Actually, being able to easily see the best comments in a 1000-comment thread would be useful.
Sure. That'd be really useful. Except allowing higher scores doesn't do that on any internet forum I've seen. What higher scores do is show the most POPULAR comments, the ones that maximize groupthink. They do not necessarily enable the "best" comments in terms of quality, and certainly not the ones that will maximize discussion of a variety of views.
Other commenting platforms have this feature and it works really well.
It depends on what you want. If you want to see the consensus opinion of the mods, then yes, it works really well. If you want real discussion and lots of opinions, such systems tend to bury less popular ones.
One thing it does is make the time and subthread of posting completely irrelevant. Currently, +5 posts at the bottom of a story are read far less often than those at the top, I believe.
First, the vast majority of stories don't tend to have a lot of +5 posts... maybe a handful or a dozen. If you're browsing at +5, there's not a lot to see except for the one story each day that might get many hundreds of comments.
But regardless, your proposal not only doesn't solve the problem -- it makes the timing effect worse. Time of post is MORE relevant in forums that permit higher scores, since that one post with gets 175 likes in the first hour will always stay on top of those who browse sorting by highest rating, and people will continue to pile on the likes. There's almost no chance of a reversal when it turns out that person was actually full of crap and spouting inaccurate nonsense that just sounded good to the groupthink. But a +5 post can still be nodded down and its influence decreased -- more importantly, a late post in response can gain ground and get up to the same status at least, whereas in the system with an early post with 175 likes, any rational response often gets buried.
I'm not saying the current system is perfect by any means, but I don't think your proposal actually makes things better.
It's only a slight overstatement. My ranking of scumbaggery goes roughly (1) Hitler, Stalin, et al., (2) other mass murderers and serial killers, (3) internet trolls who'd drive a person to suicide just for the lulz, (4) people who drive like jerks in ways that endanger others.
At least lawyers and politicians mostly have self-delusions that they are helping people or society, and even most pedophiles have some warped belief they are acting out of love. Idiots who screech through residential areas showing reckless disregard for the rest of humanity just so they can get to their destination 10 seconds earlier? They have no excuse.
Agreed. PLEASE -- Keep the mod cap at +5. It's high enough to make excellent posts stand out, and it's also high enough that a single downmod by someone who just wants to disagree isn't going to make the comment invisible. There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about... here it's just about making the decent posts stand out from the herd.
This is on the right track, but a few clarifications:
As for Flamma, its latin and is a verb there. Go ask them.
No, "flamma" is not a verb. Flamma is a noun, meaning a "blazing fire." Flammo/flammare is a verb. (Well, technically I suppose "flamma" could be an imperative of the verb flammo -- "Be on fire, you heathen!" -- but the normal dictionary entry for the verb is under flammo or flammare.)
There is a fairly clear reason for why both these words carry the same meaning: the prefix in- does not always function as a negative prefix.
Sometimes (and this is one of those times) it serves as an intensifier. Itâ(TM)s fairly obvious how this could lead to problems.
That's not quite right. "In-" is NOT an intensifer. It's derived from the Latin prefix "in" which means "into" or sometimes "on/upon." Hence, in Latin "inflammare" means "to set INTO flames" or "to light on fire," whereas "flammare" simply means "to burn."
(For comparison, think of a word like "intimidate" -- it doesn't mean "more timid." It means to MAKE fearful, to force someone INTO timidity.)
This distinction hasn't really carried over into English in the case of flammable/inflammable, especially since the fire prevention folks started using "flammable" to mean "easily set on fire," which would be a better fit to "inflammable." (If we follow the Latin origin, "flammable" would be better suited to mean, "capable of being burned" (at all).)
Surprisingly, both flammable and inflammable coexisted peacefully in English for hundreds of years before anyone decided to do something about it.
It's not exactly surprising if you know anything about Latin or the history of English. As I just noted, most such pairs actually meant different things. And if you want to see real confusion, read the etymology page for "in-" at the link above. Centuries ago, you had examples like "implume" which mean "to put feathers on" (as in "tar and feathering" or something) from the "in-" = "into" meaning. But "implumed" generally meant "unfeathered," from the "in-" = "not" meaning. THAT was confusing since the same word meant two different things.
But in most cases "in-" was either used in one sense or the other, and when it was used to mean "into," it was generally clearly distinct in meaning from the form without the prefix. (E.g., note that "implume" didn't simply mean "feathered" -- it meant to ADD or put INTO feathers.) I think it's really the fire prevention folks who should be blamed on the confusion, since they took the word "flammable" (which was never popular, never had a clear meaning, and was basically obsolete in the early 1900s) and started using it commonly to mean something that "inflammable" properly should mean.
And projectors! How else can I connect to those projectors if not VGA? And their life-span is probably decades. I think the new projectors actually have alternatives to VGA optional, but usually this is HDMI,
THIS. The person who wrote TFA must not do any presentations anywhere ever. Yes, new projectors often have other inputs, but that's often irrelevant in a conference venue or a classroom or whatever, where often there's ONE cable that's presented to you to hook in your laptop -- and it's a VGA cable (often with an audio headphone jack plug, if you need it).
That's the same as it was most places decades ago. If your laptop today doesn't have a VGA port, you get a dongle. Everybody who needs to plug into a projector has a standard VGA one. Switching to another standard would require a major initiative, since this is NOT a place where you can just adopt a different standard on the fly.
Probably tens of thousands of people show up an unfamiliar place every day and expect to be able to plug a laptop into a projector to give a presentation. For better or for worse, everybody knows that you bring a connector for VGA, and if you change that, you need to be darn sure all of your presenters know that (and, even if they do, lots of people who give talks can be old and won't understand if they show up with a laptop that doesn't connect to something else, so you'll be scrambling at the last minute to move stuff to another computer or whatever).
I don't see this standard switching anytime soon -- it tends to be used in high-profile, time-sensitive situations where people expect to be able to plug a computer in and have it work instantly. Unless a venue is going to provide a dongle that fits every possible port on the planet (and most don't), it will be really hard to switch.
The only thing that will eventually allow the switch won't be a new port standard, but rather wireless broadcast of video directly to the projector. It's still quite rare, but it's feasible and the only way to get out of the VGA rut. I doubt HDMI/DP/whatever is EVER going to overcome VGA for such applications -- the next "standard" won't have cables at all.
But the attitude of "Screw this science stuff. We need the parchment for a prayer book." eradicated a lot of earlier knowledge.
You do realize that early books made of parchment were from animal skin, right? So, to put a new page in your book, you had to kill a sheep?
Parchment was extremely valuable. Books required you to slaughter lots of animals. So yeah, people reused the animal skin when they could. It wasn't just reused for "prayer books" -- it was reused for community records, for legal documents, for endpapers to join the spines in new books, etc., etc., etc.
Not until King Ferdinand of Spain figured out that all the stuff the Moors had collected in their libraries might actually be important, the Churches attitude toward knowledge was pretty much indifference.
Huh? That's simply not true. The attitude was: "Here's some valuable material that has a bunch of squiggles on it I can't read. I need paper to make records of new stuff. Let's scrape and reuse."
It's not that they didn't value knowledge -- they didn't value stuff they weren't able to use. That's how life was for most of history for most people. It's only in the past few decades that we've reached a point where production to excess is so great that disposable stuff is everywhere and regular reuse of old stuff isn't necessary.
Very few people in Europe could read Greek for much of the medieval period, so a lot of old manuscripts were scraped off and reused. It's kind of like you came upon an old hard drive which was corrupted and you couldn't read it (and you didn't know what was on it), so you reformatted and started over. That's not "indifference" toward the contents of the drive -- it's just saying, "I need more space, I can't use this thing as-is, so I'll make it so I can reuse it."
On the other hand, there were plenty of books that were kept that maintained knowledge that was important to them. Prayer books were important to them, because without them you might be suffering in eternal torment forever. So, it's kinda like: "I don't have any fresh sheep to kill to make a new book, and here's this skin with squiggles on it I can't read, and if I don't make the new book, I might burn in hell forever."
That's not indifference toward knowledge. That's being practical with materials you have to live your life in a pretty bleak historical period.
No. What the church brought was stagnation and illiteracy. Anyone caught translating the bible was burned at the stake.
Another myth. (Note -- before I go on, I'm NOT Catholic, and I have no interest in defending the Catholic Church. But I do think we have a moral duty to accurate history.)
The Catholic Church punished people who translated the Bible AND threatened heresy/schism, etc. Yes, there were some incidents in medieval Europe where translators were punished, but that was because they were associated with political movements against the church. If you wanted to translate the Bible AND lead an insurrection, sure they might kill you.
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where portions or the entirety of the Bible were translated in the years 1000-1500, and the Church didn't do anything to the translators. It only became a significant controversy after the whole Luther thing and the Counter-Reformation.
By the way, I don't mean this to be argumentative or even that you should have known this. Errors in scholarship have a long life, and there were some influential studies done on this stuff based on incomplete evidence and erroneous interpretations of medieval documents in the early 1900s. That's why this myth endures.
But it's a myth nonetheless.
And illiteracy was just a consequence of lack of utility. Parchment was expensive -- how many animals did you have to kill and skin to make a book? So, why would literacy be common until paper became cheap in the 1400s (due to a sudden excess of scrap linen that could be pulped)?
Preserving the bad ideas of the Greeks may or may not have been a good thing. We might have been better off flushing the whole thing and starting over completely from scratch.
Well, that's all very debatable. Arguably the major medieval renaissance in knowledge was in part driven by reclaiming the knowledge of the ancients, which in turn led to what most people think of as the real "Renaissance," which in turn led to Humanistic enterprises that were no longer dominated by the Church, which led to the Scientific Revolution.
That's only one way of telling the story, of course. But there's some truth to it.
The real problem was not being able to challenge bogus crap for 1000 years.
You really have no idea what medieval Scholasticism was about, then, do you? Medieval universities were largely started by priests and monks. Debates were the norm. Empiricism and logical argument were combined into a new method. Challenging accepted facts was commonplace. In fact, some historians of science actually argue that the reason why the West had a "Scientific Revolution" and other places (e.g., China, the Arab world) didn't was because of the accepted level of scholarly debate that occurred in the West compared to other areas of the world... which didn't have the same kinds of debates.
What made it painful was that it was done without algebra or even the symbol pi. Think long wordy descriptions involving limits and ratios and you end up with 3 pages of text for what takes half a line in modern notation. Heck, even his result takes a couple lines to write.
But that's not the only way to do calculus with geometrical methods. And no, I'm not talking about the idea of integration with rectangles that get thinner and thinner.
Tom Apostol (author of one of the most well-known -- and abstract -- Calculus textbooks ever) highlighted the possible benefits of a geometrical approach years ago. A lot of complex problems are incredibly simple and intuitive to solve, once you get used to geometrical methods.
It's also important to remember that geometry was critical to Newton's conception of calculus too. Read his Principia, and you'll find plenty of geometrical proofs showing things that today we'd do with algebra.
Anyhow, the point is that we tend to think in algebra today because that's primarily how we're taught. There are actually intuitive and simple ways to use geometry to do calculus, and it doesn't surprise me at all if the Babylonians figured some of them out. It would surprise me if it really took a couple thousand years before anyone else did anything like that again -- my guess is that many historians who look at treatises from that period don't always realize what's going on in some historical methods, because we no longer work from a geometry-centric view of mathematics.
However, given what you thought happened does really put it into perspective and I likely would have felt the same. I never had to live with the fear of nuclear war, so it's hard to imagine the kind of stress and fear that could cause.
Indeed. It's a long story but a strange combination of events, a bizarre phone message, and hearing the wrong excerpt of a radio broadcast on 9/11 initially led me to believe that it was likely that thermonuclear devices had been detonated over major U.S. cities. For a minute or more, I was trying to figure out who might be lobbing ICBMs at us, where the nearest major cities were to me, likely direction of prevailing winds and fallout clouds, etc. After turning on the TV and finally hearing it was about a few plane crashes and thousands were dead instead of tens of millions that I was imagining... yeah, I breathed a sigh of relief too. Believe me, you never was to go through a period where you seriously believe that a nuclear war has begun.
Do some research before disagreeing in ignorance. Read some actual studies, which there are many of on the inaccuracies of BMI. Basically, BMI misclassifies at least 25% of the population -- tall people are disproportionately flagged as obese (particularly women), while short people (particularly men) are incorrectly viewed as healthy. If you try to move the thresholds around, it doesn't ever really get better. And there are loads of simple measures that are superior to BMI -- for example, men's waist measurement (regardless of height) has a MUCH higher correlation with obesity-related illness than BMI.
What are the best PDF applications to edit existing PDF files?
THIS. Yes, creating a PDF using open source software on Linux or whatever is obviously trivial.
But editing a PDF is a different matter. To my knowledge, nothing comes close to Acrobat is terms of its flexibility and ease of use in editing existing PDFs, particularly if you're looking for open source on Linux. (And I'm a big supporter of non-proprietary alternatives in general.) Yes, you can cobble together functionality from various tools, and certain command line utilities can even be faster for certain tasks, but nothing like the convenience of Acrobat.
For example, the Manhattan project involved hundreds of people, yet remained secret for years, is that what this theory suggests would have happened?
I can't speak to the validity of the mathematical model here, but it seems the Manhattan Project might be distinguished in a number of ways.
(1) The "conspiracies" in TFA are mostly things that many people would view as against "public interest." Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project was doing something that was actually trying to win a war, which average Americans knew was already killing millions of them. Thus, I think it would be easier to appeal to people's patriotism to keep the Manhattan Project secret even if more people did find out or someone was thinking of "talking." The very word "conspiracy" implies something negative and nefarious going on; while some people nowadays consider the Manhattan Project to have unleashed "evil" I suppose, the general negative impact at the time was on enemies who were intent on killing Americans -- so I don't know that most people would have considered it a net benefit to release that information to the public, where it could more easily get in the hands of enemies and put Americans at a disadvantage in the war if the enemy developed weapons faster.
(2) It was a different time. Not just because of the war. This was the era when journalists voluntarily kept the secret that FDR was basically confined to a wheelchair. Could you imagine something like that being kept secret today? The amount of technology, surveillance, electronic communications, etc. that EVERYONE has access to (and anything anyone was trying to keep secret would be subject to a barrage of), not to mention the lack of the kind of ethical choices that journalists of that time made... well, it's just a different world today.
(3) Probably only a few dozen people knew of the full scope of the Manhattan project, and probably only a few hundred had any real clue that it even had to do with atoms. Hundreds of thousands of people were employed doing construction, etc., but they had no clue what was going on, and they couldn't figure it out from the little pieces they knew and observed personally. And even if they started to figure something out, see (1) and (2) above.
(4) The Manhattan Project hit a "big reveal" when the bombs were dropped on Japan. Probably a few hundred more people who didn't really "get" what was going on figured something out when they heard that news. And more people likely started putting the pieces together then. And it was in that same year that the government started revealing stuff about the project. Compare that to something like the Moon Landings. You could imaging thousands of construction workers and whatever involved in setting those up to create a hoax, and maybe they could segregate people similarly to avoid any one person having "all the pieces." But then the day comes in 1969 when it's broadcast around the globe, and I bet lots of people start putting the pieces together. Same thing for the other conspiracies in TFA -- these are all publicly disclosed matters where the "official" story is different from the supposed "conspiracy" story. With the Manhattan Project, there often was really no major "official" story -- in fact, you have stories about managers from then who were tasked with keeping workers happy when no one knew anything (including the managers). If anything, the danger of the Manhattan Project was that too many people thought it was worthless or nonsense -- since they had no clue what the work was for. There's not the same tension in explanations or the feeling of "deception" that would tend to lead to "leaks."
Oh, and besides all of this, TFS says these conspiracies would unravel in a MINIMUM of 3-4 years (and perhaps as long as decades). While the Manhattan Project got started in 1939, it didn't really get going in force until around 1942, and it was revealed in 1945. So, it's not like the "secret" phase of the project lasted even much longer than the MINIMUM predicted by this model.
The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)
Well, it's partly a myth. Yes, it is a myth that QWERTY was intended to slow down typists. It *WAS* intended to reduce key-jams on manual typewriters, and it did this by introducing frequent alternation between hands and by placing frequently used letters far apart. The frequent alternation between hands actually speeds up typing, so that's a positive for QWERTY, but the placement of frequently used letters far apart is no longer necessary -- and it was never optimized for modern computers and speed/ergonomics.
Basically, the Dvorak proponents often overstate their case, and your link is correct that some of the studies promoted by Dvorak himself had questionable methodology. The supposed benefits of 20-40% increase in speed and getting up to previous QWERTY speed with only 20-25 hours of training is bogus and was known to be bogus for the past 50 years or more.
On the other hand, various studies do show Dvorak has some advantage over QWERTY, both theoretically (in terms of motion needed to travel by the hands, etc.) and practically, but that advantage is likely more in the 5-10% speed increase range and it likely requires about 100 hours of retraining to get back to QWERTY speed for an existing touch-typist. That's just a lot of work for a small benefit, especially when one can use that 100 hours instead to train in specific ways and increase QWERTY speed instead -- which likely will result in a small speed increase as well.
So, GP is correct that QWERTY was designed to reduce manual jams that can no longer happen, and it IS a bad standard for modern computers, etc. But the improvements for moving to a better layout are quite small and would require extensive retraining... so we all tend to stick with a (slightly) inferior standard.
(How "inferior" is really difficult to know precisely, because to my knowledge the "gold standard" study has never been done. There are quite a few studies which have taken QWERTY typists and retrained them in Dvorak. And there are studies that waited until those retrained typists got up to their previous QWERTY speeds and then pitted them (now Dvorak typists) against existing QWERTY typists. But I've never seen reference to a study that took existing Dvorak typists who have been using that layout for years and retrained them in QWERTY -- probably because such people are incredibly rare, and likely next-to-impossible to find in the modern era of ubiquitous keyboards. 25 years ago we could have done a study like this, since many people wouldn't learn to type until high school or later, but now it may be next-to-impossible to even start training someone who has never spent significant time with a QWERTY keyboard first. And that previous QWERTY exposure will significantly affect "muscle memory" and cognitive load when confronted with a new standard, even after many hours of retraining.)
Now that the battle to normalize homosexuality is largely won there are a growing number of voices in society (including academicians) working to normalize pedophilia.
No there aren't.
There was a time (which had its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s) when there was a push to abolish ages of consent and recognize the possible validity of sexual relationships between all ages, and it had some significant academic support (particularly in Europe).
But that was 30-40 years ago. Support for that sort of thing has been declining ever since.
There is some growing interest (though only in a small minority of researchers) in trying to sort out more details concerning the behavior of pedophiles -- for example, how many viewers of child pornography actually also commit offenses with children? How often does the "escalation" you refer to actually occur? Are there differences in the recidivism rates and possibilities for rehabilitation in those who merely view child pornography vs. those who actually sexually assault children?
The research on a lot of these questions is in its infancy, partly because it's a very icky topic, and we all want to believe the worst about anyone who would ever view a naked picture of a child. But such research is trying to sort out whether our criminal penalties make sense, whether they are actually effective in reducing further abuse, etc.
That's not "normalizing pedophilia" -- it's trying to focus effort on places where it can prevent the most harm, and trying to help people who may actually be able to be helped vs. just demonizing everyone who we can corral into the category of "dangerous pedophile."
Well in this particular instance i'm assuming the FBI wasn't creating any new child porn, so there were no new victims...
But that's not the logic the FBI uses in convicting those who possess or distribute child pornography. According to them, the existence and distribution of child pornography creates a market for more child pornography, which means more children are abused to create it. If you follow the standard FBI logic, then, their distribution of pornography necessarily contributed to the creation of a market which would cause more abuse and thus "new victims."
(That is, of course, assuming that the FBI did not manage to arrest every single person who viewed this pornography, as well as any other person any of these persons may have sent the images to. It seems incredibly doubtful that the FBI could manage that.)
It's unlikely that shutting down the site immediately would have prevented any crimes from being committed
Huh? By definition, possession of child pornography is a crime. The FBI allowed numerous such crimes to be committed by freely allowing access. And if any of the images were redistributed, the FBI also contributed to further crimes of distribution and possession.
as the pedophiles would go elsewhere therefore actually catching some is probably a positive result overall.
Perhaps. It's difficult to say what constitutes "positive result." If you go by the standard FBI line that possession and distribution create demand and thus are morally equivalent to abuse, then the FBI most certainly contributed significantly to that.
If you take a more nuanced perspective and ask how many of these "pedophiles" were likely to actually commit abusive acts with children, it's a little harder to gauge, since research is mixed. It seems clear that at least some people who view child pornography never act on their impulses (in the same way that some people who view all sorts of random hardcore sex acts in pornography may not ever actually attempt them or seek them out), but the percentage of those people is hard to pin down. Studies have put the number of people arrested for possession of child pornography that also committed an abusive act with a child at anywhere from 1% to 85%. That's a huge range, and it's clear that most studies so far are somewhat biased one way or another.
The point is -- just because the FBI arrested another person for viewing child porn doesn't necessarily mean that fewer children will be molested by that person. Also, recidivism rates for child porn viewers are apparently significantly lower (for any crime) than recidivism rates for stereotypical "child molesters" actually arrested for having contact with a child.
Lastly, there is the issue of the victims who were used to create this pornography in the first place. Did the FBI have permission from all of them to keep these images up? It seems very doubtful from TFA. Imagine if you were raped (or even just physically assaulted or had nude pictures taken of you without proper consent) and some website posted pictures of it for people's entertainment. Now imagine that the police actually host that material for people's entertainment without your consent. How would that make you feel?
I agree that the FBI likely arrested some bad people here. But this isn't a clear case that the "ends justify the means" -- it's really quite messy from a moral perspective.
Name a place in the US where two 17 year olds have sex, and once one of them turns 18, it suddenly becomes illegal.
Well, if Wikipedia's summary of age of consent laws is accurate, your scenario would likely apply in North Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin. It seems in all cases that these would be misdemeanors, not felonies.
For one, the age of consent isn't uniformly 18, and most places have restrictions on the law that allow for close-age relationships.
Yes, but not all do. And by perusing Wikipedia's summary list, you can see how convoluted the laws are in various places. The "close in age" exceptions can vary from a couple years difference to decades.
Just because you can't figure out how to calibrate your equipment properly doesn't mean trained lab scientists couldn't calibrate a thermometer properly 100 years ago. Mercury thermometers were easily accurate to within 1/10th of a degree back then, and once they were calibrated they were a sealed glass tube whose calibration would be VERY stable over time. For the past century or so, there have also been standard calibration protocols in place where you could send you thermometers away to be tested and properly calibrated, and existing weather stations often had logbooks noting this sort of thing.
Oh, and as for yourself, if you're making a calibration ice bath properly, it should definitely not be 36F. Read up on the proper way to make a slush bath (use crushed ice, usually more ice than water, if the ice floats, there's too much water, etc.), which should at a minimum get you to within 1 degree of freezing even in poorly controled conditions.
There is nothing dubious about it. Primes are defined this way because of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.
While, I completely agree with you, lighten up a bit. Also, realize that in the real world the word "prime" comes from Latin primus, meaning first... hence prime steak, prime meridian, Optimus Prime, etc. And thus while in the mathy definition you're right, the real-world definition allows significant wordplay in this specific thread -- the first post is by definition a prime post, but in another sense (your sense), it's not.
"Scholarly" blah blah blah useless crappy people like you who take other people's work and put it out again and claim YOU hold the rights to THEIR work, NO. That's not copyright. That's the bullshit you spew.
I probably shouldn't respond to sure a puerile post, but hey, what the heck.
Look -- first off, **I** have never earned a cent off of claiming any rights off of anyone else's work. The work I did was for a foundation which was tasked with preparing a critical edition of the works of someone (obviously famous) who died hundreds of years ago. This edition required tens of thousands of hours of work investigating thousands of original sources and manuscripts. I was paid for some of the work I did at the time I did it, but I personally don't claim any rights to anything.
Now, you may not care about any of this work or think it's stupid. But the vast majority of the publications in the project I mention were in publishing manuscript sources that previously had been unavailable to anyone except scholars who would travel to an archive. And many of the sources were in such disarray or had conflicting versions, etc. that it required a significant amount of editorial decision to produce something useful from them.
Some scholars may find this stuff useful. Some of the previously unpublished works might be found to be interesting and find their way into a more "popular" canon of works. I don't know.
But I certainly don't claim any rights to any dead person's work. And in this particular case, the work was significantly subsidized by a number of charitable foundations in the interest of getting this work out there. The volumes of the edition don't make any profit either -- it's a non-profit organization, and the money solely went to pay for publishing costs.
I don't know if any of this is at all relevant to Anne Frank's case -- the more I read about her case, the less I think the legal arguments are valid. To me, it sounds like the Anne Frank foundation (or whatever) is just trying to keep making money off of the stuff, which I find personally offensive too.
But that doesn't justify a wholesale attack on scholars who are trying to preserve and disseminate valuable works of history and culture.
Your 'apparently' doesn't follow from your 'given'. It's a non-sequitur. Editing does not grant copyright to the editor, and it never has.
You're partly right in that I misspoke. I don't claim to be an expert on European copyright law. Upon reading further, it's clear that current European law on "scholarly editions" of works varied by country -- it's generally 20-30 years in length, and is limited by EU policy to no more than 30 years. In any case, it's inapplicable in this case.
But your assertion that no copyright protections exist in European law for editions is demonstrably false.
Unless he created some original work in that 1947 edition, the copyright will still be based on the life of the *author* herself. And, if he *did* create some original work, only *that* will still be under copyright until 2050, because he is not the author of the parts Anne wrote.
Yes, upon further reading the situation is slightly different from what I understood from the original articles I read about this case. Sorry -- honest mistake.
What the publishers are claiming is not that Otto Frank made an "edition," but rather that his contributions were significant enough to be considered a "co-author" and hence would carry protection for him. (In cases of coauthorship, I believe the copyright protection extends to the last possible date from the various coauthors.)
I agree this sounds completely bogus to me now. Otto Frank, to my knowledge, never claimed the work as his own. That appears to be a wacky argument the publishers invented in recent years (after he was obviously already dead). I agree that's bogus.
So, the "edition" copyright should no longer be in effect, if it existed in the first place. And the "co-author" claim seems bogus to me, as I read more.
Again, only the parts not originally written by Anne Frank herself would be subject to a longer copyright span.
Apparently that may not be true under an obscure Dutch law. Decades ago, some countries grant different copyright lengths to posthumous works dependent on date of publication, regardless of when the author died.
Again, I'm not claiming these arguments are CORRECT, only that they have been used in legal proceedings and apparently have some merit... though whether they'll withstand more challenges is an open question.
As far as I am aware this is one of a very few cases where the editor is claiming copyright and is thus highly dubious and open to legal challenge.
Well, the general concept is NOT "highly dubious" -- editions are well-established in European law and are generally granted a 25-year copyright term (if I remember correctly).
As I read more about the specific case of Anne Frank, though, it appears the publishers are trying to pull more significant shenanigans, effectively claiming Otto as a sort of co-author, rather than an editor. That seems a real stretch to me, but you'd have to look at how many changes he made and of what type before publication.
That doesn't actually matter. Copyright is automatic, and exists from the time of creation - not the time of publication. That's a Berne Convention standard so no signatory country's laws (and that includes all of Europe) can fail to comply with it.
Look -- I'm not a lawyer, but apparently prior to 1995 there was SOME law that stated posthumous publication fell under different laws. Apparently, that law is no longer in force but previously copyrighted works are grandfathered in. And apparently courts have agreed with this line of reasoning. (I've already said this repeatedly, but just to be clear, I think the length of time on these laws is stupid and the diary should be PD by now... that doesn't change legal arguments here, though.)
Not the original diary, but rather a version that apparently combined two existing versions, since Anne Frank apparently began rewriting sections, drafting them for publication before her death. Thus, the original 1947 publication was not a complete version of the whole thing, but rather an edition that reconciled various elements of the original to make something more readable and coherent.
In 1986 a commented version was edited and published
Yes, the first complete version of the original, apparently showing both the "A and B versions" of the rewritten entries, etc.
Apparently the present copyright holders are claiming that the 1947 version should be considered as an "edition," and thus Otto Frank should be treated as "author" in terms of copyright, since he had to make choices about how to reconcile versions and such (as well as omitting various entries and passages for various reasons). And apparently the copyright holders are claiming that the 1986 date is valid for the publication of the full original.
Again, I personally think most of copyright law is bogus and all of this should have passed into the public domain decades ago. But this seems to be the way the copyright holders have argued in line with existing law (and courts seem to have upheld their claims).
The debate over whether editors have a copyright interest in a given work is not a new debate. What is different about this case is that the author could not have any say over how her works were edited or say over whether her writings should have been published in the first place.
This is not a unique issue at all. Famous people of the past often have left behind hoards of unpublished papers, correspondence, etc. Many scholars create editions of such things, often long after those people have died -- sometimes centuries later.
In these cases, it is generally standard that the editor/compiler holds copyright on that edition from the date of publication, rather than anything having to do with the death of the author. Of course the original documents may long ago have become public domain (and hence may be republished freely without permission), but the edition generally requires quite a bit of work to put together. (I admit I know very little about how much was done in the case Anne Frank, though.)
Indeed, in all the copies I have seen published, none of them credit Otto or Mirjam as co-authors.
This is the more interesting issue, to me. If these publications actually ascribed the work completely to Anne Frank, even if they were edited, then Otto Frank should be considered more as an editor in the sense of an internal copyeditor at a publishing house that cleans up a manuscript, rather than as a "scholarly" editor who has to make tough decisions about reconciling different versions of texts and how to turn an unedited mess into something comprehensible. The latter is generally entitled to be treated as an "editor" in the formal sense and perhaps granted copyright, but the former is not generally entitled to such protections.
They can't have it both ways, either it is her diary and the copyright is expired or it's a post-war original work of authorship based on her diary, but not both.
Actually, that's precisely what they are claiming, and there are valid legal arguments for it under copyright law. Multiple new editions of an old work can be published and may be copyrighted. As someone who has worked on scholarly editions of source materials (though I've never been a primary author on one), there's a lot of original research that often goes into making judgment calls on how to take some handwritten source and turn it into a printed text. In particular, you often have multiple sources (e.g., different drafts, different fragments of manuscripts) which require reconciliation and interpretation.
I don't know anything about the sources of Anne Frank's diary, though -- but I do know that apparently Anne Frank began rewriting some portions with an intent on publication at some point in 1944. That presumably means that any edition would have to make choices about how to present the sections she originally wrote vs. her redrafted ones for publication, which also may require reconciling elements in the portions which had not been rewritten before her death to make sense with the ones which had been rewritten.
This may or may not be a straightforward process to put all this together in a format that would be easily accessible and understood by readers. I don't know enough about the sources.
Nevertheless, what we have here apparently is the following:
(1) The first edited version was published in 1947 by Otto Frank. I don't know how much editing was done here, but apparently it was more than just selecting entries, given that there would be multiple versions of some entries. The copyright to that is claimed by Otto Frank, who died in 1980, and applicable copyright law for his version thus extends to 70 years after his death.
(2) The original diaries were finally published in a scholarly "critical edition" in 1986. Under applicable copyright law at that time, posthumous publications were granted a 50 year term after the first PUBLICATION. So, that would extend to 50 years after 1986.
Thus, yes it is both. It is her diary, but copyright law as of 1986 said what matters in posthumous publication was the date of publication, not when the author died. (That law has since been changed in the EU, but old works still under copyright are grandfathered in.) And it is also a post-war "original" edited work, whose copyright expires at a different date. This is actually quite common for scholarly editions, such as edited publications of correspondence by famous people, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, being able to easily see the best comments in a 1000-comment thread would be useful.
Sure. That'd be really useful. Except allowing higher scores doesn't do that on any internet forum I've seen. What higher scores do is show the most POPULAR comments, the ones that maximize groupthink. They do not necessarily enable the "best" comments in terms of quality, and certainly not the ones that will maximize discussion of a variety of views.
Other commenting platforms have this feature and it works really well.
It depends on what you want. If you want to see the consensus opinion of the mods, then yes, it works really well. If you want real discussion and lots of opinions, such systems tend to bury less popular ones.
One thing it does is make the time and subthread of posting completely irrelevant. Currently, +5 posts at the bottom of a story are read far less often than those at the top, I believe.
First, the vast majority of stories don't tend to have a lot of +5 posts... maybe a handful or a dozen. If you're browsing at +5, there's not a lot to see except for the one story each day that might get many hundreds of comments.
But regardless, your proposal not only doesn't solve the problem -- it makes the timing effect worse. Time of post is MORE relevant in forums that permit higher scores, since that one post with gets 175 likes in the first hour will always stay on top of those who browse sorting by highest rating, and people will continue to pile on the likes. There's almost no chance of a reversal when it turns out that person was actually full of crap and spouting inaccurate nonsense that just sounded good to the groupthink. But a +5 post can still be nodded down and its influence decreased -- more importantly, a late post in response can gain ground and get up to the same status at least, whereas in the system with an early post with 175 likes, any rational response often gets buried.
I'm not saying the current system is perfect by any means, but I don't think your proposal actually makes things better.
It's only a slight overstatement. My ranking of scumbaggery goes roughly (1) Hitler, Stalin, et al., (2) other mass murderers and serial killers, (3) internet trolls who'd drive a person to suicide just for the lulz, (4) people who drive like jerks in ways that endanger others.
At least lawyers and politicians mostly have self-delusions that they are helping people or society, and even most pedophiles have some warped belief they are acting out of love. Idiots who screech through residential areas showing reckless disregard for the rest of humanity just so they can get to their destination 10 seconds earlier? They have no excuse.
Agreed. PLEASE -- Keep the mod cap at +5. It's high enough to make excellent posts stand out, and it's also high enough that a single downmod by someone who just wants to disagree isn't going to make the comment invisible. There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about... here it's just about making the decent posts stand out from the herd.
As for Flamma, its latin and is a verb there. Go ask them.
No, "flamma" is not a verb. Flamma is a noun, meaning a "blazing fire." Flammo/flammare is a verb. (Well, technically I suppose "flamma" could be an imperative of the verb flammo -- "Be on fire, you heathen!" -- but the normal dictionary entry for the verb is under flammo or flammare.)
There is a fairly clear reason for why both these words carry the same meaning: the prefix in- does not always function as a negative prefix.
Sometimes (and this is one of those times) it serves as an intensifier. Itâ(TM)s fairly obvious how this could lead to problems.
That's not quite right. "In-" is NOT an intensifer. It's derived from the Latin prefix "in" which means "into" or sometimes "on/upon." Hence, in Latin "inflammare" means "to set INTO flames" or "to light on fire," whereas "flammare" simply means "to burn."
(For comparison, think of a word like "intimidate" -- it doesn't mean "more timid." It means to MAKE fearful, to force someone INTO timidity.)
This distinction hasn't really carried over into English in the case of flammable/inflammable, especially since the fire prevention folks started using "flammable" to mean "easily set on fire," which would be a better fit to "inflammable." (If we follow the Latin origin, "flammable" would be better suited to mean, "capable of being burned" (at all).)
Surprisingly, both flammable and inflammable coexisted peacefully in English for hundreds of years before anyone decided to do something about it.
It's not exactly surprising if you know anything about Latin or the history of English. As I just noted, most such pairs actually meant different things. And if you want to see real confusion, read the etymology page for "in-" at the link above. Centuries ago, you had examples like "implume" which mean "to put feathers on" (as in "tar and feathering" or something) from the "in-" = "into" meaning. But "implumed" generally meant "unfeathered," from the "in-" = "not" meaning. THAT was confusing since the same word meant two different things.
But in most cases "in-" was either used in one sense or the other, and when it was used to mean "into," it was generally clearly distinct in meaning from the form without the prefix. (E.g., note that "implume" didn't simply mean "feathered" -- it meant to ADD or put INTO feathers.) I think it's really the fire prevention folks who should be blamed on the confusion, since they took the word "flammable" (which was never popular, never had a clear meaning, and was basically obsolete in the early 1900s) and started using it commonly to mean something that "inflammable" properly should mean.
And projectors! How else can I connect to those projectors if not VGA? And their life-span is probably decades. I think the new projectors actually have alternatives to VGA optional, but usually this is HDMI,
THIS. The person who wrote TFA must not do any presentations anywhere ever. Yes, new projectors often have other inputs, but that's often irrelevant in a conference venue or a classroom or whatever, where often there's ONE cable that's presented to you to hook in your laptop -- and it's a VGA cable (often with an audio headphone jack plug, if you need it).
That's the same as it was most places decades ago. If your laptop today doesn't have a VGA port, you get a dongle. Everybody who needs to plug into a projector has a standard VGA one. Switching to another standard would require a major initiative, since this is NOT a place where you can just adopt a different standard on the fly.
Probably tens of thousands of people show up an unfamiliar place every day and expect to be able to plug a laptop into a projector to give a presentation. For better or for worse, everybody knows that you bring a connector for VGA, and if you change that, you need to be darn sure all of your presenters know that (and, even if they do, lots of people who give talks can be old and won't understand if they show up with a laptop that doesn't connect to something else, so you'll be scrambling at the last minute to move stuff to another computer or whatever).
I don't see this standard switching anytime soon -- it tends to be used in high-profile, time-sensitive situations where people expect to be able to plug a computer in and have it work instantly. Unless a venue is going to provide a dongle that fits every possible port on the planet (and most don't), it will be really hard to switch.
The only thing that will eventually allow the switch won't be a new port standard, but rather wireless broadcast of video directly to the projector. It's still quite rare, but it's feasible and the only way to get out of the VGA rut. I doubt HDMI/DP/whatever is EVER going to overcome VGA for such applications -- the next "standard" won't have cables at all.
But the attitude of "Screw this science stuff. We need the parchment for a prayer book." eradicated a lot of earlier knowledge.
You do realize that early books made of parchment were from animal skin, right? So, to put a new page in your book, you had to kill a sheep?
Parchment was extremely valuable. Books required you to slaughter lots of animals. So yeah, people reused the animal skin when they could. It wasn't just reused for "prayer books" -- it was reused for community records, for legal documents, for endpapers to join the spines in new books, etc., etc., etc.
Not until King Ferdinand of Spain figured out that all the stuff the Moors had collected in their libraries might actually be important, the Churches attitude toward knowledge was pretty much indifference.
Huh? That's simply not true. The attitude was: "Here's some valuable material that has a bunch of squiggles on it I can't read. I need paper to make records of new stuff. Let's scrape and reuse."
It's not that they didn't value knowledge -- they didn't value stuff they weren't able to use. That's how life was for most of history for most people. It's only in the past few decades that we've reached a point where production to excess is so great that disposable stuff is everywhere and regular reuse of old stuff isn't necessary.
Very few people in Europe could read Greek for much of the medieval period, so a lot of old manuscripts were scraped off and reused. It's kind of like you came upon an old hard drive which was corrupted and you couldn't read it (and you didn't know what was on it), so you reformatted and started over. That's not "indifference" toward the contents of the drive -- it's just saying, "I need more space, I can't use this thing as-is, so I'll make it so I can reuse it."
On the other hand, there were plenty of books that were kept that maintained knowledge that was important to them. Prayer books were important to them, because without them you might be suffering in eternal torment forever. So, it's kinda like: "I don't have any fresh sheep to kill to make a new book, and here's this skin with squiggles on it I can't read, and if I don't make the new book, I might burn in hell forever."
That's not indifference toward knowledge. That's being practical with materials you have to live your life in a pretty bleak historical period.
No. What the church brought was stagnation and illiteracy. Anyone caught translating the bible was burned at the stake.
Another myth. (Note -- before I go on, I'm NOT Catholic, and I have no interest in defending the Catholic Church. But I do think we have a moral duty to accurate history.)
The Catholic Church punished people who translated the Bible AND threatened heresy/schism, etc. Yes, there were some incidents in medieval Europe where translators were punished, but that was because they were associated with political movements against the church. If you wanted to translate the Bible AND lead an insurrection, sure they might kill you.
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where portions or the entirety of the Bible were translated in the years 1000-1500, and the Church didn't do anything to the translators. It only became a significant controversy after the whole Luther thing and the Counter-Reformation.
By the way, I don't mean this to be argumentative or even that you should have known this. Errors in scholarship have a long life, and there were some influential studies done on this stuff based on incomplete evidence and erroneous interpretations of medieval documents in the early 1900s. That's why this myth endures.
But it's a myth nonetheless.
And illiteracy was just a consequence of lack of utility. Parchment was expensive -- how many animals did you have to kill and skin to make a book? So, why would literacy be common until paper became cheap in the 1400s (due to a sudden excess of scrap linen that could be pulped)?
Preserving the bad ideas of the Greeks may or may not have been a good thing. We might have been better off flushing the whole thing and starting over completely from scratch.
Well, that's all very debatable. Arguably the major medieval renaissance in knowledge was in part driven by reclaiming the knowledge of the ancients, which in turn led to what most people think of as the real "Renaissance," which in turn led to Humanistic enterprises that were no longer dominated by the Church, which led to the Scientific Revolution.
That's only one way of telling the story, of course. But there's some truth to it.
The real problem was not being able to challenge bogus crap for 1000 years.
You really have no idea what medieval Scholasticism was about, then, do you? Medieval universities were largely started by priests and monks. Debates were the norm. Empiricism and logical argument were combined into a new method. Challenging accepted facts was commonplace. In fact, some historians of science actually argue that the reason why the West had a "Scientific Revolution" and other places (e.g., China, the Arab world) didn't was because of the accepted level of scholarly debate that occurred in the West compared to other areas of the world... which didn't have the same kinds of debates.
What made it painful was that it was done without algebra or even the symbol pi. Think long wordy descriptions involving limits and ratios and you end up with 3 pages of text for what takes half a line in modern notation. Heck, even his result takes a couple lines to write.
But that's not the only way to do calculus with geometrical methods. And no, I'm not talking about the idea of integration with rectangles that get thinner and thinner.
Tom Apostol (author of one of the most well-known -- and abstract -- Calculus textbooks ever) highlighted the possible benefits of a geometrical approach years ago. A lot of complex problems are incredibly simple and intuitive to solve, once you get used to geometrical methods.
It's also important to remember that geometry was critical to Newton's conception of calculus too. Read his Principia, and you'll find plenty of geometrical proofs showing things that today we'd do with algebra.
Anyhow, the point is that we tend to think in algebra today because that's primarily how we're taught. There are actually intuitive and simple ways to use geometry to do calculus, and it doesn't surprise me at all if the Babylonians figured some of them out. It would surprise me if it really took a couple thousand years before anyone else did anything like that again -- my guess is that many historians who look at treatises from that period don't always realize what's going on in some historical methods, because we no longer work from a geometry-centric view of mathematics.
However, given what you thought happened does really put it into perspective and I likely would have felt the same. I never had to live with the fear of nuclear war, so it's hard to imagine the kind of stress and fear that could cause.
Indeed. It's a long story but a strange combination of events, a bizarre phone message, and hearing the wrong excerpt of a radio broadcast on 9/11 initially led me to believe that it was likely that thermonuclear devices had been detonated over major U.S. cities. For a minute or more, I was trying to figure out who might be lobbing ICBMs at us, where the nearest major cities were to me, likely direction of prevailing winds and fallout clouds, etc. After turning on the TV and finally hearing it was about a few plane crashes and thousands were dead instead of tens of millions that I was imagining... yeah, I breathed a sigh of relief too. Believe me, you never was to go through a period where you seriously believe that a nuclear war has begun.
Do some research before disagreeing in ignorance. Read some actual studies, which there are many of on the inaccuracies of BMI. Basically, BMI misclassifies at least 25% of the population -- tall people are disproportionately flagged as obese (particularly women), while short people (particularly men) are incorrectly viewed as healthy. If you try to move the thresholds around, it doesn't ever really get better. And there are loads of simple measures that are superior to BMI -- for example, men's waist measurement (regardless of height) has a MUCH higher correlation with obesity-related illness than BMI.
What are the best PDF applications to edit existing PDF files?
THIS. Yes, creating a PDF using open source software on Linux or whatever is obviously trivial.
But editing a PDF is a different matter. To my knowledge, nothing comes close to Acrobat is terms of its flexibility and ease of use in editing existing PDFs, particularly if you're looking for open source on Linux. (And I'm a big supporter of non-proprietary alternatives in general.) Yes, you can cobble together functionality from various tools, and certain command line utilities can even be faster for certain tasks, but nothing like the convenience of Acrobat.
For example, the Manhattan project involved hundreds of people, yet remained secret for years, is that what this theory suggests would have happened?
I can't speak to the validity of the mathematical model here, but it seems the Manhattan Project might be distinguished in a number of ways.
(1) The "conspiracies" in TFA are mostly things that many people would view as against "public interest." Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project was doing something that was actually trying to win a war, which average Americans knew was already killing millions of them. Thus, I think it would be easier to appeal to people's patriotism to keep the Manhattan Project secret even if more people did find out or someone was thinking of "talking." The very word "conspiracy" implies something negative and nefarious going on; while some people nowadays consider the Manhattan Project to have unleashed "evil" I suppose, the general negative impact at the time was on enemies who were intent on killing Americans -- so I don't know that most people would have considered it a net benefit to release that information to the public, where it could more easily get in the hands of enemies and put Americans at a disadvantage in the war if the enemy developed weapons faster.
(2) It was a different time. Not just because of the war. This was the era when journalists voluntarily kept the secret that FDR was basically confined to a wheelchair. Could you imagine something like that being kept secret today? The amount of technology, surveillance, electronic communications, etc. that EVERYONE has access to (and anything anyone was trying to keep secret would be subject to a barrage of), not to mention the lack of the kind of ethical choices that journalists of that time made... well, it's just a different world today.
(3) Probably only a few dozen people knew of the full scope of the Manhattan project, and probably only a few hundred had any real clue that it even had to do with atoms. Hundreds of thousands of people were employed doing construction, etc., but they had no clue what was going on, and they couldn't figure it out from the little pieces they knew and observed personally. And even if they started to figure something out, see (1) and (2) above.
(4) The Manhattan Project hit a "big reveal" when the bombs were dropped on Japan. Probably a few hundred more people who didn't really "get" what was going on figured something out when they heard that news. And more people likely started putting the pieces together then. And it was in that same year that the government started revealing stuff about the project. Compare that to something like the Moon Landings. You could imaging thousands of construction workers and whatever involved in setting those up to create a hoax, and maybe they could segregate people similarly to avoid any one person having "all the pieces." But then the day comes in 1969 when it's broadcast around the globe, and I bet lots of people start putting the pieces together. Same thing for the other conspiracies in TFA -- these are all publicly disclosed matters where the "official" story is different from the supposed "conspiracy" story. With the Manhattan Project, there often was really no major "official" story -- in fact, you have stories about managers from then who were tasked with keeping workers happy when no one knew anything (including the managers). If anything, the danger of the Manhattan Project was that too many people thought it was worthless or nonsense -- since they had no clue what the work was for. There's not the same tension in explanations or the feeling of "deception" that would tend to lead to "leaks."
Oh, and besides all of this, TFS says these conspiracies would unravel in a MINIMUM of 3-4 years (and perhaps as long as decades). While the Manhattan Project got started in 1939, it didn't really get going in force until around 1942, and it was revealed in 1945. So, it's not like the "secret" phase of the project lasted even much longer than the MINIMUM predicted by this model.
The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)
That's a myth: http://www.straightdope.com/co...
Well, it's partly a myth. Yes, it is a myth that QWERTY was intended to slow down typists. It *WAS* intended to reduce key-jams on manual typewriters, and it did this by introducing frequent alternation between hands and by placing frequently used letters far apart. The frequent alternation between hands actually speeds up typing, so that's a positive for QWERTY, but the placement of frequently used letters far apart is no longer necessary -- and it was never optimized for modern computers and speed/ergonomics.
Basically, the Dvorak proponents often overstate their case, and your link is correct that some of the studies promoted by Dvorak himself had questionable methodology. The supposed benefits of 20-40% increase in speed and getting up to previous QWERTY speed with only 20-25 hours of training is bogus and was known to be bogus for the past 50 years or more.
On the other hand, various studies do show Dvorak has some advantage over QWERTY, both theoretically (in terms of motion needed to travel by the hands, etc.) and practically, but that advantage is likely more in the 5-10% speed increase range and it likely requires about 100 hours of retraining to get back to QWERTY speed for an existing touch-typist. That's just a lot of work for a small benefit, especially when one can use that 100 hours instead to train in specific ways and increase QWERTY speed instead -- which likely will result in a small speed increase as well.
So, GP is correct that QWERTY was designed to reduce manual jams that can no longer happen, and it IS a bad standard for modern computers, etc. But the improvements for moving to a better layout are quite small and would require extensive retraining... so we all tend to stick with a (slightly) inferior standard.
(How "inferior" is really difficult to know precisely, because to my knowledge the "gold standard" study has never been done. There are quite a few studies which have taken QWERTY typists and retrained them in Dvorak. And there are studies that waited until those retrained typists got up to their previous QWERTY speeds and then pitted them (now Dvorak typists) against existing QWERTY typists. But I've never seen reference to a study that took existing Dvorak typists who have been using that layout for years and retrained them in QWERTY -- probably because such people are incredibly rare, and likely next-to-impossible to find in the modern era of ubiquitous keyboards. 25 years ago we could have done a study like this, since many people wouldn't learn to type until high school or later, but now it may be next-to-impossible to even start training someone who has never spent significant time with a QWERTY keyboard first. And that previous QWERTY exposure will significantly affect "muscle memory" and cognitive load when confronted with a new standard, even after many hours of retraining.)
Now that the battle to normalize homosexuality is largely won there are a growing number of voices in society (including academicians) working to normalize pedophilia.
No there aren't.
There was a time (which had its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s) when there was a push to abolish ages of consent and recognize the possible validity of sexual relationships between all ages, and it had some significant academic support (particularly in Europe).
But that was 30-40 years ago. Support for that sort of thing has been declining ever since.
There is some growing interest (though only in a small minority of researchers) in trying to sort out more details concerning the behavior of pedophiles -- for example, how many viewers of child pornography actually also commit offenses with children? How often does the "escalation" you refer to actually occur? Are there differences in the recidivism rates and possibilities for rehabilitation in those who merely view child pornography vs. those who actually sexually assault children?
The research on a lot of these questions is in its infancy, partly because it's a very icky topic, and we all want to believe the worst about anyone who would ever view a naked picture of a child. But such research is trying to sort out whether our criminal penalties make sense, whether they are actually effective in reducing further abuse, etc.
That's not "normalizing pedophilia" -- it's trying to focus effort on places where it can prevent the most harm, and trying to help people who may actually be able to be helped vs. just demonizing everyone who we can corral into the category of "dangerous pedophile."
Well in this particular instance i'm assuming the FBI wasn't creating any new child porn, so there were no new victims...
But that's not the logic the FBI uses in convicting those who possess or distribute child pornography. According to them, the existence and distribution of child pornography creates a market for more child pornography, which means more children are abused to create it. If you follow the standard FBI logic, then, their distribution of pornography necessarily contributed to the creation of a market which would cause more abuse and thus "new victims."
(That is, of course, assuming that the FBI did not manage to arrest every single person who viewed this pornography, as well as any other person any of these persons may have sent the images to. It seems incredibly doubtful that the FBI could manage that.)
It's unlikely that shutting down the site immediately would have prevented any crimes from being committed
Huh? By definition, possession of child pornography is a crime. The FBI allowed numerous such crimes to be committed by freely allowing access. And if any of the images were redistributed, the FBI also contributed to further crimes of distribution and possession.
as the pedophiles would go elsewhere therefore actually catching some is probably a positive result overall.
Perhaps. It's difficult to say what constitutes "positive result." If you go by the standard FBI line that possession and distribution create demand and thus are morally equivalent to abuse, then the FBI most certainly contributed significantly to that.
If you take a more nuanced perspective and ask how many of these "pedophiles" were likely to actually commit abusive acts with children, it's a little harder to gauge, since research is mixed. It seems clear that at least some people who view child pornography never act on their impulses (in the same way that some people who view all sorts of random hardcore sex acts in pornography may not ever actually attempt them or seek them out), but the percentage of those people is hard to pin down. Studies have put the number of people arrested for possession of child pornography that also committed an abusive act with a child at anywhere from 1% to 85%. That's a huge range, and it's clear that most studies so far are somewhat biased one way or another.
The point is -- just because the FBI arrested another person for viewing child porn doesn't necessarily mean that fewer children will be molested by that person. Also, recidivism rates for child porn viewers are apparently significantly lower (for any crime) than recidivism rates for stereotypical "child molesters" actually arrested for having contact with a child.
Lastly, there is the issue of the victims who were used to create this pornography in the first place. Did the FBI have permission from all of them to keep these images up? It seems very doubtful from TFA. Imagine if you were raped (or even just physically assaulted or had nude pictures taken of you without proper consent) and some website posted pictures of it for people's entertainment. Now imagine that the police actually host that material for people's entertainment without your consent. How would that make you feel?
I agree that the FBI likely arrested some bad people here. But this isn't a clear case that the "ends justify the means" -- it's really quite messy from a moral perspective.
Name a place in the US where two 17 year olds have sex, and once one of them turns 18, it suddenly becomes illegal.
Well, if Wikipedia's summary of age of consent laws is accurate, your scenario would likely apply in North Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin. It seems in all cases that these would be misdemeanors, not felonies.
For one, the age of consent isn't uniformly 18, and most places have restrictions on the law that allow for close-age relationships.
Yes, but not all do. And by perusing Wikipedia's summary list, you can see how convoluted the laws are in various places. The "close in age" exceptions can vary from a couple years difference to decades.
Just because you can't figure out how to calibrate your equipment properly doesn't mean trained lab scientists couldn't calibrate a thermometer properly 100 years ago. Mercury thermometers were easily accurate to within 1/10th of a degree back then, and once they were calibrated they were a sealed glass tube whose calibration would be VERY stable over time. For the past century or so, there have also been standard calibration protocols in place where you could send you thermometers away to be tested and properly calibrated, and existing weather stations often had logbooks noting this sort of thing.
Oh, and as for yourself, if you're making a calibration ice bath properly, it should definitely not be 36F. Read up on the proper way to make a slush bath (use crushed ice, usually more ice than water, if the ice floats, there's too much water, etc.), which should at a minimum get you to within 1 degree of freezing even in poorly controled conditions.
There is nothing dubious about it. Primes are defined this way because of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.
While, I completely agree with you, lighten up a bit. Also, realize that in the real world the word "prime" comes from Latin primus, meaning first... hence prime steak, prime meridian, Optimus Prime, etc. And thus while in the mathy definition you're right, the real-world definition allows significant wordplay in this specific thread -- the first post is by definition a prime post, but in another sense (your sense), it's not.
"Scholarly" blah blah blah useless crappy people like you who take other people's work and put it out again and claim YOU hold the rights to THEIR work, NO. That's not copyright. That's the bullshit you spew.
I probably shouldn't respond to sure a puerile post, but hey, what the heck.
Look -- first off, **I** have never earned a cent off of claiming any rights off of anyone else's work. The work I did was for a foundation which was tasked with preparing a critical edition of the works of someone (obviously famous) who died hundreds of years ago. This edition required tens of thousands of hours of work investigating thousands of original sources and manuscripts. I was paid for some of the work I did at the time I did it, but I personally don't claim any rights to anything.
Now, you may not care about any of this work or think it's stupid. But the vast majority of the publications in the project I mention were in publishing manuscript sources that previously had been unavailable to anyone except scholars who would travel to an archive. And many of the sources were in such disarray or had conflicting versions, etc. that it required a significant amount of editorial decision to produce something useful from them.
Some scholars may find this stuff useful. Some of the previously unpublished works might be found to be interesting and find their way into a more "popular" canon of works. I don't know.
But I certainly don't claim any rights to any dead person's work. And in this particular case, the work was significantly subsidized by a number of charitable foundations in the interest of getting this work out there. The volumes of the edition don't make any profit either -- it's a non-profit organization, and the money solely went to pay for publishing costs.
I don't know if any of this is at all relevant to Anne Frank's case -- the more I read about her case, the less I think the legal arguments are valid. To me, it sounds like the Anne Frank foundation (or whatever) is just trying to keep making money off of the stuff, which I find personally offensive too.
But that doesn't justify a wholesale attack on scholars who are trying to preserve and disseminate valuable works of history and culture.
Your 'apparently' doesn't follow from your 'given'. It's a non-sequitur. Editing does not grant copyright to the editor, and it never has.
You're partly right in that I misspoke. I don't claim to be an expert on European copyright law. Upon reading further, it's clear that current European law on "scholarly editions" of works varied by country -- it's generally 20-30 years in length, and is limited by EU policy to no more than 30 years. In any case, it's inapplicable in this case.
But your assertion that no copyright protections exist in European law for editions is demonstrably false.
Unless he created some original work in that 1947 edition, the copyright will still be based on the life of the *author* herself. And, if he *did* create some original work, only *that* will still be under copyright until 2050, because he is not the author of the parts Anne wrote.
Yes, upon further reading the situation is slightly different from what I understood from the original articles I read about this case. Sorry -- honest mistake.
What the publishers are claiming is not that Otto Frank made an "edition," but rather that his contributions were significant enough to be considered a "co-author" and hence would carry protection for him. (In cases of coauthorship, I believe the copyright protection extends to the last possible date from the various coauthors.)
I agree this sounds completely bogus to me now. Otto Frank, to my knowledge, never claimed the work as his own. That appears to be a wacky argument the publishers invented in recent years (after he was obviously already dead). I agree that's bogus.
So, the "edition" copyright should no longer be in effect, if it existed in the first place. And the "co-author" claim seems bogus to me, as I read more.
Again, only the parts not originally written by Anne Frank herself would be subject to a longer copyright span.
Apparently that may not be true under an obscure Dutch law. Decades ago, some countries grant different copyright lengths to posthumous works dependent on date of publication, regardless of when the author died.
Again, I'm not claiming these arguments are CORRECT, only that they have been used in legal proceedings and apparently have some merit... though whether they'll withstand more challenges is an open question.
As far as I am aware this is one of a very few cases where the editor is claiming copyright and is thus highly dubious and open to legal challenge.
Well, the general concept is NOT "highly dubious" -- editions are well-established in European law and are generally granted a 25-year copyright term (if I remember correctly).
As I read more about the specific case of Anne Frank, though, it appears the publishers are trying to pull more significant shenanigans, effectively claiming Otto as a sort of co-author, rather than an editor. That seems a real stretch to me, but you'd have to look at how many changes he made and of what type before publication.
That doesn't actually matter. Copyright is automatic, and exists from the time of creation - not the time of publication. That's a Berne Convention standard so no signatory country's laws (and that includes all of Europe) can fail to comply with it.
Look -- I'm not a lawyer, but apparently prior to 1995 there was SOME law that stated posthumous publication fell under different laws. Apparently, that law is no longer in force but previously copyrighted works are grandfathered in. And apparently courts have agreed with this line of reasoning. (I've already said this repeatedly, but just to be clear, I think the length of time on these laws is stupid and the diary should be PD by now... that doesn't change legal arguments here, though.)
The diary was first published in 1947 in Dutch
Not the original diary, but rather a version that apparently combined two existing versions, since Anne Frank apparently began rewriting sections, drafting them for publication before her death. Thus, the original 1947 publication was not a complete version of the whole thing, but rather an edition that reconciled various elements of the original to make something more readable and coherent.
In 1986 a commented version was edited and published
Yes, the first complete version of the original, apparently showing both the "A and B versions" of the rewritten entries, etc.
Apparently the present copyright holders are claiming that the 1947 version should be considered as an "edition," and thus Otto Frank should be treated as "author" in terms of copyright, since he had to make choices about how to reconcile versions and such (as well as omitting various entries and passages for various reasons). And apparently the copyright holders are claiming that the 1986 date is valid for the publication of the full original.
Again, I personally think most of copyright law is bogus and all of this should have passed into the public domain decades ago. But this seems to be the way the copyright holders have argued in line with existing law (and courts seem to have upheld their claims).
The debate over whether editors have a copyright interest in a given work is not a new debate. What is different about this case is that the author could not have any say over how her works were edited or say over whether her writings should have been published in the first place.
This is not a unique issue at all. Famous people of the past often have left behind hoards of unpublished papers, correspondence, etc. Many scholars create editions of such things, often long after those people have died -- sometimes centuries later.
In these cases, it is generally standard that the editor/compiler holds copyright on that edition from the date of publication, rather than anything having to do with the death of the author. Of course the original documents may long ago have become public domain (and hence may be republished freely without permission), but the edition generally requires quite a bit of work to put together. (I admit I know very little about how much was done in the case Anne Frank, though.)
Indeed, in all the copies I have seen published, none of them credit Otto or Mirjam as co-authors.
This is the more interesting issue, to me. If these publications actually ascribed the work completely to Anne Frank, even if they were edited, then Otto Frank should be considered more as an editor in the sense of an internal copyeditor at a publishing house that cleans up a manuscript, rather than as a "scholarly" editor who has to make tough decisions about reconciling different versions of texts and how to turn an unedited mess into something comprehensible. The latter is generally entitled to be treated as an "editor" in the formal sense and perhaps granted copyright, but the former is not generally entitled to such protections.
They can't have it both ways, either it is her diary and the copyright is expired or it's a post-war original work of authorship based on her diary, but not both.
Actually, that's precisely what they are claiming, and there are valid legal arguments for it under copyright law. Multiple new editions of an old work can be published and may be copyrighted. As someone who has worked on scholarly editions of source materials (though I've never been a primary author on one), there's a lot of original research that often goes into making judgment calls on how to take some handwritten source and turn it into a printed text. In particular, you often have multiple sources (e.g., different drafts, different fragments of manuscripts) which require reconciliation and interpretation.
I don't know anything about the sources of Anne Frank's diary, though -- but I do know that apparently Anne Frank began rewriting some portions with an intent on publication at some point in 1944. That presumably means that any edition would have to make choices about how to present the sections she originally wrote vs. her redrafted ones for publication, which also may require reconciling elements in the portions which had not been rewritten before her death to make sense with the ones which had been rewritten.
This may or may not be a straightforward process to put all this together in a format that would be easily accessible and understood by readers. I don't know enough about the sources.
Nevertheless, what we have here apparently is the following:
(1) The first edited version was published in 1947 by Otto Frank. I don't know how much editing was done here, but apparently it was more than just selecting entries, given that there would be multiple versions of some entries. The copyright to that is claimed by Otto Frank, who died in 1980, and applicable copyright law for his version thus extends to 70 years after his death.
(2) The original diaries were finally published in a scholarly "critical edition" in 1986. Under applicable copyright law at that time, posthumous publications were granted a 50 year term after the first PUBLICATION. So, that would extend to 50 years after 1986.
Thus, yes it is both. It is her diary, but copyright law as of 1986 said what matters in posthumous publication was the date of publication, not when the author died. (That law has since been changed in the EU, but old works still under copyright are grandfathered in.) And it is also a post-war "original" edited work, whose copyright expires at a different date. This is actually quite common for scholarly editions, such as edited publications of correspondence by famous people, etc.