I've installed it several times, likewise various linux distros. I'd say the share of installation problems is about equal.
Bah... it depends on what you mean by "installation problems." I've been using Linux on and off for over a decade. This is BS. My primary machine is Linux these days and has been for a few years, and I've been through a number of different distros on a number of different machines. Even on really, really common, standard hardware, I've had completely bizarre problems emerge during installation. Sure, sometimes I've had weird Windows problems too, but those usually only affect some minor weird setting; on Linux, almost every installation I've tried ends up with some major disruption in basic desktop functionality.
If you're running a server, probably the installation problems are about equal. If you're a typical desktop user, they definitely are not, and the solutions needed to fix them are much more complex.
Typical Windows install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui, (3) realize that many things were detected correctly, (4) do Google search and download drivers, (5) now 99% of system usually works for basic desktop functionality (unless you're using some truly weird hardware)
Greatest difficulty encountered? Usually using Google to find drivers.
Typical Linux install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui in wrong resolution or sometimes get kicked to command line, (3) spend time fixing monitor detection, video drivers, etc., perhaps involving recompiling kernel if you're unlucky, (4) hopefully get to reasonably working gui, (5) start trying to get other hardware working, (6) after some basic troubleshooting fails, spend hours searching in linux forums for someone with a similar configuration, (7) try out 2 or 3 solutions to the bugs you're encountering until you get the hardware to work for every hardware item that doesn't work, (8) even after everything seems to work, deal with intermittent sound problems, codec issues when playing various media types, problems with plugins to view the most common internet sites, etc., and (9) eventually give up after a weekend with a system that has about 75% functionality of what the average desktop user wants (browsing, email, basic multimedia playing, etc.).
Common difficulties encountered: having to deal with a CLI, having to solve weird problems caused by interactions between hardware and OS manually rather than by simply downloading a driver, settling for odd multimedia behavior and/or lack of basic functionality on some common websites, etc.
Sure, I have enough experience myself that I can sort through these problems relatively quickly, perhaps sometimes as quickly as the average Windows user could find drivers and download them. I don't think I'm the average desktop user. But I would never make the claim the Linux installations are less problematic or equivalently problematic for average desktop users than Windows installs... despite what many people like to claim on Slashdot.
You can bitch about having to download drivers for Windows installs as much as you want, but it's not like troubleshooting Linux installs. And 99% of the time I've had such issues in Windows, the drivers work, at least for the basic functions most people want. Usually solving such a problem takes 5 minutes. In Linux, similar problems often take me a couple hours of research and fiddling if it's something I haven't seen before.
I've probably spent almost equal time using Linux and Windows over the years, but I think I've spent at least 20 times as much time troubleshooting Linux as I have troubleshooting Windows. Perhaps I'm incredibly unlucky, but I find that Linux desktop installs tend to be broken in ways that are less easy to fix. Complicated server installs are a different story... but that's not what the GP was talking about.
In fact, many historical facts are supported by records that have no particular bias, viewpoint, or historical purpose:
Really? Like what?
census records,
Ah yes, the ones that only recorded the names of male property owners for the first 50 years of the US? Or that forgot slaves, native Americans, etc. for much longer? And what we know depends on the year -- some census records have dates of marriage, some don't; some have birth months, others have only the year; some have occupation in greater detail than others; some have information on property values and estate values; some don't. And that's just variation among 19th-century records.
birth/death records,
Which ones? Which births were recorded and how? Were these only church records, country records, or was there a state database? What other information was recorded?
business records.
Not sure what you mean by this. If you believe everything you see in accounting records (even old ones), I'm not sure what you think of various high-profile scandals in business these days. What gets recorded is what the business wants some particular audience to know.
Many involve no human record keeping at all, they are based on archaeological finds.
Why do digs occur in certain places and not others? Why do some digs get funding and not others? What tools are available for the archaeologist to analyze the data, and how do these change over time?
Many other historical facts have been documented by the perpetrators of crimes themselves.
They have been documented, but autobiographical interpretations aren't necessarily the best source for historical fact.
Look -- I'm not using "biased" in the bigoted or intentional sense. I'm saying that we all have our perspective, our reasons for being interested in certain things, writing certain things down, researching certain things, etc.
But the historical facts and events themselves don't change.
You're half-right: historical events don't change. What we consider to be a "fact" about those events, however, often does.
Squatters on controversial pages will remove anything you post on "their" turf within hours, and sometimes minutes, of your changes or additions. They simply won't tolerate facts that contradict their POV.
Yes, and even on pages that are not high-profile "controversial" pages, you often see the same sorts of edit wars emerge when they are tangentially related to something more controversial or politically/socially charged. For such things, even topics that have a well-accepted scholarly interpretation can be altered by a large enough internet community who police these sites.
Or another example is topics that have a long history on Wikipedia but have developed an insular community that has a specific POV. For example, while math and science pages got built up pretty quickly a few years ago with a relatively large base of editors, many of them reasonably competent people who understood what was going on, lots of pages related to the arts, humanities, etc. had only a few editors and admins that established a domain. Often these people are technologically-savvy people who work on the fringes of the world they write about. As the Wikipedia movement grew a few years back, scholars and other knowledgeable people in such fields found themselves having to confront an established hierarchy of editors who were used to managing things by themselves for years.
Basically, to this day, while I trust Wikipedia to give relatively good basic information on math and science topics, anything you read about history, literature, the humanities, arts, etc. should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Chances are that unless it's a simple fact like who George Washington's parents were, the interpretation and scholarship is error-prone and about 50 to 75 years out-of-date.
In sum, turf wars are happening all over Wikipedia... not just on controversial subjects. In fact, it's probably more likely to see domineering editors and frivolous reverts on pages that no one cares about.
While Amazon handled their end badly, I still pull for them in the battle. Macmillan is basically trying to kill e-books with the price point they are forcing on the market.
And isn't that Macmillan's choice? If consumers want e-books, and Macmillan tries to kill them, people won't buy Macmillan's books. Authors and readers will seek out books from other publishers, if the e-book market grows. It's their choice as a publisher about how to run their own business, even if you (or Amazon) doesn't like it.
Amazon at least realizes that it makes no sense to have an e-book go for the same price as a physical book (if we could only get them to remove the DRM now).
What Amazon thinks makes "no sense" may not be what the publisher thinks makes "no sense" or what you think makes "no sense." All of these parties get to choose their strategies in a free marketplace. But when one company starts to have a monopolistic control over one segment of the marketplace, and tries to force other companies to change their policies to suit its business model, the marketplace is no longer free. That's the larger problem. I don't think we're quite there with Amazon yet, but the potential for abuse is high.
Book's most often require editing, fact checking, layout, artwork - even hiring a set of on the cheap professionals this will cost thousands.
Or you can go down to your local college and higher a couple people for next to nothing and end up with the same quality.
It's sad, but unfortunately the trend seems to indicate that you're right. Many publishers used to do multiple levels of editing, detailed proofreading, etc. The process in some sense required it, because you had to move from a typescript page (or even handwritten) by an author to a typeset page, and in the process, things had to be checked. Nowadays, even large publishers have cut out many stages, and some appear to do little more than dump the text from a computer file into a layout app, do 15 minutes of design, and get ready to publish. If there were errors, the author has to catch them. And I've seen a number of cases where proofs don't seem to matter -- things that an author corrects in proofs go uncorrected in the final copy, because it's too much of a pain to go through those corrections in detail and make changes in a format that is often different from the application the author is using (or the one that is being used to track changes).
Designing, typesetting, and making a book used to be so much more labor-intensive and time-consuming in the past. Yet I look at such books published decades ago all the time, and generally the quality is quite high. Why is it, then, that I see more poorly-designed books these days with typographical errors on every page?
I don't use Abiword on a regular basis, but if I remember correctly, Abiword was one of the first word processors to support DOCX when MS Office 2007 came out. I couldn't open things in OpenOffice, so I had to use Abiword because of its better compatibility with MS Office. I don't use it on a regular basis, but I've often seen DOC files look better (i.e., closer to the original) when opened in Abiword than in OpenOffice.
As for a comparison to Google Docs, it really depends on what features you want. Most of the formatting tends to be preserved pretty well in Abiword in my experience, while there are some features that Google Docs just doesn't have. For other features, it may be the reverse, but usually I've found Google Docs to screw up formatting more for basic things.
That said, I don't use Abiword because it's buggy and awful, so that's a better reason to ignore it rather than MS Office compatibility.
The "tiny form factor" becomes a deal breaker as you grow older.
Depends. What's part of your body starts to go -- your eyes or your back? If the latter, perhaps carrying around 2 lbs. instead of 5-7 lbs. all the time in your bag might be something to look into.
The keyboard awkward and uncomfortable to use.
I agree that used to be the case. I bought an expensive ultraportable a few years back which had an 80% keyboard that was annoying, but usable. Smaller keyboards just hurt my hands. Nowadays, netbooks often have a keyboard that is 90% full-size or larger... not annoying at all. I haven't measured, but they feel like the keyboard on the laptop I had in the mid to late 90s, which was a rather popular model.
The display hard to read.
Why? If you have eyesight problems and can't focus on small things, I agree that this device is not for you. If you're complaining that the screens are dark or not sharp enough or something -- well, look at the netbooks today. Even the cheap ones blow the crap out of the screen on my laptop from 5 years ago that cost 6 times as much.
The netbook strikes me as being a second or third purchase - and not the first choice for the low income buyer that the geek fondly believes.
That's probably true if you're talking about person who is buying both a business computer and a personal one. If, as for most people, their primary business computer is provided by their employer, why the heck wouldn't they buy a netbook for personal use? Most people use their personal computers to do non-processor-intensive tasks that netbooks are designed for, like email, chat, social networking, blogging, online purchases, looking things up, etc.
The iPhone (or similar device) is a good replacement as well, but it suffers from the problems you mention (small display, small keyboard, "tiny form factor") to a MUCH greater degree. And yet lots of people are buying them. For someone who wants the convenience of a small device, but needs to do a little more typing, surfing, etc. so the iPhone is uncomfortable or annoying, why wouldn't they use a netbook?
The low-end netbook competes for attention and sales with a dozen other high-tech gadgets at the same price point
Exactly, like the iPhone. Maybe you're right that people will continue to flock toward iPhones but won't embrace netbooks. But if so, it's not because of the reasons you cite, because the iPhone and similar gadgets in that price category suffer from the same criticisms you mention, except to a greater degree.
Thanks for a very good explanation of a lot of these things.
The hallmark of science is the development of models that yield useful information, but the only way to know if the model is right is to test it - which is why Popper and everyone else is so obsessed with falsifiability.
Exactly. I think people misunderstood my previous post as saying that falsifiability is useless. (Because that's all people tend to know about Popper.) It's not. It's a simple model, and the way things actually work is more complicated, but it's not a bad place to begin.
Instead, what I said is that Popper's epistemology isn't ultimately enough for us to understand the world. It isn't enough to make scientific advances or to predict which theories will win out within science. You touch on a similar point when you say, "the public ought to realize that science is a process, not The Ultimate Truth." I completely agree. And that process is a very complex social one, and one that requires creativity, political wrangling, not to mention dealing with competing research programs that may believe in different assumptions. Popper's simple criterion may be a good place to start understanding how science works, but in practice it is much more complicated.
Given that Popperian epistemology isn't ultimately useless, I'd start with that.
Have you read the philosophy of science stuff mentioned by the GP (or other similar stuff)? If not, take some time to do that before assuming I'm just a troll.
I'm not saying that Popper's falsifiability criterion isn't a helpful simplification, or that there aren't other aspects of Popper that don't have great insight. What's I'm saying is that if you try to use Popper as the sole basis for your epistemology, i.e., the complete theory of how you get your knowledge about the world, you'll find his theories are hopelessly incomplete... not to mention (as I said) an inaccurate fit when you look at the way science actually develops in practice.
There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of books written on the philosophy of science in the past century, most of them since Popper. Obviously if the issues were all resolved by one simple idea from Karl Popper, people would have stopped writing. They haven't.
First, you have lawyers speaking what looks like English but has only a thin connection to it.
You're overstating the problem. Lawyers are not speaking Chinese, though perhaps a more appropriate comparison might be Shakespearean English. If we listen carefully, we get the general sense of what's going on, even if some details fly past us. It's the job of the attorneys, judge, and expert witnesses (just like Shakespearean actors) to point out to juries when those words actually do mean something significant that is different from standard English AND is relevant to the trial at hand. For example, if someone is claiming an insanity defense, attorneys will generally debate the actually legal definition of "insanity" with witnesses, and point out things about that definition in opening/closing statements. That's because the jury's decision is crucially dependent on knowledge of that term, in its legal sense. If, on the other hand, a lawyer is raising an obscure motion that has to do with court procedure, but doesn't really have an impact on the jury's decision, why do they need to know what the technical language of that procedure means?
If one lawyer is using a term in a legal sense to mislead the jury, it's the job of the other attorneys and/or judge to point out that potential misunderstanding.
Second, I work as a software engineer. I know, even stated humbly and conservatively, vastly more about how
modern electronic devices work than the average Joe.
Again, the same thing applies. It's the job of the people conducting the jury to make sure they educate the jury on the relevant technical details of the case, often by calling expert witnesses. Sure, the jury will not a complete understanding, but the point of having advocates on both sides is to ensure that one side isn't misleading the jury by providing inaccurate technical details.
Honestly, in part, expert juries are not used because it may result in a "clique" effect. You may think that you'd get a better trial with a bunch of software engineers, but what if the trial has to do with some controversial area of the field? What if all those engineers are on one side of an issue or on an opposing side to your beliefs? How is that more fair than an ignorant jury?
But, more importantly, your argument has to apply to everyone. Do we really want bank executives judged by juries of bank executives? Politicians judged by juries of politicians? You may trust software engineers to be reasonably impartial, but don't you think that many such groups would tend to side with "their own" in such trials? This wouldn't be any different from the historical US South, where an all-white jury judging a white man who perpetrated a crime against a black man/woman was judged differently.
Unfortunately, that requires having a well informed jury, not the first dozen morons you could find who haven't the
curiosity or resources to have watched TV in the last two months.
Yes, but how do you define "well informed"? Did the jury watch CNN or Fox News? Does that matter, even if the two networks might have opposing positions on the trial?
Your first couple arguments seem to be arguing for expert juries. At least in the legal sense, I can see the rationale for such things, which is in part why we have appellate courts composed of expert judges to correct legal errors. But an "informed" jury?? I don't really think that would be more fair, given the fragmentation of the news media, than any other jury that comes in with their own biases.
One of the things that many scientists lack, is a good grounding in the Philosophy of Science. The public version of science, largely pushed by science teachers has an origin in the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists. This is now largely known to be problematic, but is still the prevailing view.
Thanks so much for pointing this out. It never ceases to amaze me how many scientists seem to believe blindly in some sort of simplified method taught in middle school or the interesting, but ultimately useless, Popperian epistemology.
Is it really that complicated to understand that "falsifiability" is only a useful concept (and a somewhat limited one at that) for describing the process of testing hypotheses that are already formulated, but it gives almost no guidance about how to come up with such hypotheses in the first place? With such a "method," how could scientific progress ever happen?
Such a "method" is not supported by any reasonable empirical study of the history of science. It's sort of ironic that with all the data available about how scientific advances actually seem to work, scientists believe in a paradigm of their own discipline that doesn't describe the evidence.
Re:Could someone explain to me
on
Making Sense of ACTA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There is no requirement for public debate or notice in passing legislation or signing treaties.
And in general, we have no need for more "notice." What "debate" happens is mostly wheeling and dealing behind the scenes before the bill comes to the floor, and any "debate" on the floor is usually for soundbites for the evening news. I'm not sure how one could require an "actual" debate, except through media and individuals being more critical during the process... which they can be.
Most non-trivial pieces of legislation take months to go through both houses and get to the President's desk for signature. Once a bill is introduced, it's a matter of public record, and current legislation under consideration can be found on the websites of both houses of Congress.
Yes, there are last minute amendments, but the negative effect there is usually more about pork rather than some more nefarious purpose... and there's generally still a delay while the bill winds its way through the other house or takes a few days before the President has to decide on it.
But the vast majority of this stuff is available for anyone who wants to look, and usually weeks or even months ahead of time. No one looks.
As for the implication that secret meetings are a common occurrence... they aren't. The Senate has only held secret sessions a couple dozen times in the past century, and the House has only had less than a handful since the early days of the US.
So, I'm not sure where this great public outcry against secrecy is... 99.9% of the stuff is already there (and most of the actual secret meetings had to deal with national security briefings). That doesn't mean there isn't a potential for abuse, but I'm not sure why everyone's acting like what Congress does is some big secret or that they are continuously hiding things from the public.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that every proposed law has to be published first and being discussed by the public
This is how it should be. Default of 3 months review by public eyes before final decision. Fat chance of that happening.
WHAT?!? Do you really think that much is being hidden? Almost all legislation already spends months going through committees, and once a bill is introduced (i.e., before it goes through months of committee bureaucracy), it's available to the public. Take a look at http://www.house.gov/ and http://www.senate.gov/ to see what's currently being considered.
Sure, there are last minute amendments and other things, but the vast majority of legislative text is already available for months for anyone to review by "public eyes before final decision."
You know what the problem is? Nobody cares enough to dig through the mountains of pages of proposed legislation... not individuals, not the media, and certainly not most Congressmen (sometimes even those sponsoring the bill). Since the advent of CSPAN most Congressmen aren't paying attention to debate in the chamber -- they're wheeling and dealing in their office, with CSPAN on mute in the background. That's what "public access" to the live actions of Congress has gotten you.
The only people who read bills are generally the minor staff lawyers who draft them. Do you want things revealed before "public eyes"? Fine. Go to the websites yourself, start reading bills, and when you see something interesting, start blogging about it. Get a couple hundred people doing this, and maybe Congress will pay attention. But stop with the conspiracy theories about Congress -- if you don't know what legislation is under consideration, that's your own fault.
How about cars (they seem popular for analogies around here)? Advances in technology there has certainly made it a lot harder to just pop the hood and poke around. The same holds for computers.
In general, you make a lot of good points, but I'm not sure this is one of them. It's still quite easy to pop the hood and poke around. While certain parts and systems of cars have gotten sophisticated (and that trend seems to have sped up in the past decade), for many cars, most people can still do 98% of their own car maintenance with a complete service manual for the model and a decent set of tools that could be acquired for the price of maybe one minor overhaul at a garage.
Instead of replacing a bad mechanical part, you might occasionally have to replace a bad electronic component -- I don't see a major difference there. And sure, certain kinds of tweaks have gotten difficult or impossible with computerization, but a lot of potential tweaking is still done mechanically, with the basic tools that have been used for generations (or similar mechanical replacements).
That's what I consider as "pop the hood and poke around," and you can still do that. If you actually mean doing rather sophisticated performance tweaking in an engine or transmission or something... well, I think that's always been a bit of niche market and outside the realm of the common home mechanic.
At first, I thought your comment was spot-on. But maybe not...
If tinkerability is default in all computers, all children in computer owning households, whatever their parents motives/level of interest/level of information get access to it. If tinkerability is a special feature, one that you have to trade off against shiny for, a much smaller percentage of children will have access to it.
Who owns a computer that isn't "tinkerable"? Sure, some aspects of the more fundamental aspects of the OS are harder to get access to (on some systems) these days then they were a couple decades ago, but so what? There are still oodles of things one can fiddle with on any standard OS. And if you haven't noticed, now kids have access to the internet, which has orders of magnitude more possibilities for exploration, tinkering, things you can download to tinker with on your computer, etc. If kids are sufficiently interested, they could just as easily do the same sort of stuff on a computer today that they did on a supposedly more "tinkerable" computer in the 1980s... but they choose to do other things instead, because there are so many possibilities they have access to.
This isn't a "OMG, the iCops are violating your rights" thing; but it could easily be the case that the rise of appliances results in a reduction of children's access to tinkering and future motivation in certain directions.
Yes, we get it. But perhaps the motivation "in certain directions" no longer happens because other opportunities to tinker take their place.
There will always be the fringe world of tinkering and experimentation. It may not be about the same things you did as a kid, but there will still be plenty of opportunities.
There's a lot the Drake Equation fails to account for. As a mathematical estimate, it's fairly useless. Its chief contribution to science (although some might question whether this is a contribution) is that it gets people talking about extraterrestrial life.
Indeed, I think you'd have to stretch the idea of "science" pretty far to accommodate the Drake equation.
People here often feel the need to debate whether climatologists can extrapolate climate a hundred years into the future based on huge quantities of data. But they're perfectly willing to consider seriously the value of an equation where a lot of the terms are extrapolated based on one data point. And it we would need to know a hell of a lot more about that data point than we do about climate science to even know whether we're assigning the probability from that data point with any accuracy.
But whenever discussion of this equation comes up, everyone carries on as if this were normal science. It's not science when you just make up values for most of the terms in your calculations (and the terms you do know could easily be off by several orders of magnitude) -- that's just random speculation.
His family can still benefit from his work by collecting royalties. That's also part of the intent of copyrights as well--for creators and their beneficiaries to be rewarded for their work.
How does..."To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"...lead to the above conclusion? Particularly considering originally protection was limited to 14 years.
Easy.
Say I'm an artist or inventor or writer or whatever. I come up with something really good which would "promote the Progress...", but for whatever reason I haven't yet published/patented/distributed this work. I find out I have terminal cancer. If copyright, etc. expires upon my death, what incentive do I have to do anything with my work? I might as well burn or destroy it. If so, society doesn't get the "Progress" mentioned in the Constitution.
On the other hand, if copyright lasts for 14 years, with an extension for 14 more, and if I have some young kids, I have an incentive to publish. My young kids get some money from my work until they come of age. Or if I have a wife in previous centuries when the US laws were crafted, she probably had no source of income in the event of my death. So, again, another incentive to publish, if my copyright privilege can be inherited.
You might think this situation is constructed, but the American copyright system, which was inherited from the English one, generally allowed the original short copyright terms to be inherited for this very reason. Just like real property, intellectual property is not destroyed upon death.
Some folks also claim that if copyright expired upon death, there would an incentive to kill popular writers. It would be sort of like if killing a rich person allowed you (and everyone else) to run freely over his estate, use his stuff, etc. I personally think that idea is a little crazy, but... well, I suppose it all depends on how much it's worth to you....
By the way, don't get me wrong -- I'm all for the original quite LIMITED US copyright term lengths. But copyright, as intellectual property, should be inherited if the creator dies and the term is still in effect. Whatever profits we would give to a creator should also be passed on to his/her heirs... who might perchance need the income. (That doesn't mean all of this isn't massively abused today, but the problem is term length, not inheritance.)
Yeah, how 'ironic' that Mac users get software that meets their needs. Idiots!
I'm going to assume, given your other posts on this story, that you're being sarcastic.
If so, I think you missed the point of the anecdote. The point is that my friend already had software that met her "needs." She could have spent three minutes customizing Word to achieve a similar result. If she didn't like that, she could have downloaded any of dozens of free text editors that "have less distractions" than Word and do exactly what this new "word processor" does for her.
I have nothing against Macs. I own one myself, though it's not my primary computer at the moment. I think they're generally well-built and work well for many purposes, though a little pricey (just in my opinion).
What I have a problem with are computer users who are trained by a supposed "just works" mentality that they can't do anything different from what clearly appears on their screen when they boot up, and if it doesn't work, they run to the Mac Store. I know lots and lots of Mac users who simply don't know what to do to troubleshoot their computers... instead, they go for months and sometimes years using a system that does some bizarre thing or won't do something they really need, so they work around it -- even if that thing would just take five minutes of exploring menus or help to solve. That is emphatically NOT "just works," since the system actually DOESN'T work and DOESN'T "meet their needs," but these same people swear by their Macs and make fun of people who don't use them.
So, yes, I do find it "ironic" that Mac users would pay money for an interface that is readily available on their system and has been available on just about every computer for free for decades... and they pay it because some corporation has convinced them that they shouldn't ever need to think to use their computer or ever explore their system beyond the options that readily pop up in front of their eyes.
This isn't just Mac users, I know. Lots of computer users are like this with Windows and other OSes. But Mac actively encourages this mentality. And this Slashdot story is about how the average brainwashed Mac user mentality is created, and my anecdote does show some issues with that.
A mac user might think "I want to write a text document". And the mac caters very well to this sort of idea.
You give the average Mac user too much credit. Few of them even understand what a "text document" is. They only know of things that open in Word, things that open in Pages, and things that open in Acrobat (maybe - usually they just use Preview).
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine was telling everyone about this great new piece of software for Mac that would allow her to type on a screen with green text on a black background full screen with no distractions. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. She thought it was great when she just needed to write without worrying about all the other distractions on her computer. Of course, this "word processor" (as she called it) had almost no options to do much of anything.
This is the average Mac user. She had probably never encountered a "text editor." She didn't even realize that you could customize the appearance of MS Word to use it full screen, with whatever background and text color you want.
And many of her Mac user friends were expressing amazement about this wonderful new distraction-free writing application!
And so some Mac users will now pay money to get a crappy stripped-down text editor that looks like a CLI editor from the 80s and has significantly less functionality.
There is an enormous amount of material, no index, and any inconvenient material can simply be claimed not to exist.
Yes, like a whole bunch of European archives. You sound like someone who has never done significant archival research. There are hundreds and probably thousands of archives spread around Europe that have a large amount of material (often not as large as the Vatican's but too large for one scholar or even a team to go through it in a short amount of time), no catalogue (sometimes only a catalogue prepared a century or even centuries ago, or in smaller archives, often only the knowledge of the main archivist), and most of these archives are run by finicky archivists with a God-complex when it comes to dealing with the materials in their collection. If you're a foreigner, many things "don't exist" or "were lost in the war." Or if you're too inquisitive, too annoying, not committed enough, too famous, not famous enough, or the archivist simply doesn't like you, things "don't exist." Or perhaps they're "too fragile," or they don't accept your credentials, or "those things never come out of the vault."
If you're very nice and polite, show up every day, don't make a fuss or ask to see anything too outrageous at the beginning, and particularly if you make a friend with some junior member of the staff... then, maybe one day someone will show you the interesting stuff.
Really -- while there's lots of great stuff in the Vatican, and probably quite a bit that few people know about, the same could be said of many such archives in Europe.
Until the archives have been cataloged, indexed, and digitized, and until those steps have been verified by independent sources without a Catholic political agenda, the archives have to be presumed to exist mainly to serve the propaganda needs of the Catholic church.
Are you serious?? No European archive will submit to that sort thing! Well, maybe a few of the smaller ones who don't actually have anything interesting and are sure of it, or they have some crazy archivist who understands and believes in modern free information ideals. Many European archives, even major ones, still don't have internet access or allow computers or have other random restrictions on technology.
Not to mention that your tin-foil hat is showing. If the Catholic church were hiding a bunch of documents that they didn't want people to get access to, well... they could just destroy them. Why not? If they're really as corrupt as you seem to think, there are simpler solutions than having a place called the "Secret Archives" where nuts like yourself can dream about what's in there... and where some errant scholar could accidentally request something, or some archivist could dig something out that wasn't classified correctly as "secret" or whatever.
Are there some things there that could potentially be embarrassing to the Catholic Church? Sure. Like any documents owned by any organization or even any individual person. If they are that dangerous, they are probably destroyed, and if they're simply embarrassing, who cares?
If there is anything being hidden, it's probably much less interesting than what you might imagine. That's generally the case in any conspiracy theory.
History doesn't change. History is fact. It's the people who try to twist the facts through deceit who are responsible for this malleability.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. "History" requires selection and interpretation of "facts," whatever you're defining your "facts" to be. The process of selecting "facts" and creating a narrative that we can understand is a very complex task that is debated all the time in historiography.
This is like saying "science is fact." No -- science is a process by which we understand the world, and sometimes we misinterpret data or wrongly select data or use data to support an accepted theory that is eventually overturned. And sometimes scientists do deliberately "twist the facts through deceit," but that's only one possible reason for failure in the scientific method. Often, as society changes or new data is introduced or new scientists come along with novel ideas, old data is reinterpreted to mean something else.
Quite simply, history requires someone to make a record of something. That record is biased by that person's point of view. Then, some other person comes along and looks through those records (usually drawing on many records from more than one primary source, with all their inherent biases). That person selects some things out to preserve in a secondary source. Usually, to qualify as "history" in the normal sense, that second person tries to create a coherent account from the scattered primary records. That involves lots of interpretation and the biases of the second person. Then more people come along and read and interpret those secondary sources. And finally, by the time it gets into your high school history textbook, it has generally been filtered through interpretations of dozens of people, all of whom have their biases.
Every "fact" you think you know about history is someone's spin on something, and even if it's close to a "raw fact" that something happened on such-and-such a date, the only reason you know that thing is because someone was biased enough to single out that particular event and that particular date over trillions of other things that happened and nobody cared enough about to tell you about it.
It is not just the mandatory password changes that increases the mess. It is also that each and every site has different validation rules.
Yes, and some get incredibly arcane and frankly, idiotic. A few years back, I needed to get the password reset on a school email account. I don't know why my old password wouldn't work, and the tech couldn't explain it to me. I went in to reset it manually.
I started entering in one of my rather long (15+ character) passwords that I often use, along with non-alphanumeric characters. (I have variations for generating alphanumerics when I need them for websites, etc.)
But it didn't complain about the non-alphanumerics or the length. It complained that I had some string of three letters in a row that was a "word," and thus was vulnerable to a dictionary attack. Okay, so I tried another long password that I knew didn't have a three-letter actual "word" in it. Again, it complained about this three-letter "word," even though it isn't actually a word... it's simply a three-character string.
While I agree that having a long string of alphabetic characters in the midst of a short password is insecure, it surely doesn't matter within a 15+ character password that includes a bunch of numbers, capitals and lowercase, and non-alphanumerics.
Yet the system wouldn't accept any of my passwords or their variants, even though any password-strength meter would say that they are extremely secure.
So eventually I entered an 8-character alphanumeric password composed of only lowercase letters and numbers that I knew I could remember on the spot, and it said okay, because I didn't have three letters in a row.
Later that evening, I changed my password to something better. But when I looked the online guide to selecting a password for this institution, ALL of the passwords it gave as examples wouldn't actually be accepted by the system.
And this is at one of the best universities in the US....
English spelling is based on half a dozen different sets of phonics rules (English, Latin, Greek, French, and probably others). I don't know about you, but I only learned the very simplest of them when I was in first grade in 1982. Getting a feel for the rest came from just seeing words that looked similar.
Exactly. That's what many teachers used for many years -- a sort of hybrid approach that combines basic phonics with whole-word. I'm not sure what the GP's teacher is actually doing, but I know teachers who tend to use only one or the other, and I don't think either is as effective as a hybrid.
I asked the teacher she wasn't learning the multiplication table and the teacher said that it was not taught anymore because they prefered 'concepts.'
Right, because those apply to things that are still important.
Sorry, but I actually can't agree with this. Yes, it takes a lot of time and effort to memorize the multiplication table (along with doing similar speed drills with addition/subtraction and other basic operations), but along with that memorizing, a student gets some basic sense of numeracy, particularly if combined with estimation skills taught a few years later.
Innumeracy is a huge problem with students today. I taught algebra II and geometry, as well as high school physics for a few years, and if students have never learned basic arithmetic facts and basic estimation ideas, they simply have no idea whether what their calculator spits out is correct. If we were arguing about spending hours with young kids drilling long division or something, I think you might be onto something -- just teach the basic idea, but then allow calculators.
But without at least some baseline of simple arithmetic facts, it makes it really difficult for students to understand when a computer or calculator spits out an answer that doesn't make any sense.
My son is in 7th grade, and not as good at long multiplication and division as I was then, but he's learning geometry and algebra I didn't get until 9th and 10th grade.
The GP wasn't talking about "long multiplication and division," he was talking about a basic multiplication table. Try teaching a bunch of students how to solve quadratic or exponential equations when they don't know what 3 times 5 is, or can't divide 12 by 6. I've done it, and it just makes the whole idea of teaching algebra to these kids ridiculous, since the abstract concepts of algebra require at least a basic level of numeracy... otherwise, your solution is just a shot in the dark, and you have no idea whether it's right.
Oh, one other way they could make money (particularly in the 19th century) -- be a traveling virtuoso, sort of like our current "rock stars." But those guys are mostly forgotten these days, except for Liszt and a couple others.
I completely agree that having a major record-label contract is the one and only way for a musician to achieve the highest levels of success. To that end, can anybody remind me of who the labels were for Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven?
Sure, the "labels" for Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven were various publishers. And yes, there was a pecking order among publishers, and composers spent a lot of time (particularly in the 19th century) negotiating deals with them.
The thing is, those great musicians had it so much easier than musicians today.
Really? In Bach's first few years at Leipzig, he had to teach at a boys' school (Latin and music), direct a bunch of choirs and musicians, supervise a whole bunch of music students, and have time left over to write a 20-minute cantata every week or so (and then arrange for the copyists to create the parts necessary for performance), in addition to random organ music, etc. All this to make money to support his family. I'd hardly call this "much easier than musicians today." Beethoven and Brahms had it somewhat easier, but they weren't depending on an organist job for a living, and their social class made a difference.
Back then it was just so much easier to get your music out to a wide audience. Today, that's nearly impossible.
What the heck are you talking about? In the era before recordings, the main way to get your music "out to a wide audience" was through publishers, and publication was quite a competitive business. Although I don't think it's true of the three composers you mention, other major classical composers had exclusive publishing contracts with some major publishers.
Bach's music, in fact, really didn't get "out to a wide audience" during his lifetime, except for a few keyboard works that he published, so I don't know how he's even relevant to your argument.
And besides, as other have already pointed out, there was a system of patrons for the arts into the early 19th century. Sort of like getting NEA grants nowadays, except often back then they were pensions for life. These musicians only had it easier if they were independently wealthy, sold copies of their music, or had random rich guys giving them money periodically.
Slashdot Mirror
I've installed it several times, likewise various linux distros. I'd say the share of installation problems is about equal.
Bah... it depends on what you mean by "installation problems." I've been using Linux on and off for over a decade. This is BS. My primary machine is Linux these days and has been for a few years, and I've been through a number of different distros on a number of different machines. Even on really, really common, standard hardware, I've had completely bizarre problems emerge during installation. Sure, sometimes I've had weird Windows problems too, but those usually only affect some minor weird setting; on Linux, almost every installation I've tried ends up with some major disruption in basic desktop functionality.
If you're running a server, probably the installation problems are about equal. If you're a typical desktop user, they definitely are not, and the solutions needed to fix them are much more complex.
Typical Windows install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui, (3) realize that many things were detected correctly, (4) do Google search and download drivers, (5) now 99% of system usually works for basic desktop functionality (unless you're using some truly weird hardware)
Greatest difficulty encountered? Usually using Google to find drivers.
Typical Linux install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui in wrong resolution or sometimes get kicked to command line, (3) spend time fixing monitor detection, video drivers, etc., perhaps involving recompiling kernel if you're unlucky, (4) hopefully get to reasonably working gui, (5) start trying to get other hardware working, (6) after some basic troubleshooting fails, spend hours searching in linux forums for someone with a similar configuration, (7) try out 2 or 3 solutions to the bugs you're encountering until you get the hardware to work for every hardware item that doesn't work, (8) even after everything seems to work, deal with intermittent sound problems, codec issues when playing various media types, problems with plugins to view the most common internet sites, etc., and (9) eventually give up after a weekend with a system that has about 75% functionality of what the average desktop user wants (browsing, email, basic multimedia playing, etc.).
Common difficulties encountered: having to deal with a CLI, having to solve weird problems caused by interactions between hardware and OS manually rather than by simply downloading a driver, settling for odd multimedia behavior and/or lack of basic functionality on some common websites, etc.
Sure, I have enough experience myself that I can sort through these problems relatively quickly, perhaps sometimes as quickly as the average Windows user could find drivers and download them. I don't think I'm the average desktop user. But I would never make the claim the Linux installations are less problematic or equivalently problematic for average desktop users than Windows installs... despite what many people like to claim on Slashdot.
You can bitch about having to download drivers for Windows installs as much as you want, but it's not like troubleshooting Linux installs. And 99% of the time I've had such issues in Windows, the drivers work, at least for the basic functions most people want. Usually solving such a problem takes 5 minutes. In Linux, similar problems often take me a couple hours of research and fiddling if it's something I haven't seen before.
I've probably spent almost equal time using Linux and Windows over the years, but I think I've spent at least 20 times as much time troubleshooting Linux as I have troubleshooting Windows. Perhaps I'm incredibly unlucky, but I find that Linux desktop installs tend to be broken in ways that are less easy to fix. Complicated server installs are a different story... but that's not what the GP was talking about.
Very late reply...
In fact, many historical facts are supported by records that have no particular bias, viewpoint, or historical purpose:
Really? Like what?
census records,
Ah yes, the ones that only recorded the names of male property owners for the first 50 years of the US? Or that forgot slaves, native Americans, etc. for much longer? And what we know depends on the year -- some census records have dates of marriage, some don't; some have birth months, others have only the year; some have occupation in greater detail than others; some have information on property values and estate values; some don't. And that's just variation among 19th-century records.
birth/death records,
Which ones? Which births were recorded and how? Were these only church records, country records, or was there a state database? What other information was recorded?
business records.
Not sure what you mean by this. If you believe everything you see in accounting records (even old ones), I'm not sure what you think of various high-profile scandals in business these days. What gets recorded is what the business wants some particular audience to know.
Many involve no human record keeping at all, they are based on archaeological finds.
Why do digs occur in certain places and not others? Why do some digs get funding and not others? What tools are available for the archaeologist to analyze the data, and how do these change over time?
Many other historical facts have been documented by the perpetrators of crimes themselves.
They have been documented, but autobiographical interpretations aren't necessarily the best source for historical fact.
Look -- I'm not using "biased" in the bigoted or intentional sense. I'm saying that we all have our perspective, our reasons for being interested in certain things, writing certain things down, researching certain things, etc.
But the historical facts and events themselves don't change.
You're half-right: historical events don't change. What we consider to be a "fact" about those events, however, often does.
Squatters on controversial pages will remove anything you post on "their" turf within hours, and sometimes minutes, of your changes or additions. They simply won't tolerate facts that contradict their POV.
Yes, and even on pages that are not high-profile "controversial" pages, you often see the same sorts of edit wars emerge when they are tangentially related to something more controversial or politically/socially charged. For such things, even topics that have a well-accepted scholarly interpretation can be altered by a large enough internet community who police these sites.
Or another example is topics that have a long history on Wikipedia but have developed an insular community that has a specific POV. For example, while math and science pages got built up pretty quickly a few years ago with a relatively large base of editors, many of them reasonably competent people who understood what was going on, lots of pages related to the arts, humanities, etc. had only a few editors and admins that established a domain. Often these people are technologically-savvy people who work on the fringes of the world they write about. As the Wikipedia movement grew a few years back, scholars and other knowledgeable people in such fields found themselves having to confront an established hierarchy of editors who were used to managing things by themselves for years.
Basically, to this day, while I trust Wikipedia to give relatively good basic information on math and science topics, anything you read about history, literature, the humanities, arts, etc. should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Chances are that unless it's a simple fact like who George Washington's parents were, the interpretation and scholarship is error-prone and about 50 to 75 years out-of-date.
In sum, turf wars are happening all over Wikipedia... not just on controversial subjects. In fact, it's probably more likely to see domineering editors and frivolous reverts on pages that no one cares about.
While Amazon handled their end badly, I still pull for them in the battle. Macmillan is basically trying to kill e-books with the price point they are forcing on the market.
And isn't that Macmillan's choice? If consumers want e-books, and Macmillan tries to kill them, people won't buy Macmillan's books. Authors and readers will seek out books from other publishers, if the e-book market grows. It's their choice as a publisher about how to run their own business, even if you (or Amazon) doesn't like it.
Amazon at least realizes that it makes no sense to have an e-book go for the same price as a physical book (if we could only get them to remove the DRM now).
What Amazon thinks makes "no sense" may not be what the publisher thinks makes "no sense" or what you think makes "no sense." All of these parties get to choose their strategies in a free marketplace. But when one company starts to have a monopolistic control over one segment of the marketplace, and tries to force other companies to change their policies to suit its business model, the marketplace is no longer free. That's the larger problem. I don't think we're quite there with Amazon yet, but the potential for abuse is high.
Book's most often require editing, fact checking, layout, artwork - even hiring a set of on the cheap professionals this will cost thousands.
Or you can go down to your local college and higher a couple people for next to nothing and end up with the same quality.
It's sad, but unfortunately the trend seems to indicate that you're right. Many publishers used to do multiple levels of editing, detailed proofreading, etc. The process in some sense required it, because you had to move from a typescript page (or even handwritten) by an author to a typeset page, and in the process, things had to be checked. Nowadays, even large publishers have cut out many stages, and some appear to do little more than dump the text from a computer file into a layout app, do 15 minutes of design, and get ready to publish. If there were errors, the author has to catch them. And I've seen a number of cases where proofs don't seem to matter -- things that an author corrects in proofs go uncorrected in the final copy, because it's too much of a pain to go through those corrections in detail and make changes in a format that is often different from the application the author is using (or the one that is being used to track changes).
Designing, typesetting, and making a book used to be so much more labor-intensive and time-consuming in the past. Yet I look at such books published decades ago all the time, and generally the quality is quite high. Why is it, then, that I see more poorly-designed books these days with typographical errors on every page?
I don't use Abiword on a regular basis, but if I remember correctly, Abiword was one of the first word processors to support DOCX when MS Office 2007 came out. I couldn't open things in OpenOffice, so I had to use Abiword because of its better compatibility with MS Office. I don't use it on a regular basis, but I've often seen DOC files look better (i.e., closer to the original) when opened in Abiword than in OpenOffice.
As for a comparison to Google Docs, it really depends on what features you want. Most of the formatting tends to be preserved pretty well in Abiword in my experience, while there are some features that Google Docs just doesn't have. For other features, it may be the reverse, but usually I've found Google Docs to screw up formatting more for basic things.
That said, I don't use Abiword because it's buggy and awful, so that's a better reason to ignore it rather than MS Office compatibility.
The "tiny form factor" becomes a deal breaker as you grow older.
Depends. What's part of your body starts to go -- your eyes or your back? If the latter, perhaps carrying around 2 lbs. instead of 5-7 lbs. all the time in your bag might be something to look into.
The keyboard awkward and uncomfortable to use.
I agree that used to be the case. I bought an expensive ultraportable a few years back which had an 80% keyboard that was annoying, but usable. Smaller keyboards just hurt my hands. Nowadays, netbooks often have a keyboard that is 90% full-size or larger... not annoying at all. I haven't measured, but they feel like the keyboard on the laptop I had in the mid to late 90s, which was a rather popular model.
The display hard to read.
Why? If you have eyesight problems and can't focus on small things, I agree that this device is not for you. If you're complaining that the screens are dark or not sharp enough or something -- well, look at the netbooks today. Even the cheap ones blow the crap out of the screen on my laptop from 5 years ago that cost 6 times as much.
The netbook strikes me as being a second or third purchase - and not the first choice for the low income buyer that the geek fondly believes.
That's probably true if you're talking about person who is buying both a business computer and a personal one. If, as for most people, their primary business computer is provided by their employer, why the heck wouldn't they buy a netbook for personal use? Most people use their personal computers to do non-processor-intensive tasks that netbooks are designed for, like email, chat, social networking, blogging, online purchases, looking things up, etc.
The iPhone (or similar device) is a good replacement as well, but it suffers from the problems you mention (small display, small keyboard, "tiny form factor") to a MUCH greater degree. And yet lots of people are buying them. For someone who wants the convenience of a small device, but needs to do a little more typing, surfing, etc. so the iPhone is uncomfortable or annoying, why wouldn't they use a netbook?
The low-end netbook competes for attention and sales with a dozen other high-tech gadgets at the same price point
Exactly, like the iPhone. Maybe you're right that people will continue to flock toward iPhones but won't embrace netbooks. But if so, it's not because of the reasons you cite, because the iPhone and similar gadgets in that price category suffer from the same criticisms you mention, except to a greater degree.
The hallmark of science is the development of models that yield useful information, but the only way to know if the model is right is to test it - which is why Popper and everyone else is so obsessed with falsifiability.
Exactly. I think people misunderstood my previous post as saying that falsifiability is useless. (Because that's all people tend to know about Popper.) It's not. It's a simple model, and the way things actually work is more complicated, but it's not a bad place to begin.
Instead, what I said is that Popper's epistemology isn't ultimately enough for us to understand the world. It isn't enough to make scientific advances or to predict which theories will win out within science. You touch on a similar point when you say, "the public ought to realize that science is a process, not The Ultimate Truth." I completely agree. And that process is a very complex social one, and one that requires creativity, political wrangling, not to mention dealing with competing research programs that may believe in different assumptions. Popper's simple criterion may be a good place to start understanding how science works, but in practice it is much more complicated.
Given that Popperian epistemology isn't ultimately useless, I'd start with that.
Have you read the philosophy of science stuff mentioned by the GP (or other similar stuff)? If not, take some time to do that before assuming I'm just a troll.
I'm not saying that Popper's falsifiability criterion isn't a helpful simplification, or that there aren't other aspects of Popper that don't have great insight. What's I'm saying is that if you try to use Popper as the sole basis for your epistemology, i.e., the complete theory of how you get your knowledge about the world, you'll find his theories are hopelessly incomplete... not to mention (as I said) an inaccurate fit when you look at the way science actually develops in practice.
There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of books written on the philosophy of science in the past century, most of them since Popper. Obviously if the issues were all resolved by one simple idea from Karl Popper, people would have stopped writing. They haven't.
First, you have lawyers speaking what looks like English but has only a thin connection to it.
You're overstating the problem. Lawyers are not speaking Chinese, though perhaps a more appropriate comparison might be Shakespearean English. If we listen carefully, we get the general sense of what's going on, even if some details fly past us. It's the job of the attorneys, judge, and expert witnesses (just like Shakespearean actors) to point out to juries when those words actually do mean something significant that is different from standard English AND is relevant to the trial at hand. For example, if someone is claiming an insanity defense, attorneys will generally debate the actually legal definition of "insanity" with witnesses, and point out things about that definition in opening/closing statements. That's because the jury's decision is crucially dependent on knowledge of that term, in its legal sense. If, on the other hand, a lawyer is raising an obscure motion that has to do with court procedure, but doesn't really have an impact on the jury's decision, why do they need to know what the technical language of that procedure means?
If one lawyer is using a term in a legal sense to mislead the jury, it's the job of the other attorneys and/or judge to point out that potential misunderstanding.
Second, I work as a software engineer. I know, even stated humbly and conservatively, vastly more about how modern electronic devices work than the average Joe.
Again, the same thing applies. It's the job of the people conducting the jury to make sure they educate the jury on the relevant technical details of the case, often by calling expert witnesses. Sure, the jury will not a complete understanding, but the point of having advocates on both sides is to ensure that one side isn't misleading the jury by providing inaccurate technical details.
Honestly, in part, expert juries are not used because it may result in a "clique" effect. You may think that you'd get a better trial with a bunch of software engineers, but what if the trial has to do with some controversial area of the field? What if all those engineers are on one side of an issue or on an opposing side to your beliefs? How is that more fair than an ignorant jury?
But, more importantly, your argument has to apply to everyone. Do we really want bank executives judged by juries of bank executives? Politicians judged by juries of politicians? You may trust software engineers to be reasonably impartial, but don't you think that many such groups would tend to side with "their own" in such trials? This wouldn't be any different from the historical US South, where an all-white jury judging a white man who perpetrated a crime against a black man/woman was judged differently.
Unfortunately, that requires having a well informed jury, not the first dozen morons you could find who haven't the curiosity or resources to have watched TV in the last two months.
Yes, but how do you define "well informed"? Did the jury watch CNN or Fox News? Does that matter, even if the two networks might have opposing positions on the trial?
Your first couple arguments seem to be arguing for expert juries. At least in the legal sense, I can see the rationale for such things, which is in part why we have appellate courts composed of expert judges to correct legal errors. But an "informed" jury?? I don't really think that would be more fair, given the fragmentation of the news media, than any other jury that comes in with their own biases.
One of the things that many scientists lack, is a good grounding in the Philosophy of Science. The public version of science, largely pushed by science teachers has an origin in the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists. This is now largely known to be problematic, but is still the prevailing view.
Thanks so much for pointing this out. It never ceases to amaze me how many scientists seem to believe blindly in some sort of simplified method taught in middle school or the interesting, but ultimately useless, Popperian epistemology.
Is it really that complicated to understand that "falsifiability" is only a useful concept (and a somewhat limited one at that) for describing the process of testing hypotheses that are already formulated, but it gives almost no guidance about how to come up with such hypotheses in the first place? With such a "method," how could scientific progress ever happen?
Such a "method" is not supported by any reasonable empirical study of the history of science. It's sort of ironic that with all the data available about how scientific advances actually seem to work, scientists believe in a paradigm of their own discipline that doesn't describe the evidence.
There is no requirement for public debate or notice in passing legislation or signing treaties.
And in general, we have no need for more "notice." What "debate" happens is mostly wheeling and dealing behind the scenes before the bill comes to the floor, and any "debate" on the floor is usually for soundbites for the evening news. I'm not sure how one could require an "actual" debate, except through media and individuals being more critical during the process... which they can be.
Most non-trivial pieces of legislation take months to go through both houses and get to the President's desk for signature. Once a bill is introduced, it's a matter of public record, and current legislation under consideration can be found on the websites of both houses of Congress.
Yes, there are last minute amendments, but the negative effect there is usually more about pork rather than some more nefarious purpose... and there's generally still a delay while the bill winds its way through the other house or takes a few days before the President has to decide on it.
But the vast majority of this stuff is available for anyone who wants to look, and usually weeks or even months ahead of time. No one looks.
As for the implication that secret meetings are a common occurrence... they aren't. The Senate has only held secret sessions a couple dozen times in the past century, and the House has only had less than a handful since the early days of the US.
So, I'm not sure where this great public outcry against secrecy is... 99.9% of the stuff is already there (and most of the actual secret meetings had to deal with national security briefings). That doesn't mean there isn't a potential for abuse, but I'm not sure why everyone's acting like what Congress does is some big secret or that they are continuously hiding things from the public.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that every proposed law has to be published first and being discussed by the public
This is how it should be. Default of 3 months review by public eyes before final decision. Fat chance of that happening.
WHAT?!? Do you really think that much is being hidden? Almost all legislation already spends months going through committees, and once a bill is introduced (i.e., before it goes through months of committee bureaucracy), it's available to the public. Take a look at http://www.house.gov/ and http://www.senate.gov/ to see what's currently being considered.
Sure, there are last minute amendments and other things, but the vast majority of legislative text is already available for months for anyone to review by "public eyes before final decision."
You know what the problem is? Nobody cares enough to dig through the mountains of pages of proposed legislation... not individuals, not the media, and certainly not most Congressmen (sometimes even those sponsoring the bill). Since the advent of CSPAN most Congressmen aren't paying attention to debate in the chamber -- they're wheeling and dealing in their office, with CSPAN on mute in the background. That's what "public access" to the live actions of Congress has gotten you.
The only people who read bills are generally the minor staff lawyers who draft them. Do you want things revealed before "public eyes"? Fine. Go to the websites yourself, start reading bills, and when you see something interesting, start blogging about it. Get a couple hundred people doing this, and maybe Congress will pay attention. But stop with the conspiracy theories about Congress -- if you don't know what legislation is under consideration, that's your own fault.
How about cars (they seem popular for analogies around here)? Advances in technology there has certainly made it a lot harder to just pop the hood and poke around. The same holds for computers.
In general, you make a lot of good points, but I'm not sure this is one of them. It's still quite easy to pop the hood and poke around. While certain parts and systems of cars have gotten sophisticated (and that trend seems to have sped up in the past decade), for many cars, most people can still do 98% of their own car maintenance with a complete service manual for the model and a decent set of tools that could be acquired for the price of maybe one minor overhaul at a garage.
Instead of replacing a bad mechanical part, you might occasionally have to replace a bad electronic component -- I don't see a major difference there. And sure, certain kinds of tweaks have gotten difficult or impossible with computerization, but a lot of potential tweaking is still done mechanically, with the basic tools that have been used for generations (or similar mechanical replacements).
That's what I consider as "pop the hood and poke around," and you can still do that. If you actually mean doing rather sophisticated performance tweaking in an engine or transmission or something... well, I think that's always been a bit of niche market and outside the realm of the common home mechanic.
If tinkerability is default in all computers, all children in computer owning households, whatever their parents motives/level of interest/level of information get access to it. If tinkerability is a special feature, one that you have to trade off against shiny for, a much smaller percentage of children will have access to it.
Who owns a computer that isn't "tinkerable"? Sure, some aspects of the more fundamental aspects of the OS are harder to get access to (on some systems) these days then they were a couple decades ago, but so what? There are still oodles of things one can fiddle with on any standard OS. And if you haven't noticed, now kids have access to the internet, which has orders of magnitude more possibilities for exploration, tinkering, things you can download to tinker with on your computer, etc. If kids are sufficiently interested, they could just as easily do the same sort of stuff on a computer today that they did on a supposedly more "tinkerable" computer in the 1980s... but they choose to do other things instead, because there are so many possibilities they have access to.
This isn't a "OMG, the iCops are violating your rights" thing; but it could easily be the case that the rise of appliances results in a reduction of children's access to tinkering and future motivation in certain directions.
Yes, we get it. But perhaps the motivation "in certain directions" no longer happens because other opportunities to tinker take their place.
There will always be the fringe world of tinkering and experimentation. It may not be about the same things you did as a kid, but there will still be plenty of opportunities.
There's a lot the Drake Equation fails to account for. As a mathematical estimate, it's fairly useless. Its chief contribution to science (although some might question whether this is a contribution) is that it gets people talking about extraterrestrial life.
Indeed, I think you'd have to stretch the idea of "science" pretty far to accommodate the Drake equation.
People here often feel the need to debate whether climatologists can extrapolate climate a hundred years into the future based on huge quantities of data. But they're perfectly willing to consider seriously the value of an equation where a lot of the terms are extrapolated based on one data point. And it we would need to know a hell of a lot more about that data point than we do about climate science to even know whether we're assigning the probability from that data point with any accuracy.
But whenever discussion of this equation comes up, everyone carries on as if this were normal science. It's not science when you just make up values for most of the terms in your calculations (and the terms you do know could easily be off by several orders of magnitude) -- that's just random speculation.
His family can still benefit from his work by collecting royalties. That's also part of the intent of copyrights as well--for creators and their beneficiaries to be rewarded for their work.
How does..."To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"...lead to the above conclusion? Particularly considering originally protection was limited to 14 years.
Easy.
Say I'm an artist or inventor or writer or whatever. I come up with something really good which would "promote the Progress...", but for whatever reason I haven't yet published/patented/distributed this work. I find out I have terminal cancer. If copyright, etc. expires upon my death, what incentive do I have to do anything with my work? I might as well burn or destroy it. If so, society doesn't get the "Progress" mentioned in the Constitution.
On the other hand, if copyright lasts for 14 years, with an extension for 14 more, and if I have some young kids, I have an incentive to publish. My young kids get some money from my work until they come of age. Or if I have a wife in previous centuries when the US laws were crafted, she probably had no source of income in the event of my death. So, again, another incentive to publish, if my copyright privilege can be inherited.
You might think this situation is constructed, but the American copyright system, which was inherited from the English one, generally allowed the original short copyright terms to be inherited for this very reason. Just like real property, intellectual property is not destroyed upon death.
Some folks also claim that if copyright expired upon death, there would an incentive to kill popular writers. It would be sort of like if killing a rich person allowed you (and everyone else) to run freely over his estate, use his stuff, etc. I personally think that idea is a little crazy, but... well, I suppose it all depends on how much it's worth to you....
By the way, don't get me wrong -- I'm all for the original quite LIMITED US copyright term lengths. But copyright, as intellectual property, should be inherited if the creator dies and the term is still in effect. Whatever profits we would give to a creator should also be passed on to his/her heirs... who might perchance need the income. (That doesn't mean all of this isn't massively abused today, but the problem is term length, not inheritance.)
Yeah, how 'ironic' that Mac users get software that meets their needs. Idiots!
I'm going to assume, given your other posts on this story, that you're being sarcastic.
If so, I think you missed the point of the anecdote. The point is that my friend already had software that met her "needs." She could have spent three minutes customizing Word to achieve a similar result. If she didn't like that, she could have downloaded any of dozens of free text editors that "have less distractions" than Word and do exactly what this new "word processor" does for her.
I have nothing against Macs. I own one myself, though it's not my primary computer at the moment. I think they're generally well-built and work well for many purposes, though a little pricey (just in my opinion).
What I have a problem with are computer users who are trained by a supposed "just works" mentality that they can't do anything different from what clearly appears on their screen when they boot up, and if it doesn't work, they run to the Mac Store. I know lots and lots of Mac users who simply don't know what to do to troubleshoot their computers... instead, they go for months and sometimes years using a system that does some bizarre thing or won't do something they really need, so they work around it -- even if that thing would just take five minutes of exploring menus or help to solve. That is emphatically NOT "just works," since the system actually DOESN'T work and DOESN'T "meet their needs," but these same people swear by their Macs and make fun of people who don't use them.
So, yes, I do find it "ironic" that Mac users would pay money for an interface that is readily available on their system and has been available on just about every computer for free for decades... and they pay it because some corporation has convinced them that they shouldn't ever need to think to use their computer or ever explore their system beyond the options that readily pop up in front of their eyes.
This isn't just Mac users, I know. Lots of computer users are like this with Windows and other OSes. But Mac actively encourages this mentality. And this Slashdot story is about how the average brainwashed Mac user mentality is created, and my anecdote does show some issues with that.
A mac user might think "I want to write a text document". And the mac caters very well to this sort of idea.
You give the average Mac user too much credit. Few of them even understand what a "text document" is. They only know of things that open in Word, things that open in Pages, and things that open in Acrobat (maybe - usually they just use Preview).
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine was telling everyone about this great new piece of software for Mac that would allow her to type on a screen with green text on a black background full screen with no distractions. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. She thought it was great when she just needed to write without worrying about all the other distractions on her computer. Of course, this "word processor" (as she called it) had almost no options to do much of anything.
This is the average Mac user. She had probably never encountered a "text editor." She didn't even realize that you could customize the appearance of MS Word to use it full screen, with whatever background and text color you want.
And many of her Mac user friends were expressing amazement about this wonderful new distraction-free writing application!
And so some Mac users will now pay money to get a crappy stripped-down text editor that looks like a CLI editor from the 80s and has significantly less functionality.
Oh the irony....
There is an enormous amount of material, no index, and any inconvenient material can simply be claimed not to exist.
Yes, like a whole bunch of European archives. You sound like someone who has never done significant archival research. There are hundreds and probably thousands of archives spread around Europe that have a large amount of material (often not as large as the Vatican's but too large for one scholar or even a team to go through it in a short amount of time), no catalogue (sometimes only a catalogue prepared a century or even centuries ago, or in smaller archives, often only the knowledge of the main archivist), and most of these archives are run by finicky archivists with a God-complex when it comes to dealing with the materials in their collection. If you're a foreigner, many things "don't exist" or "were lost in the war." Or if you're too inquisitive, too annoying, not committed enough, too famous, not famous enough, or the archivist simply doesn't like you, things "don't exist." Or perhaps they're "too fragile," or they don't accept your credentials, or "those things never come out of the vault."
If you're very nice and polite, show up every day, don't make a fuss or ask to see anything too outrageous at the beginning, and particularly if you make a friend with some junior member of the staff... then, maybe one day someone will show you the interesting stuff.
Really -- while there's lots of great stuff in the Vatican, and probably quite a bit that few people know about, the same could be said of many such archives in Europe.
Until the archives have been cataloged, indexed, and digitized, and until those steps have been verified by independent sources without a Catholic political agenda, the archives have to be presumed to exist mainly to serve the propaganda needs of the Catholic church.
Are you serious?? No European archive will submit to that sort thing! Well, maybe a few of the smaller ones who don't actually have anything interesting and are sure of it, or they have some crazy archivist who understands and believes in modern free information ideals. Many European archives, even major ones, still don't have internet access or allow computers or have other random restrictions on technology.
Not to mention that your tin-foil hat is showing. If the Catholic church were hiding a bunch of documents that they didn't want people to get access to, well... they could just destroy them. Why not? If they're really as corrupt as you seem to think, there are simpler solutions than having a place called the "Secret Archives" where nuts like yourself can dream about what's in there... and where some errant scholar could accidentally request something, or some archivist could dig something out that wasn't classified correctly as "secret" or whatever.
Are there some things there that could potentially be embarrassing to the Catholic Church? Sure. Like any documents owned by any organization or even any individual person. If they are that dangerous, they are probably destroyed, and if they're simply embarrassing, who cares?
If there is anything being hidden, it's probably much less interesting than what you might imagine. That's generally the case in any conspiracy theory.
History doesn't change. History is fact. It's the people who try to twist the facts through deceit who are responsible for this malleability.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. "History" requires selection and interpretation of "facts," whatever you're defining your "facts" to be. The process of selecting "facts" and creating a narrative that we can understand is a very complex task that is debated all the time in historiography.
This is like saying "science is fact." No -- science is a process by which we understand the world, and sometimes we misinterpret data or wrongly select data or use data to support an accepted theory that is eventually overturned. And sometimes scientists do deliberately "twist the facts through deceit," but that's only one possible reason for failure in the scientific method. Often, as society changes or new data is introduced or new scientists come along with novel ideas, old data is reinterpreted to mean something else.
Quite simply, history requires someone to make a record of something. That record is biased by that person's point of view. Then, some other person comes along and looks through those records (usually drawing on many records from more than one primary source, with all their inherent biases). That person selects some things out to preserve in a secondary source. Usually, to qualify as "history" in the normal sense, that second person tries to create a coherent account from the scattered primary records. That involves lots of interpretation and the biases of the second person. Then more people come along and read and interpret those secondary sources. And finally, by the time it gets into your high school history textbook, it has generally been filtered through interpretations of dozens of people, all of whom have their biases.
Every "fact" you think you know about history is someone's spin on something, and even if it's close to a "raw fact" that something happened on such-and-such a date, the only reason you know that thing is because someone was biased enough to single out that particular event and that particular date over trillions of other things that happened and nobody cared enough about to tell you about it.
Claiming that "history is fact" is naive.
It is not just the mandatory password changes that increases the mess. It is also that each and every site has different validation rules.
Yes, and some get incredibly arcane and frankly, idiotic. A few years back, I needed to get the password reset on a school email account. I don't know why my old password wouldn't work, and the tech couldn't explain it to me. I went in to reset it manually.
I started entering in one of my rather long (15+ character) passwords that I often use, along with non-alphanumeric characters. (I have variations for generating alphanumerics when I need them for websites, etc.)
But it didn't complain about the non-alphanumerics or the length. It complained that I had some string of three letters in a row that was a "word," and thus was vulnerable to a dictionary attack. Okay, so I tried another long password that I knew didn't have a three-letter actual "word" in it. Again, it complained about this three-letter "word," even though it isn't actually a word... it's simply a three-character string.
While I agree that having a long string of alphabetic characters in the midst of a short password is insecure, it surely doesn't matter within a 15+ character password that includes a bunch of numbers, capitals and lowercase, and non-alphanumerics.
Yet the system wouldn't accept any of my passwords or their variants, even though any password-strength meter would say that they are extremely secure.
So eventually I entered an 8-character alphanumeric password composed of only lowercase letters and numbers that I knew I could remember on the spot, and it said okay, because I didn't have three letters in a row.
Later that evening, I changed my password to something better. But when I looked the online guide to selecting a password for this institution, ALL of the passwords it gave as examples wouldn't actually be accepted by the system.
And this is at one of the best universities in the US....
English spelling is based on half a dozen different sets of phonics rules (English, Latin, Greek, French, and probably others). I don't know about you, but I only learned the very simplest of them when I was in first grade in 1982. Getting a feel for the rest came from just seeing words that looked similar.
Exactly. That's what many teachers used for many years -- a sort of hybrid approach that combines basic phonics with whole-word. I'm not sure what the GP's teacher is actually doing, but I know teachers who tend to use only one or the other, and I don't think either is as effective as a hybrid.
I asked the teacher she wasn't learning the multiplication table and the teacher said that it was not taught anymore because they prefered 'concepts.'
Right, because those apply to things that are still important.
Sorry, but I actually can't agree with this. Yes, it takes a lot of time and effort to memorize the multiplication table (along with doing similar speed drills with addition/subtraction and other basic operations), but along with that memorizing, a student gets some basic sense of numeracy, particularly if combined with estimation skills taught a few years later.
Innumeracy is a huge problem with students today. I taught algebra II and geometry, as well as high school physics for a few years, and if students have never learned basic arithmetic facts and basic estimation ideas, they simply have no idea whether what their calculator spits out is correct. If we were arguing about spending hours with young kids drilling long division or something, I think you might be onto something -- just teach the basic idea, but then allow calculators.
But without at least some baseline of simple arithmetic facts, it makes it really difficult for students to understand when a computer or calculator spits out an answer that doesn't make any sense.
My son is in 7th grade, and not as good at long multiplication and division as I was then, but he's learning geometry and algebra I didn't get until 9th and 10th grade.
The GP wasn't talking about "long multiplication and division," he was talking about a basic multiplication table. Try teaching a bunch of students how to solve quadratic or exponential equations when they don't know what 3 times 5 is, or can't divide 12 by 6. I've done it, and it just makes the whole idea of teaching algebra to these kids ridiculous, since the abstract concepts of algebra require at least a basic level of numeracy... otherwise, your solution is just a shot in the dark, and you have no idea whether it's right.
Oh, one other way they could make money (particularly in the 19th century) -- be a traveling virtuoso, sort of like our current "rock stars." But those guys are mostly forgotten these days, except for Liszt and a couple others.
I completely agree that having a major record-label contract is the one and only way for a musician to achieve the highest levels of success. To that end, can anybody remind me of who the labels were for Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven?
Sure, the "labels" for Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven were various publishers. And yes, there was a pecking order among publishers, and composers spent a lot of time (particularly in the 19th century) negotiating deals with them.
The thing is, those great musicians had it so much easier than musicians today.
Really? In Bach's first few years at Leipzig, he had to teach at a boys' school (Latin and music), direct a bunch of choirs and musicians, supervise a whole bunch of music students, and have time left over to write a 20-minute cantata every week or so (and then arrange for the copyists to create the parts necessary for performance), in addition to random organ music, etc. All this to make money to support his family. I'd hardly call this "much easier than musicians today." Beethoven and Brahms had it somewhat easier, but they weren't depending on an organist job for a living, and their social class made a difference.
Back then it was just so much easier to get your music out to a wide audience. Today, that's nearly impossible.
What the heck are you talking about? In the era before recordings, the main way to get your music "out to a wide audience" was through publishers, and publication was quite a competitive business. Although I don't think it's true of the three composers you mention, other major classical composers had exclusive publishing contracts with some major publishers.
Bach's music, in fact, really didn't get "out to a wide audience" during his lifetime, except for a few keyboard works that he published, so I don't know how he's even relevant to your argument.
And besides, as other have already pointed out, there was a system of patrons for the arts into the early 19th century. Sort of like getting NEA grants nowadays, except often back then they were pensions for life. These musicians only had it easier if they were independently wealthy, sold copies of their music, or had random rich guys giving them money periodically.