The idea that your language determines the way you see the world (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has been around for many decades, and has been the subject of many experiments and much discussion. Language has generally not been shown to affect perception or thought, altho there are occasional special cases where there does seem to be an mild effect.
Example #1: Different languages divide up the color space differently. For example, Russian divides the color space covered by the English word "blue" into two separate color terms. However, language doesn't appear to affect the way people perceive color. For example, when researchers ask informants to judge color chips as "same" or "different," there appears to be no effect at all from the division of color space in the informant's native language.
Example #2: Chinese doesn't have a way of marking counterfactual or hypothetical statements as some languages do. One researcher (Bloom) had speakers of English and of Chinese read the same story in their respective native languages, and the speakers of Chinese did in fact have trouble answering whether such-and-such really happened. Bloom took this as evidence that language strongly affects thought. But another researcher said that the problem was just a bad translation into Chinese, and repeated the experiment with a better translation. Now the Chinese speakers had no difficulty saying "Of course such-and-such didn't happen."
On the other hand, the tense/aspect system of Russian does appear to have an effect on the way that speakers evaluate the temporal relationships in non-linguistic pictures of events. So it is occasionally possible to tease out a case where language does seem to have an effect on non-linguistic thought.
In sum, a blanket statement that "language determines thought" is much too strong. Even if the finding of the article mentioned above is accurate, the weight of the evidence seems to be that these cases are the exception, not the rule.
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
I'm hearing. My boyfriend is deaf. I can pick up any voice phone, call the relay service, and use it to call my boyfriend. The CA types what I say, and reads to me what my boyfriend types back.
How would you put a password protection on this? Would every hearing person have to register a spoken password to be able to call a deaf person?
The point of the relay service is to allow deaf and hearing people equal access to the phone system. If I need a password to call a deaf person but not a hearing person, that's hardly equal access.
Deaf people would never stand for such unequal treatment. They would be even more insulted if you said that they can't take care of themselves by screening their own scammers as hearing people do.
One of the courses I teach is Introduction to Linguistics. That field has changed an enormous deal over that last 70-90 years. There is no text which is old enough to be out of copyright and which would remotely approach the needs of my class. This is true of most of the other courses I teach, such as Intro to Computational Linguistics, etc.
I already checked MIT's OpenCourseware site, and their Intro to Linguistics course simply gave a reference to the commercial text which the professor for that course ordered. No no luck there, either.
If there were a cheap alternative, I'd go for it. I just don't see any, at this point.
Amusingly, a publisher rep called me today trying to sell me on a textbook. I asked how much the text would cost my students; it was $49. Then I raised a bunch of the issues that came up on this thread. I said that the high cost of textbooks is such a problem that it's pushing me in the direction of abandoning the commercial publishers and writing some contributions for free, open-source online textbooks. The guy was stammering and obviously squirming. I asked him to pass these concerns on to others in his company, and he said that he definitely would.
The purpose of tenure is to ensure freedom of speech. The proper functioning of the scholarly world depends crucially on this freedom, because our way of trying to find out the truth is by arguing for competing ideas. If I'm afraid that I might lose my job for stating an unpopular view, I'm less likely to voice that view; and this in turn interferes with the progress of knowledge. That's why we have tenure: so that we can say what we think without having to fear popular opinion.
No human decision-making process is perfect, and you do occasionally get deadwood tenured faculty. On the whole, however, I think the system functions pretty well. People who are slackers by their nature usually don't generally make it thru the years of grad school and the years of the tenure process. If you want to be a slacker, there are much easier ways to do it. People who make it thru all of that tend to be hard workers by their nature.
As for the idea that professorships should be like jobs in other sectors, I'd argue that it's the other sectors that have it wrong. It used to be common for someone to work for one company for his or her entire career. Now, employees are generally viewed as disposable parts to be dumped when doing so makes more money for the shareholders. Even leaving aside the free-speech issue, are you saying that it would be a good thing for more sectors to take this view?
I sure don't get any kickbacks for "forcing my classes to use 'upgraded' textbooks". I've never heard of such a practice. These days, I'm lucky if I can even get the publishers to follow the traditional practice of sending me a free desk copy for evaluation purposes; more and more often, publishers want me to pay for the text before I consider creating a captive market of 40 student customers for them.
I share your anger about the problem of publishers charging unreasonable prices for textbooks. If I could find a low-priced textbook which is a reasonably academically sound choice, I'd choose it. Unfortunately, for every course I've ever taught, all of my choices have been overpriced. So what I'm forced to do is to make the best tradeoff I can between picking the most academically suitable text vs. saving my students as much money as I can.
The only other option I see is to create my own inexpensive in-house textbook, but this is a huge amount of effort; it's much easier for me to simply use a prepackaged text. Producing my own text would be easier is if someone in my field would organize a single, well-ordered, referreed online repository of open-source chapters, exercises, etc. If such a thing existed, and if the college infrastructure existed so that I could just hand off my camera-ready pages and have the bound text effortlessly appear on the bookstore shelf without my having to rassle with copying, binding, and pricing details, then I'd consider putting the extra time into doing this.
However, unrefereed course packs don't count as publications, and if you don't have enough publications, you don't get tenure--simple as that. If I spend time creating a cheap alternative for my students instead of writing research articles for peer-reviewed journals, then I'm significantly reducing my propects for my own survival. Those are the pressures I'm responding to.
It would be nice if students organized and lobbied the administration to change their tenure evaluation criteria on this point. If it helped us to get tenure by creating inexpensive in-house texts, more of us would be doing it. Unfortunately, I don't foresee students doing this; the point is probably too abstruse from the perspective of students who never come into contact with the tenure process.
Oh, I already know that, and I've said as much in other posts in this thread. I was simply responding to what someone else said about copyright. I agree that it is trademark law, not copyright law, which is germane to this case.
Firebird (the database project) was using the name prior to the use of the name by Mozilla. Because of prior use, the Firebird database project has certain legally enforceable trademark rights to the name "Firebird" even if they did not register the trademark and are not using the (tm) mark. For example, if someone else started using the name "Firebird" for a database-related product, they would almost certainly be infringing on the Firebird project's trademark.
The Mozilla project may or may not be infringing on the database project's trademark. The crucial legal question is whether web browsers and database products are sufficiently similar types of products that a reasonable layperson might be confused into thinking that there is a connection between the two.
This is one of those questions where the answer is not clear-cut and where I wouldn't want to bet a lot of money on a court ruling in either direction. Just to give one example of the complexity of the laws when it comes to this kind of interpretation, consider this. When a company with no connection with Kodak-Eastman marketed "Kodak" brand cigarette lighters, they were found to be in violation of Kodak-Eastman's trademark even though the products are of quite different types. In this case, it was because "Kodak" is an invented word; if the name had been "Imperial", the finding would have probably been different. The point is that there are a lot of things which the court has to take into consideration in a case of this type, and the outcome of litigation in this case regarding the name "Firebird" would not be certain.
2. You have no claim to the Trademark or copyright for EITHER Firebird or Phoenix. I have browsed several pages of your site, and find no instances of "(tm)" "trademark" "copyright" or "(c)" (done with the appropriate circle) claiming either the Firebird or Phoenix name to be your own. Those are most definitely required to defend/protect a copyright/trademark
As someone else has already pointed out, copyright is not germane to protecting a brand name. You can't copyright a word or name; but under some circumstances you can have trademark rights to a name.
You are incorrect that a name can only be protected as a trademark if the (tm) symbol appears. If a name is widely used for a particular brand, the original user of that name has certain trademark rights to that name, even if the name was never registered as a trademark.
This can even be true if the name was not created by the product manufacturer, but is generally used to refer to a particular brand; for example, the Coca-Cola Corporation had trademark rights to the widely-used name "Coke" even before that company started using that name in its own marketing, since the name was widely understood as referring to Coca-Cola's brand of cola soft drink. The important test in any trademark infringement case is whether the use of the name is likely to create confusion and thus allow a user of the name to take advantage of the reputation of another vendor.
Registering a name as a trademark is advantageous because it serves as public notice of your claim of trademark, and prevents a defense of ignorance in a trademark infringement case.
You must not use the (tm) mark if you have not registrered your trademark; doing so can actually statutorily result in the loss of your trademark rights.
All of this information is from a basic text on trademark law which I checked out from the Univerisity of Pennsylvania library a few years ago.
It's more complicated than that; the law you reference simply tells how to affix a copyright notice if you choose to.
Prior to the 1976 revision of U.S. copyright law, you would actually lose your copyright to a work if you published it without proper copyright notice being displayed.
After 1976, you automatically obtain copyright on your work as soon as it is fixed in a tangible format. You own the copyright whether you add the copyright notice or not. Including the copyright notice is still a good idea, however, because it makes it easier to establish that someone _knowingly_ violated your copyright; it can affect the amount of damages you receive.
All of this stuff is in the circulars which the U.S. Copyright office makes available on the web.
I think "fundamentally broken" is an overstatement. TCP/IP and the "actor transportation" metaphor have the following in common:
-The low-level transfer is unreliable: things might come thru damaged or not at all, and things might not arrive in the order they were sent.
-A higher level management system deals with transmission failures by requesting retransmissions as needed. It also deals with ordering problems by holding onto things and putting them in the right order.
No metaphor is ever a perfect fit, but this one is a pretty good one, if you ask me. I think that even non-technical types generally understand that you can make arbitrarily many copies of information (they understand Xerox machines, for example), so I don't think this one failing greatly compromises the overall teaching usefulness of the metaphor.
> Huh? You can't retransmit cabbages or actors or hard copies of badly researched > essays . . . but you can retransmit freaking TCP packets!
He does go on to say that "retransmission" in this case means sending an identical twin of the actor. Your criticism really isn't fair in ignoring this. The metaphor of identical twins for copies of information is not perfect, but as a teaching tool for explaining TCP to a non-technical type, I'm not sure I could come up with another metaphor which matches this one for its intuitive value.
If I were in your situation, my own first choice would be to hook up with an Intentional Community and stay for a couple of years. Twin Oaks is an example of a particularly successful and long-lived Intentional Community; it's been around since the 60's. You can follow the links from that site to dozens of other ICs.
One of my pipe dreams is to chuck my career and start an Intentional Community with a geek focus: the cash industries could be things like building custom computers, doing installation and tech support, web design, video production, etc.
For any given piece of free software, there might be any number of contributors. Getting two dozen authors on four continents to sue together against a GPL violator would be very difficult. If just some of them sue, then we're into the messy area of who owns what part of the project (do the plaintiffs own enough of the project to have standing to sue?).
If all of these contributors assign to the FSF the copyrights on their respective portions of the project, then it is much easier for the case to proceed, since there is just one plaintiff, and no nitpicking over who owns what part.
So I don't think that the FSF will refuse to help you if you don't assign them your copyright; it just makes the proceedings much simpler if you do.
I'm wondering if maybe we need new input devices before the WIMP paradigm is replaced with something better
This seems a bit like asking what it would take to replace the current way of driving a car (steering wheel, gas and pedal brakes, etc.) with something better. But the interface between humans and automobiles is pretty much a solved problem, and nobody seems to spend much time speculating on what a paradigm change in automobile control would be like.
There's a curious assumption which I've seen repeatedly-- namely, that a paradigm shift in human/computer interaction would be a good thing. Why, exactly? I see no reason to pursue a paradigm change for its own sake; I view it as a problem which has basically been solved for now, much as the problem of steering cars is a solved problem.
You've giving a case where the visual representation of the ampersand is described in the text. What I'm looking for is an example like the following:
Bob & Mary are coming over on Tuesday.
If you substitute the other presentation forms of the ampersand here, the sentence still means exactly the same thing (i.e., there are no situations where the sentence is TRUE with one form of the ampersand, and FALSE with another).
Contrast "I gave him a snack". Substituting "m" for "n" does change the meaning ("I gave him a smack"). There could be cases where I gave someone a snack without giving him a smack, and vice versa.
Your solution is roughly functionally equivalent to the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. UTF-8 is a way of representing the Unicode character space. It has the following properties:
Every character in the U0000-U007F range is represented by a single byte which happens to correspond to the ASCII code for the same character (so purely ASCII text is identical to the same text in UTF-8).
Characters outside the U0000-U007F range are represented by two, three, or four bytes.
You can tell what kind a given byte is by examining its high bits (it's either in the ASCII range, or is the first byte of a multi-byte encoding, or is a non-initial byte of a multi-byte encoding).
Since UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII, it is becoming widely accepted.
To the contrary, Unicode 3.0 does include the Germanic runes.
I don't see a need for special software to display runes. It's just a matter of having a font architecture which allows you to create and install a font for an arbitrary subrange of the Unicode space.
Your arguments fail on languages such as Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, etc. These languages use non-Roman character sets, but each has many millions of speakers; none is faced with language death in the foreseeable future. None of these languages can be considered politically or economically insignificant.
Even if a language does die, there is often still a need to work with it. For example, I specialize professionally in various pre-modern languages, some of which have not survived to the present. I still need a way to encode these languages as I use computers to produce dictionaries and online corpora.
There is in fact a group working on Unicode encodings for the Egyptian heiroglyhic character set. The codes will go in the "surrogate characters" range of Unicode. Regular Unicode uses the codes between 0 thru 2^16-1; the surrogate range runs from 2^16 thru 2^32-1, and has been designated by the Unicode Consortium for exactly this kind of case, i.e. large, rarely used characters sets.
I have to represent multiple character sets all the time in my line of work (linguistics). For example, my dissertation included Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, IPA, and Runic characters, among others.
You're correct that it is possible to mark ranges of text as belonging to a particular character set, but there are many drawbacks to this solution. For example, I was recently trying to grep Greek words from a text in both Greek and Latin; both languages were encoded in the same character space, with tags to show what text was in what language. I got all sorts of spurious matches from the Latin words, which wouldn't happen if the Greek and Roman letters weren't sharing a single character space.
There are workarounds, but they are a huge hassle for anyone who has to regularly work with multilingual text.
The author's example of treating "M" and "N" as the same character is just plain wrong. Changing one for the other changes the meaning (e.g. "smack" vs. "snack"). Not so for the various presentation forms of a single Chinese character.
A better example would be the ampersand character (&). I can think of several ways to write that character, but I challenge anyone to come up with a sentence where changing one presentation form of the ampersand for another changes the meaning of the sentence.
This article mischaracterizes the issue concerning the Chinese characters. To take a western example as an illustration, the number one is handwritten in America as a vertical stroke, but in Germany as an upside-down V. However, folks in America and Germany agree that this is "the same character"; we simply have a different way of writing it. Unicode recognizes this sameness by assigning the same code for character for "one"; the way to display it locally is a presentation issue, not an encoding one.
This is exactly the issue with the Chinese characters. For a given character, there might be a difference between the Taiwanese way of writing it, the Japanese way, and the mainland Chinese way; but the character is still recognized as being the same, despite these presentation-level differences.
For someone to demand that each national presentation form have its own character code is to misunderstand what Unicode is designed for. It encodes abstract characters, not presentation forms. Unicode does not have separate codes for "A" in Garamond and "A" in Helvetica.
It is worth noting that its very likely that many modern speakers of Uighur have ancestors who spoke Tocharian A and Tocharian B, extinct Indo-European languages remotely related to English which were spoken in northwestern China up until around a thousand years ago.
Of course, a biological designation and a linguistic designation are two entirely different things.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that your language determines the way you see the world (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has been around for many decades, and has been the subject of many experiments and much discussion. Language has generally not been shown to affect perception or thought, altho there are occasional special cases where there does seem to be an mild effect.
Example #1: Different languages divide up the color space differently. For example, Russian divides the color space covered by the English word "blue" into two separate color terms. However, language doesn't appear to affect the way people perceive color. For example, when researchers ask informants to judge color chips as "same" or "different," there appears to be no effect at all from the division of color space in the informant's native language.
Example #2: Chinese doesn't have a way of marking counterfactual or hypothetical statements as some languages do. One researcher (Bloom) had speakers of English and of Chinese read the same story in their respective native languages, and the speakers of Chinese did in fact have trouble answering whether such-and-such really happened. Bloom took this as evidence that language strongly affects thought. But another researcher said that the problem was just a bad translation into Chinese, and repeated the experiment with a better translation. Now the Chinese speakers had no difficulty saying "Of course such-and-such didn't happen."
On the other hand, the tense/aspect system of Russian does appear to have an effect on the way that speakers evaluate the temporal relationships in non-linguistic pictures of events. So it is occasionally possible to tease out a case where language does seem to have an effect on non-linguistic thought.
In sum, a blanket statement that "language determines thought" is much too strong. Even if the finding of the article mentioned above is accurate, the weight of the evidence seems to be that these cases are the exception, not the rule.
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
I'm hearing. My boyfriend is deaf. I can pick up any voice phone, call the relay service, and use it to call my boyfriend. The CA types what I say, and reads to me what my boyfriend types back.
How would you put a password protection on this? Would every hearing person have to register a spoken password to be able to call a deaf person?
The point of the relay service is to allow deaf and hearing people equal access to the phone system. If I need a password to call a deaf person but not a hearing person, that's hardly equal access.
Deaf people would never stand for such unequal treatment. They would be even more insulted if you said that they can't take care of themselves by screening their own scammers as hearing people do.
One of the courses I teach is Introduction to Linguistics. That field has changed an enormous deal over that last 70-90 years. There is no text which is old enough to be out of copyright and which would remotely approach the needs of my class. This is true of most of the other courses I teach, such as Intro to Computational Linguistics, etc.
I already checked MIT's OpenCourseware site, and their Intro to Linguistics course simply gave a reference to the commercial text which the professor for that course ordered. No no luck there, either.
If there were a cheap alternative, I'd go for it. I just don't see any, at this point.
Amusingly, a publisher rep called me today trying to sell me on a textbook. I asked how much the text would cost my students; it was $49. Then I raised a bunch of the issues that came up on this thread. I said that the high cost of textbooks is such a problem that it's pushing me in the direction of abandoning the commercial publishers and writing some contributions for free, open-source online textbooks. The guy was stammering and obviously squirming. I asked him to pass these concerns on to others in his company, and he said that he definitely would.
The purpose of tenure is to ensure freedom of speech. The proper functioning of the scholarly world depends crucially on this freedom, because our way of trying to find out the truth is by arguing for competing ideas. If I'm afraid that I might lose my job for stating an unpopular view, I'm less likely to voice that view; and this in turn interferes with the progress of knowledge. That's why we have tenure: so that we can say what we think without having to fear popular opinion.
No human decision-making process is perfect, and you do occasionally get deadwood tenured faculty. On the whole, however, I think the system functions pretty well. People who are slackers by their nature usually don't generally make it thru the years of grad school and the years of the tenure process. If you want to be a slacker, there are much easier ways to do it. People who make it thru all of that tend to be hard workers by their nature.
As for the idea that professorships should be like jobs in other sectors, I'd argue that it's the other sectors that have it wrong. It used to be common for someone to work for one company for his or her entire career. Now, employees are generally viewed as disposable parts to be dumped when doing so makes more money for the shareholders. Even leaving aside the free-speech issue, are you saying that it would be a good thing for more sectors to take this view?
I sure don't get any kickbacks for "forcing my classes to use 'upgraded' textbooks". I've never heard of such a practice. These days, I'm lucky if I can even get the publishers to follow the traditional practice of sending me a free desk copy for evaluation purposes; more and more often, publishers want me to pay for the text before I consider creating a captive market of 40 student customers for them.
I share your anger about the problem of publishers charging unreasonable prices for textbooks. If I could find a low-priced textbook which is a reasonably academically sound choice, I'd choose it. Unfortunately, for every course I've ever taught, all of my choices have been overpriced. So what I'm forced to do is to make the best tradeoff I can between picking the most academically suitable text vs. saving my students as much money as I can.
The only other option I see is to create my own inexpensive in-house textbook, but this is a huge amount of effort; it's much easier for me to simply use a prepackaged text. Producing my own text would be easier is if someone in my field would organize a single, well-ordered, referreed online repository of open-source chapters, exercises, etc. If such a thing existed, and if the college infrastructure existed so that I could just hand off my camera-ready pages and have the bound text effortlessly appear on the bookstore shelf without my having to rassle with copying, binding, and pricing details, then I'd consider putting the extra time into doing this.
However, unrefereed course packs don't count as publications, and if you don't have enough publications, you don't get tenure--simple as that. If I spend time creating a cheap alternative for my students instead of writing research articles for peer-reviewed journals, then I'm significantly reducing my propects for my own survival. Those are the pressures I'm responding to.
It would be nice if students organized and lobbied the administration to change their tenure evaluation criteria on this point. If it helped us to get tenure by creating inexpensive in-house texts, more of us would be doing it. Unfortunately, I don't foresee students doing this; the point is probably too abstruse from the perspective of students who never come into contact with the tenure process.
Oh, I already know that, and I've said as much in other posts in this thread. I was simply responding to what someone else said about copyright. I agree that it is trademark law, not copyright law, which is germane to this case.
Lest the point be missed here:
Firebird (the database project) was using the name prior to the use of the name by Mozilla. Because of prior use, the Firebird database project has certain legally enforceable trademark rights to the name "Firebird" even if they did not register the trademark and are not using the (tm) mark. For example, if someone else started using the name "Firebird" for a database-related product, they would almost certainly be infringing on the Firebird project's trademark.
The Mozilla project may or may not be infringing on the database project's trademark. The crucial legal question is whether web browsers and database products are sufficiently similar types of products that a reasonable layperson might be confused into thinking that there is a connection between the two.
This is one of those questions where the answer is not clear-cut and where I wouldn't want to bet a lot of money on a court ruling in either direction. Just to give one example of the complexity of the laws when it comes to this kind of interpretation, consider this. When a company with no connection with Kodak-Eastman marketed "Kodak" brand cigarette lighters, they were found to be in violation of Kodak-Eastman's trademark even though the products are of quite different types. In this case, it was because "Kodak" is an invented word; if the name had been "Imperial", the finding would have probably been different. The point is that there are a lot of things which the court has to take into consideration in a case of this type, and the outcome of litigation in this case regarding the name "Firebird" would not be certain.
2. You have no claim to the Trademark or
copyright for EITHER Firebird or Phoenix. I have
browsed several pages of your site, and find no
instances of "(tm)" "trademark" "copyright" or
"(c)" (done with the appropriate circle)
claiming either the Firebird or Phoenix name to
be your own. Those are most definitely required
to defend/protect a copyright/trademark
As someone else has already pointed out, copyright is not germane to protecting a brand name. You can't copyright a word or name; but under some circumstances you can have trademark rights to a name.
You are incorrect that a name can only be protected as a trademark if the (tm) symbol appears. If a name is widely used for a particular brand, the original user of that name has certain trademark rights to that name, even if the name was never registered as a trademark.
This can even be true if the name was not created by the product manufacturer, but is generally used to refer to a particular brand; for example, the Coca-Cola Corporation had trademark rights to the widely-used name "Coke" even before that company started using that name in its own marketing, since the name was widely understood as referring to Coca-Cola's brand of cola soft drink. The important test in any trademark infringement case is whether the use of the name is likely to create confusion and thus allow a user of the name to take advantage of the reputation of another vendor.
Registering a name as a trademark is advantageous because it serves as public notice of your claim of trademark, and prevents a defense of ignorance in a trademark infringement case.
You must not use the (tm) mark if you have not registrered your trademark; doing so can actually statutorily result in the loss of your trademark rights.
All of this information is from a basic text on trademark law which I checked out from the Univerisity of Pennsylvania library a few years ago.
It's more complicated than that; the law you reference simply tells how to affix a copyright notice if you choose to.
Prior to the 1976 revision of U.S. copyright law, you would actually lose your copyright to a work if you published it without proper copyright notice being displayed.
After 1976, you automatically obtain copyright on your work as soon as it is fixed in a tangible format. You own the copyright whether you add the copyright notice or not. Including the copyright notice is still a good idea, however, because it makes it easier to establish that someone _knowingly_ violated your copyright; it can affect the amount of damages you receive.
All of this stuff is in the circulars which the U.S. Copyright office makes available on the web.
I think "fundamentally broken" is an overstatement. TCP/IP and the "actor transportation" metaphor have the following in common:
-The low-level transfer is unreliable: things might come thru damaged or not at all, and things might not arrive in the order they were sent.
-A higher level management system deals with transmission failures by requesting retransmissions as needed. It also deals with ordering problems by holding onto things and putting them in the right order.
No metaphor is ever a perfect fit, but this one is a pretty good one, if you ask me. I think that even non-technical types generally understand that you can make arbitrarily many copies of information (they understand Xerox machines, for example), so I don't think this one failing greatly compromises the overall teaching usefulness of the metaphor.
> Huh? You can't retransmit cabbages or actors or hard copies of badly researched
> essays . . . but you can retransmit freaking TCP packets!
He does go on to say that "retransmission" in this case means sending an identical twin of the actor. Your criticism really isn't fair in ignoring this. The metaphor of identical twins for copies of information is not perfect, but as a teaching tool for explaining TCP to a non-technical type, I'm not sure I could come up with another metaphor which matches this one for its intuitive value.
If I were in your situation, my own first choice would be to hook up with an Intentional Community and stay for a couple of years.
Twin Oaks is an example of a particularly successful and long-lived Intentional Community; it's been around since the 60's. You can follow the links from that site to dozens of other ICs.
One of my pipe dreams is to chuck my career and start an Intentional Community with a geek focus: the cash industries could be things like building custom computers, doing installation and tech support, web design, video production, etc.
If all of these contributors assign to the FSF the copyrights on their respective portions of the project, then it is much easier for the case to proceed, since there is just one plaintiff, and no nitpicking over who owns what part.
So I don't think that the FSF will refuse to help you if you don't assign them your copyright; it just makes the proceedings much simpler if you do.
Visual Pipes
This seems a bit like asking what it would take to replace the current way of driving a car (steering wheel, gas and pedal brakes, etc.) with something better. But the interface between humans and automobiles is pretty much a solved problem, and nobody seems to spend much time speculating on what a paradigm change in automobile control would be like.
There's a curious assumption which I've seen repeatedly-- namely, that a paradigm shift in human/computer interaction would be a good thing. Why, exactly? I see no reason to pursue a paradigm change for its own sake; I view it as a problem which has basically been solved for now, much as the problem of steering cars is a solved problem.
There's probably variation among Germans, but at least some Germans do write a "1" as an upside-down V.
If you substitute the other presentation forms of the ampersand here, the sentence still means exactly the same thing (i.e., there are no situations where the sentence is TRUE with one form of the ampersand, and FALSE with another).
Contrast "I gave him a snack". Substituting "m" for "n" does change the meaning ("I gave him a smack"). There could be cases where I gave someone a snack without giving him a smack, and vice versa.
- Every character in the U0000-U007F range is represented by a single byte which happens to correspond to the ASCII code for the same character (so purely ASCII text is identical to the same text in UTF-8).
- Characters outside the U0000-U007F range are represented by two, three, or four bytes.
- You can tell what kind a given byte is by examining its high bits (it's either in the ASCII range, or is the first byte of a multi-byte encoding, or is a non-initial byte of a multi-byte encoding).
Since UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII, it is becoming widely accepted.I don't see a need for special software to display runes. It's just a matter of having a font architecture which allows you to create and install a font for an arbitrary subrange of the Unicode space.
Even if a language does die, there is often still a need to work with it. For example, I specialize professionally in various pre-modern languages, some of which have not survived to the present. I still need a way to encode these languages as I use computers to produce dictionaries and online corpora.
There is in fact a group working on Unicode encodings for the Egyptian heiroglyhic character set. The codes will go in the "surrogate characters" range of Unicode. Regular Unicode uses the codes between 0 thru 2^16-1; the surrogate range runs from 2^16 thru 2^32-1, and has been designated by the Unicode Consortium for exactly this kind of case, i.e. large, rarely used characters sets.
You're correct that it is possible to mark ranges of text as belonging to a particular character set, but there are many drawbacks to this solution. For example, I was recently trying to grep Greek words from a text in both Greek and Latin; both languages were encoded in the same character space, with tags to show what text was in what language. I got all sorts of spurious matches from the Latin words, which wouldn't happen if the Greek and Roman letters weren't sharing a single character space.
There are workarounds, but they are a huge hassle for anyone who has to regularly work with multilingual text.
A better example would be the ampersand character (&). I can think of several ways to write that character, but I challenge anyone to come up with a sentence where changing one presentation form of the ampersand for another changes the meaning of the sentence.
This is exactly the issue with the Chinese characters. For a given character, there might be a difference between the Taiwanese way of writing it, the Japanese way, and the mainland Chinese way; but the character is still recognized as being the same, despite these presentation-level differences.
For someone to demand that each national presentation form have its own character code is to misunderstand what Unicode is designed for. It encodes abstract characters, not presentation forms. Unicode does not have separate codes for "A" in Garamond and "A" in Helvetica.
It is worth noting that its very likely that many modern speakers of Uighur have ancestors who spoke Tocharian A and Tocharian B, extinct Indo-European languages remotely related to English which were spoken in northwestern China up until around a thousand years ago.
Of course, a biological designation and a linguistic designation are two entirely different things.