And of course, all of those Normals are never guilty of "affectation" in their desperate quest to appear Normal, because after all, they're Normal: you can tell they're
Normal because they Just Naturally dress like everyone else without even trying to.
You're being a bit incoherent here, yes, but you have hit on a fundamental truth of the world: from the suit's point of view, the suit is never wrong. If those weird guys in California manage to do something cool, it must be a flash-in-the-pan that desperately needs a bunch of suits to come in and manage it to turn it into a real business.
If the suits come in, and it doesn't all fall apart, then all credit goes to the Responsible Management, if the suits come in, and it all flames out, the suits just shake their heads at how hard it is to work with those weird techies, and continue to fall upwards.
It also makes it easier for others to make corrections. Even news organizations have issued corrections when someone in the blogosphere points out they're wrong.
And in one corner, we have a rag-tag bunch of citizen amateurs; and over in the other corner, we have the Chinese government, the Republican party, the RIAA, the marketing departments of the fortune 500...
My contention is that the Karl Roves of the world have the resources to hire more people than the core group of volunteers at wikipedia. If they want to own wikipedia, it will be owned... at least as wikipedia is presently constituted.
How would you set up something like wikipedia to resist that kind of take-over?
I'm reminded of the non-anonymous, expert-driven fork of Wikipedia called Citizendium, where the identities of editors are verified.
It's not quite what I'm interested in, but you're
right, Citizendium is an example of something that's at least trying to be serious.
My personal take: they're too obsessed with credentials, and their approvals process is too cumbersome, but at the very least it's good that there's someone out there experimenting with a different approach toward things.
(At least on citizendium I probably wouldn't continually get into inane arguments with people who demonized common intellectual phrases like "widely regarded as".)
Well, I have to say that I used to be interested in free-market libertarianism, too... but much as I'd like to have a simple set of general rules to organize all of human society, I don't want it so badly that I'm willing to lie to myself to get it. You might try taking off the green shades once in awhile... you might
even, you know, check your premises.
It started all with work of the Goons (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe) and there was somewhat of an explosion of comedy in the years of the Cambridge Footlights [...]
I was skeptical about the idea that it all started with the Goons, but I was just listening to some of this earlier British radio comedy, and there isn't much there but light sitcom, it seems:
Old Time Radio - 1940s.
(Of course, there is the inescapable Marx Brothers to contend with...)
I'll keep an ear out for the Cambridge footlights
(And yes, the radio version of the Hitchhiker's Guide is really good. Actually, that's the only version I'm really familiar with. Neither the book or the TV show had much appeal to me...)
Any regulation of the internet to make it abide by some common goal that you envision must necessarily violate the rights of those computer users.
Do you feel like your rights have just been violated by the FTC?
I'm not suggesting that anonymity should be outlawed, just that we need channels of information that are not anonymous. If people see the need, a new generation of web sites could fix the problem, and still leave the old ones as a sewer for the propaganda army to play with undisturbed.
The NAZis and Fascists are exactly why anonymous speech must be preserved
My contention is that the common use of anonymity on internet message blogs and such is actually making it easier for the rise of things like fascism. There are now people on the web who are paid experts at manipulation, they're out there planting smears, astroturfing, and so on. Without some sort of dependable channels of information, it all degenerates into ungrounded he-said/she-said fights.
And that's just the way it is now... we haven't seen where this is going yet. Jimbo Wales was once asked what he would do if the Chinese government decided to try to subvert wikipedia, rather than block it. He didn't have a good answer.
"What you're advocating is the destruction of freedom of speech, the destruction of the internet." What I am arguing is that either the internet is a toy, or it's a critical piece of information infrastructure, and if it's the latter than tracking the sources of your information is actually, you know, kind of important.
Would you be happy with "Lancet" if they announced they were going to start concealing the identity of it's researchers?
Lately I've been listening to the Goon Show a lot, that being a British radio show from the 50s, and it's pretty clearly one of the places that Monty Python was coming from,
not to mention the Firesign Theater (my favorite line: "Are you going to go quietly, or do we need to use earplugs?").
I've been wondering if there might be other sources in play over there on the other side of the pond... British radio of the 40s is not exactly a subject most of us know about over here.
You mean the same Israelis that have warred with their neighbors after being invaded by those neighbors, right?
Actually, that is, shall we say, a "gross oversimplification". Briefly: the formation of modern Israel in '48 was at best a rather high-handed move by the UN, and even by the UN's standards, Israel has been a rogue state since it's 1967 land-grab. Beating up on Lebanon periodically has not done much to improve it's reputation, either. Few people have kind words to say for Hezbollah, but it's hard to get from there to a justification for Israel's recent actions in Gaza (e.g. using banned weaponry on civilian populations).
But even if the US wanted to reign in Israel, it could turn out to be difficult to do, because of all those nuclear weapons they don't have. (On the other hand, we could stop bank-rolling their military expenses... that much would be easy.)
That is, of course, the reason that governments like to have nuclear weapons. Why shouldn't Iran want nukes? If you look at US behavior in the last decade, we went ape-shit bombing two countries, but left North Korea alone. What lesson can we draw from this, class?
How is this about politics? I thought this was about bloggers and reviewers of products? Or do politicions and their parties also get in on that act?
It probably isn't about politics at present, but it probably should be. This grand dream of
citizens collaborating to share information is going to run up against a wall of paid subversion one
of these days, if it hasn't already. Requiring that people disclose who's paying them would be an
obvious first step.
But then, we also need a change in the design of these collaborative sites so you really
do know who you're talking to... I'm afraid "anonymity" just can't work in the long run.
Everyone likes to imagine brave Daniel Ellsbergs hiding from the fascists, but it works even better
for the modern-day Goebbels of the world.
and Perl use had dropped to 15% of its former level in the past five years
You forgot to link to the data supporting this figure.
But what the hell, it's only another smear of the perl community,
it's not like you're ever going to be called on it.
Perl 5 development is stagnant for one simple reason: Perl 5 is near perfect, there is nothing left to be developed there.
I know you mean well, but despite the fact that it's certainly true that perl5 is a mature language, there's plenty of active development happening in the perl5 world. There were a lot of interesting features added to perl5 with the 5.10 release. Just to pick one, they added recursive regular expressions, which enabled Damian Conway to write this: Regexp::Grammars.
Some wanted better Perl with more consistent syntax. That's what Perl 6 is for. 5.10/etc are intermediate releases serving the purpose of facilitating future migration to Perl 6: some ambiguous constructs of previous version are gone in 5.10/etc.
That's a bit of an over-simplification of what perl6 is about,
and there hasn't really been all that much removed with the release of 5.10 (maybe, pseudo-hashes?). The perl-porters care a lot about not breaking live code.
I personally do not care much about 6th - I yet to find any pathological problem in Perl 5 which would persuade me somehow to move to next big thing. Perl 5 is well documented, has piles of modules and examples all over the net. I see no point to move from it.
I'm not waiting with baited breath for perl 6 either, for much the same reasons... though I wouldn't say that perl 6 is uninteresting either. It's one of a handful of Latest Languages
that I'd want to take the trouble to learn.
If any one cares, this idea is one of the key things that Ted Nelson (you know,
the guy who invented the word "hypertext"), wanted from his Xanadu system. He was really interested in tools to assist in inter-comparison of multiple versions of text. In fact, he apparently wanted tools that are a little more complex than the usual version control front-end, for example, he liked the idea of letting a writer organize some thoughts in three different ways, then pick which version seems best without risking losing an important point in one of the other versions.
But yeah, it would seem to be a rather useful public service
for someone to take the publicly available info about pending
legislation, and just load it all into a mediawiki site, or some such, so that people can easily browse through the history of
the changes. Just to pick an example at random,
there are four versions of this bill in the THOMAS database:
H.R.3221,
and that page provides links to all of the versions, without any obvious way of comparing them.
By the way, there's an awful lot of interesting stuff out there
apparently dying in committee, just waiting for some bright young political blogger to pick up on them:
Title: A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to abolish the electoral college and to provide for the direct popular election of the President and Vice President of the United States.
Sponsor: Sen Nelson, Bill [FL] (introduced 1/8/2009) Cosponsors (None)
Related Bills: H.J.RES.9
Latest Major Action: 1/8/2009 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.
Title: A bill to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require new voting systems to provide a voter-verified permanent record, to develop better accessible voting machines for individuals with disabilities, and for other purposes.
Sponsor: Sen Ensign, John [NV] (introduced 1/6/2009) Cosponsors (None)
Latest Major Action: 1/6/2009 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration.
Flash isn't a browser addon but an embeddable control. It is embeded into the website whereas what you were replying to refers to browser addons that change the way Firefox itself works. Flash cannot affect the browser 'chrome' whereas a browser addon can.
I think you're flapping your arms really hard here, but the distinction remains meaningless.
The arguments against chrome here are exactly parallel to the arguments against flash,
and I suspect the arguments are correct in both cases.
Bingo. Google has a bunch of lawyers that sit in a room making sure that the IP of google is protected. They found a case where a license was being violated, and responded as they are paid to do. I don't know why these kind of things always turn into a debate about whether a company is evil or not... this has nothing to do with that, and people need to stop reading so much into these kinds of cases.
In which case it's a sign that the company has been taken over by it's lawyers,
who are not being restrained by any other concerns, e.g. public relations, and so on.
Google's founding mythology is that it is different from the usual corporation.
it's entirely appropriate that people continue to debate how well it's living up to it's pretensions.
One reason you might prefer an Android to an iPhone is that the Android is not supposed
to be locked down...
There's a trend at the moment for everyone to put their entire virtual existence into Google's hands (gmail,
google docs, Android). One of the reasons people are comfortable with this is Google's reputation for virtue. This kind of muscle-flexing makes one wonder about that.
Well, it would help if astronomers would start casting horoscopes again.
And biologists need to get over there constant recommendation for moderate diet and exercise and come
up with something more snazzy, like a tape-worm weight-loss program.
ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
on
Coders At Work
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A refreshing aspect of Coders at Work are the interviewees who don't shy away from strong opinions or humor, as shown in this remark by Peter Deutsch, "I think Larry Wall has a lot of nerve talking about language design--Perl is an abomination as a language."
Yes, it must be refreshing all right, listening to aging Computer "Scientists" reciting crap that's been stale for years.
It certainly is courageous for an ACM member to continue the smear campaign against perl. His friends in the gentleman's club will be shocked at his outspokeness.
You might think that the obvious utility of perl, the fact that perl and perl derived languages remain tremendously popular with people writing actual code, might blunt the man's opinion that it's an "abomination". Is it at all possible that Larry Wall got a few things right, and that the CS field's decades-long obsession with elegance and reductionism was somewhat misplaced?
(And if you want to take the line that the CS attitude is correct, how would you prove that it's correct? Writing working code is evidently not relevant. And if you can't prove it, then what does the "S" stand for in "CS"?)
The way you make something generic is by convincing everyone to use it in a generic sense.
And what kind of evidence would it take to convince a judge that this has happened?
Even then though, Apple is a trademark yet an apple is about as generic as you can get.
I think that's "arbitrary/fanciful", not generic... and I think you'll find that Apple computer didn't make it impossible for you to sell apples, what they did is get a lock on the association between apples and computers. They
could not, for example, sell products associated with music without paying off the old Apple records (the label/recording studio started by the Beatles).
Thus, there is no real "release to the public" analog, other than simply abandoning your trademark by no longer using it. And that doesn't really 'trademark left' it, it just means it's no longer currently considered a trademark. If someone else came along after you abandoned the trademark, they could just as easily start their own "Edge" trademark.
You have a point, and yet, there are things that can't be trademarked,
e.g. things that are "generic". So a real anti-trademark might be a way of
saying "I want this to be a generic symbol".
I have no idea if there's a way to actually do that which would stand up...
it does seem like a glaring omission in all the various discussion of "free culture"
issues, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude... have you ever heard about perl? (I used to like awk a lot, once upon a time).
And of course, all of those Normals are never guilty of "affectation" in their desperate quest to appear Normal, because after all, they're Normal: you can tell they're Normal because they Just Naturally dress like everyone else without even trying to.
You're being a bit incoherent here, yes, but you have hit on a fundamental truth of the world: from the suit's point of view, the suit is never wrong. If those weird guys in California manage to do something cool, it must be a flash-in-the-pan that desperately needs a bunch of suits to come in and manage it to turn it into a real business. If the suits come in, and it doesn't all fall apart, then all credit goes to the Responsible Management, if the suits come in, and it all flames out, the suits just shake their heads at how hard it is to work with those weird techies, and continue to fall upwards.
And in one corner, we have a rag-tag bunch of citizen amateurs; and over in the other corner, we have the Chinese government, the Republican party, the RIAA, the marketing departments of the fortune 500...
My contention is that the Karl Roves of the world have the resources to hire more people than the core group of volunteers at wikipedia. If they want to own wikipedia, it will be owned... at least as wikipedia is presently constituted.
How would you set up something like wikipedia to resist that kind of take-over?
It's not quite what I'm interested in, but you're right, Citizendium is an example of something that's at least trying to be serious.
My personal take: they're too obsessed with credentials, and their approvals process is too cumbersome, but at the very least it's good that there's someone out there experimenting with a different approach toward things.
(At least on citizendium I probably wouldn't continually get into inane arguments with people who demonized common intellectual phrases like "widely regarded as".)
Well, I have to say that I used to be interested in free-market libertarianism, too... but much as I'd like to have a simple set of general rules to organize all of human society, I don't want it so badly that I'm willing to lie to myself to get it. You might try taking off the green shades once in awhile... you might even, you know, check your premises.
I was skeptical about the idea that it all started with the Goons, but I was just listening to some of this earlier British radio comedy, and there isn't much there but light sitcom, it seems: Old Time Radio - 1940s.
(Of course, there is the inescapable Marx Brothers to contend with...)
I'll keep an ear out for the Cambridge footlights
(And yes, the radio version of the Hitchhiker's Guide is really good. Actually, that's the only version I'm really familiar with. Neither the book or the TV show had much appeal to me...)
"Quiet! We might be overheard!"
"On BBC Home? Ha!"
Do you feel like your rights have just been violated by the FTC?
I'm not suggesting that anonymity should be outlawed, just that we need channels of information that are not anonymous. If people see the need, a new generation of web sites could fix the problem, and still leave the old ones as a sewer for the propaganda army to play with undisturbed.
My contention is that the common use of anonymity on internet message blogs and such is actually making it easier for the rise of things like fascism. There are now people on the web who are paid experts at manipulation, they're out there planting smears, astroturfing, and so on. Without some sort of dependable channels of information, it all degenerates into ungrounded he-said/she-said fights.
And that's just the way it is now... we haven't seen where this is going yet. Jimbo Wales was once asked what he would do if the Chinese government decided to try to subvert wikipedia, rather than block it. He didn't have a good answer.
"What you're advocating is the destruction of freedom of speech, the destruction of the internet." What I am arguing is that either the internet is a toy, or it's a critical piece of information infrastructure, and if it's the latter than tracking the sources of your information is actually, you know, kind of important.
Would you be happy with "Lancet" if they announced they were going to start concealing the identity of it's researchers?
Lately I've been listening to the Goon Show a lot, that being a British radio show from the 50s, and it's pretty clearly one of the places that Monty Python was coming from, not to mention the Firesign Theater (my favorite line: "Are you going to go quietly, or do we need to use earplugs?").
I've been wondering if there might be other sources in play over there on the other side of the pond... British radio of the 40s is not exactly a subject most of us know about over here.
Actually, that is, shall we say, a "gross oversimplification". Briefly: the formation of modern Israel in '48 was at best a rather high-handed move by the UN, and even by the UN's standards, Israel has been a rogue state since it's 1967 land-grab. Beating up on Lebanon periodically has not done much to improve it's reputation, either. Few people have kind words to say for Hezbollah, but it's hard to get from there to a justification for Israel's recent actions in Gaza (e.g. using banned weaponry on civilian populations).
But even if the US wanted to reign in Israel, it could turn out to be difficult to do, because of all those nuclear weapons they don't have. (On the other hand, we could stop bank-rolling their military expenses... that much would be easy.)
That is, of course, the reason that governments like to have nuclear weapons. Why shouldn't Iran want nukes? If you look at US behavior in the last decade, we went ape-shit bombing two countries, but left North Korea alone. What lesson can we draw from this, class?
It probably isn't about politics at present, but it probably should be. This grand dream of citizens collaborating to share information is going to run up against a wall of paid subversion one of these days, if it hasn't already. Requiring that people disclose who's paying them would be an obvious first step.
But then, we also need a change in the design of these collaborative sites so you really do know who you're talking to... I'm afraid "anonymity" just can't work in the long run. Everyone likes to imagine brave Daniel Ellsbergs hiding from the fascists, but it works even better for the modern-day Goebbels of the world.
You forgot to link to the data supporting this figure. But what the hell, it's only another smear of the perl community, it's not like you're ever going to be called on it.
I know you mean well, but despite the fact that it's certainly true that perl5 is a mature language, there's plenty of active development happening in the perl5 world. There were a lot of interesting features added to perl5 with the 5.10 release. Just to pick one, they added recursive regular expressions, which enabled Damian Conway to write this: Regexp::Grammars.
That's a bit of an over-simplification of what perl6 is about, and there hasn't really been all that much removed with the release of 5.10 (maybe, pseudo-hashes?). The perl-porters care a lot about not breaking live code.
I'm not waiting with baited breath for perl 6 either, for much the same reasons... though I wouldn't say that perl 6 is uninteresting either. It's one of a handful of Latest Languages that I'd want to take the trouble to learn.
If any one cares, this idea is one of the key things that Ted Nelson (you know, the guy who invented the word "hypertext"), wanted from his Xanadu system. He was really interested in tools to assist in inter-comparison of multiple versions of text. In fact, he apparently wanted tools that are a little more complex than the usual version control front-end, for example, he liked the idea of letting a writer organize some thoughts in three different ways, then pick which version seems best without risking losing an important point in one of the other versions.
But yeah, it would seem to be a rather useful public service for someone to take the publicly available info about pending legislation, and just load it all into a mediawiki site, or some such, so that people can easily browse through the history of the changes. Just to pick an example at random, there are four versions of this bill in the THOMAS database: H.R.3221, and that page provides links to all of the versions, without any obvious way of comparing them.
By the way, there's an awful lot of interesting stuff out there apparently dying in committee, just waiting for some bright young political blogger to pick up on them:
S.J.RES.4:
S.48
I think you're flapping your arms really hard here, but the distinction remains meaningless.
The arguments against chrome here are exactly parallel to the arguments against flash, and I suspect the arguments are correct in both cases.
You mean, "proprietary".
In which case it's a sign that the company has been taken over by it's lawyers, who are not being restrained by any other concerns, e.g. public relations, and so on.
Google's founding mythology is that it is different from the usual corporation. it's entirely appropriate that people continue to debate how well it's living up to it's pretensions. One reason you might prefer an Android to an iPhone is that the Android is not supposed to be locked down...
There's a trend at the moment for everyone to put their entire virtual existence into Google's hands (gmail, google docs, Android). One of the reasons people are comfortable with this is Google's reputation for virtue. This kind of muscle-flexing makes one wonder about that.
Well, it would help if astronomers would start casting horoscopes again.
And biologists need to get over there constant recommendation for moderate diet and exercise and come up with something more snazzy, like a tape-worm weight-loss program.
Yes, it must be refreshing all right, listening to aging Computer "Scientists" reciting crap that's been stale for years. It certainly is courageous for an ACM member to continue the smear campaign against perl. His friends in the gentleman's club will be shocked at his outspokeness.
You might think that the obvious utility of perl, the fact that perl and perl derived languages remain tremendously popular with people writing actual code, might blunt the man's opinion that it's an "abomination". Is it at all possible that Larry Wall got a few things right, and that the CS field's decades-long obsession with elegance and reductionism was somewhat misplaced?
(And if you want to take the line that the CS attitude is correct, how would you prove that it's correct? Writing working code is evidently not relevant. And if you can't prove it, then what does the "S" stand for in "CS"?)
And what kind of evidence would it take to convince a judge that this has happened?
I think that's "arbitrary/fanciful", not generic... and I think you'll find that Apple computer didn't make it impossible for you to sell apples, what they did is get a lock on the association between apples and computers. They could not, for example, sell products associated with music without paying off the old Apple records (the label/recording studio started by the Beatles).
You have a point, and yet, there are things that can't be trademarked, e.g. things that are "generic". So a real anti-trademark might be a way of saying "I want this to be a generic symbol".
I have no idea if there's a way to actually do that which would stand up... it does seem like a glaring omission in all the various discussion of "free culture" issues, though.