>People's understanding of statistics and numerical analysis is woefully inadequate.
Not all of us. I also specifically set the "previous decade" NOT the "last ten years" - meaning the years from 2000 to 2010. So the current heatwave isn't even included in that measurement. That measurement is the hottest on record (though the current year may end up beating the figures - I admit don't know if it does/will). It is also true that over that decade there WAS a warming trend, it wasn't non-existent as you (and the deniers) claim, though it wasn't nearly as high as most proponents believe.
>Sure, if you're advocating the use of open source software vs. commercial alternatives, you might just be able to make a strong case that 'You get what you pay for!" is a lie.
It's an outright lie in many (if not most) instances and every culture prior to present-day has known this. I always find you can learn a lot of how past generations thought from etymology. Today the word "amateur" is generally said with scorn, because only "professional" is capable of producing quality - but that is not a true reflection of reality. The latin root of "amateur" is "amo" - meaning love. He who does it because he loves to do it. In fact - the truth is the exact opposite: the people who do something because they love doing it will usually provide better quality work than those who it to get paid. Even if the amateur is making money doing it, the fact that he is not doing it IN ORDER to make money, but because he loves doing it means he'll put in more effort, he'll have gone above and beyond requirements and educated himself further.
You get what you pay for implies that quality is measured in price - but this is outright false. The measurement of value can in fact be stated as quality / price. That suggests the exact opposite to be true in ANY economics: that you get more quality bang for your buck if you pay less, and the quality of that which is free is nearly infinite.
>It stopped several hundred years ago, over the course of a single lifetime, and caused the Little Ice Age in Europe
Goes one theory. The little ice age also happened to start the year after Krakatoa and a more plausible theory is that dust-coverage from the volcano reached Europe the next year and greatly reduced solar infiltration leading to the little ice age. It's not several hundred years ago either (unless we're talking about different events with the same name...), it was only about 2 centuries ago, in fact while holed up against the cold in Switzerland, Mary Shelley wrote the first draft of Frankenstein.
>"Troll"??? This is EXACTLY the same argument used by AGW proponents, when they are confronted with the fact that Country X had a colder-than-normal winter last year: "That's not climate, it's weather."
No it's not, the two arguments aren't even superficially similar though one is designed to try and look as if it is the other one - it's a bad make-up job that you fell for hook-line-and-sinker. AGW proponents (in particular scientists) look at global averages, and the expected outcomes of that. They expect weather in some areas to change because of average warming in ways that may not be alike- including that global warming can CAUSE some places to have unusually cold weather. Let me try and make this simple. If you have a clay fire oven, it's well known that there are "cold spots" in the oven where the movement of warm air actually creates convection holes that are significantly colder than the rest of the oven (any Pizza chef will have seen that for himself), in some cases those spots will actually be colder than the ambient room temperature (since the convection actually sucks the hot air from them) by a small degree (this is an extreme case for a pizza oven but on the scale of a planet it's not even slightly extreme but expected). Now before you light the fire - the temperature is relatively uniform in the oven, no hot or cold spots. But as the fire warms up the cold spots form. The increase in the average temperature of the air in the oven actually CAUSES some parts to drop in temperature. Yes, this is a terrible analogy and the real stuff we're talking about is massively more complex but the point of the analogy is merely this: most "colder than average" reports actually PROVES an increase in average warming. They are evidence that AGW is happening, not that it isn't.
>And by the way: they have NOT "all" been pointing in the same direction. Here, for example, we've had close to record cool Springs and early Summers for the last two years. In fact most of last summer was fairly cool, as well.
Those actually DO point in the same direction. Any climatologist will tell you that an increase in the average temperature of the planet will cause some places to actually become colder (at least in the short term). This is not all that surprising, the increased temperature in most places causes changes in various weather patterns, in some cases it could cause polar cold fronts to move into areas they previously didn't often reach (pushed there by warmer air in regions they used to) - and so cool those places down (just one of many examples). Warmer climate over-all means more rain, which in some areas (usually not the same ones where the warmth was) would mean more cloud coverage. You could see colder temperatures in some places because of more rain - and ultimately flooding - exactly because of the over-all increase.
That's not an argument in the debate either way. Climate is about the AVERAGE over many measurements in many places, and that average is indeed going up.
>Remember: approximately the last 10 years have NOT been increasing significantly in temperature.
False. Most AGW-deniers claim that but they are wrong- there was heating over the past ten years and the past decade was the hottest in recorded history. It is also true that most AGW-proponents over-estimate the DEGREE of the heating in the past decade. Most believe an average of 5 Degrees Celcius per year, the actual figure is more like 0.5 C per annum. That's still huge by climatologists standards though.
>. But it would take a pretty vivid imagination of think of a eco doom worse than socialism, especially since we would have a robust economy to pay for mitigation or geoengineering.
Really now ? Too bad that the vast majority of the damage predicted is also predicted to hit the poorest places on earth. Ironically the places that have contributed to the least to the cause of the problem will suffer the worst of it's effects.
So where the money will be needed, they don't and probably won't, have robust economies to pay for anything with. Which means the rich world which caused the problem in the first place will have to foot the bill.
But I don't think the anti-AGW crowd has any intention of doing so if they turn out to be wrong, indeed I believe they are relying on it. "After all, if we ARE wrong - it won't really be OUR problem anyway, who cares if a bunch of African Niggers get drowned".
Could it be because the very definition of a conservative is "one who clings to existing ideas and ways of doing things" ?
Now the degree of that is definitely up for debate, because many "conservatives" today are actually pushing for radical changes to the system the likes of which has never existed (or at least- not been implemented in centuries) but personally I see those merely as following the logical conclusions of the lines of thinking they had been embracing since their great grandparent's time and never questioned.
Another aspect may well be that such a large contingent (perhaps the entirety) of the religious right are politically conservative. They must skew the average for conservative voters simply because religion actively encourages cognitive dissonance - if you habitually do so, it's only to be expected that you'll end up doing so in other spheres of life as well. Perhaps all this data really tells us is that the stereotype of the religious right being badly educated may not be as true as we generally hold - but smart, educated religious people often still cling to the church-taught way of believing authoritive sources over empirical ones.
You're right, sorry my Macbeth studies were almost 14 years ago now, so I obviously remembered a detail wrong. That Shakespeare did include bits to flatter the English monarch in most of his plays and were quite willing to rewrite history to do so is pretty much accepted though.
>Anyway, lots of English language literature uses anachronistic speech patterns,
Very true, but what I said about middle-English playwrights being DELIBERATELY anachronistic and the history that led to it is something any drama major will be able to tell you, and somewhat unrelated to your statement.
>as a lot of English dialects use accents, words, and speech patterns that other areas consider anachronistic, like North Carolina's triple and quadruple negatives indicating extreme negativity rather than an obscure positive.
There's many such things around the world. My native language is derived from Dutch - but in my native tongue ONLY a double negative is accepted. The single negative is considered gramatically incorrect, all negatives come in two parts. Most linguists believe we inherited the concept of a double language from the French - but the particular way we do it may well be unique.
In Afrikaans the structure to say I can't kick a ball would end up word for word as: I cannot kick the ball not. We can typically tell somebody whose native tongue is Dutch but who learned Afrikaans very quickly - they pronounce and speak the language well very fast (because the vocabulary is so alike) but they always forget the second "not" at the end of a negative.
It makes perfect sense if you realize that the Catholics weren't the only people who comitted atrocities in those wars. The vast majority of Huguenots fled to South Africa, not England btw.
>You do know that Henry VIII created the Anglican church in opposition to Catholicism? 1) False - Henry VIII created the Anglican church because he wanted a Catholic church that deemed the monarch a higher authority than the pope. Even today the Anglican church is the most similar to the catholic church of all protestant churches. 2) The reference isn't to the REASON for their creation anyway but to the METHOD of their establishment. Henry didn't just found a competing Church - he effectively took over administration of the existing Catholic church - and to secure that position changed it's name and then banished the Catholic faith (despite having changed little EXCEPT the leadership and name). For a long time after that genuine Catholics in England were driven underground, persecuted and tortured - their fight for religious freedom had many interesting chapters before it ended - among them the Guy Fawkes conspiracy (Fawkes was a catholic revolutionary).
I wasn't talking about WHY Henry established the Catholic church (your wrong about it anyway - and the reason he wanted to be in charge of the church was about the shallowest you can imagine: because he didn't want the pope to be able to deny him a divorce), I was talking about what the Anglicans DID in the years after that.
While the Catholics were committing atrocities in some countries (The Spanish Inquisition in the Netherlands, The French suppression of the Huguenots) etc. - make no mistake, the protestants were JUST as bad in many places where they were in charge. In Iceland the protestants used to force nuns and priests to copulate at gunpoint !
>Actually that's pretty much a myth. The saggy-boobs on African woman is actually caused by malnutrition. There's no observable sagging in healthy women.
Mind you, it says a LOT about the perception of Africa for outsiders, that most of the images you've ever seen of our women were of the ones who are malnourished. Those make the news. Your typical Africa city-girl sure doesn't, her rural cousin who is required by custom to remain topless until her wedding day doesn't either. In the vast majority of healthy African woman - I have never seen the kind of sagging that I've seen on CNN and Discovery channel however.
>I guess that's why african women who never wear bras have their breasts almost touching their vaginas.
Actually that's pretty much a myth. The saggy-boobs on African woman is actually caused by malnutrition. There's no observable sagging in healthy women. I actually LIVE in Africa, I see African tits every day of my life.
>The only question is if they'd be admissible as evidence from a source like Wayback instead of the direct site itself.
I don't see a question there, you can never actually VIEW an original website unless you physically at the server looking at the source files. Any browser creates a copy (downloading the page) and displays that copy. All web pages are already indirectly viewed.
So either ALL web-based content is hearsay evidence (which is clearly NOT the current position of the courts) or archives should be admissible as evidence.
That post had such potential... if only you knew history. The Huguenots fled persecution (In fact I'm of Huguenot Descent - that's my own family history you're talking about) - you basically said the equivalent of "Beware the Grammar Jews" when you meant to say Nazis.
Since "Grammar Catholics" has no time-reference, I suppose a good version could be "Beware the Henry VIII Grammar Anglicans" instead ?
>Your comment reveals your still a youth as more senior slashdotters are well aware of the long term effects of gravity on the female breast, they are not so perky any more.
There have been several studies that suggested the opposite. The theory being that since Breasts contain almost no muscle, what holds them up is the ligaments in the chest. The bra moves the pressure to the shoulder muscles, which makes those ligaments weaken - so in fact wearing bras INCREASE sagging.
But in honesty - so was Shakespeare's and indeed all medieval and renaissance playwrights. The anachronisms have their origins in the circle-plays which were one of the few forms of theater that were allowed in the middle-ages under catholic rule. Peasants used to do Easter Passions with each craft guild depicting one part of the story - and they used to set the story in their own familiar circumstances. The Shepherd's circle for example is in medieval English and describes things from a contemporary rather than ancient shepherd's point of view.
These anachronisms were probably unintentional at the start but became traditional over the years.
By Renaissance times the tradition was well established and all playwrights gleefully used anachronisms all the time. Sometimes with clever plot points to sneak them in. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus uses magic to introduce time-travel in a plot which left a clear imprint on present-day Doctor Who - and so hides it's massive anachronisms (a medieval character meeting Helen of Troy) behind a clever plot - but even that wasn't always done, when the anachronisms were more subtle they were usually just left unexplained. So for example, in Macbeth, Duncan's two sons spend time at the court of Edward the Great, even though Macbeth is set almost two centuries before Edward the Great was even BORN (but Edward was a direct ancestor to Queen Elizabeth - still reigning monarch when Macbeth was written), the passage is a clear case of puckering up to the royal rectum rather than attempting to be historically accurate or believable. So one could argue that any attempt to write in Shakespearean-inspired middle-English would be MORE authentic if it's filled with anachronisms since Shakespeare himself loved anachronisms. Tom Stoppard (perhaps the greatest Shakespeare-expert in contemporary theater, also the script-writer for Shakespeare in Love) played on this beautifully when he wrote "Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" - a play which posits what would happen if the two messengers that leave the court of Hamlet to visit England would arrive in the England of King Lear.
>The point wasn't anywhere near whether Apple was being an asshole about it - yes, they were - the whole lawsuit has got way out of hand, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't correct false statements.
There is a very duplicitous question mark about whether you OUGHT to be able to get a design patent if one can successfully argue that the chosen design is the ONLY logical design for a given task. Form following function severely limits the design changes that are even POSSIBLE in many cases.
30 Years ago when the Star Trek:TNG designers proposed a hand-held computing tablet concept, the design they settled on was a rectangle with rounded corners, and a large, flat touch-display.
That's because it's ONLY functional form that such a device CAN take. You shouldn't BE able to patent that because the design is determined by human biology and is not creative or unique (more importantly SHOULD not be unique because if it IS unique then that prevents ALL competition in the entire INDUSTRY).
There are many possibilities to subtly alter the design of a car so it's still a functional car - yet has decent wind resistance etc. There are NO other designs that a tablet-pc CAN be than the one used by er... ALL of them - ever, even the ones in science fiction that predated the real thing.
>judge should have really shown some balls. force micros^H I mean apple to include in its next software update, a message window that pops up, says this stuff, makes the user type 'yes, I know about apple' and then the popup disappears and that's that.
Wouldn't work, when have you ever seen a user actually READ a dialog box before clicking OK ? In this case they would only read the last line (enough to close the dialogue).
Slashdot Mirror
>People's understanding of statistics and numerical analysis is woefully inadequate.
Not all of us. I also specifically set the "previous decade" NOT the "last ten years" - meaning the years from 2000 to 2010. So the current heatwave isn't even included in that measurement. That measurement is the hottest on record (though the current year may end up beating the figures - I admit don't know if it does/will). It is also true that over that decade there WAS a warming trend, it wasn't non-existent as you (and the deniers) claim, though it wasn't nearly as high as most proponents believe.
Could be, I'm no expert, I was pretty much quoting a /. headline a few days ago - I haven't personally checked it's accuracy.
The really interesting question is: how much is concerning, and at which point do we risk a self-sustaining and accelerating feedback loop ?
>Sure, if you're advocating the use of open source software vs. commercial alternatives, you might just be able to make a strong case that 'You get what you pay for!" is a lie.
It's an outright lie in many (if not most) instances and every culture prior to present-day has known this. I always find you can learn a lot of how past generations thought from etymology.
Today the word "amateur" is generally said with scorn, because only "professional" is capable of producing quality - but that is not a true reflection of reality. The latin root of "amateur" is "amo" - meaning love. He who does it because he loves to do it.
In fact - the truth is the exact opposite: the people who do something because they love doing it will usually provide better quality work than those who it to get paid. Even if the amateur is making money doing it, the fact that he is not doing it IN ORDER to make money, but because he loves doing it means he'll put in more effort, he'll have gone above and beyond requirements and educated himself further.
You get what you pay for implies that quality is measured in price - but this is outright false. The measurement of value can in fact be stated as quality / price. That suggests the exact opposite to be true in ANY economics: that you get more quality bang for your buck if you pay less, and the quality of that which is free is nearly infinite.
Sorry, I hadn't had coffee yet, I meant to write 5 Degrees over the WHOLE decade, as opposed to 0.5 over the whole decade.
>I think you're mixing up events.
That's possible, I even stated the possibility in my post, since I couldn't be arsed to look it up :P
You forgot:
2.5 Along with a massive list of rules on what you think they should be allowed to do with the product they bought.
>It stopped several hundred years ago, over the course of a single lifetime, and caused the Little Ice Age in Europe
Goes one theory. The little ice age also happened to start the year after Krakatoa and a more plausible theory is that dust-coverage from the volcano reached Europe the next year and greatly reduced solar infiltration leading to the little ice age.
It's not several hundred years ago either (unless we're talking about different events with the same name...), it was only about 2 centuries ago, in fact while holed up against the cold in Switzerland, Mary Shelley wrote the first draft of Frankenstein.
>"Troll"??? This is EXACTLY the same argument used by AGW proponents, when they are confronted with the fact that Country X had a colder-than-normal winter last year: "That's not climate, it's weather."
No it's not, the two arguments aren't even superficially similar though one is designed to try and look as if it is the other one - it's a bad make-up job that you fell for hook-line-and-sinker.
AGW proponents (in particular scientists) look at global averages, and the expected outcomes of that. They expect weather in some areas to change because of average warming in ways that may not be alike- including that global warming can CAUSE some places to have unusually cold weather.
Let me try and make this simple. If you have a clay fire oven, it's well known that there are "cold spots" in the oven where the movement of warm air actually creates convection holes that are significantly colder than the rest of the oven (any Pizza chef will have seen that for himself), in some cases those spots will actually be colder than the ambient room temperature (since the convection actually sucks the hot air from them) by a small degree (this is an extreme case for a pizza oven but on the scale of a planet it's not even slightly extreme but expected).
Now before you light the fire - the temperature is relatively uniform in the oven, no hot or cold spots. But as the fire warms up the cold spots form. The increase in the average temperature of the air in the oven actually CAUSES some parts to drop in temperature.
Yes, this is a terrible analogy and the real stuff we're talking about is massively more complex but the point of the analogy is merely this: most "colder than average" reports actually PROVES an increase in average warming. They are evidence that AGW is happening, not that it isn't.
>And by the way: they have NOT "all" been pointing in the same direction. Here, for example, we've had close to record cool Springs and early Summers for the last two years. In fact most of last summer was fairly cool, as well.
Those actually DO point in the same direction. Any climatologist will tell you that an increase in the average temperature of the planet will cause some places to actually become colder (at least in the short term). This is not all that surprising, the increased temperature in most places causes changes in various weather patterns, in some cases it could cause polar cold fronts to move into areas they previously didn't often reach (pushed there by warmer air in regions they used to) - and so cool those places down (just one of many examples).
Warmer climate over-all means more rain, which in some areas (usually not the same ones where the warmth was) would mean more cloud coverage. You could see colder temperatures in some places because of more rain - and ultimately flooding - exactly because of the over-all increase.
That's not an argument in the debate either way. Climate is about the AVERAGE over many measurements in many places, and that average is indeed going up.
>Remember: approximately the last 10 years have NOT been increasing significantly in temperature.
False. Most AGW-deniers claim that but they are wrong- there was heating over the past ten years and the past decade was the hottest in recorded history. It is also true that most AGW-proponents over-estimate the DEGREE of the heating in the past decade. Most believe an average of 5 Degrees Celcius per year, the actual figure is more like 0.5 C per annum.
That's still huge by climatologists standards though.
>. But it would take a pretty vivid imagination of think of a eco doom worse than socialism, especially since we would have a robust economy to pay for mitigation or geoengineering.
Really now ? Too bad that the vast majority of the damage predicted is also predicted to hit the poorest places on earth. Ironically the places that have contributed to the least to the cause of the problem will suffer the worst of it's effects.
So where the money will be needed, they don't and probably won't, have robust economies to pay for anything with. Which means the rich world which caused the problem in the first place will have to foot the bill.
But I don't think the anti-AGW crowd has any intention of doing so if they turn out to be wrong, indeed I believe they are relying on it. "After all, if we ARE wrong - it won't really be OUR problem anyway, who cares if a bunch of African Niggers get drowned".
Could it be because the very definition of a conservative is "one who clings to existing ideas and ways of doing things" ?
Now the degree of that is definitely up for debate, because many "conservatives" today are actually pushing for radical changes to the system the likes of which has never existed (or at least- not been implemented in centuries) but personally I see those merely as following the logical conclusions of the lines of thinking they had been embracing since their great grandparent's time and never questioned.
Another aspect may well be that such a large contingent (perhaps the entirety) of the religious right are politically conservative. They must skew the average for conservative voters simply because religion actively encourages cognitive dissonance - if you habitually do so, it's only to be expected that you'll end up doing so in other spheres of life as well.
Perhaps all this data really tells us is that the stereotype of the religious right being badly educated may not be as true as we generally hold - but smart, educated religious people often still cling to the church-taught way of believing authoritive sources over empirical ones.
>Wrong Edward.
You're right, sorry my Macbeth studies were almost 14 years ago now, so I obviously remembered a detail wrong. That Shakespeare did include bits to flatter the English monarch in most of his plays and were quite willing to rewrite history to do so is pretty much accepted though.
>Anyway, lots of English language literature uses anachronistic speech patterns,
Very true, but what I said about middle-English playwrights being DELIBERATELY anachronistic and the history that led to it is something any drama major will be able to tell you, and somewhat unrelated to your statement.
>as a lot of English dialects use accents, words, and speech patterns that other areas consider anachronistic, like North Carolina's triple and quadruple negatives indicating extreme negativity rather than an obscure positive.
There's many such things around the world. My native language is derived from Dutch - but in my native tongue ONLY a double negative is accepted. The single negative is considered gramatically incorrect, all negatives come in two parts.
Most linguists believe we inherited the concept of a double language from the French - but the particular way we do it may well be unique.
In Afrikaans the structure to say I can't kick a ball would end up word for word as: I cannot kick the ball not. We can typically tell somebody whose native tongue is Dutch but who learned Afrikaans very quickly - they pronounce and speak the language well very fast (because the vocabulary is so alike) but they always forget the second "not" at the end of a negative.
Apple Rodeo Clowdscape Brain Horrible Homunculus Arousing Sixty Icicle
Sadly - songs you hate tend to stick in your memory far too well.
How many people can quote "call me maybe" or Justin Bieber's baby.
Now how many of them actually LIKE those songs ?
It makes perfect sense if you realize that the Catholics weren't the only people who comitted atrocities in those wars.
The vast majority of Huguenots fled to South Africa, not England btw.
>You do know that Henry VIII created the Anglican church in opposition to Catholicism?
1) False - Henry VIII created the Anglican church because he wanted a Catholic church that deemed the monarch a higher authority than the pope.
Even today the Anglican church is the most similar to the catholic church of all protestant churches.
2) The reference isn't to the REASON for their creation anyway but to the METHOD of their establishment. Henry didn't just found a competing Church - he effectively took over administration of the existing Catholic church - and to secure that position changed it's name and then banished the Catholic faith (despite having changed little EXCEPT the leadership and name). For a long time after that genuine Catholics in England were driven underground, persecuted and tortured - their fight for religious freedom had many interesting chapters before it ended - among them the Guy Fawkes conspiracy (Fawkes was a catholic revolutionary).
I wasn't talking about WHY Henry established the Catholic church (your wrong about it anyway - and the reason he wanted to be in charge of the church was about the shallowest you can imagine: because he didn't want the pope to be able to deny him a divorce), I was talking about what the Anglicans DID in the years after that.
While the Catholics were committing atrocities in some countries (The Spanish Inquisition in the Netherlands, The French suppression of the Huguenots) etc. - make no mistake, the protestants were JUST as bad in many places where they were in charge. In Iceland the protestants used to force nuns and priests to copulate at gunpoint !
>Actually that's pretty much a myth. The saggy-boobs on African woman is actually caused by malnutrition. There's no observable sagging in healthy women.
Mind you, it says a LOT about the perception of Africa for outsiders, that most of the images you've ever seen of our women were of the ones who are malnourished. Those make the news.
Your typical Africa city-girl sure doesn't, her rural cousin who is required by custom to remain topless until her wedding day doesn't either. In the vast majority of healthy African woman - I have never seen the kind of sagging that I've seen on CNN and Discovery channel however.
>I guess that's why african women who never wear bras have their breasts almost touching their vaginas.
Actually that's pretty much a myth. The saggy-boobs on African woman is actually caused by malnutrition. There's no observable sagging in healthy women.
I actually LIVE in Africa, I see African tits every day of my life.
Forsooth, though hast caught me. I am a time traveller from the long distant past of slashdot circa 1999.
>The only question is if they'd be admissible as evidence from a source like Wayback instead of the direct site itself.
I don't see a question there, you can never actually VIEW an original website unless you physically at the server looking at the source files. Any browser creates a copy (downloading the page) and displays that copy. All web pages are already indirectly viewed.
So either ALL web-based content is hearsay evidence (which is clearly NOT the current position of the courts) or archives should be admissible as evidence.
>Beware of the Grammar Huguenots.
That post had such potential... if only you knew history. The Huguenots fled persecution (In fact I'm of Huguenot Descent - that's my own family history you're talking about) - you basically said the equivalent of "Beware the Grammar Jews" when you meant to say Nazis.
Since "Grammar Catholics" has no time-reference, I suppose a good version could be "Beware the Henry VIII Grammar Anglicans" instead ?
>Your comment reveals your still a youth as more senior slashdotters are well aware of the long term effects of gravity on the female breast, they are not so perky any more.
There have been several studies that suggested the opposite. The theory being that since Breasts contain almost no muscle, what holds them up is the ligaments in the chest. The bra moves the pressure to the shoulder muscles, which makes those ligaments weaken - so in fact wearing bras INCREASE sagging.
But in honesty - so was Shakespeare's and indeed all medieval and renaissance playwrights. The anachronisms have their origins in the circle-plays which were one of the few forms of theater that were allowed in the middle-ages under catholic rule. Peasants used to do Easter Passions with each craft guild depicting one part of the story - and they used to set the story in their own familiar circumstances. The Shepherd's circle for example is in medieval English and describes things from a contemporary rather than ancient shepherd's point of view.
These anachronisms were probably unintentional at the start but became traditional over the years.
By Renaissance times the tradition was well established and all playwrights gleefully used anachronisms all the time. Sometimes with clever plot points to sneak them in. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus uses magic to introduce time-travel in a plot which left a clear imprint on present-day Doctor Who - and so hides it's massive anachronisms (a medieval character meeting Helen of Troy) behind a clever plot - but even that wasn't always done, when the anachronisms were more subtle they were usually just left unexplained. So for example, in Macbeth, Duncan's two sons spend time at the court of Edward the Great, even though Macbeth is set almost two centuries before Edward the Great was even BORN (but Edward was a direct ancestor to Queen Elizabeth - still reigning monarch when Macbeth was written), the passage is a clear case of puckering up to the royal rectum rather than attempting to be historically accurate or believable.
So one could argue that any attempt to write in Shakespearean-inspired middle-English would be MORE authentic if it's filled with anachronisms since Shakespeare himself loved anachronisms.
Tom Stoppard (perhaps the greatest Shakespeare-expert in contemporary theater, also the script-writer for Shakespeare in Love) played on this beautifully when he wrote "Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" - a play which posits what would happen if the two messengers that leave the court of Hamlet to visit England would arrive in the England of King Lear.
>The point wasn't anywhere near whether Apple was being an asshole about it - yes, they were - the whole lawsuit has got way out of hand, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't correct false statements.
There is a very duplicitous question mark about whether you OUGHT to be able to get a design patent if one can successfully argue that the chosen design is the ONLY logical design for a given task.
Form following function severely limits the design changes that are even POSSIBLE in many cases.
30 Years ago when the Star Trek:TNG designers proposed a hand-held computing tablet concept, the design they settled on was a rectangle with rounded corners, and a large, flat touch-display.
That's because it's ONLY functional form that such a device CAN take.
You shouldn't BE able to patent that because the design is determined by human biology and is not creative or unique (more importantly SHOULD not be unique because if it IS unique then that prevents ALL competition in the entire INDUSTRY).
There are many possibilities to subtly alter the design of a car so it's still a functional car - yet has decent wind resistance etc. There are NO other designs that a tablet-pc CAN be than the one used by er... ALL of them - ever, even the ones in science fiction that predated the real thing.
>judge should have really shown some balls. force micros^H I mean apple to include in its next software update, a message window that pops up, says this stuff, makes the user type 'yes, I know about apple' and then the popup disappears and that's that.
Wouldn't work, when have you ever seen a user actually READ a dialog box before clicking OK ? In this case they would only read the last line (enough to close the dialogue).