I found their mobile app to be so intrusive, I uninstalled it after a day of trying it out.
Exactly. I rarely use Facebook, but I do have an account mostly to monitor what other people may say and do regarding me. (Otherwise, for example, people would take photos of me and post them online anyway -- this way at least I can see a lot of them when they tag me and know what's going on.)
Anyhow, a few years ago I did post very occasionally and I started to check in a little more frequently (maybe even every day or so). When I got a new tablet, I thought -- hmm, maybe I'll install the Facebook app.
But I never got to the installation. It just threw up this gigantic set of permissions required unlike any other app I've ever seen. There was no way I would allow ANY app on my device that asked for so many permissions. I can't fathom how so many users just blithely click through that screen without realizing what Facebook is asking to do with their device.
(After that, I truly became disturbed by what Facebook had become, so I am almost never active on it anymore.)
IANAL, but I don't believe this applies to a discussion where the party (FB) doing the recording isn't even known to be a part of the fucking discussion. It would be like me calling my wife, an having someone else listening/recording our phone sex w/o our knowledge.
Actually, it would be more like... well, what it is: a listening device in your house (or wherever you are).
This actually demonstrates the fundamental shift in technology that has occurred in the past couple decades. It used to be that the most standard method of spying was interception of a communication, like tapping into a phone line to hear what was being transferred over that line.
Infiltration was often harder -- it would require you to actually physically go "bug" someone's house by installing your own hardware and transmitter (rather than relying on voluntary use of a phone line to carry information out).
But now rather than choosing a time or a place to speak into an electronic device (like a phone or a general microphone), we instead tend to carry these devices with us at all times, where they can theoretically be activated and programmed to activate remotely -- and can listen in whenever and wherever you have that device. Bottom line is that your phone or tablet or whatever is MUCH more insidious than a traditional "phone tap" ever could be.
On top of that, there are already lotteries where the prize is life-time annuity, or who have a stable unearned income from a trust, so the experiment is already being done. It's just a matter of tracking the participants down.
I can think of many ways this is generally different. For a few examples:
(1) The lottery is thought of by most people as a "prize" rather than "income." People often tend to spend money they "win" very differently from their "income."
(2) Lottery awards vary wildly in size, from enough money to live well on for the rest of one's life to barely enough to scrape by. A universal basic income would be set at a certain rate for everyone (presumably low). It would be very hard to get good data from such a broad dataset.
(3) A lottery is generally won by a single person in isolation. If family, neighbors, random community members find out about this win, they often expect to be treated differently by the winner, perhaps even given money. Many generous lottery winners end up going through their funds faster in providing for others, while the universal basic income would provide for ALL people separately, so there would be less such pressure.
I could go on, but you hopefully get the point. The data from lottery winners will be really hard to interpret compared to a uniform income given to an entire community.
And also the real questions about a universal income are about the long-term impacts. If I quit my job, and in five years decide I'm no longer happy with the minimal standard of living and want to return to the workforce, what will potential employers feel about five years of idleness?
I suspect it's the same answer as it is today if you are out of work for any period of time. Parents who take time off to spend with a kid before old enough for school experience this all the time -- often they don't get much sympathy for being out of the career for a while. I don't think the reason will much matter -- if you haven't worked for a while, your skills and abilities are likely out of date, and you'll have to prove your worth to get someone to hire you or at least to keep you on for an extended period.
Will the number of people wanting to work be high enough that employers can drive down wages, or low enough that workers can drive up wages?
Again, I suspect the answer to this question is the same as it is now: both. The workforce will likely ebb and flow with demand and wages over time, as it does now.
The main difference is that workers will probably be less willing to be exploited just because they need money to survive and feed their families, etc. Workers are motivated differently if they need to work to pay for the ability to buy "extras" vs. if they are hungry and know they don't get to work on time that they could get fired and their family will have trouble making rent, paying for electricity, and getting food on the table.
"911? I am being illegally detained at ADDRESS under threat of harm if I try to leave. Please help."
Better yet -- "I'm being illegally detained under threat of harm if I try to leave. The person threatening me is babbling incoherently... though I am told by one of my colleagues that he may be speaking in an ancient tongue with almost religious fervor, quoting something about wanting to destroy his enemies and an entire city. I'm really scared. Please send help!"
"Carthago delenda est."? Why even revert to Latin if you don't even know your quotes? Where is this from, Asterix? I mean, Cato the Elder's stock ending was famous enough that its start "Ceterum censeo" is almost better known than the rest: "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam."
Before you go on a rant about how someone else misuses an ancient language, you might bother to make sure you know what you're talking about.
As even the Wikipedia article explains, the phrase was actually never quoted in an ancient source directly in the TWO forms it is generally quoted in today. (If you want to see many of the various paraphrases of the form actually found in ancient sources, Wikipedia has some of them.) One form being your longer indirect speech version, and the other generally being "Carthago delenda est."
This isn't an "Asterix" version -- it's a well-known version of the phrase that has been commonly cited by English-language scholars for the past couple centuries. Just to show you how long people have been quoting the phrase as "Carthago delenda est" -- The form was common enough to even be parodied in the well-known account of a Harvard professor opposed to academic music study in the 1870s who supposedly ended faculty meetings after the first appointment of a music professor with the phrase "musica delenda est" (i.e., music must be destroyed).
It's true in other modern languages that the "ceterum censeo..." version is perhaps more common, but English-language scholars very frequently cite the phrase as "Carthago delenda est," which is as close to the actual ancient quotations as any.
Without the "Ceterum censeo", a Classic Latin speaker would drop the redundant "est" anyway and just state "Delenda Carthago."
Actually, wrong again. "Delenda" is a gerundive and by itself is only a passive participle. Saying "Delenda Carthago" could mean something more like "Carthage is to be destroyed." Adding a form of the Latin verb esse (i.e., to be) turns the construction from a naked gerundive into a passive periphrastic, which connotes an element of necessity. That is, it alters the meaning from "Carthage [is] to be destroyed" to "Carthage MUST be destroyed."
The gerundive itself can carry that connotation a bit informally, but if Cato were speaking formally and wanted to emphasize his feeling that it MUST happen, he likely would have added a form of "esse" (as you can see is found in multiple actual quotations and references from Latin sources as seen in the Wikipedia article).
Actually, I think the latter is the Asterix version so Goscinny still beats Zuckerberg, Harvard be damned.
Yes, I believe Asterix actually uses the form you mention, which is abbreviated and less formal. And I really can't believe I'm actually defending Zuckerberg here... but his version was perfectly acceptable.
Sometimes when dealing with General Ignorance you have to be Captain Obvious although here apparently not obvious enough.
Woah -- sorry, but that's over the line. I admittedly was a bit rude in making fun of your post, and for that I would apologize. But I did not accuse you yourself of being an idiot. This is impolite and unwarranted. If you spend even a few minute reviewing the history of my posts here, you'd know that I have a deep background in the history and philosophy of science. So accusing me of "general ignorance" in this area is really being a jerk.
Nevertheless, I'm in a good-natured mood, so I'll respond a bit just to try to enlighten you.
I understood your rough analogy for what it was and was extending it to explain to you the difference between a scientific theory and a mathematical proof.
Thanks, but I don't need that. I completely understand what the COMMON idea of this distinction is. I was trying to get you to think a bit more "outside the box" and realize the practical reality of these distinctions is a bit less helpful than most people think.
The perfection of the maths does not fail when describing the real world it is simply that the mathematical model used was not a perfect representation. This means that the model is wrong, not the maths which underlies that model.
You really didn't get what I was trying to say. There's no precise way to define a statement like "the sky is blue" in any mathematical sense, because the real world is simply too messy. Just like there's no such thing as an actual "triangle" in the real world -- eventually you go far enough down dividing space and you get to Plank length and things go wonky. There's only an imprecise relationship between the number 23 and anything in reality, because even enumerating things precisely in the real world is often very "messy" when you try to get very, very, very precise.
Yes, there are some cases where math seems to have an exact relationship to the real world, but in most cases (including in most uses in physics), we just skim over that messiness and ignore it while assuming the math just "matches" the reality. And there are plenty of cases where that math turns out to be wrong, because that "messiness" of reality (even when it's relatively small differences and mostly imperceptible in real life) "bubble up" and make errors appear on the macro level in some physical circumstances.
Now, you seem to be arguing that in that case the "math is still right" but the model was wrong. What I'm telling you is that I think that's an artificial distinction that has no practical meaning. You can disagree with me, but I'd say that when the math doesn't fit reality, it's flawed -- the whole thing. Because a mathematical model used within a scientific hypothesis IS part of the science. That's why Newton isn't really "wrong" and why we still teach his version of mechanics. The math model IS the science, even if it doesn't reflect the reality at high speeds or energies or whatever, and as a practical matter, the math works to a high-enough precision that Newton's model is still useful in most everyday applications.
To me, math models and experimental science are fundamentally related. Trying to claim one can be "right" while the other is "wrong" is just a distinction without usefulness. Anyhow, all of this discussion, while interesting, is NOT at all related to the example I gave.
Actually you can go further and say that is it not a scientific hypothesis at all because it has zero power of prediction. In science we actually just call what you did a measurement because that is all it is.
Who called it a scientific hypothesis? I didn't in my original post. But you did. At no point would I have considered what I said to be a "hypothesis." I called it a "conjecture."
Anyhow, my example is similar to a mathematical proof in the sense t
it's better than nothing. The right wing took over the state legislatures and used them to gerrymander Senate & House victories. After that single payer was dead.
Huh? How do you connect these two things? Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for Obamacare. It passed with ONLY Democratic votes, while Democrats were in control of both houses. How exactly can you blame the system adopted on Republicans when they unanimously opposed the bill??
Yes, both parties have used gerrymandering to their advantage. Yes, Republicans largely retook Congress by running on a platform to oppose Obamacare. Heck, when Ted Kennedy died, one of the most liberal states in the country -- Massachusetts -- held a special election, and Massachusetts voters sent a Republican to fill the seat largely on the platform that he would stop Obamacare from being passed... and yet Congress leaders used procedures to get around passing the bill that avoided intervention by that newly elected senator from one of the most liberal states.
There is absolutely NO ONE to blame for this other than a Democratic President and Democratic Congress members -- from the refusal to consider single payer to all the wacky crap like the Cornhusker Kickback.
BTW -- I'm NOT a Republican, and I'd absolutely be in favor of a single-payer system. But Obamacare is an abomination, designed to enslave people to insurance companies who skim money off the top for doing nothing but standing in the way of good healthcare. Democrats have no one to blame for this other than themselves.
Check out David Cope's work. He deconstructed Bach's music into an underlying grammatical theory, generalised it to other composers, then built EMI, a program to analyze music for stylistic patterns, then to use his musical grammar to create a full composition in that style. Later he wrote Emily Howell, which can do grammar-based compositions in its own synthesised style. You might be surprised how good the pieces are.
Almost every sentence here is misleading or wrong. Cope didn't build an "underlying grammatical theory" from Bach or anyone else. He basically built a program that pulled out patterns from a specific repertoire (Bach chorales, Mozart sonatas, Chopin Mazurkas, etc.). Then he would have his program "generate" hundreds of "new compositions" that sound like rearranged bits of old works. Then he'd select the best few out of those hundreds of nonsense compositions and showcase them to audiences as new computer "intelligence" as a "composer."
Seriously -- I understand why these things would sound reasonable to a non-expert. But if you were a university music major in an upper-level course and were asked to write a Mazurka in the style of Chopin and brought in something like Cope's works, your work would be torn to shreds by a competent composition teacher for being unidiomatic and sounding like a weird ungrammatical mashup of preexisting Chopin.
By the way, none of this is meant as a criticism of Cope's work. I'm a big admirer of what he did accomplish and the kind of things he tried. But the claim that his programs produced "original compositions" in the style of X has always been overblown, especially given how he'd select the best exemplars out of the nonsense the programs generally spit out.
His most interesting work was actually in the programs that tried to be more " free form" and less imitative of a particular composer or style. I wish he had spent more time focusing on that.
Ah, the single life. Still thinking like you are living out of the dorm. But for social engagements with your wife and kids, friends and family, you are going to need that big screen TV and the sound bar to match
Hmm... I guess I don't go to your kind of parties. When I have a "social engagement" with friends, it's generally to... Well, uh... be "social." You know, talking to other people and such. Watching TV tends to be a distraction that happens at parties where people don't want to talk to each other... And if I didn't want to talk, why wouldn't I just stay home and watch the TV by myself?
Seriously. Aside from "Superbowl parties" and the occasional other party organized around a sporting event (which I don't go to very much), I can't recall the last time I sat around with a bunch of people at a "social engagement" that required a big TV. For me, TV is the thing you put on for the kids in the other room, so the adults can hang out and actually socialize somewhere else. (And who cares how big the TV is for the kids...)
Maybe I'm doing it wrong?? I guess I don't spend my life chained to a big-screen TV.
Also, I would note that there are explicitly contradictory signals from pay-TV services at this time. From a 1985 newspaper article:
"We know that many of our viewers subscribe to our service so that they can tape uncut movies," said Peter Chernin, executive vice president of programming for Showtime.
To accommodate those viewers... Showtime will begin in August a weekly, late-night double feature "of the best films we're offering that week. We'll run them probably at 2 a.m. to allow subscribers to set their VCRs and tape the movies while they sleep," Chernin said.
Later in the article, an executive from HBO is also quoted as agreeing that "We know that a lot of movies are taped from HBO and we are not immune to the desires of our consumers." He therefore explicitly rejected an early form of DRM which could attempt to decrease home taping quality.
So, not only did Stevens NOT reject pay-TV taping or taping without advertisements, the people who were actually running pay-TV stations at the time were explicitly encouraging it! (After all, they wanted the revenue to go to them, rather than to the video rental companies.)
Stevens decision in the Betamax case applies only to time-shifting of advertiser-supported content carried by television stations. He specifically excluded pay-TV services like the then-new HBO.
Well -- Here's a link to the decision. I'm assuming you're referencing Stevens's summary of the District Court decision, where he includes: "This case involves only the home recording for home use of television programs broadcast free over the airwaves. No issue is raised concerning cable or pay television, or the sharing or trading of tapes."
Note that "no issue X is raised" does NOT mean the same as "this case does not apply to X." Perhaps there's a subsequent case dealing with cable TV or whatever, but this one doesn't deal with it. It does NOT mean that this reasoning couldn't apply, only that the question was not raised here. Also, typically appellate courts do not consider matters which were not brought before lower courts. So the reasonable way to read this sentence is, "The lower court only considered over-the-air broadcasts, so that's all we're considering here." There's no judgment about whether the legal argument would or would not apply more broadly.
Stevens found that the fair-use defense applied because time-shifting via VCRs expanded the audience for the advertising.
Really? Where? I see only a few references to this sort of thing. Stevens notes in summarizing the function of VCRs that:
The pause button, when depressed, deactivates the recorder until it is released, thus enabling a viewer to omit a commercial advertisement from the recording, provided, of course, that the viewer is present when the program is recorded. The fast-forward control enables the viewer of a previously recorded program to run the tape rapidly when a segment he or she does not desire to see is being played back on the television screen.
I skimmed the rest of his decision, and I didn't see any place where he remarked on these capabilities as significant to the copyright issue. There are a couple footnotes on point. Footnote 28 mentions that TV is often (though not exclusively) enabled through advertiser revenue, rather than through fees paid directly from consumers. In footnote 36, Stevens notes that the District Court rejected arguments from advertisers:
In a separate section, the District Court rejected plaintiffs' suggestion that the commercial attractiveness of television broadcasts would be diminished because Betamax owners would use the pause button or fast-forward control to avoid viewing advertisements...
The District Court apparently held that for people to skip commercials during taping, they had to view the program anyway, so they viewed the commercials as much as anyone else. And for those who fast-forwarded, well... advertisers realize that people might get up to make a sandwich or whatever during commercials anyway.
Justice Blackmun's dissent does mention the issue, but only as a potential one, not a proven one:
Moreover, advertisers may be willing to pay for only "live" viewing audiences, if they believe VTR viewers will delete commercials or if rating services are unable to measure VTR use; if this is the case, VTR recording could reduce the license fees the Studios are able to charge even for first-run showings.
Again, none of this really justifies your argument. Maybe there's a subsequent ruling that explicitly says this logic does NOT apply to cable TV or pay TV or that advertisements are required to be taped -- but there's nothing in the actual Betamax case ruling that seems to say that.
And good riddance, most of the time. On rare occasions, I am actually stupid enough to think that it's a reasonable idea to try looking in a brick-and-mortar store for something that would be useful for me today, not in two days from Amazon. Almost always, the brick-and-mortar store doesn't have the thing in stock, but "can order it for me." Why the fuck would I go to the trouble of driving out to the fucking strip mall where the box store is, if I wanted it "ordered"?
Well, you know, they do have this thing called the "internet," where many chain stores make their inventory available online now. You can easily search online and find out what is in-stock, and then you only end up going to a store you actually know has what you want. They'll even often tell you what aisle to find the item in. That's particularly useful when looking for something obscure at a giant store like Lowe's or Home Depot -- it's actually faster to search online before leaving so I know where to look, rather than wandering around the store for 30 minutes looking for some random thing (which often no one at the store seems to know the location of either).
Most modern brick-and-mortar stores should just die, with the possible exception of grocery stores.
There are all sorts of other stores that people find useful, believe it or not.
This is often a more stereotypical "woman thing," but many people actually like to try on clothes to see how they fit and how they "look on them" before buying. Yeah, you can have clothes shipped to you and then send stuff back, too -- but I've known women who will try on 15 dresses for every 1 they will buy. That's pretty tough to do online.
Or, do you own a home? Have you ever attempted a home repair? I can't tell you how many times I've spent a weekend driving back and forth to Home Depot or Lowe's trying out different parts and then realizing they won't work, so I need something slightly different. In a brick-and-mortar store, you can take a part with you, see whether it looks like it might fit. Or, if you buy the wrong one, you can take it back, and get a different one the same day.
If I tried to do many basic home repairs using only online resources, it could take me weeks or even months of back-and-forth until I got everything right... particularly if you have an older home with older random parts (or even a home with stuff in it that's more than 10 or 15 years old).
And then there are tools you actually want to use regularly -- and you often want to know what the "feel like" first. I cook a lot, and buying kitchen knives online would be horrible, unless I'm buying a hand-crafted knife from a Japanese master I trust or something. Most knives have terrible balance, or the handle hurts your hand when you use it for more than a few minutes, or whatever.
Everyone has their own set of things they'd prefer to see themselves or "try out" before buying. Not to mention the experience of "browsing" is completely different in a physical store. Sure, a brick-and-mortar store may have a smaller selection, but I'm still rather amazed sometimes at the way they group items and what I may discover for a task which I wouldn't find online because search terms wouldn't have suggested it.
I say all of this as someone who buys a LOT of stuff online. But I still recognize the utility of many physical stores for a lot of use cases.
I mean, the video is already on your computer. If they shut down internet service, it'll move client-side. Hell, if I wanted I could output the video/audio of my screen and record them.
It's futile. They know it and we know it.
Absolutely. Moreover, I think there should be some more legal examination about the legality of downloading streaming content. I've never quite understood why making a copy of streaming content is not directly analogous to making a copy of "streaming" cable or over-the-air TV, a practice that was explicitly ruled legal 30 years ago in the so-called Betamax decision.
File-sharing has always been a bit more nebulous, because it often involves someone making available copies of pre-made copyrighted files to simply make more copies. Here, YouTube is actually NOT making those files directly available to end users -- instead, a service is allowing you to essentially preserving a "recording" of what would otherwise be an ephemeral stream.
The Supreme Court has explicitly legalized "time-shifting" for VCRs. Why is it necessarily illegal when we essentially do the same thing for streaming video over the internet? (The only answer I can come up with is just because recording is now "easier" than with VCRs... but that doesn't seem like a good legal argument about what should constitute "fair use".)
People don't like being spammed with ads in any notification tray. Learn your lesson, Microsoft.
Sorry to be cynical, but exactly how will Microsoft "learn its lesson" here? That phrase is usually accompanied by a punishment (or at least a threat of one).
But it's not like Microsoft will actually be "punished" for this. It's not like their sales of MS Office will go down significantly because of this. Microsoft has been selling a bloated office software suite for 20 years, and reasonable free alternatives have been available for at least a decade -- but every time this comes up here, you have a hundred people shouting, "But, but -- everybody else uses MS Office, and the converters screw up the formatting moving between office suites!"
As long as MS Office has the dominant market share, there's no threat to them, hence they have no reason to "learn their lesson."
(Oh, and I'm sure this could lead to a typical discussion about how someone is missing function X in LibreOffice or whatever that only Excel does. Yeah, I know. But if corporations spent 1/10th of the money and time resources they spend on MS Office (as well as support and training for new upgrades, etc.) instead helping to improve open-source alternatives, we'd have a much better FREE office suite and MS Office would be dead within a couple years. Instead, we all just keep paying the Microsoft license tax, year after year.)
Yep, that's why I specified that one should look at the whole spectrum and distribution and compare it to what humans would characterize as "blue." Obviously many light sources emit a wide variety of frequencies, but humans just perceive one hue out of that mess. The association, as you note, is complex, but pretty well studied.
This is not a mathematical proof but a scientific theory supported by evidence.
I knew somebody was going to come and start arguing about this nonsense. Look -- I was trying to make a rough analogy in common language, first of all, which should have been clear to anyone (I thought). OBVIOUSLY the statement "the sky is blue" is not true at night or when it's cloudy or whatever. Duh. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
A mathematical proof, if correct, is always and absolutely true. [snip] In fact you can never really prove a scientific theory - all you can say is that it works in all the situations it has been tested under.
I want you to think hard about this. This is a common statement, but if you actually spend some time interrogating what you're claiming, you'll realize there is no PRACTICAL difference between the two. Why? A mathematical proof is NOT "always and absolutely true." It only works in an imaginary situation that has been made up and functions under various untestable axioms. If some of those axioms fail (as they often do when math is applied to the real, actual world), the math "proof" is no longer valid.
There's a whole area devoted to the philosophy of mathematics that has to do with how (or whether!) math actually applies to the real world. Most of those perfect assumptions we make in mathematical theorems don't really work in the messiness of the real world.
So, you're stuck with a couple of possibilities, either (1) math is purely imaginary and has no relationship to the real world, in which case you get to claim that mathematical proofs are "different" because it's a purely mental exercise (but practically useless), or (2) math HAS some imprecise relationship to the real world, but the perfection of the math fails due to the imprecision of application... in which case any mathematical proof is essentially another fallible hypothesis about the real world which could fail at any moment for the same reason any "scientific" theory fails.
To put it another way, a math proof is the equivalent of saying, "The sky is blue, assuming a perfect day with these 164 assumptions." And yeah, if you assume those 164 background assumptions are true, you pretty much can "prove" that the sky will be blue. The real world doesn't work like that, but I can still prove that the sky IS blue (not that it "will be blue" at some future time) by measuring the sky outside MY house RIGHT NOW. That is an assertion of fact regarding a specific measurement I took, NOT a scientific hypothesis expected to be valid at all times and in all places.
Isaac Newton was proven wrong, he was ignorant. Did anyone prove Trump wrong? Or is it just opinion that doesn't have scientific merit?
If you think Newton was ignorant you have a bad definition of ignorant.
Also, well, there's the well-known discussion about the relativity of wrong by Asimov.
If you (or GP) hasn't read it, it's worth it -- but basically, it would be more accurate to say that Newton's theory was "incomplete" given what he knew and had observed at the time. Nobody else in his era had better data, so he couldn't be called "ignorant" and really not even "wrong" in some sense. (That's why we still teach his physics to students -- it's really not absolutely "wrong," just an approximate understanding that's incomplete in special circumstances that most people don't encounter every day.)
Trump, on the other hand, utters known factual errors on a daily basis... and actually doesn't seem to care. When someone calls him on it, his reaction is usually either to deny he's wrong (with no evidence) or to act like a bully and insult the person who called him out. Either way, he epitomizes ignorance.
Indeed. I'm rather confused by the editorial commentary. To put it in terms of the summary regarding a question of color, imagine if someone asked the question, "What color is the sky?" Conjecture: The sky is blue.
Proof? Point an instrument at the sky and measure the light coming from it. Looking at the spectrum of frequencies coming from the sky, it falls into a range of colors that humans would generally associate with "blue."
That's it -- you've "proved" what the color of the sky is, i.e., "blue."
TFS instead starts asking, "But WHY are the frequencies emitted from the sky in the range that qualifies as blue? Why aren't there other dominant frequencies? Why do they fall in a particular range? Have we really proved what color the sky is???"
These are all very interesting questions, but they are irrelevant to the fact that the sky IS blue and one can prove it by measuring the frequency and correlating it with what humans call "blue." Proofs aren't generally about "why," and in fact many concise "elegant" mathematical proofs may be completely non-intuitive about showing why they work -- nevertheless they are considered valid proofs.
What do you say that? I did. I have several friends who did as well around that age -- we taught ourselves from manuals available at the time.
It's like calculus. It's a tool and you learn it when you need it
There are elements of calculus that could easily be introduced in elementary school, particularly if we focused on geometrical explanations (which were originally used by people like Newton, and which people like Tom Apostol have been arguing for a long time) instead of the abstract algebraic ones. It would be very helpful to lay the foundation for basic calculus concepts so early, so the elements wouldn't be so foreign when the kids are prepared for the algebraic abstractions later on.
But learning art, or music and being physically active makes every day of your life better. And you'll probably be more successful because of it.
Completely agree. But there's no reason why we can't introduce some concepts earlier. Apps like Lightbot and Scratch Jr. clearly show that one can introduce procedural ideas even to younger kids (earlier than 4th grade), and although I don't have evidence to back this up, I would bet that kids do better at picking up coding concepts for more abstract things later on.
Parents should teach their children how to be good members of society,
Yes, I agree,
and it is not only not the place
of schools to teach that, but it is explicitly overstepping their role to assume they have the right to teach
children social values.
First, the very idea of mandatory public schooling came out of social engineering to promote certain values. If you want to "opt out" of that system, then home-school your kids.
Second, the role of teachers is often to go beyond what you could learn from your parents alone. In this instance, I would argue that the function of a GOOD teacher is to expose students to a wide variety of possible philosophies, along with critical thinking about ethical systems and standards, rather than inculcating them into a specific social system.
I'm speaking here of secondary school, of course. At a primary school level, the basic "social values" shouldn't be that complex -- it should just be about teaching kids to get along with each other and respecting others. But, for secondary school, a good teacher will challenge students to think about their choices and values and to consider alternatives. My history teachers in high school were very good at this, and my school offered some choices about English class tracks, where I chose to take something on a sort of "Books that Changed the World" idea. The teacher there again was great about not taking sides -- instead, like a good philosophy class, getting students to think about the foundations of metaethics, the possible political philosophies that have sprung up over the ages, etc.
Not every kid will be able to get all of this at a high school age, but it will spark an interest in many kids to think ABOUT their values, rather than simply parroting what a parent (or bad teacher) tells them to do without questioning anything.
Or do you think some random teacher is the best person to decide on the social values or your child?
Think about it..
Again, there's a difference between teaching kids to think ABOUT systems of values, how they are constructed, and how making a choice about them requires consideration of fundamental ethics and social ideas vs. simply telling kids what to believe. I agree with you that the latter should NOT be the job of a teacher -- and in fact, it shouldn't be what good parents do either, though in a free society that's the choice of parents to do so.
But the former is a necessary part of a solid education. Just as your English teacher might lead a student to understand new vocabulary and the grammatical systems that parents may not use or understand, or a math teacher might lead a student to go beyond parents, so teachers may also lead students to consider the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of their social choices. That's something a good education should do.
Be careful what you wish for. Terrorists have already started attacking the area outside the secure zone and other soft targets like sports stadiums in Europe.
I don't think anyone is "wishing for" this, except for a TINY number of insane people.
I do wonder why this sort of attack is less common in the US.
Umm, "this sort of attack" isn't "COMMON" in Europe either. There have been a few high-profile isolated incidents. There have also been a few high-profile isolated mass shootings, etc. in Europe in recent years. Neither of these things qualifies as "common."
And the reason they are "less common" (i.e., DON'T EVER HAPPEN) in the U.S. is because the idea that there are tens of thousands of terrorists just ready with the desire AND the means to attack the U.S. at any moment is -- and has always been -- a myth.
Look -- do you even remember what things were like in the U.S. after 9/11? I do. For months, people were rationally scared of just these sorts of things. They weren't just afraid of planes being hijacked, they were afraid of people with bombs OUTSIDE the security zones at airports, so they put extra security in effect at many airports even extending outside the outer doors to the airport.
People were afraid of terrorists doing all sorts of thing -- blowing up Times Square, putting poisons in unprotected water supplies to cities, even blowing up your local shopping mall. I had a very good friend who had heard about all the people talking about these sorts of things on the news, and he was afraid to go to malls -- he avoided them for months after 9/11. Yet none of this happened, and the public gradually forgot about it.
If there were anywhere near the number of terrorists the TSA wants us to believe there are, there would be all sorts of things blowing up all over the U.S. Take a look at a country that actually had SERIOUS terrorism -- Israel, England at the height of the IRA activity, etc. Then you'd have suicide bombers getting on a bus in a major city, or walking into a large crowd... this stuff is NOT hard.
But, as you point out, it doesn't happen in the U.S. The only people who actually attempt to get on planes and do something are STUPID terrorists who can't even figure out there would be so many more easy ways to cause mayhem.
TL;DR: (1) If there were terrorists, bad stuff could happen anywhere. (2) It doesn't, so there aren't that many terrorists. Q.E.D. (3) The only terrorists we might hope to protect against through enhanced TSA security are the most stupid ones -- anyone actually interested in planning a serious attack would never target a plane in the U.S. when there are so many easier targets.
Actually, you're not answering "Is downloading a file a copyright violation?" Obviously the current answer to that question is yes. But you're trying to answer that question historically as a matter of law when downloading copyrighted materials first started. And as I noted, copyright law has had to evolve to deal with new technology, and in some cases (eg VCR taping of TV broadcasts), it was determined NOT to be a copyright violation. The matter about downloading was unsettled law until the late 1990s at least (and some of that actually required new legislation, as I noted). There are concepts of "fair use" and allowable notions of copying... Perhaps it seems obvious to you now that downloading is more like physically copying a book and less like making a personal copy of a TV broadcast on a VCR, but it took courts a couple decades to sort out that question. So, no, we do NOT agree. (And yes, I also added that you were unlikely to be sued for personal copying because it's relevant for why it took so long for this question to be litigated and determined.)
They're already been made obsolete by the Keurig machine in my office...
While I know you were trying to be funny, I think that there's an underlying assumption in the summary about the nature of college and university study that needs to be picked apart a bit.
A couple centuries ago, very few people would have thought of college or university as something that should provide direct life skills for a job or something. That's what apprenticeships were for. Why would anyone in their right mind sit in a lecture with someone talking about a skill, rather than actually working with a real-life expert actually DOING the job??
Universities emphasized "the liberal arts" (which included mathematics and the early versions of sciences) with the idea that an educated person would learn abstract methods for approaching problems and dealing with problems in new areas of study. By being exposed to a wide variety of material from different fields, one was prepared for an intellectual life and a lifelong ability to learn and confront new things.
As science became more specialized in the late 19th century, it became more common for undergraduates to begin to specialize too. But aside from those technical fields, most college students even into the mid 20th century sought out "broad" fields in the humanities, such as history or literature or philosophy, again NOT to prepare for a CAREER as a historian or philosopher or whatever, but to learn about all sorts of problems and ways of thinking over the centuries. Until the past couple decades where people now just make fun of "humanities majors," they were the dominant path toward many fields -- most businessmen, lawyers, etc. would tend to study a humanities discipline as an undergraduate.
And even that was a bit more focused than had traditionally been the case. The very idea of a college "major" for undergraduate study again only dates to the past couple centuries. Many older universities resisted the very idea of "majors" for a long time. (To this day, Harvard for example calls them "concentrations," a term meant to de-emphasize the notion that an undergraduate has one primary "major" area of study... instead, there are just supposed to be a small number of classes that are "concentrated" in one area. Obviously the present Harvard undergraduates don't view them this way anymore -- it's just a weird archaic code for "major" to most people.)
Anyhow, with the scientific specialization and then the idea of bringing in the middle classes and lower classes to college in the mid 20th century led to an expectation for more "practical" study. Degrees that had previously only been offered at specialized "institutes of technology" or "agricultural colleges" or whatever now became practical degrees at many traditional universities.
Except this didn't make any sense then, and it still doesn't make sense. Yes, many careers require some theoretical knowledge and classes, but the vast majority of study would be better done as hands-on apprenticeships, if you actually want career training. College was never designed to be a glorified "trade school," and it really doesn't work as one now.
Basically, the problem is that university was never really intended to be for "the masses." It was originally to train people for contemplative intellectual (and originally spiritual) lives, not for practical skills. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it became a place to send young aristocrats too, so it became associated with something that wealthy people do. (In reality, up until the 1960s or so, most of these rich kids goofed off at universities, often earning what was called "the gentleman's C" in most classes, for barely doing what was required.) Along the way, somebody confused correlation (rich people often sent their kids to college) with causation (college makes people rich). The result is that we're now pretending that college is for career prep, something it never was really meant for... while we've basically neglected the broad training that used to be the goal.
And now we're stuck with our present mess of higher education.
When did downloading a file become a copyright violation?
The relevant law in the US was enacted in 1947, so downloading a copyrighted file without the copyright holder granting the right would have been a copyright violation as soon as downloading was invented.
Well, that's somewhat misleading. In practice, before the internet, it was very rare for corporations (or individual artists/authors/creators) to attempt a copyright lawsuit unless there was proof that the infringer had monetary gain, usually through commercial distribution or something like that.
Keep in mind that this was only subject to a civil action before 1997, so you'd have to hire a lawyer. And then you'd also have to convince a court that downloading a file (which, by your own argument, was "just invented") was significantly different from things like time-shifting, which SCOTUS had ruled was legal in 1984. (That is, you can't be sued for copyright infringement for videotaping a TV broadcast on your VCR for personal use.) It's not readily apparent at the outset that downloading a file is not analogous to something like taping a TV show or movie for later use. In fact, there's a string of litigation in the 1990s that dealt with just these kinds of distinctions, until the "space-shifting" argument was ultimately rejected in court rulings around 2000.
Even if you could convince a court in the 1980s or early 1990s that downloading a file was "making an unauthorized copy," the actual damages for non-commercial infringement would be near zero. So, someone suing would have to go with statutory damages, and given the ambiguity of the situation in the early days, they'd probably only get the minimum in statutory damages... and be lucky to get away with a couple hundred dollars, maybe not even enough to cover court costs.
So, while it may have been a "copyright violation" to download "as soon as downloading was invented," it wouldn't have been pursued unless there was commercial gain involved or some other egregious copyright violation.
Also, while it was perhaps subject to civil penalties, downloading was NOT a criminal violation of copyright until 1997 with the NET Act. Before that, the LaMacchia loophole did not allow prosecution for downloading -- or even filesharing (which would include distribution) -- with no commercial gain. (Note that the "LaMacchia loophole" depended on a distinction between "theft" or "fraud" involving electronic transactions and stealing physical items, again bringing up problems in naively applying previous copyright law to the new electronic landscape.)
Wikipedia is a treasure of useful information, a starting point for unknown topics.
Most of the time, sure. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to tell the difference between a well-researched article that agrees with the scholarly consensus vs. an article based on weird sources (but usually popular, not necessarily scholarly) that are 50 years out of date. Now, it's true that paper encyclopedias could suffer from that problem too. On the other hand, good paper encyclopedias often had information on authors of articles or at least the major subject editors, so you could take a guess about whether it was reliable. You don't have that on Wikipedia, where "anyone can edit."
But there are much worse things -- like how you don't know whether an article has been randomly vandalized, or edited recently by some idiot who just inserted false information. Back when I was actually active editing Wikipedia for a while (before I became aware of how insanely screwed up it was), I remember a number of cases of very subtle vandalism that went unnoticed for weeks.
My favorite was some person -- who was a registered user, rather than just an "anonymous IP address," so it didn't send up as many immediate red flags -- who went through and just changed DIGITS in historical dates. So some random historical person suddenly did X in 1742 instead of 1752 or whatever. They did this on perhaps a dozen articles, and the edits stood for at least a week. The main reason I think he was caught is because -- like most vandals -- eventually he couldn't contain himself and altered some historical article on a woman to say she was "a dirty whore" or something. If he hadn't done that, it might have been months or years before anyone noticed that this one guy had been randomly switching digits across a bunch of Wikipedia articles.
The "vandalism" problem is definitely something that is much WORSE than traditional paper encyclopedias... and if you don't think you've viewed articles that contain various subtle forms of it, you have no idea of how much vandalism is attempted on Wikipedia all the time. (And that doesn't even get into deliberate hoaxes or persistent misinformation that doesn't look like obvious vandalism.)
In such an endeavor striving too much for perfection is the enemy of the good. People always have to understand the perspectives and biases of their sources. That isn't a flaw, that is just reality.
"Perspectives and biases of their sources" is important. But the problem with Wikipedia is that we don't know the perspectives and biases, because it's written mostly by anonymous people and pseudonyms (who have sometimes been known to lie about their identities, even when they claim to provide real-world info about themselves).
And leaving almost all articles open to random editing ensures a continuous war against the kind of vandalism I've already mentioned. That's not a "perspective or bias" -- that IS a serious FLAW. Say what you will about Encyclopedia Britannica, but when I open the paper copy two days later, there won't be random NEW misprints appearing or the word "PENUS!!" suddenly appearing in the middle of an article.
Sure it still sucks, but show me something better and that will suck too.
I have a real problem with this attitude -- "Oh, well it's still better than other stuff!" That's a lame excuse, frankly. We could still improve the concept significantly.
I've been saying this for years, but if Wikipedia really wants to be successful in the long term, it needs major changes. The idea that "anyone can edit!" any article was great in the early days to build a foundation of information -- and it's still good for new articles
Slashdot Mirror
I found their mobile app to be so intrusive, I uninstalled it after a day of trying it out.
Exactly. I rarely use Facebook, but I do have an account mostly to monitor what other people may say and do regarding me. (Otherwise, for example, people would take photos of me and post them online anyway -- this way at least I can see a lot of them when they tag me and know what's going on.)
Anyhow, a few years ago I did post very occasionally and I started to check in a little more frequently (maybe even every day or so). When I got a new tablet, I thought -- hmm, maybe I'll install the Facebook app.
But I never got to the installation. It just threw up this gigantic set of permissions required unlike any other app I've ever seen. There was no way I would allow ANY app on my device that asked for so many permissions. I can't fathom how so many users just blithely click through that screen without realizing what Facebook is asking to do with their device.
(After that, I truly became disturbed by what Facebook had become, so I am almost never active on it anymore.)
IANAL, but I don't believe this applies to a discussion where the party (FB) doing the recording isn't even known to be a part of the fucking discussion. It would be like me calling my wife, an having someone else listening/recording our phone sex w/o our knowledge.
Actually, it would be more like... well, what it is: a listening device in your house (or wherever you are).
This actually demonstrates the fundamental shift in technology that has occurred in the past couple decades. It used to be that the most standard method of spying was interception of a communication, like tapping into a phone line to hear what was being transferred over that line.
Infiltration was often harder -- it would require you to actually physically go "bug" someone's house by installing your own hardware and transmitter (rather than relying on voluntary use of a phone line to carry information out).
But now rather than choosing a time or a place to speak into an electronic device (like a phone or a general microphone), we instead tend to carry these devices with us at all times, where they can theoretically be activated and programmed to activate remotely -- and can listen in whenever and wherever you have that device. Bottom line is that your phone or tablet or whatever is MUCH more insidious than a traditional "phone tap" ever could be.
On top of that, there are already lotteries where the prize is life-time annuity, or who have a stable unearned income from a trust, so the experiment is already being done. It's just a matter of tracking the participants down.
I can think of many ways this is generally different. For a few examples:
(1) The lottery is thought of by most people as a "prize" rather than "income." People often tend to spend money they "win" very differently from their "income."
(2) Lottery awards vary wildly in size, from enough money to live well on for the rest of one's life to barely enough to scrape by. A universal basic income would be set at a certain rate for everyone (presumably low). It would be very hard to get good data from such a broad dataset.
(3) A lottery is generally won by a single person in isolation. If family, neighbors, random community members find out about this win, they often expect to be treated differently by the winner, perhaps even given money. Many generous lottery winners end up going through their funds faster in providing for others, while the universal basic income would provide for ALL people separately, so there would be less such pressure.
I could go on, but you hopefully get the point. The data from lottery winners will be really hard to interpret compared to a uniform income given to an entire community.
And also the real questions about a universal income are about the long-term impacts. If I quit my job, and in five years decide I'm no longer happy with the minimal standard of living and want to return to the workforce, what will potential employers feel about five years of idleness?
I suspect it's the same answer as it is today if you are out of work for any period of time. Parents who take time off to spend with a kid before old enough for school experience this all the time -- often they don't get much sympathy for being out of the career for a while. I don't think the reason will much matter -- if you haven't worked for a while, your skills and abilities are likely out of date, and you'll have to prove your worth to get someone to hire you or at least to keep you on for an extended period.
Will the number of people wanting to work be high enough that employers can drive down wages, or low enough that workers can drive up wages?
Again, I suspect the answer to this question is the same as it is now: both. The workforce will likely ebb and flow with demand and wages over time, as it does now.
The main difference is that workers will probably be less willing to be exploited just because they need money to survive and feed their families, etc. Workers are motivated differently if they need to work to pay for the ability to buy "extras" vs. if they are hungry and know they don't get to work on time that they could get fired and their family will have trouble making rent, paying for electricity, and getting food on the table.
"911? I am being illegally detained at ADDRESS under threat of harm if I try to leave. Please help."
Better yet -- "I'm being illegally detained under threat of harm if I try to leave. The person threatening me is babbling incoherently... though I am told by one of my colleagues that he may be speaking in an ancient tongue with almost religious fervor, quoting something about wanting to destroy his enemies and an entire city. I'm really scared. Please send help!"
"Carthago delenda est."? Why even revert to Latin if you don't even know your quotes? Where is this from, Asterix? I mean, Cato the Elder's stock ending was famous enough that its start "Ceterum censeo" is almost better known than the rest: "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam."
Before you go on a rant about how someone else misuses an ancient language, you might bother to make sure you know what you're talking about.
As even the Wikipedia article explains, the phrase was actually never quoted in an ancient source directly in the TWO forms it is generally quoted in today. (If you want to see many of the various paraphrases of the form actually found in ancient sources, Wikipedia has some of them.) One form being your longer indirect speech version, and the other generally being "Carthago delenda est."
This isn't an "Asterix" version -- it's a well-known version of the phrase that has been commonly cited by English-language scholars for the past couple centuries. Just to show you how long people have been quoting the phrase as "Carthago delenda est" -- The form was common enough to even be parodied in the well-known account of a Harvard professor opposed to academic music study in the 1870s who supposedly ended faculty meetings after the first appointment of a music professor with the phrase "musica delenda est" (i.e., music must be destroyed).
It's true in other modern languages that the "ceterum censeo..." version is perhaps more common, but English-language scholars very frequently cite the phrase as "Carthago delenda est," which is as close to the actual ancient quotations as any.
Without the "Ceterum censeo", a Classic Latin speaker would drop the redundant "est" anyway and just state "Delenda Carthago."
Actually, wrong again. "Delenda" is a gerundive and by itself is only a passive participle. Saying "Delenda Carthago" could mean something more like "Carthage is to be destroyed." Adding a form of the Latin verb esse (i.e., to be) turns the construction from a naked gerundive into a passive periphrastic, which connotes an element of necessity. That is, it alters the meaning from "Carthage [is] to be destroyed" to "Carthage MUST be destroyed."
The gerundive itself can carry that connotation a bit informally, but if Cato were speaking formally and wanted to emphasize his feeling that it MUST happen, he likely would have added a form of "esse" (as you can see is found in multiple actual quotations and references from Latin sources as seen in the Wikipedia article).
Actually, I think the latter is the Asterix version so Goscinny still beats Zuckerberg, Harvard be damned.
Yes, I believe Asterix actually uses the form you mention, which is abbreviated and less formal. And I really can't believe I'm actually defending Zuckerberg here... but his version was perfectly acceptable.
Sometimes when dealing with General Ignorance you have to be Captain Obvious although here apparently not obvious enough.
Woah -- sorry, but that's over the line. I admittedly was a bit rude in making fun of your post, and for that I would apologize. But I did not accuse you yourself of being an idiot. This is impolite and unwarranted. If you spend even a few minute reviewing the history of my posts here, you'd know that I have a deep background in the history and philosophy of science. So accusing me of "general ignorance" in this area is really being a jerk.
Nevertheless, I'm in a good-natured mood, so I'll respond a bit just to try to enlighten you.
I understood your rough analogy for what it was and was extending it to explain to you the difference between a scientific theory and a mathematical proof.
Thanks, but I don't need that. I completely understand what the COMMON idea of this distinction is. I was trying to get you to think a bit more "outside the box" and realize the practical reality of these distinctions is a bit less helpful than most people think.
The perfection of the maths does not fail when describing the real world it is simply that the mathematical model used was not a perfect representation. This means that the model is wrong, not the maths which underlies that model.
You really didn't get what I was trying to say. There's no precise way to define a statement like "the sky is blue" in any mathematical sense, because the real world is simply too messy. Just like there's no such thing as an actual "triangle" in the real world -- eventually you go far enough down dividing space and you get to Plank length and things go wonky. There's only an imprecise relationship between the number 23 and anything in reality, because even enumerating things precisely in the real world is often very "messy" when you try to get very, very, very precise.
Yes, there are some cases where math seems to have an exact relationship to the real world, but in most cases (including in most uses in physics), we just skim over that messiness and ignore it while assuming the math just "matches" the reality. And there are plenty of cases where that math turns out to be wrong, because that "messiness" of reality (even when it's relatively small differences and mostly imperceptible in real life) "bubble up" and make errors appear on the macro level in some physical circumstances.
Now, you seem to be arguing that in that case the "math is still right" but the model was wrong. What I'm telling you is that I think that's an artificial distinction that has no practical meaning. You can disagree with me, but I'd say that when the math doesn't fit reality, it's flawed -- the whole thing. Because a mathematical model used within a scientific hypothesis IS part of the science. That's why Newton isn't really "wrong" and why we still teach his version of mechanics. The math model IS the science, even if it doesn't reflect the reality at high speeds or energies or whatever, and as a practical matter, the math works to a high-enough precision that Newton's model is still useful in most everyday applications.
To me, math models and experimental science are fundamentally related. Trying to claim one can be "right" while the other is "wrong" is just a distinction without usefulness. Anyhow, all of this discussion, while interesting, is NOT at all related to the example I gave.
Actually you can go further and say that is it not a scientific hypothesis at all because it has zero power of prediction. In science we actually just call what you did a measurement because that is all it is.
Who called it a scientific hypothesis? I didn't in my original post. But you did. At no point would I have considered what I said to be a "hypothesis." I called it a "conjecture."
Anyhow, my example is similar to a mathematical proof in the sense t
it's better than nothing. The right wing took over the state legislatures and used them to gerrymander Senate & House victories. After that single payer was dead.
Huh? How do you connect these two things? Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for Obamacare. It passed with ONLY Democratic votes, while Democrats were in control of both houses. How exactly can you blame the system adopted on Republicans when they unanimously opposed the bill??
Yes, both parties have used gerrymandering to their advantage. Yes, Republicans largely retook Congress by running on a platform to oppose Obamacare. Heck, when Ted Kennedy died, one of the most liberal states in the country -- Massachusetts -- held a special election, and Massachusetts voters sent a Republican to fill the seat largely on the platform that he would stop Obamacare from being passed... and yet Congress leaders used procedures to get around passing the bill that avoided intervention by that newly elected senator from one of the most liberal states.
There is absolutely NO ONE to blame for this other than a Democratic President and Democratic Congress members -- from the refusal to consider single payer to all the wacky crap like the Cornhusker Kickback.
BTW -- I'm NOT a Republican, and I'd absolutely be in favor of a single-payer system. But Obamacare is an abomination, designed to enslave people to insurance companies who skim money off the top for doing nothing but standing in the way of good healthcare. Democrats have no one to blame for this other than themselves.
Check out David Cope's work. He deconstructed Bach's music into an underlying grammatical theory, generalised it to other composers, then built EMI, a program to analyze music for stylistic patterns, then to use his musical grammar to create a full composition in that style. Later he wrote Emily Howell, which can do grammar-based compositions in its own synthesised style. You might be surprised how good the pieces are.
Almost every sentence here is misleading or wrong. Cope didn't build an "underlying grammatical theory" from Bach or anyone else. He basically built a program that pulled out patterns from a specific repertoire (Bach chorales, Mozart sonatas, Chopin Mazurkas, etc.). Then he would have his program "generate" hundreds of "new compositions" that sound like rearranged bits of old works. Then he'd select the best few out of those hundreds of nonsense compositions and showcase them to audiences as new computer "intelligence" as a "composer."
Seriously -- I understand why these things would sound reasonable to a non-expert. But if you were a university music major in an upper-level course and were asked to write a Mazurka in the style of Chopin and brought in something like Cope's works, your work would be torn to shreds by a competent composition teacher for being unidiomatic and sounding like a weird ungrammatical mashup of preexisting Chopin.
By the way, none of this is meant as a criticism of Cope's work. I'm a big admirer of what he did accomplish and the kind of things he tried. But the claim that his programs produced "original compositions" in the style of X has always been overblown, especially given how he'd select the best exemplars out of the nonsense the programs generally spit out.
His most interesting work was actually in the programs that tried to be more " free form" and less imitative of a particular composer or style. I wish he had spent more time focusing on that.
Ah, the single life. Still thinking like you are living out of the dorm. But for social engagements with your wife and kids, friends and family, you are going to need that big screen TV and the sound bar to match
Hmm... I guess I don't go to your kind of parties. When I have a "social engagement" with friends, it's generally to... Well, uh... be "social." You know, talking to other people and such. Watching TV tends to be a distraction that happens at parties where people don't want to talk to each other... And if I didn't want to talk, why wouldn't I just stay home and watch the TV by myself?
Seriously. Aside from "Superbowl parties" and the occasional other party organized around a sporting event (which I don't go to very much), I can't recall the last time I sat around with a bunch of people at a "social engagement" that required a big TV. For me, TV is the thing you put on for the kids in the other room, so the adults can hang out and actually socialize somewhere else. (And who cares how big the TV is for the kids...)
Maybe I'm doing it wrong?? I guess I don't spend my life chained to a big-screen TV.
"We know that many of our viewers subscribe to our service so that they can tape uncut movies," said Peter Chernin, executive vice president of programming for Showtime.
To accommodate those viewers... Showtime will begin in August a weekly, late-night double feature "of the best films we're offering that week. We'll run them probably at 2 a.m. to allow subscribers to set their VCRs and tape the movies while they sleep," Chernin said.
Later in the article, an executive from HBO is also quoted as agreeing that "We know that a lot of movies are taped from HBO and we are not immune to the desires of our consumers." He therefore explicitly rejected an early form of DRM which could attempt to decrease home taping quality.
So, not only did Stevens NOT reject pay-TV taping or taping without advertisements, the people who were actually running pay-TV stations at the time were explicitly encouraging it! (After all, they wanted the revenue to go to them, rather than to the video rental companies.)
Stevens decision in the Betamax case applies only to time-shifting of advertiser-supported content carried by television stations. He specifically excluded pay-TV services like the then-new HBO.
Well -- Here's a link to the decision. I'm assuming you're referencing Stevens's summary of the District Court decision, where he includes: "This case involves only the home recording for home use of television programs broadcast free over the airwaves. No issue is raised concerning cable or pay television, or the sharing or trading of tapes."
Note that "no issue X is raised" does NOT mean the same as "this case does not apply to X." Perhaps there's a subsequent case dealing with cable TV or whatever, but this one doesn't deal with it. It does NOT mean that this reasoning couldn't apply, only that the question was not raised here. Also, typically appellate courts do not consider matters which were not brought before lower courts. So the reasonable way to read this sentence is, "The lower court only considered over-the-air broadcasts, so that's all we're considering here." There's no judgment about whether the legal argument would or would not apply more broadly.
Stevens found that the fair-use defense applied because time-shifting via VCRs expanded the audience for the advertising.
Really? Where? I see only a few references to this sort of thing. Stevens notes in summarizing the function of VCRs that:
The pause button, when depressed, deactivates the recorder until it is released, thus enabling a viewer to omit a commercial advertisement from the recording, provided, of course, that the viewer is present when the program is recorded. The fast-forward control enables the viewer of a previously recorded program to run the tape rapidly when a segment he or she does not desire to see is being played back on the television screen.
I skimmed the rest of his decision, and I didn't see any place where he remarked on these capabilities as significant to the copyright issue. There are a couple footnotes on point. Footnote 28 mentions that TV is often (though not exclusively) enabled through advertiser revenue, rather than through fees paid directly from consumers. In footnote 36, Stevens notes that the District Court rejected arguments from advertisers:
In a separate section, the District Court rejected plaintiffs' suggestion that the commercial attractiveness of television broadcasts would be diminished because Betamax owners would use the pause button or fast-forward control to avoid viewing advertisements...
The District Court apparently held that for people to skip commercials during taping, they had to view the program anyway, so they viewed the commercials as much as anyone else. And for those who fast-forwarded, well... advertisers realize that people might get up to make a sandwich or whatever during commercials anyway.
Justice Blackmun's dissent does mention the issue, but only as a potential one, not a proven one:
Moreover, advertisers may be willing to pay for only "live" viewing audiences, if they believe VTR viewers will delete commercials or if rating services are unable to measure VTR use; if this is the case, VTR recording could reduce the license fees the Studios are able to charge even for first-run showings.
Again, none of this really justifies your argument. Maybe there's a subsequent ruling that explicitly says this logic does NOT apply to cable TV or pay TV or that advertisements are required to be taped -- but there's nothing in the actual Betamax case ruling that seems to say that.
And good riddance, most of the time. On rare occasions, I am actually stupid enough to think that it's a reasonable idea to try looking in a brick-and-mortar store for something that would be useful for me today, not in two days from Amazon. Almost always, the brick-and-mortar store doesn't have the thing in stock, but "can order it for me." Why the fuck would I go to the trouble of driving out to the fucking strip mall where the box store is, if I wanted it "ordered"?
Well, you know, they do have this thing called the "internet," where many chain stores make their inventory available online now. You can easily search online and find out what is in-stock, and then you only end up going to a store you actually know has what you want. They'll even often tell you what aisle to find the item in. That's particularly useful when looking for something obscure at a giant store like Lowe's or Home Depot -- it's actually faster to search online before leaving so I know where to look, rather than wandering around the store for 30 minutes looking for some random thing (which often no one at the store seems to know the location of either).
Most modern brick-and-mortar stores should just die, with the possible exception of grocery stores.
There are all sorts of other stores that people find useful, believe it or not.
This is often a more stereotypical "woman thing," but many people actually like to try on clothes to see how they fit and how they "look on them" before buying. Yeah, you can have clothes shipped to you and then send stuff back, too -- but I've known women who will try on 15 dresses for every 1 they will buy. That's pretty tough to do online.
Or, do you own a home? Have you ever attempted a home repair? I can't tell you how many times I've spent a weekend driving back and forth to Home Depot or Lowe's trying out different parts and then realizing they won't work, so I need something slightly different. In a brick-and-mortar store, you can take a part with you, see whether it looks like it might fit. Or, if you buy the wrong one, you can take it back, and get a different one the same day.
If I tried to do many basic home repairs using only online resources, it could take me weeks or even months of back-and-forth until I got everything right... particularly if you have an older home with older random parts (or even a home with stuff in it that's more than 10 or 15 years old).
And then there are tools you actually want to use regularly -- and you often want to know what the "feel like" first. I cook a lot, and buying kitchen knives online would be horrible, unless I'm buying a hand-crafted knife from a Japanese master I trust or something. Most knives have terrible balance, or the handle hurts your hand when you use it for more than a few minutes, or whatever.
Everyone has their own set of things they'd prefer to see themselves or "try out" before buying. Not to mention the experience of "browsing" is completely different in a physical store. Sure, a brick-and-mortar store may have a smaller selection, but I'm still rather amazed sometimes at the way they group items and what I may discover for a task which I wouldn't find online because search terms wouldn't have suggested it.
I say all of this as someone who buys a LOT of stuff online. But I still recognize the utility of many physical stores for a lot of use cases.
I mean, the video is already on your computer. If they shut down internet service, it'll move client-side. Hell, if I wanted I could output the video/audio of my screen and record them.
It's futile. They know it and we know it.
Absolutely. Moreover, I think there should be some more legal examination about the legality of downloading streaming content. I've never quite understood why making a copy of streaming content is not directly analogous to making a copy of "streaming" cable or over-the-air TV, a practice that was explicitly ruled legal 30 years ago in the so-called Betamax decision.
File-sharing has always been a bit more nebulous, because it often involves someone making available copies of pre-made copyrighted files to simply make more copies. Here, YouTube is actually NOT making those files directly available to end users -- instead, a service is allowing you to essentially preserving a "recording" of what would otherwise be an ephemeral stream.
The Supreme Court has explicitly legalized "time-shifting" for VCRs. Why is it necessarily illegal when we essentially do the same thing for streaming video over the internet? (The only answer I can come up with is just because recording is now "easier" than with VCRs... but that doesn't seem like a good legal argument about what should constitute "fair use".)
People don't like being spammed with ads in any notification tray. Learn your lesson, Microsoft.
Sorry to be cynical, but exactly how will Microsoft "learn its lesson" here? That phrase is usually accompanied by a punishment (or at least a threat of one).
But it's not like Microsoft will actually be "punished" for this. It's not like their sales of MS Office will go down significantly because of this. Microsoft has been selling a bloated office software suite for 20 years, and reasonable free alternatives have been available for at least a decade -- but every time this comes up here, you have a hundred people shouting, "But, but -- everybody else uses MS Office, and the converters screw up the formatting moving between office suites!"
As long as MS Office has the dominant market share, there's no threat to them, hence they have no reason to "learn their lesson."
(Oh, and I'm sure this could lead to a typical discussion about how someone is missing function X in LibreOffice or whatever that only Excel does. Yeah, I know. But if corporations spent 1/10th of the money and time resources they spend on MS Office (as well as support and training for new upgrades, etc.) instead helping to improve open-source alternatives, we'd have a much better FREE office suite and MS Office would be dead within a couple years. Instead, we all just keep paying the Microsoft license tax, year after year.)
Yep, that's why I specified that one should look at the whole spectrum and distribution and compare it to what humans would characterize as "blue." Obviously many light sources emit a wide variety of frequencies, but humans just perceive one hue out of that mess. The association, as you note, is complex, but pretty well studied.
This is not a mathematical proof but a scientific theory supported by evidence.
I knew somebody was going to come and start arguing about this nonsense. Look -- I was trying to make a rough analogy in common language, first of all, which should have been clear to anyone (I thought). OBVIOUSLY the statement "the sky is blue" is not true at night or when it's cloudy or whatever. Duh. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
A mathematical proof, if correct, is always and absolutely true. [snip] In fact you can never really prove a scientific theory - all you can say is that it works in all the situations it has been tested under.
I want you to think hard about this. This is a common statement, but if you actually spend some time interrogating what you're claiming, you'll realize there is no PRACTICAL difference between the two. Why? A mathematical proof is NOT "always and absolutely true." It only works in an imaginary situation that has been made up and functions under various untestable axioms. If some of those axioms fail (as they often do when math is applied to the real, actual world), the math "proof" is no longer valid.
There's a whole area devoted to the philosophy of mathematics that has to do with how (or whether!) math actually applies to the real world. Most of those perfect assumptions we make in mathematical theorems don't really work in the messiness of the real world.
So, you're stuck with a couple of possibilities, either (1) math is purely imaginary and has no relationship to the real world, in which case you get to claim that mathematical proofs are "different" because it's a purely mental exercise (but practically useless), or (2) math HAS some imprecise relationship to the real world, but the perfection of the math fails due to the imprecision of application... in which case any mathematical proof is essentially another fallible hypothesis about the real world which could fail at any moment for the same reason any "scientific" theory fails.
To put it another way, a math proof is the equivalent of saying, "The sky is blue, assuming a perfect day with these 164 assumptions." And yeah, if you assume those 164 background assumptions are true, you pretty much can "prove" that the sky will be blue. The real world doesn't work like that, but I can still prove that the sky IS blue (not that it "will be blue" at some future time) by measuring the sky outside MY house RIGHT NOW. That is an assertion of fact regarding a specific measurement I took, NOT a scientific hypothesis expected to be valid at all times and in all places.
Isaac Newton was proven wrong, he was ignorant. Did anyone prove Trump wrong? Or is it just opinion that doesn't have scientific merit?
If you think Newton was ignorant you have a bad definition of ignorant.
Also, well, there's the well-known discussion about the relativity of wrong by Asimov.
If you (or GP) hasn't read it, it's worth it -- but basically, it would be more accurate to say that Newton's theory was "incomplete" given what he knew and had observed at the time. Nobody else in his era had better data, so he couldn't be called "ignorant" and really not even "wrong" in some sense. (That's why we still teach his physics to students -- it's really not absolutely "wrong," just an approximate understanding that's incomplete in special circumstances that most people don't encounter every day.)
Trump, on the other hand, utters known factual errors on a daily basis... and actually doesn't seem to care. When someone calls him on it, his reaction is usually either to deny he's wrong (with no evidence) or to act like a bully and insult the person who called him out. Either way, he epitomizes ignorance.
Indeed. I'm rather confused by the editorial commentary. To put it in terms of the summary regarding a question of color, imagine if someone asked the question, "What color is the sky?" Conjecture: The sky is blue.
Proof? Point an instrument at the sky and measure the light coming from it. Looking at the spectrum of frequencies coming from the sky, it falls into a range of colors that humans would generally associate with "blue."
That's it -- you've "proved" what the color of the sky is, i.e., "blue."
TFS instead starts asking, "But WHY are the frequencies emitted from the sky in the range that qualifies as blue? Why aren't there other dominant frequencies? Why do they fall in a particular range? Have we really proved what color the sky is???"
These are all very interesting questions, but they are irrelevant to the fact that the sky IS blue and one can prove it by measuring the frequency and correlating it with what humans call "blue." Proofs aren't generally about "why," and in fact many concise "elegant" mathematical proofs may be completely non-intuitive about showing why they work -- nevertheless they are considered valid proofs.
Nobody here learned to code in the 4th grade.
What do you say that? I did. I have several friends who did as well around that age -- we taught ourselves from manuals available at the time.
It's like calculus. It's a tool and you learn it when you need it
There are elements of calculus that could easily be introduced in elementary school, particularly if we focused on geometrical explanations (which were originally used by people like Newton, and which people like Tom Apostol have been arguing for a long time) instead of the abstract algebraic ones. It would be very helpful to lay the foundation for basic calculus concepts so early, so the elements wouldn't be so foreign when the kids are prepared for the algebraic abstractions later on.
But learning art, or music and being physically active makes every day of your life better. And you'll probably be more successful because of it.
Completely agree. But there's no reason why we can't introduce some concepts earlier. Apps like Lightbot and Scratch Jr. clearly show that one can introduce procedural ideas even to younger kids (earlier than 4th grade), and although I don't have evidence to back this up, I would bet that kids do better at picking up coding concepts for more abstract things later on.
Parents should teach their children how to be good members of society,
Yes, I agree,
and it is not only not the place of schools to teach that, but it is explicitly overstepping their role to assume they have the right to teach children social values.
First, the very idea of mandatory public schooling came out of social engineering to promote certain values. If you want to "opt out" of that system, then home-school your kids.
Second, the role of teachers is often to go beyond what you could learn from your parents alone. In this instance, I would argue that the function of a GOOD teacher is to expose students to a wide variety of possible philosophies, along with critical thinking about ethical systems and standards, rather than inculcating them into a specific social system.
I'm speaking here of secondary school, of course. At a primary school level, the basic "social values" shouldn't be that complex -- it should just be about teaching kids to get along with each other and respecting others. But, for secondary school, a good teacher will challenge students to think about their choices and values and to consider alternatives. My history teachers in high school were very good at this, and my school offered some choices about English class tracks, where I chose to take something on a sort of "Books that Changed the World" idea. The teacher there again was great about not taking sides -- instead, like a good philosophy class, getting students to think about the foundations of metaethics, the possible political philosophies that have sprung up over the ages, etc.
Not every kid will be able to get all of this at a high school age, but it will spark an interest in many kids to think ABOUT their values, rather than simply parroting what a parent (or bad teacher) tells them to do without questioning anything.
Or do you think some random teacher is the best person to decide on the social values or your child? Think about it..
Again, there's a difference between teaching kids to think ABOUT systems of values, how they are constructed, and how making a choice about them requires consideration of fundamental ethics and social ideas vs. simply telling kids what to believe. I agree with you that the latter should NOT be the job of a teacher -- and in fact, it shouldn't be what good parents do either, though in a free society that's the choice of parents to do so.
But the former is a necessary part of a solid education. Just as your English teacher might lead a student to understand new vocabulary and the grammatical systems that parents may not use or understand, or a math teacher might lead a student to go beyond parents, so teachers may also lead students to consider the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of their social choices. That's something a good education should do.
Be careful what you wish for. Terrorists have already started attacking the area outside the secure zone and other soft targets like sports stadiums in Europe.
I don't think anyone is "wishing for" this, except for a TINY number of insane people.
I do wonder why this sort of attack is less common in the US.
Umm, "this sort of attack" isn't "COMMON" in Europe either. There have been a few high-profile isolated incidents. There have also been a few high-profile isolated mass shootings, etc. in Europe in recent years. Neither of these things qualifies as "common."
And the reason they are "less common" (i.e., DON'T EVER HAPPEN) in the U.S. is because the idea that there are tens of thousands of terrorists just ready with the desire AND the means to attack the U.S. at any moment is -- and has always been -- a myth.
Look -- do you even remember what things were like in the U.S. after 9/11? I do. For months, people were rationally scared of just these sorts of things. They weren't just afraid of planes being hijacked, they were afraid of people with bombs OUTSIDE the security zones at airports, so they put extra security in effect at many airports even extending outside the outer doors to the airport.
People were afraid of terrorists doing all sorts of thing -- blowing up Times Square, putting poisons in unprotected water supplies to cities, even blowing up your local shopping mall. I had a very good friend who had heard about all the people talking about these sorts of things on the news, and he was afraid to go to malls -- he avoided them for months after 9/11. Yet none of this happened, and the public gradually forgot about it.
If there were anywhere near the number of terrorists the TSA wants us to believe there are, there would be all sorts of things blowing up all over the U.S. Take a look at a country that actually had SERIOUS terrorism -- Israel, England at the height of the IRA activity, etc. Then you'd have suicide bombers getting on a bus in a major city, or walking into a large crowd... this stuff is NOT hard.
But, as you point out, it doesn't happen in the U.S. The only people who actually attempt to get on planes and do something are STUPID terrorists who can't even figure out there would be so many more easy ways to cause mayhem.
TL;DR: (1) If there were terrorists, bad stuff could happen anywhere. (2) It doesn't, so there aren't that many terrorists. Q.E.D. (3) The only terrorists we might hope to protect against through enhanced TSA security are the most stupid ones -- anyone actually interested in planning a serious attack would never target a plane in the U.S. when there are so many easier targets.
Actually, you're not answering "Is downloading a file a copyright violation?" Obviously the current answer to that question is yes. But you're trying to answer that question historically as a matter of law when downloading copyrighted materials first started. And as I noted, copyright law has had to evolve to deal with new technology, and in some cases (eg VCR taping of TV broadcasts), it was determined NOT to be a copyright violation. The matter about downloading was unsettled law until the late 1990s at least (and some of that actually required new legislation, as I noted). There are concepts of "fair use" and allowable notions of copying... Perhaps it seems obvious to you now that downloading is more like physically copying a book and less like making a personal copy of a TV broadcast on a VCR, but it took courts a couple decades to sort out that question. So, no, we do NOT agree. (And yes, I also added that you were unlikely to be sued for personal copying because it's relevant for why it took so long for this question to be litigated and determined.)
What about Humanities students?
They're already been made obsolete by the Keurig machine in my office...
While I know you were trying to be funny, I think that there's an underlying assumption in the summary about the nature of college and university study that needs to be picked apart a bit.
A couple centuries ago, very few people would have thought of college or university as something that should provide direct life skills for a job or something. That's what apprenticeships were for. Why would anyone in their right mind sit in a lecture with someone talking about a skill, rather than actually working with a real-life expert actually DOING the job??
Universities emphasized "the liberal arts" (which included mathematics and the early versions of sciences) with the idea that an educated person would learn abstract methods for approaching problems and dealing with problems in new areas of study. By being exposed to a wide variety of material from different fields, one was prepared for an intellectual life and a lifelong ability to learn and confront new things.
As science became more specialized in the late 19th century, it became more common for undergraduates to begin to specialize too. But aside from those technical fields, most college students even into the mid 20th century sought out "broad" fields in the humanities, such as history or literature or philosophy, again NOT to prepare for a CAREER as a historian or philosopher or whatever, but to learn about all sorts of problems and ways of thinking over the centuries. Until the past couple decades where people now just make fun of "humanities majors," they were the dominant path toward many fields -- most businessmen, lawyers, etc. would tend to study a humanities discipline as an undergraduate.
And even that was a bit more focused than had traditionally been the case. The very idea of a college "major" for undergraduate study again only dates to the past couple centuries. Many older universities resisted the very idea of "majors" for a long time. (To this day, Harvard for example calls them "concentrations," a term meant to de-emphasize the notion that an undergraduate has one primary "major" area of study... instead, there are just supposed to be a small number of classes that are "concentrated" in one area. Obviously the present Harvard undergraduates don't view them this way anymore -- it's just a weird archaic code for "major" to most people.)
Anyhow, with the scientific specialization and then the idea of bringing in the middle classes and lower classes to college in the mid 20th century led to an expectation for more "practical" study. Degrees that had previously only been offered at specialized "institutes of technology" or "agricultural colleges" or whatever now became practical degrees at many traditional universities.
Except this didn't make any sense then, and it still doesn't make sense. Yes, many careers require some theoretical knowledge and classes, but the vast majority of study would be better done as hands-on apprenticeships, if you actually want career training. College was never designed to be a glorified "trade school," and it really doesn't work as one now.
Basically, the problem is that university was never really intended to be for "the masses." It was originally to train people for contemplative intellectual (and originally spiritual) lives, not for practical skills. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it became a place to send young aristocrats too, so it became associated with something that wealthy people do. (In reality, up until the 1960s or so, most of these rich kids goofed off at universities, often earning what was called "the gentleman's C" in most classes, for barely doing what was required.) Along the way, somebody confused correlation (rich people often sent their kids to college) with causation (college makes people rich). The result is that we're now pretending that college is for career prep, something it never was really meant for... while we've basically neglected the broad training that used to be the goal.
And now we're stuck with our present mess of higher education.
When did downloading a file become a copyright violation?
The relevant law in the US was enacted in 1947, so downloading a copyrighted file without the copyright holder granting the right would have been a copyright violation as soon as downloading was invented.
Well, that's somewhat misleading. In practice, before the internet, it was very rare for corporations (or individual artists/authors/creators) to attempt a copyright lawsuit unless there was proof that the infringer had monetary gain, usually through commercial distribution or something like that.
Keep in mind that this was only subject to a civil action before 1997, so you'd have to hire a lawyer. And then you'd also have to convince a court that downloading a file (which, by your own argument, was "just invented") was significantly different from things like time-shifting, which SCOTUS had ruled was legal in 1984. (That is, you can't be sued for copyright infringement for videotaping a TV broadcast on your VCR for personal use.) It's not readily apparent at the outset that downloading a file is not analogous to something like taping a TV show or movie for later use. In fact, there's a string of litigation in the 1990s that dealt with just these kinds of distinctions, until the "space-shifting" argument was ultimately rejected in court rulings around 2000.
Even if you could convince a court in the 1980s or early 1990s that downloading a file was "making an unauthorized copy," the actual damages for non-commercial infringement would be near zero. So, someone suing would have to go with statutory damages, and given the ambiguity of the situation in the early days, they'd probably only get the minimum in statutory damages... and be lucky to get away with a couple hundred dollars, maybe not even enough to cover court costs.
So, while it may have been a "copyright violation" to download "as soon as downloading was invented," it wouldn't have been pursued unless there was commercial gain involved or some other egregious copyright violation.
Also, while it was perhaps subject to civil penalties, downloading was NOT a criminal violation of copyright until 1997 with the NET Act. Before that, the LaMacchia loophole did not allow prosecution for downloading -- or even filesharing (which would include distribution) -- with no commercial gain. (Note that the "LaMacchia loophole" depended on a distinction between "theft" or "fraud" involving electronic transactions and stealing physical items, again bringing up problems in naively applying previous copyright law to the new electronic landscape.)
Wikipedia is a treasure of useful information, a starting point for unknown topics.
Most of the time, sure. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to tell the difference between a well-researched article that agrees with the scholarly consensus vs. an article based on weird sources (but usually popular, not necessarily scholarly) that are 50 years out of date. Now, it's true that paper encyclopedias could suffer from that problem too. On the other hand, good paper encyclopedias often had information on authors of articles or at least the major subject editors, so you could take a guess about whether it was reliable. You don't have that on Wikipedia, where "anyone can edit."
But there are much worse things -- like how you don't know whether an article has been randomly vandalized, or edited recently by some idiot who just inserted false information. Back when I was actually active editing Wikipedia for a while (before I became aware of how insanely screwed up it was), I remember a number of cases of very subtle vandalism that went unnoticed for weeks.
My favorite was some person -- who was a registered user, rather than just an "anonymous IP address," so it didn't send up as many immediate red flags -- who went through and just changed DIGITS in historical dates. So some random historical person suddenly did X in 1742 instead of 1752 or whatever. They did this on perhaps a dozen articles, and the edits stood for at least a week. The main reason I think he was caught is because -- like most vandals -- eventually he couldn't contain himself and altered some historical article on a woman to say she was "a dirty whore" or something. If he hadn't done that, it might have been months or years before anyone noticed that this one guy had been randomly switching digits across a bunch of Wikipedia articles.
The "vandalism" problem is definitely something that is much WORSE than traditional paper encyclopedias... and if you don't think you've viewed articles that contain various subtle forms of it, you have no idea of how much vandalism is attempted on Wikipedia all the time. (And that doesn't even get into deliberate hoaxes or persistent misinformation that doesn't look like obvious vandalism.)
In such an endeavor striving too much for perfection is the enemy of the good. People always have to understand the perspectives and biases of their sources. That isn't a flaw, that is just reality.
"Perspectives and biases of their sources" is important. But the problem with Wikipedia is that we don't know the perspectives and biases, because it's written mostly by anonymous people and pseudonyms (who have sometimes been known to lie about their identities, even when they claim to provide real-world info about themselves).
And leaving almost all articles open to random editing ensures a continuous war against the kind of vandalism I've already mentioned. That's not a "perspective or bias" -- that IS a serious FLAW. Say what you will about Encyclopedia Britannica, but when I open the paper copy two days later, there won't be random NEW misprints appearing or the word "PENUS!!" suddenly appearing in the middle of an article.
Sure it still sucks, but show me something better and that will suck too.
I have a real problem with this attitude -- "Oh, well it's still better than other stuff!" That's a lame excuse, frankly. We could still improve the concept significantly.
I've been saying this for years, but if Wikipedia really wants to be successful in the long term, it needs major changes. The idea that "anyone can edit!" any article was great in the early days to build a foundation of information -- and it's still good for new articles