience and breathless reporters get a little carried away."
It's not always the reporters' fault. Some of the worst statistical misrepresentations I've seen in science have come directly from physics people.
For previous examples, look at the "cheerleading" that happened over research on GR's black holes in the 1960's, and then some of the hype that the string theory guys used to put out. If anything, I thought that the journos sometimes tended to tone down some of the worst claims.
Or look at the unrealistic estimates that researchers have been putting out for decades about how close we are to having commercial fusion reactors, if we just put in another few billion dollars right now... a lot of those guys must know (and must always have known) that the estimates weren't realistic, but it's been getting them the funding so far.
"Cheerleading" seems to be seen by some in the physics community as a legitimate way of "gaming" the system, provided that they're only misleading the politicians and the wider public who vote those politicians in, and aren't misleading their fellow professionals. But "helpful" misinformation originally intended as harmless PR has a habit of contaminating and corrupting genuine information, and if it's not checked, after a generation or two you can end up with a research field where many of the of the newer intake don't really know what information is real and what isn't.
Conversations get a little taxing if you have to be careful to say "hypothetical non-radiating weakly interacting massive particles" every time. Dark matter rolls of the tongue much better.
Yep! Trouble is, as a name, "dark matter" is just too catchy. It's a brilliant name, and it's seductive, and when we get to the point where most of the population have heard of "it", and are aware that scientists study "it", they tend to think, quite naturally, that "it" is something that is known to be real. And in the case of DM, so far, it isn't.
Dark matter isn't like a missing element in the periodic table, or an unseen particle that can account for momentum and energy that disappears in a collision. We don't have a "family" structure that suggests the existence of DM, and we don't have a method of carrying out a reaction and comparing a mismatch between measured quantities in two situations, before and after, to indicate an additional piece of the puzzle.
What we seem to have is a single, consistent mismatch between a theory and experiment, and because we can't see how we could have gotten the calculations wrong, or the theory wrong, we've invented new "stuff" to make up the difference, whose only other derived properties are that it doesn't seem to manifest itself in any other way that we can detect. It's getting perilously close to the old medieval description of a basilisk.
While I really love most of the design ideas behind Einstein's GR, I think that other aspects of it suck. It wasn't designed around modern ideas about cosmology, it wasn't imagined as a truly stand-alone system, and it's damned difficult to find any properly testable predictions for it at medium scales that are distinguishable from, say, updated Newtonian theory. Its predicted properties for horizons don't work properly for horizons caused by cosmological curvature, and its predictions for strong-gravity sources (GR black hole event horizons) don't agree with those of quantum theory or with our basic rules of thermodynamics. In an expanding universe it doesn't support energy conservation (unless you make up more arbitrary additional terms). It crashes at cosmological scales, it's not required for medium-scale work, and we aren't supposed to use it to model small-scale curvature down at the particle scale, because... it doesn't work there either.
So if people using it keep getting the wrong large-scale gravitational predictions too, why the heck
Physicists sometimes exaggerate. It helps them to get attention for their research, and credibility for their ideas, and makes it easier for those ideas to get a decent shot at being evaluated properly instead of just getting lost in the noise. It also makes for better news stories and for more excited, enthusiastic students.
Well, we can detect dark matter by it's gravitational effects. That's how we know it's there.
No, our calculations for the apparent distribution of this "dark matter" turn out to shadow the distribution of conventional matter.
The problem that we're facing here is that if current GR seems to be wrong, and if we're inventing new, arbitrary, independently-unverifiable substances to explain the difference between predicted and observed effect, and say that we know that GR is right, and we know that these things exist, then we've lost the principle of falsifiability, and it becomes more difficult to say that what we are doing is still science.
Certainly the dark matter hypothesis should be seriously considered. But if we go further and say that we know that DM is out there, our analysis becomes "faith-based" rather than scientific. If we can eventually find some way to derive and predict some properties for "dark matter" that don't look like an arbitrary exercise in creative accounting, then fair enough, the idea may yet become elevated from the status of an arbitrary fudge to real physics.
But that hasn't happened yet.
Nobel prizes are tricky. They're supposed to be for work that has some demonstrable practical benefit to mankind, so getting a prize for cosmology is difficult.
Although the basic idea has been kicking around for a while (ahem), this work seems to put some numbers to it.
Basically, current cosmology has tended to be founded on the idea of a nice simple universe, and when theory moved from a "constant, flat" universe to an "expanding bubble" universe, we still tried to maintain the idea that things were nice and orderly.
This gave us the idea of an expanding hypersurface that was rather like the surface of an orange... pitted and creased with gravitational detail, but essentially sphere-like.
On the other hand, if you allow expansion to run faster in the less-dense regions, perhaps as a consequence of the higher rate of timeflow in those regions, what you end up with is a more lobed shape that looks more like a raspberry.
In response to those who think all DRM and proprietary formats are evil, you're thinking about it all wrong. Some of you are even admitting to buying CDs. CDs are a proprietary format that only works in a closed system. Sound familiar? You can't take audio in CD format and play it on an iPod, or a turntable, or a cassette player, or anything other than a computer or CD player. Same goes for FairPlay. You can't play anything encoded with FairPlay on anything other than iTunes or an iPod/iPhone. And yet, nearly everyone has a CD player, and nearly everyone has iTunes or an iPod, so the argument of a closed system become invalid simply due to the rate of adoption. Just because you own a device that doesn't work with a particular format doesn't give you the right to complain. Just as people who own Laserdisc or Betamax players don't have the right to complain about DVD or VHS formats not playing on their devices.
No, CDA is arguably one of the most open hardware formats available: As consumers, we expect every piece of consumer equipment that takes optical disks and supports audio to also play audio CD's by default, or else we raise merry hell and declare the things to be not of saleable quality.
You can take your audio CD and play it on a CD player, but you can also play it on old CDI devices, or on a shiny new DVD player. A You can play the things on desktop computers or on laptops, there are CD-playing support services for Windows, the Macintosh, and Linux. I'm guessing that any games consoles that have the right size optical drive can probably play the things, too.
Not only is support for the CD format demanded by consumers for almost any form of hardware that is mechanically capable of reading the disks, regardless of whether anyone's actually likely to want to play audio-only disks on the device or not, but OS producers then go out of their way to give away utilities that encourage users to then transfer the contents of their existing CDs onto other digital formats, for playback on other non-CD devices (hello iPod).
So the CD audio format is about as open as it is physically possible for it to be.
By contrast, DRM systems represent a deliberate attempt to try to stop consumers from being able to play the digital files that they have purchased on anything other than the originating system. We aren't talking here about incompatibilities that exist because of unavoidable hardware differences (like tape, vinyl and CD)... we are talking about an industry taking a common, compatible platform, digital audio, where cross-platform compression systems are already available for low cost, and going out and spending millions in order to try to engineer-in new deliberate incompatibilities where none existed before.
It's about deliberately spending more R&D and marketing money, to create a worse product that is less useful to the consumer, in order to limit that customer's future choices, so that corporations can then use their control of a locked-in customer-base as a bargaining tool with other media corporations.
Some, people, understandably, aren't happy about this development and hope that it wont succeed.
In industries other than computing and music/film media distribution, this sort of behaviour tends to be illegal. If you have substantial market control, and you get get caught deliberately crippling the stuff you sell in order to make it as incompatible as possible with your competitors, in order to try to screw them over, then that tends to be treated as an illegal anticompetitive practice that is not in the interests of the consumer. In the computer industry, large corporations like IBM/Microsoft/etc, have tended to get away with it for various reasons, but that doesn't make it a good thing. We all know that the music/entertainment industry is pretty sleazy at times, the cutural norms in large computer corporations have probably slipped a few notches down the ethical scale too, and when it comes ot a combination of the two... things can get real ugly.
If there is one thing that confounds me when I'm trying to show someone how to use a computer it's that godoffal damned fuckwitted doubleclick. I wind up exasperated saying "click on the icon and press 'enter'. It's easier. Its frustrating to new users.
Yep, new users might learn faster if a double-click was associated with a double-beep.
The double-click wasn't down to Microsoft, if I remember correctly, the Atari ST OS could recognise double-clicks, triple-clicks, all the way up to a ten-click monstrosity!:)
That might sound like a rotten idea, but actually it was quite clever: it meant that if someone wanted to manufacture a custom six-button mouse, they could base it on standard two-button hardware, and have the extra buttons communicating via multi-clicks.
And it's pointless. There's no reason why you should have to have two clicks in a certain time period; one click should highlight, a second should execute. Especially since MS and Linux mice have more than one button!
Well, you could try pretending to newbies that the "double-click" is a deliberate security feature: "It's difficult on purpose so you don't run programs by accident".;)
Or, show them how to launch programs (initially) by right-clicking and then selecting the default action from the drop-down options menu. That'll give them a visual indicator of what they're doing, and let them gain confidence in what they are doing, and learn what their options are. Then show them the keyboard way, and say that for Very Advanced Users(!) there's also this special hidden "double-click" method.
Microsoft often aren't that great at GUI design, but Apple's decision to standardise on a one-button mouse had to be one of the most perverse design decisions in the history of computing! I think that Apple sometimes concentrate so hard on visual ergonomics that they sometimes forget that efficient user interfaces are about more than eye candy. Eye candy sells, and gives you something to show off to your mates, but ergonomics is about something more. The one-button mouse was such a rotten idea that no other computer manufacturer did it, and even MS couldn't be persuaded to steal it. It was simply a Dumb Idea.
I guess they've stuck with the OBM this long, because to change now would look like an admission that they screwed up.
So I guess they'll stick with OBMs until they can think of some way of repackaging a multi-button mouse so that it looks like something new and exciting and Apple-specific. I guess they could try using a modified version of the iPod button interface......
So give me a few new parts and let me install Linux.
Well, last time I installed Linux it still had its own quirks. I wouldn't wish it on a computer newbie. In fact, I think that even the average Windows user would have trouble deciphering parts of it. The whole thing about there being a choice of desktops, and different programs needing different environments... the deliberately-obscure program names, the wanky self-referential acronyms, the tedious in-jokes that take too long to explain... IMO the impression that newbies get from Linux is that this is still basically a system designed by computer geeks, for computer geeks. Perhaps that's unfair, but it's the impression given.
I'm sure that they'll get it sorted... eventually.
If you look at the back of a flat-screen monitors, they usually have four mounting screw-holes, so that the monitor can be fitted to an external arm. Sometimes the monitor's own stand is already attached by the holes, sometimes it isn't. The holes typically appear with one of two standardised layouts, depending on the size of the monitor.
If free, these holes can be used to mount Other Things.
So, if you're an experienced PC constructor: Invest in a couple of large sheets of 1.5mm aluminium, work out how your (small) motherboard and components are going to fit to it around the mounting holes, screw some alu U-brackets around the edges, and the second plate onto the back, and... bingo!... you've got yourself an all-in-one flatty puter. Perhaps use a weeny Shuttle motherboard and 1U power supply to keep things compact, and use laptop harddrives and an external optical drive.
Plus points:
1) You get to choose which monitor to use.
2) If you make a mess of it and it looks awful, it's hidden behind the pretty screen.
3) You can take it off and attach it to another screen at a later date if you want.
4) You can use the large back surface are for some pretty extravagant passive heatsinking.
If the monitor has a back-panel ventilation grille, the pc-slab could be "stood off" with some spacers threaded onto the four mounting bolts. Experienced constructors could run amok with heatpipe arrays and radiators etc for silent passive cooling.
In fact, maybe Panasonic or Sony should already be making these things as general-purpose linux-based "media centre modules" to be fitted to the back of their HDTVs.
They//might// be able to register national treasures and monuments as previously-unlisted designs, and claim manufacturing design rights (rather than conventional copyright). Maybe.
I notice that in the full article it says that they're only trying to restrict the manufacture of "100%" copies, indistinguishable from the originals, made to the same scale and with the same materials. So they aren't trying to claim rights over the Luxor hotel in Vegas, but if you had a spare few million tons of stone handy and some free time, and wanted to carve and assemble your own full-scale duplicate of the Great Pyramid, they might get a bit annoyed.
To be honest, I think this is probably about the artefacts in the Cairo Museum and elsewhere. With modern scholarship, these things can be 3-D scanned and the details held in databases and then refabricated. Computer-milling can carve stone directly or produce moulds for castings. I think they're probably concerned that once everything's been scanned in high res., some bright foreign museum entrepreneur will get the idea of downloading the files and setting up their own competing King Tut exhibition in Chicago or London.
But do these computers come with a recovery CD, or just a recovery partition? I've also read about recovery CDs that entirely reformat the computer's hard drive, taking My Documents with it.
I'd be worried about using MyDocuments for anything vaguely important.
Assume that Windows is inevitably going to end up trashing its own file system at some point, and choose your file locations accordingly:
"OS" partition... "documents" partition... "emergency backup files" partition...
There's no point in Wikipedia just being a direct clone of Britannica, because Britannica already exists. If you want Britannica-style collection of articles buy a subscription!
Please show me the Britannica article on any South Park episode, some instrumental by Dream Theater, an Allentown, PA newspaper , or All your base are belong to us. Or xkcd.
Not having articles on subjects isn't necessarily something to be proud of!
Britannica doesn't know what "South Park" is. That's understandable, but it also doesn't have entries for obscure little films like... "Star Wars". It agrees that the film exists, and is notable... it has an entry for George Lucas and the film appears in the biography pages for lots of individual cast members... but no page on the actual movie itself. Similarly, searching for "Casablanca" finds a lesser-known record company called Casablanca Records, and the Casablanca Conference, but no entry for the movie with Humphey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Margaret Michell earns a biographical entry for writing "the enormously popular novel Gone with the Wind".. but the book itself (and the movie) aren't deemed worth an entry.
It seems that Britannica have decided, as a point of policy, that their encyclopedia will focus more on the biographical details of famous people rather than on famous works, presumably because it's easier to come up with a consistent format for famous people, and a way of limiting the number of entries, than if you start listing individual pieces separately.
So Brittanica will often tell you the personal details of an author, but not the details of the work that actually made the author notable in the first place (J.K. Rowling, yes, "Harry Potter", no).
Ironically, this means that the lofty Britannica is actually stuffed full of details that could easily be considered by a deletionist Wikieditor as being obvious trivia and pointless fancruft deserving immediate erasure (knowing about "Gone with the Wind" is arguably culturally important, knowing the author's precise date and place of birth arguably isn't).
So Britannica is missing articles on almost every culturally-important work of art (unless it's a place or building), except as footnotes in the biographies of people involved with them, or who created them.
Britannica has no article on Bach's "Brandenburg" concertos, or van Gogh's "Starry Night". They don't cover the "Watchmen" or "Sandman" graphic novels. They have Bob Kane but no "Batman". Siegel and Shuster, but no "Superman". The Sistine Chapel and its ceiling sneak in as architectural works, but Leonardo's iconic "Vitruvian Man" doesn't get its own entry.
Very few culturally-important pieces break through the Britannica "artwork" barrier. The Mona Lisa sneaks in as "Mona Lisa and other works", and Mickey Mouse is listed (and, strangely enough, "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" has his own Britannica index entry), but contemporaries "Felix the Cat", and "Tom and Jerry" aren't deemed sufficiently important (although Britannica does see fit to include biographies of the "Felix" creator Otto Mesmer, and of Hanna & Barbera).
As for the example on your list of a newspaper, well, Britannica does seem to list the major national US and UK newspapers, but London's "Evening Standard" isn't listed. It also doesn't have an entry for New York's "Village Voice" (it prefers to "biog" Daniel Wolf, one of the founders, instead).
So Britannica's strength (to a journalist) is probably its reliable biographical info, which is probably really useful if you want to say something in print about a living person. It seems to be a decent biographical encyclopedia
On the down-side (for a journalist), its serious coverage of current news subjects is nowhere near as timely as Wiki's.
Britannica does now cover Enron and the Enron crash and major players involved, but it doesn't yet list Northern Rock, which recen
"any such Evil Agenda would be exposed so quickly from the inside it would make your head spin."
I was at an MSDN developers' conference some years back, and BG appeared on a datalink to explain his long-term strategy for the internet. The internet, he said, only had a few years left in it. People wouldn't put up with the continuing anarchy and unreliability for much longer. They and their families wanted proper safe, reliable, certified content, produced by proper media companies. A few years from now, Bill told us, we wouldn't need to worry about this internet thing, because by then everyone would have migrated over to Microsoft Network. MSN was The Future that we should all be planning for.
I guess it was a straightforward calculation: if you can get everyone to use a proprietary system that you own and control, then you can do deals with big corporations like Disney and Time Warner to distribute their branded content direct to customers. You own the market, and make a buck every time someone wants to go online. On the other hand, if an open system catches on and becomes popular, then even if customers are happier, you've lost control, and its more difficult to get the money flowing in your direction.
So MS decided that the road they were going down was proprietary closed software, and they didn't go out of their way to get standardised HTML working on their systems. They'd always wanted businesses to use proprietary formats like MSWord rather than RTF or HTML, and whenever an open format started becoming popular, they'd try to step in to "Microsoft-ify" it.
This isn't an Evil Plan as such, its simply a business calculation.
If MS had realised what was actually going on, and had had a chance to stop it, then the internet as we currently know it might not have happened. They might have tried to find some way to head it off, like lobbying for people not to be allowed to own websites unless they had an expensive license, or for web content to be brought under the regulatory remit of the FCC.
Luckily, the early betas of MSN were so laughably, absurdly, ludicrously bad, that MS didn't have a serious alternative to offer, and they had to content themselves with trying to wrestle control of HTML standardisation instead.
Incomplete support means that the standards committees never manage to get quite as much credit (and power and control) as they'd otherwise have, and that perceived weakness prevents them from being able to publicly dictate to MS how products like IE have to behave. If compliance was considered necessary and the W3C could demand that IE supports the standards (under penalty of having to stop representing IE as a "fully-functional" internet browser), then MS loses the ability to use its control over IE to support any future MS business scheme.
One of the key strategies for maintaining a monopoly is to have control over several different independent sectors (e.g. applications, tools, distribution, content, formats), and whenever one of those areas encounters serious competition, to leverage your control of all the others to see off the threat, in ways that your single-sector competition can't respond to. If a company makes a better browser than yours, and you can't compete, then you eliminate their market and their cashflow by giving yours away with your popular operating system. If your OS is weak, you bundle applications with it, or you ensure that a popular application is only available for that OS. If applications are weak but tools are strong, then you reengineer the tools to work preferentially with the applications' formats, or to encourage third-party designers to write applications that require the office suite to be installed on the end-user's system. It's a constant juggling operation, playing off strengths and weaknesses between different market sectors, but if you get it right, nobody can compete with you. The downside is that you never get to release a truly great product, because the "strong
I chained my PCs and external harddrives together using firewire, XP automatically recognised it as a potential network connection and gave me "LAN over firewire". Whichever PC was switched on first "got" the peripherals, and the second one got to share them over the network. No LAN cables involved, and no hubs. I also included a redundant connection to make a complete circuit, so that even if only one PC was powered up, whichever one it was could still access all the peripherals directly with no replugging.
You can't do that with USB!
"Explain to me how does wikipedia suffer if that trash is submitted for deletion by "assholes". Explain to me how users like me are "ruining wikipedia" by voting for those articles to be deleted. Do you really believe that everything that is put into wikipedia smells of roses and has every right to be there?"
The problem is that once something is deleted, other users don't have the chance to rummage about in the bins to see if what was lost was valuable. It's gone forever.
A large library (say, The Library of Congress) is considered more valuable than a small one,//not// because it includes more books that most people would consider interesting, or more books that are popular, or "better-written" books, but because of its inclusivity. It includes more//un//popular, niche, specialised books that most people normally have no interest in at all... but which suddenly become invaluable if you need to find out something obscure. A great library lets you find everything that you can find at other sources, plus a whole load of things that can't be found anywhere else, and that's what makes it great.
The "deletionist" approach to improving Wikipedia, if it was applied to the Library of Congress, would try to "improve" the LoC by sending in teams of editors to strip out all the "unnecessary" books. First they'd destroy all the books that haven't been accessed in the last five years, because obviously people aren't sufficiently interested in them. Then you'd remove all the near-duplicates -- do we really need fifteen separate books on Beethoven? Then they'd strip out all the "trivia", everything on movies, actors, famous people, books, theatre, and so on. Eliminate all the biographies. Anything to do with popular culture after 1920. Delete information on pop music, video games, radio and TV. Maybe leave in some limited material to do with classical music, and perhaps a few modern composers like Stockhausen. Definitely delete the Beatles.
And what you'd end up with is a library that nobody really cares about, and hardly anyone accesses apart from a few academics, and even they no longer find it//that// useful because the purges have removed everything that isn't already in their standard reference works anyway. Eventually, even most of the the remaining books on the shelves would fall foul of the "five year" rule, and it wouldn't be worth employing staff to keep it open. You'd end up shutting the thing down altogether.
Now, market forces might suggest that if such an enterprise destroyed itself in this way, that it wouldn't really matter because something else would spring up to take its place. Unfortunately, by that time, a lot of the original material would have been lost forever. If you delete the least popular books in a "world" library, a lot of that information won't exist anywhere else. Some of the people who donated archive material the first time round will never do it again, because they no longer have the source material, or the time, or because they have since died, or because they feel betrayed by what happened the first time. They tried donating once, it didn't work, they consider it a bad experience, and they won't do it again. When a monolithic system crashes, the idea itself is damaged, not just the implementation.
So when information is deleted from Wikipedia, it isn't necessarily only removed from Wikipedia's databases, the effort that went into generating that content may never be repeated, and some of that information may never be available to any future Wikipedia-like enterprises. Wiki is coasting on that first rush of enthusiasm and idealism, and has been burning it like fuel to expand its listings at an incredible rate. If it squanders that resource, the same degree of excitement and motivation may not be available to future projects trying to start again from scratch if the people lurking behind Wiki screw things up.
IMO, we need Wiki to take a stand one way or the other on this. If it
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If you discovered a previously "undocumented" foreign folk song, the system usually allowed you to publish and put your dibs on it. The justification for copyrightability was that was that the new owner was making material accessible to people in the copyright system's realm of influence that hadn't previously been available there, and that documenting these old pieces was valuable work, and the people making these discoveries deserved to be able to make a buck out of it.
Anyhow, another twist on "prior art" ... I think there may be some rules whereby the US doesn't accept prior art as legitimate if it wasn't available within US borders, so if you did a tour of, say, Hungary finding previously undocumented folk songs, you could probably try copyrighting them in the US. But a whole bunch of European composers tapped into this scam about century ago, so there's probably not much left to nick.
Some Asian and S. American countries are increasingly getting a bit pissed off at the idea that US corporations are able to patent other countries' local public-domain solutions on the grounds that they can be regarded as "novel" inside the US, especially when those patents then get applied and enforced outside the US. If they legally have to respect US intellectual property rights thanks to things like the WTO agreements, but US businesses can register rights to their indigenous inventions and crops with no reference to local "prior art", then it feels to local activists as if the WTO et.al. are part of a conspiracy to **** them over i n ways that allow them no legal recourse.
This has complicated attempts to preserve and document biodiversity. You get seed-banks and universities sending researchers abroad to try to preserve records of local crop strains, supposedly in the interests of wider humankind, and the locals cooperate and share seed. And then when the researchers get the material back home, anything that seems to be potentially commercial gets patented by a corporation affiliated with the organisation, that supplies funding in exchange for a slice of the intellectual property rights on anything that turns up that has potential commercial applications.
Some of these countries have started to regard visiting Western academic researchers as essentially patent scouts working for US corporations.
It's getting especially fraught with plant strains. Many economically-important strains in the West are legally protected, and the people who developed particular strains are considered to have a monopoly on those strains, and on any new strains that are developed from them. So where does a commercial organisation find new strains to use in order to to develop new breeds, that aren't already owned by their competitors? They go outside the US and Europe, and collect samples of what's being grown there, and then they register the new offspring strains as theirs. Some other countries aren't too pleased to find that an increasing proportion of the genetic content of their indigenous food crops is being registered and/or patented by foreign corporations.
Suppose that you're doing video editing or graphic design, or using your 'puter to produce music commercially. The keyboard then ends up being used more for navigation and shortcuts than for actual typing. You might have hundreds of individual context-specific actions that you could perform on a section of audio or video, or on a file, most of which will probably already have little assigned icons. But unless you have a multi-screen setup, you probably won't have all those icons on-screen at the same time.
So, with an OLED keyboard, you can have those icons (and maybe a few characters of tiny text) set up to appear on keys, and have the setup automatically switching when you move between different screens, or menus, or in response to your actions. Maybe when you highlight a section of the file, a block of keys goes blue, and gives all your cut/copy/paste/export/reverse/normalise/filter/etc... options. When you select a file, the block goes yellow and gives you load/save/rename/revert/etc options, and an adjacent block goes green and gives you options for changing the file's tags for author/category/copyright/embedded icon/notes/etc. If you click one of those options, the icons disappear and the keyboard goes back into QWERTY mode.
This could be fun for more everyday applications, too. It could seriously improve the speed at which you get used to a new piece of software. Think of all the keyboard shortcuts that a wordprocessor has, and how different wordprocessors use different shortcuts. You move from MSWord to OpenOffice, and suddenly the keys do different things! Arrgh!
So, wouldn't it be nice if, when you held down Ctrl or Ctrl-Shift, the keys suddenly changed to colour-coded representations of their shortcut functions?
A web browser could have the keyboard jump into QUERTY mode when you select a menu bar or dialog box or embedded textbox, but betweentimes show thumbnails or FavIcons for of your web-page history, and/or your favourites, and/or and/or the pages currently open in tabs. The Enter/Escape keys could go red when a two-button dialog box is open. The function keys could tell you exactly what they do on the currently-active program.
You could use whatever media player program you liked best without having to constantly relearn which keys each one uses for transport controls.
It would be cool.
No, it's just that when someone says that a scientific theory works "extremely well", I expect them to be able to back up their case with some sort of argument or example. There should be some sort of evidence of a objective assessment process having taken place. Pure assertion doesn't cut it.
As you'll know if you've studied the history of GR, some of the early claims made for the theory's wonderful accuracy were seriously overblown. Some of these might have been honest mistakes, some might have been down to "cheerleading", and some, doubtless, were made honestly by people who'd been misinformed by authority-figures that they trusted, and who were just repeating what they'd been told in good faith.
When Einstein presented gravitational shifting as the third key test of general relativity, he may have been honestly unaware that the effect had already been predicted by Michell back in the Eighteenth Century. When the effect was "definitively established" in ~1924 it was with a dubious experiment by Adams that later led to suspicions of fraud. All the claimed verifications of GR's gravitaitonal redshifts performed before the 1960's are now considered to be basically junk science. People's enthusiasm for "proving" the theory tended to overrride more boring scientific considerations.
When proper verifications were finally carried out (Pound-Rebka-Snider, 1960's), the relief that we finally had a proper verification of gravitational shifting then led to another round of over-enthusiastic claims - an outcome that was indistinguishable from a reworking of Michell's 1783 calculations somehow got presented as "proving" Einstein's GR, to umpteen decimal places. Modern texts now acknowledge that this class of test is more correctly considered a verification of the equivalence principle, rather than of something GR-specific. :(
However, as late as the 1990's I was still coming across GR guys who'd try to convince me that Pound-Snider was a definitive proof of GR. But I'd worked through the math with a pocket calculator, and they hadn't.
Things aren't all bad. There are a few GR people out there who, as well as knowing current GR, have also checked out the background history and the experimental evidence, and who do try to represent current GR honestly, warts-and-all. Cliff Will springs to mind as the prime example.
But there are a whole raft of other people out there who are still working from wildly optimistic statements about GR that were supposed to have been squashed half a century ago, and who think that they still hold. These things may have been told to them by their lecturers, who in turn may have been told them by their lecturers, but they ain't true.
Most of the ambiguity over these tests isn't GR's fault, because in the sort of range that we typically use for "the three tests", GR1915 or any successor theory would be likely to produce indistinguishable or nearly-indistinguishable results.
What it does mean though, is that anyone championing Einstein's general theory today is expected to know this history and be more careful than past writers about not making inflated claims.
I should probably repeat that I do like the idea of a general theory of relativity, and I really do like the idea of modelling relativistic physics as spacetime curvature. I think that general relativity, as a subject is very cool, and that the fundamental idea is spot-on.
But I think that any comments still being made in 2007 that the current version of the theory doesn't need revising when applied to more extreme situations, because it already works "extremely well" are misguided, and I'd invite anyone who believes that current GR is in a good state to go back and check the theory's history and its historical predictio
Says who? The experts and textbook writers who are trying to protect their field, and attract the best and the brightest students to it? How do we judge success? GR has been described as a theorist's paradise but an experimenter's nightmare, and the difficulty of actually demonstrating that the theory is any good has led to some truly rotten misrepresentations.
I'm a fan of most of the basic arguments used to construct current GR, but I think it was a premature implementation of a basically good idea, and the levels of BS I've encountered over the years from from some GR experts have been mind-boggling. I'll accept that general relativity is cool, if we take "GR" to mean a general field of study, or a broad inclusive subject whose predictions are liable to change and evolve as we learn more about it, but "Einstein's general theory" as described in textbooks, treated as an individual scientific theory really does suck in some respects. There are too many areas where it simply doesn't work properly. Where GR1915 is successful, the theory's predictions don't seem to be distinguishable from the results of applying more general arguments, and in the cases where current GR does make new predictions, those usually seem to turn out to be wrong.
As far as experimental verification is concerned, we have three main proofs of GR, none of which actually require GR1915:
(1) Gravitational shifts and time dilation, which Einstein showed in 1911 could be calculated from Newtonian principles, and which can be folded back into the Newtonian calculations to bring other NM predictions into line with GR. Since GTD gave us time-warpage as well as space-warpage, and since both seemed to give basically same predictions for, say the gravitational deflection of light, the only thing we needed to pin down to find the approximate shape of spacetime around the Sun was whether these two calculations should be considered as "equivalent" or "cumlative". If we decided to use the known anomaly in Mercury's orbit (2) as a guide, then the two light-bending effects had to be cumulative, and this then gave us the stronger "GR" predictions for the gravitational deflection of light skimming the Sun (3). The decision to take a geometrical approach, plus the 1911 "gravitational time dilation" idea, plus a guess that Mercury's orbital oddity was relevant, will give us the three "GR" results even if we happen to think that textbook GR is the wrong theory. These three results suggest that some of the initial ingredients used to construct the theory seem to be right, they don't necessarily mean that the theory's other components or construction are correct, or that its extrapolations made from this baseline are going to be valid.
The rest of textbook GR is more flakey.
GR1915's assumed reduction to SR means that it can't deal with acoustic metrics, so technically it isn't a truly general theory. It successfully predicts gravitomagnetic effects, but these aren't compatible with the theory's underlying SR equations of motion, which assume that velocity-dependent distortions don't exist. GR1915 also can't be used as a method to apply the "curvature" paradigm to moving particles, for the same reason, the incompatibility of these distortion effects with an assumed underlying Minkowski metric. This makes our standard theory of curvature incompatible with particle physics, and with quantum mechanics.
As a theory of the very large, GR1915 was originally used to explain why the universe wouldn't show a distance-dependent redshift effect (as we'd expect from the cumulative effects of gravitation), just a few years before we discovered that the Hubble shift did actually exist. We reacted by dropping Einstein's "cosmological constant" and saying that the theory had been right all along, just misapplied. We retrospectively redefined the theory and its pre
It's not always the reporters' fault. Some of the worst statistical misrepresentations I've seen in science have come directly from physics people.
For previous examples, look at the "cheerleading" that happened over research on GR's black holes in the 1960's, and then some of the hype that the string theory guys used to put out. If anything, I thought that the journos sometimes tended to tone down some of the worst claims.
Or look at the unrealistic estimates that researchers have been putting out for decades about how close we are to having commercial fusion reactors, if we just put in another few billion dollars right now ... a lot of those guys must know (and must always have known) that the estimates weren't realistic, but it's been getting them the funding so far.
"Cheerleading" seems to be seen by some in the physics community as a legitimate way of "gaming" the system, provided that they're only misleading the politicians and the wider public who vote those politicians in, and aren't misleading their fellow professionals. But "helpful" misinformation originally intended as harmless PR has a habit of contaminating and corrupting genuine information, and if it's not checked, after a generation or two you can end up with a research field where many of the of the newer intake don't really know what information is real and what isn't.
Yep! Trouble is, as a name, "dark matter" is just too catchy. It's a brilliant name, and it's seductive, and when we get to the point where most of the population have heard of "it", and are aware that scientists study "it", they tend to think, quite naturally, that "it" is something that is known to be real. And in the case of DM, so far, it isn't.
Dark matter isn't like a missing element in the periodic table, or an unseen particle that can account for momentum and energy that disappears in a collision. We don't have a "family" structure that suggests the existence of DM, and we don't have a method of carrying out a reaction and comparing a mismatch between measured quantities in two situations, before and after, to indicate an additional piece of the puzzle.
What we seem to have is a single, consistent mismatch between a theory and experiment, and because we can't see how we could have gotten the calculations wrong, or the theory wrong, we've invented new "stuff" to make up the difference, whose only other derived properties are that it doesn't seem to manifest itself in any other way that we can detect. It's getting perilously close to the old medieval description of a basilisk.
While I really love most of the design ideas behind Einstein's GR, I think that other aspects of it suck. It wasn't designed around modern ideas about cosmology, it wasn't imagined as a truly stand-alone system, and it's damned difficult to find any properly testable predictions for it at medium scales that are distinguishable from, say, updated Newtonian theory. Its predicted properties for horizons don't work properly for horizons caused by cosmological curvature, and its predictions for strong-gravity sources (GR black hole event horizons) don't agree with those of quantum theory or with our basic rules of thermodynamics. In an expanding universe it doesn't support energy conservation (unless you make up more arbitrary additional terms). It crashes at cosmological scales, it's not required for medium-scale work, and we aren't supposed to use it to model small-scale curvature down at the particle scale, because ... it doesn't work there either.
So if people using it keep getting the wrong large-scale gravitational predictions too, why the heck
Physicists sometimes exaggerate. It helps them to get attention for their research, and credibility for their ideas, and makes it easier for those ideas to get a decent shot at being evaluated properly instead of just getting lost in the noise. It also makes for better news stories and for more excited, enthusiastic students.
The problem that we're facing here is that if current GR seems to be wrong, and if we're inventing new, arbitrary, independently-unverifiable substances to explain the difference between predicted and observed effect, and say that we know that GR is right, and we know that these things exist, then we've lost the principle of falsifiability, and it becomes more difficult to say that what we are doing is still science.
Certainly the dark matter hypothesis should be seriously considered. But if we go further and say that we know that DM is out there, our analysis becomes "faith-based" rather than scientific. If we can eventually find some way to derive and predict some properties for "dark matter" that don't look like an arbitrary exercise in creative accounting, then fair enough, the idea may yet become elevated from the status of an arbitrary fudge to real physics.
But that hasn't happened yet.
Although the basic idea has been kicking around for a while (ahem), this work seems to put some numbers to it. Basically, current cosmology has tended to be founded on the idea of a nice simple universe, and when theory moved from a "constant, flat" universe to an "expanding bubble" universe, we still tried to maintain the idea that things were nice and orderly.
This gave us the idea of an expanding hypersurface that was rather like the surface of an orange ... pitted and creased with gravitational detail, but essentially sphere-like.
On the other hand, if you allow expansion to run faster in the less-dense regions, perhaps as a consequence of the higher rate of timeflow in those regions, what you end up with is a more lobed shape that looks more like a raspberry.
No, CDA is arguably one of the most open hardware formats available: As consumers, we expect every piece of consumer equipment that takes optical disks and supports audio to also play audio CD's by default, or else we raise merry hell and declare the things to be not of saleable quality.
You can take your audio CD and play it on a CD player, but you can also play it on old CDI devices, or on a shiny new DVD player. A You can play the things on desktop computers or on laptops, there are CD-playing support services for Windows, the Macintosh, and Linux. I'm guessing that any games consoles that have the right size optical drive can probably play the things, too.
Not only is support for the CD format demanded by consumers for almost any form of hardware that is mechanically capable of reading the disks, regardless of whether anyone's actually likely to want to play audio-only disks on the device or not, but OS producers then go out of their way to give away utilities that encourage users to then transfer the contents of their existing CDs onto other digital formats, for playback on other non-CD devices (hello iPod).
So the CD audio format is about as open as it is physically possible for it to be. ... we are talking about an industry taking a common, compatible platform, digital audio, where cross-platform compression systems are already available for low cost, and going out and spending millions in order to try to engineer-in new deliberate incompatibilities where none existed before.
By contrast, DRM systems represent a deliberate attempt to try to stop consumers from being able to play the digital files that they have purchased on anything other than the originating system. We aren't talking here about incompatibilities that exist because of unavoidable hardware differences (like tape, vinyl and CD)
It's about deliberately spending more R&D and marketing money, to create a worse product that is less useful to the consumer, in order to limit that customer's future choices, so that corporations can then use their control of a locked-in customer-base as a bargaining tool with other media corporations.
Some, people, understandably, aren't happy about this development and hope that it wont succeed.
In industries other than computing and music/film media distribution, this sort of behaviour tends to be illegal. If you have substantial market control, and you get get caught deliberately crippling the stuff you sell in order to make it as incompatible as possible with your competitors, in order to try to screw them over, then that tends to be treated as an illegal anticompetitive practice that is not in the interests of the consumer. In the computer industry, large corporations like IBM/Microsoft/etc, have tended to get away with it for various reasons, but that doesn't make it a good thing. We all know that the music/entertainment industry is pretty sleazy at times, the cutural norms in large computer corporations have probably slipped a few notches down the ethical scale too, and when it comes ot a combination of the two ... things can get real ugly.
Yep, new users might learn faster if a double-click was associated with a double-beep. :)
That might sound like a rotten idea, but actually it was quite clever: it meant that if someone wanted to manufacture a custom six-button mouse, they could base it on standard two-button hardware, and have the extra buttons communicating via multi-clicks.
Well, you could try pretending to newbies that the "double-click" is a deliberate security feature: "It's difficult on purpose so you don't run programs by accident".The double-click wasn't down to Microsoft, if I remember correctly, the Atari ST OS could recognise double-clicks, triple-clicks, all the way up to a ten-click monstrosity!
Or, show them how to launch programs (initially) by right-clicking and then selecting the default action from the drop-down options menu. That'll give them a visual indicator of what they're doing, and let them gain confidence in what they are doing, and learn what their options are. Then show them the keyboard way, and say that for Very Advanced Users(!) there's also this special hidden "double-click" method.
Microsoft often aren't that great at GUI design, but Apple's decision to standardise on a one-button mouse had to be one of the most perverse design decisions in the history of computing! I think that Apple sometimes concentrate so hard on visual ergonomics that they sometimes forget that efficient user interfaces are about more than eye candy. Eye candy sells, and gives you something to show off to your mates, but ergonomics is about something more. The one-button mouse was such a rotten idea that no other computer manufacturer did it, and even MS couldn't be persuaded to steal it. It was simply a Dumb Idea.
I guess they've stuck with the OBM this long, because to change now would look like an admission that they screwed up. So I guess they'll stick with OBMs until they can think of some way of repackaging a multi-button mouse so that it looks like something new and exciting and Apple-specific. I guess they could try using a modified version of the iPod button interface ... ...
Well, last time I installed Linux it still had its own quirks. I wouldn't wish it on a computer newbie. In fact, I think that even the average Windows user would have trouble deciphering parts of it. The whole thing about there being a choice of desktops, and different programs needing different environmentsI'm sure that they'll get it sorted
If free, these holes can be used to mount Other Things.
So, if you're an experienced PC constructor: Invest in a couple of large sheets of 1.5mm aluminium, work out how your (small) motherboard and components are going to fit to it around the mounting holes, screw some alu U-brackets around the edges, and the second plate onto the back, and ... bingo! ... you've got yourself an all-in-one flatty puter. Perhaps use a weeny Shuttle motherboard and 1U power supply to keep things compact, and use laptop harddrives and an external optical drive.
Plus points:
1) You get to choose which monitor to use.
2) If you make a mess of it and it looks awful, it's hidden behind the pretty screen.
3) You can take it off and attach it to another screen at a later date if you want.
4) You can use the large back surface are for some pretty extravagant passive heatsinking.
If the monitor has a back-panel ventilation grille, the pc-slab could be "stood off" with some spacers threaded onto the four mounting bolts. Experienced constructors could run amok with heatpipe arrays and radiators etc for silent passive cooling.
In fact, maybe Panasonic or Sony should already be making these things as general-purpose linux-based "media centre modules" to be fitted to the back of their HDTVs.
I notice that in the full article it says that they're only trying to restrict the manufacture of "100%" copies, indistinguishable from the originals, made to the same scale and with the same materials. So they aren't trying to claim rights over the Luxor hotel in Vegas, but if you had a spare few million tons of stone handy and some free time, and wanted to carve and assemble your own full-scale duplicate of the Great Pyramid, they might get a bit annoyed.
To be honest, I think this is probably about the artefacts in the Cairo Museum and elsewhere. With modern scholarship, these things can be 3-D scanned and the details held in databases and then refabricated. Computer-milling can carve stone directly or produce moulds for castings. I think they're probably concerned that once everything's been scanned in high res., some bright foreign museum entrepreneur will get the idea of downloading the files and setting up their own competing King Tut exhibition in Chicago or London.
"OS" partition
Not having articles on subjects isn't necessarily something to be proud of!
Britannica doesn't know what "South Park" is. That's understandable, but it also doesn't have entries for obscure little films like ... "Star Wars". It agrees that the film exists, and is notable ... it has an entry for George Lucas and the film appears in the biography pages for lots of individual cast members ... but no page on the actual movie itself. Similarly, searching for "Casablanca" finds a lesser-known record company called Casablanca Records, and the Casablanca Conference, but no entry for the movie with Humphey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Margaret Michell earns a biographical entry for writing "the enormously popular novel Gone with the Wind" .. but the book itself (and the movie) aren't deemed worth an entry.
It seems that Britannica have decided, as a point of policy, that their encyclopedia will focus more on the biographical details of famous people rather than on famous works, presumably because it's easier to come up with a consistent format for famous people, and a way of limiting the number of entries, than if you start listing individual pieces separately.
So Brittanica will often tell you the personal details of an author, but not the details of the work that actually made the author notable in the first place (J.K. Rowling, yes, "Harry Potter", no).
Ironically, this means that the lofty Britannica is actually stuffed full of details that could easily be considered by a deletionist Wikieditor as being obvious trivia and pointless fancruft deserving immediate erasure (knowing about "Gone with the Wind" is arguably culturally important, knowing the author's precise date and place of birth arguably isn't).
So Britannica is missing articles on almost every culturally-important work of art (unless it's a place or building), except as footnotes in the biographies of people involved with them, or who created them.
Britannica has no article on Bach's "Brandenburg" concertos, or van Gogh's "Starry Night". They don't cover the "Watchmen" or "Sandman" graphic novels. They have Bob Kane but no "Batman". Siegel and Shuster, but no "Superman". The Sistine Chapel and its ceiling sneak in as architectural works, but Leonardo's iconic "Vitruvian Man" doesn't get its own entry.
Very few culturally-important pieces break through the Britannica "artwork" barrier. The Mona Lisa sneaks in as "Mona Lisa and other works", and Mickey Mouse is listed (and, strangely enough, "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" has his own Britannica index entry), but contemporaries "Felix the Cat", and "Tom and Jerry" aren't deemed sufficiently important (although Britannica does see fit to include biographies of the "Felix" creator Otto Mesmer, and of Hanna & Barbera).
As for the example on your list of a newspaper, well, Britannica does seem to list the major national US and UK newspapers, but London's "Evening Standard" isn't listed. It also doesn't have an entry for New York's "Village Voice" (it prefers to "biog" Daniel Wolf, one of the founders, instead).
So Britannica's strength (to a journalist) is probably its reliable biographical info, which is probably really useful if you want to say something in print about a living person. It seems to be a decent biographical encyclopedia
On the down-side (for a journalist), its serious coverage of current news subjects is nowhere near as timely as Wiki's. Britannica does now cover Enron and the Enron crash and major players involved, but it doesn't yet list Northern Rock, which recen
I was at an MSDN developers' conference some years back, and BG appeared on a datalink to explain his long-term strategy for the internet. The internet, he said, only had a few years left in it. People wouldn't put up with the continuing anarchy and unreliability for much longer. They and their families wanted proper safe, reliable, certified content, produced by proper media companies. A few years from now, Bill told us, we wouldn't need to worry about this internet thing, because by then everyone would have migrated over to Microsoft Network. MSN was The Future that we should all be planning for.
I guess it was a straightforward calculation: if you can get everyone to use a proprietary system that you own and control, then you can do deals with big corporations like Disney and Time Warner to distribute their branded content direct to customers. You own the market, and make a buck every time someone wants to go online. On the other hand, if an open system catches on and becomes popular, then even if customers are happier, you've lost control, and its more difficult to get the money flowing in your direction.
So MS decided that the road they were going down was proprietary closed software, and they didn't go out of their way to get standardised HTML working on their systems. They'd always wanted businesses to use proprietary formats like MSWord rather than RTF or HTML, and whenever an open format started becoming popular, they'd try to step in to "Microsoft-ify" it.
This isn't an Evil Plan as such, its simply a business calculation.
If MS had realised what was actually going on, and had had a chance to stop it, then the internet as we currently know it might not have happened. They might have tried to find some way to head it off, like lobbying for people not to be allowed to own websites unless they had an expensive license, or for web content to be brought under the regulatory remit of the FCC.
Luckily, the early betas of MSN were so laughably, absurdly, ludicrously bad, that MS didn't have a serious alternative to offer, and they had to content themselves with trying to wrestle control of HTML standardisation instead.
Incomplete support means that the standards committees never manage to get quite as much credit (and power and control) as they'd otherwise have, and that perceived weakness prevents them from being able to publicly dictate to MS how products like IE have to behave. If compliance was considered necessary and the W3C could demand that IE supports the standards (under penalty of having to stop representing IE as a "fully-functional" internet browser), then MS loses the ability to use its control over IE to support any future MS business scheme.
One of the key strategies for maintaining a monopoly is to have control over several different independent sectors (e.g. applications, tools, distribution, content, formats), and whenever one of those areas encounters serious competition, to leverage your control of all the others to see off the threat, in ways that your single-sector competition can't respond to. If a company makes a better browser than yours, and you can't compete, then you eliminate their market and their cashflow by giving yours away with your popular operating system. If your OS is weak, you bundle applications with it, or you ensure that a popular application is only available for that OS. If applications are weak but tools are strong, then you reengineer the tools to work preferentially with the applications' formats, or to encourage third-party designers to write applications that require the office suite to be installed on the end-user's system. It's a constant juggling operation, playing off strengths and weaknesses between different market sectors, but if you get it right, nobody can compete with you. The downside is that you never get to release a truly great product, because the "strong
I chained my PCs and external harddrives together using firewire, XP automatically recognised it as a potential network connection and gave me "LAN over firewire". Whichever PC was switched on first "got" the peripherals, and the second one got to share them over the network. No LAN cables involved, and no hubs. I also included a redundant connection to make a complete circuit, so that even if only one PC was powered up, whichever one it was could still access all the peripherals directly with no replugging. You can't do that with USB!
"Explain to me how does wikipedia suffer if that trash is submitted for deletion by "assholes". Explain to me how users like me are "ruining wikipedia" by voting for those articles to be deleted. Do you really believe that everything that is put into wikipedia smells of roses and has every right to be there?"
//not// because it includes more books that most people would consider interesting, or more books that are popular, or "better-written" books, but because of its inclusivity. It includes more //un//popular, niche, specialised books that most people normally have no interest in at all ... but which suddenly become invaluable if you need to find out something obscure. A great library lets you find everything that you can find at other sources, plus a whole load of things that can't be found anywhere else, and that's what makes it great.
//that// useful because the purges have removed everything that isn't already in their standard reference works anyway. Eventually, even most of the the remaining books on the shelves would fall foul of the "five year" rule, and it wouldn't be worth employing staff to keep it open. You'd end up shutting the thing down altogether.
The problem is that once something is deleted, other users don't have the chance to rummage about in the bins to see if what was lost was valuable. It's gone forever.
A large library (say, The Library of Congress) is considered more valuable than a small one,
The "deletionist" approach to improving Wikipedia, if it was applied to the Library of Congress, would try to "improve" the LoC by sending in teams of editors to strip out all the "unnecessary" books. First they'd destroy all the books that haven't been accessed in the last five years, because obviously people aren't sufficiently interested in them. Then you'd remove all the near-duplicates -- do we really need fifteen separate books on Beethoven? Then they'd strip out all the "trivia", everything on movies, actors, famous people, books, theatre, and so on. Eliminate all the biographies. Anything to do with popular culture after 1920. Delete information on pop music, video games, radio and TV. Maybe leave in some limited material to do with classical music, and perhaps a few modern composers like Stockhausen. Definitely delete the Beatles.
And what you'd end up with is a library that nobody really cares about, and hardly anyone accesses apart from a few academics, and even they no longer find it
Now, market forces might suggest that if such an enterprise destroyed itself in this way, that it wouldn't really matter because something else would spring up to take its place. Unfortunately, by that time, a lot of the original material would have been lost forever. If you delete the least popular books in a "world" library, a lot of that information won't exist anywhere else. Some of the people who donated archive material the first time round will never do it again, because they no longer have the source material, or the time, or because they have since died, or because they feel betrayed by what happened the first time. They tried donating once, it didn't work, they consider it a bad experience, and they won't do it again. When a monolithic system crashes, the idea itself is damaged, not just the implementation.
So when information is deleted from Wikipedia, it isn't necessarily only removed from Wikipedia's databases, the effort that went into generating that content may never be repeated, and some of that information may never be available to any future Wikipedia-like enterprises. Wiki is coasting on that first rush of enthusiasm and idealism, and has been burning it like fuel to expand its listings at an incredible rate. If it squanders that resource, the same degree of excitement and motivation may not be available to future projects trying to start again from scratch if the people lurking behind Wiki screw things up.
IMO, we need Wiki to take a stand one way or the other on this. If it