I don't think that businesses have some god-given right to force unwelcome advertising on me. Spam, junk mail, and telemarketing are all violations of my private space. I think I have a right to create my own personal space where I can choose to exclude advertising. Right now, the law is doing little to secure this right; this is a problem which should be corrected.
The "too many laws" argument strikes me as facile; it's a question of whether the laws are good ones or not.
Mostly, we all sit here on/. and complain about spam; but if we'd make an organized effort to write to our representatives to have a law passed to ban spam, we might have a lot better weapon against it. We ought to organize a letter-writing campaign.
On what grounds would VirtualUK sue his employer? I don't think you have grounds for a suit merely because your employer makes incorrect statements that it owns something which it actually doesn't own. For example, so far as I know, you can't sue your employer for erroneously stating that it owns your house or car.
Of course, if the employer actually starts using your house and car as if it owned them, you'd have grounds for a suit. It sounds like VirtualUK's employer is not actually presently making use of his code.
The central question here has been around in linguistics for a while, specifically in the area of phonetics.
The question is how we perceive speech. Do we directly process the chirps and hisses and buzzes which make up human speech, mapping those sounds directly to words in our mental dictionaries? Or do we start by reconstructing the gestures in the mouth which produced the sounds we hear, and then look up the words in our mental dictionaries based on those reconstructed gestures?
The finding reported in this article is consistent with the latter view.
For whatever it's worth, when I was in school doing graduate work in Language Teaching Methods, I enthusiastically made technological approaches to language teaching a main focus of my study. After two years, I came away reluctantly concluding that if there is any way to use computers in language instruction which represents a real improvement over existing techniques, it hasn't been discovered yet.
When I was teaching English over in Japan, I visited more than one school which had invested in fancy, expensive language teaching technology. The students' desks had headphones and microphones and lots of buttons to push. The other teachers and I shook our heads. It's expensive, it's technological, so it must be good.
As for me, give me a blackboard and chalk, a decent textbook, and an ample xerox allocation, and I'll do just fine; that's what I need to do the best job I can. I don't think having computers in my classroom improves the class, except perhaps in a writing class where a word processor comes in handy. (Maybe I should add that it's not that I dislike computers in general; I've worked as a programmer and have been a hacker from way back. I've just come to the conclusion that computers aren't the right solution in this case.)
Real World != Business World
on
CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
most CS people never see until the real world hits em in the face
There is the academic world and there is the business world. One is concerned with the pursuit of knowledge, and the other with the pursuit of wealth. There is an arrogance on the part of some in the business world to refer to their world as the "real" world, but the truth is that academia and business are different institutions with different goals, demands, and realities.
It's quite true that if you take a pure academic and plunk him down in business, he's often going to flounder. But the converse is true as well: if you take a skilled, talented middle management person from a corporation and plunk him down as a professor, he's generally going to flounder miserably under the realities of academic life-- at least, until he comes to understand that we're concerned with truths, not with merely immediate practical problems.
Nearly everything that the business world is engaged in today can be viewed as the spinoff from the truths which academics have pursued. Some businesspeople belittle academics by implying that our world is "unreal", but if it weren't for our contributions, they'd pretty much still be selling spices and furs.
That's not what I said; I'm not saying we should do an "exhaustive run" of the program.
I'm talking about a program which takes a binary compiled for one processor as its input, and gives a binary native to another processor as its output (and then runs it). This way, you only translate once, rather than each time thru the loop.
Something just occurred to me for the first time. There's two ways that emulation is presently done: either by running a virtual processor completely in software, or by doing it in hardware as Transmeta does.
It occurs to me that there's a third possible way: rather than doing the emulation step by step as the program runs, step thru the whole compiled program and convert it to native code just once, and then run it natively from then on, rather than re-emulate it each time thru the loop.
The biggest problem is, of course, data entry. A lot of the texts pose a challenge for OCR for a number of reasons, including the large number of special characters often used.
Another problem is people who insist on copyrighting and refusing to freely share their collections of online documents in the older languages, which is a real shame, because it prevents me from creating all kinds of interesting derived works (e.g. web pages of Old English texts where you can click any word to get information about it). It basically means that all this work has to be repeated by anyone who wants to make those texts freely available-- never mind that we're talking about works over 1000 years old!
Sure, users can be educated that the same window displays two different kinds of information. However, as far as I can see, the only reason why a combination file manager/web browser program was created to start with is that Microsoft had commercial reasons for welding its web broswer as tightly as possible to its operating system, contrary to good software design.
I don't understand why the free software camp is prepetuating that legacy. If Microsoft had had reason to write a file manager/spreadsheet program, say, or a file manager/photo editor, does that mean that the free software world should continue the same strange groupings?
It doesn't strike me as good software design to write a single program which performs two unlike functions. Better to write two separate programs, and then, if there's a need, work out a way for them to talk to each other, while keeping the internals of the two completely separate.
Suppose I want to offer social commentary by creating a video where Petula Clark's "Downtown" accompanies images of homeless people sleeping on sidewalks in an urban setting, or where the upbeat theme song to "The Price Is Right" accompanies images of the environmental devastation (oil slicks, garbage dumps, etc.) caused by our gluttonous consumer society. Naturally, the corporations who "own" these songs would sue me for such use.
The problem is that these songs are shared cultural symbols. Legalities aside, there's a certain sense in which they belong to us all, just as Santa Claus and Paul Bunyan belong to us all. They are a part of our shared consciousness and cultural tradition. The mass media have essentially usurped the role formerly filled by folklore to create the symbols of our culture. This is a consideration which needs to be balanced against the "rights" of shareholders of music/entertainment corporations: current law essentially denies us the ability to speak in the vocabulary of our own culture.
It looks to me like they're planning to tax online sales ordered by California residents, where the orders are filled by companies operating in California. So it's not interstate commerce that they're trying to tax.
...people should try to creat their own, rather than copy others, that is what open source is about.
I've often heard people say this, but I've never heard anyone explain why this is a good thing. Should every new model of automobile arrange the driving controls in a different way (accelerator on the dashboard, steering with your feet, etc.), rather than "copy others"? No, because the basic problem of automobile control was solved a long time ago, and there are no advantages and some serious disadvantages to creating a new user interface in every new model. There is minor variation across models, but everyone uses essentially the same solution, and with good reason.
The basic paradigm of menus, buttons, and text fields was worked out 20 years ago; it's old, but it continues to be a good solution to the problem of human/computer interaction. People admire innovation, but I see no point in throwing out a tried-and-true solution unless the replacement offers some real advantages. I have yet to see any new kind of computer interface which seems to represent a real improvement over the current situation.
I'd welcome some sort of written user-interface standards worked out by the Linux community; but I'd hope that this set of formal standards would be largely a cleaned-up, rational statement of the customary practice in the community today rather than some misguided attempt at innovation for the sake of innovation.
Uh- how are we going to find extraterrestrial life if we forget about it until we find it? Our choices are 1) forget about it and don't look, or 2) go have a look at Europa and/or other potential life-bearing sites.
This represents an ignorance about how science works. The really important advances tend to happen when people are studying things for the sake of the pure pursuit of knowledge. Often something useful comes out, but science advances poorly when you're merely trying to solve immediate practical problems.
The discovery of penicillin, of X-rays, of radio, of electricity, etc. did not happen because individuals set out to cure disease, communicate thru the air, etc. They happened because these people were poking and prodding at the universe out of pure curiousity. Following your thinking, it would have been judged a massive waste of taxpayer money to pay to build these huge, costly machines thought up by weirdo mathematicians (e.g. ENIAC), when there are more pressing practical problems to be solved.
As for the practical spinoffs spinoffs from the space program, you're making use of them each time you use a teflon pan, or fly on a hang glider, or use instant orange breakfast drink, or listen to a CD. Understanding the workings of other planets and moons helps us to understand our own planet better and to better predict the environmental consequences of our actions. Many other examples could be given.
All the complexity is abstracting unix so that the older MacOS standards can make sense out of it. As long as developers can shake those old MacOS standards, and write for the OSX standards, they'll do fine.
Or not shake them. You've also got to consider the investment that Mac developers have in learning the old API.
I'm in the middle of a relevant case. I programmed Macs from 1989 until 1997 or so, and I know the old Mac API very well. I've now been asked to do a Mac port of a Windows app I recently wrote. Well, I have zero experience with the new Mac API (Cocoa), and frankly, I don't want to spend the time learning it, since I plan to put most of my efforts into Linux from now on. So for me, the quickest way to get the job done is to port it as an old-style Mac program.
I can answer the issues you raise, but it's far enough off topic that I think we ought to take it to email. Send me your address if you want to discuss it further.
Actually, this depends on which version of Godwin's Law you're assuming. I've seen other formulations in which you have to actually draw a parallel between Nazi thinking and the thinking of one of the participants in the discussion; mere mention of Nazis doesn't suffice.
I... support your right to oppose a rally where meat is served...
There's an important distinction here.
If it were a rally against intellectual property laws where meat coincidentally happened to be served, I wouldn't be opposed to the event.
However, it's clear from the posts that the intent is specifically to eat meat as a way of getting back at PETA, because you know that they oppose it.
You're making a specific, calculated statement that PETA's views on meat-eating are wrong-- even tho the real issue here is one of free speech, not meat-eating.
What I'm trying to point out is this: whether you intend it or not, your plan is a slap in the face to the Slashdotters who happen to abstain from meat-eating for moral reasons.
You can be a vegitarian and still support the right of others to... poke fun at People for the Ethical Treatement of Animals
Yes. I'm committed to the right to free speech, so I concede that individuals have a right to parody PETA-- even tho the parody in question makes me very angry.
Let me see if I can put this in perspective. Suppose the case in hand didn't involve PETA; suppose it involved a parody of a Jewish organization written by Nazis, and suppose the Jewish organization sues to have to web page taken down. Well, as offensive as I would find such a parody, I'd concede that even Nazis have a right to free speech, including parody. Now suppose that the judge wrongly ruled (in violation of the First Amendment) that the Nazi web site has to be taken down. I'd be with you in disagreeing with that ruling.
However, if you decide to "support free speech" by organizing a session of pork-eating and reading from Mein Kampf (just to thumb your nose at the Jewish organization), you're going to offend and alienate some people who might otherwise agree with you on the free speech question. You are within your rights to make such a response, but I'd argue that it's a tactical mistake.
Since we disagree on the morals of meat-eating, I'd recommend that we stay silent on that issue and focus on what we agree on: namely, the right of individuals to create and share information without being fettered by "intellectual property" laws.
As an ethical vegetarian, how do you feel about PETA's attempt to steal ringlingbrothers.com and put up an anti circus site.
I think they are wrong to do that. That's not the point. I'm not defending PETA's actions in this case, even if I do happen to agree with their views on animals.
The proposal was to organize a barbeque as a way of getting back at PETA members, by doing what PETA finds most offensive (eating animals). However, there are some vegetarians in the free software camp. I don't think it's in the free software movement's interests to anger and alienate your allies who happen to be vegetarian.
You might find it amusing to hold a barbeque as a way of thumbing your nose at PETA, but it will be of no practical use in correcting a bad court ruling; and it will have the negative effects I just desribed. It seems to me that your efforts would better be put into e.g. organizing a fund drive for the EFF, writing letters to your representatives against UCITA, etc.
1. Defending the First Amendment 2. Attacking vegetarians in general by doing things to deliberately offend them
You can do #1 without doing #2.
I'm with you on #1, but as an ethical vegetarian, I'd find it hard to continue to stand with you if you're doing #2, since it's a deliberate attack on moral values which I cherish. #2 would be a good thing to do if your intent is to attack your own allies and to create fragmentation and infighting among the defenders of the First Amendment.
Folks, I think you can respectfully state your disagreement with the finding of law in this ruling without heckling vegetarians in general.
Some of us are committed BOTH to vegetarianism AND to the principles of freedom of intellectual materials. For me, this PETA case is one of those really painful cases where two issues are in conflict, because the parody makes me very angry.
Here's a comparison. Suppose you were a Jew committed to freedom of speech, and a case arose involving speech by modern Nazis claiming that the Holocaust never happened (never mind that you lost half your family in the Holocaust). That's much what this case is like for me; it is REALLY hard to set your emotions aside and stick to your principles.
I think I have to side with most of the Slashdotters who disagree with the finding of law in this case. However, I don't appreciate having my other cherished moral principles heckled by my so-called allies in the free information movement. That's how rifts develop; it's how movements become fragmented by infighting and become ineffective.
Whatever happened to the Harmony project, which was writing a GPL'ed replacement for Qt? They had gotten quite some distance, but the whole project just sort of disappeared.
The Qt code was only about eighty thousand lines long (probably longer now), versus many hundreds of thousand of lines of code for KDE.
It seems to me that the answer is just to finish the Harmony project so we're freed from the QPL, and so that we can get this issue behind us once and for all.
Slashdot Mirror
The "too many laws" argument strikes me as facile; it's a question of whether the laws are good ones or not.
Mostly, we all sit here on /. and complain about spam; but if we'd make an organized effort to write to our representatives to have a law passed to ban spam, we might have a lot better weapon against it. We ought to organize a letter-writing campaign.
I wonder if the patch would violate the DMCA?
Of course, if the employer actually starts using your house and car as if it owned them, you'd have grounds for a suit. It sounds like VirtualUK's employer is not actually presently making use of his code.
The question is how we perceive speech. Do we directly process the chirps and hisses and buzzes which make up human speech, mapping those sounds directly to words in our mental dictionaries? Or do we start by reconstructing the gestures in the mouth which produced the sounds we hear, and then look up the words in our mental dictionaries based on those reconstructed gestures?
The finding reported in this article is consistent with the latter view.
When I was teaching English over in Japan, I visited more than one school which had invested in fancy, expensive language teaching technology. The students' desks had headphones and microphones and lots of buttons to push. The other teachers and I shook our heads. It's expensive, it's technological, so it must be good.
As for me, give me a blackboard and chalk, a decent textbook, and an ample xerox allocation, and I'll do just fine; that's what I need to do the best job I can. I don't think having computers in my classroom improves the class, except perhaps in a writing class where a word processor comes in handy. (Maybe I should add that it's not that I dislike computers in general; I've worked as a programmer and have been a hacker from way back. I've just come to the conclusion that computers aren't the right solution in this case.)
There is the academic world and there is the business world. One is concerned with the pursuit of knowledge, and the other with the pursuit of wealth. There is an arrogance on the part of some in the business world to refer to their world as the "real" world, but the truth is that academia and business are different institutions with different goals, demands, and realities.
It's quite true that if you take a pure academic and plunk him down in business, he's often going to flounder. But the converse is true as well: if you take a skilled, talented middle management person from a corporation and plunk him down as a professor, he's generally going to flounder miserably under the realities of academic life-- at least, until he comes to understand that we're concerned with truths, not with merely immediate practical problems.
Nearly everything that the business world is engaged in today can be viewed as the spinoff from the truths which academics have pursued. Some businesspeople belittle academics by implying that our world is "unreal", but if it weren't for our contributions, they'd pretty much still be selling spices and furs.
I'm talking about a program which takes a binary compiled for one processor as its input, and gives a binary native to another processor as its output (and then runs it). This way, you only translate once, rather than each time thru the loop.
It occurs to me that there's a third possible way: rather than doing the emulation step by step as the program runs, step thru the whole compiled program and convert it to native code just once, and then run it natively from then on, rather than re-emulate it each time thru the loop.
How come nobody is doing it that way?
The biggest problem is, of course, data entry. A lot of the texts pose a challenge for OCR for a number of reasons, including the large number of special characters often used.
Another problem is people who insist on copyrighting and refusing to freely share their collections of online documents in the older languages, which is a real shame, because it prevents me from creating all kinds of interesting derived works (e.g. web pages of Old English texts where you can click any word to get information about it). It basically means that all this work has to be repeated by anyone who wants to make those texts freely available-- never mind that we're talking about works over 1000 years old!
I don't understand why the free software camp is prepetuating that legacy. If Microsoft had had reason to write a file manager/spreadsheet program, say, or a file manager/photo editor, does that mean that the free software world should continue the same strange groupings?
It doesn't strike me as good software design to write a single program which performs two unlike functions. Better to write two separate programs, and then, if there's a need, work out a way for them to talk to each other, while keeping the internals of the two completely separate.
The problem is that these songs are shared cultural symbols. Legalities aside, there's a certain sense in which they belong to us all, just as Santa Claus and Paul Bunyan belong to us all. They are a part of our shared consciousness and cultural tradition. The mass media have essentially usurped the role formerly filled by folklore to create the symbols of our culture. This is a consideration which needs to be balanced against the "rights" of shareholders of music/entertainment corporations: current law essentially denies us the ability to speak in the vocabulary of our own culture.
It looks to me like they're planning to tax online sales ordered by California residents, where the orders are filled by companies operating in California. So it's not interstate commerce that they're trying to tax.
I've often heard people say this, but I've never heard anyone explain why this is a good thing. Should every new model of automobile arrange the driving controls in a different way (accelerator on the dashboard, steering with your feet, etc.), rather than "copy others"? No, because the basic problem of automobile control was solved a long time ago, and there are no advantages and some serious disadvantages to creating a new user interface in every new model. There is minor variation across models, but everyone uses essentially the same solution, and with good reason.
The basic paradigm of menus, buttons, and text fields was worked out 20 years ago; it's old, but it continues to be a good solution to the problem of human/computer interaction. People admire innovation, but I see no point in throwing out a tried-and-true solution unless the replacement offers some real advantages. I have yet to see any new kind of computer interface which seems to represent a real improvement over the current situation.
I'd welcome some sort of written user-interface standards worked out by the Linux community; but I'd hope that this set of formal standards would be largely a cleaned-up, rational statement of the customary practice in the community today rather than some misguided attempt at innovation for the sake of innovation.
Uh- how are we going to find extraterrestrial life if we forget about it until we find it? Our choices are 1) forget about it and don't look, or 2) go have a look at Europa and/or other potential life-bearing sites.
The discovery of penicillin, of X-rays, of radio, of electricity, etc. did not happen because individuals set out to cure disease, communicate thru the air, etc. They happened because these people were poking and prodding at the universe out of pure curiousity. Following your thinking, it would have been judged a massive waste of taxpayer money to pay to build these huge, costly machines thought up by weirdo mathematicians (e.g. ENIAC), when there are more pressing practical problems to be solved.
As for the practical spinoffs spinoffs from the space program, you're making use of them each time you use a teflon pan, or fly on a hang glider, or use instant orange breakfast drink, or listen to a CD. Understanding the workings of other planets and moons helps us to understand our own planet better and to better predict the environmental consequences of our actions. Many other examples could be given.
Or not shake them. You've also got to consider the investment that Mac developers have in learning the old API.
I'm in the middle of a relevant case. I programmed Macs from 1989 until 1997 or so, and I know the old Mac API very well. I've now been asked to do a Mac port of a Windows app I recently wrote. Well, I have zero experience with the new Mac API (Cocoa), and frankly, I don't want to spend the time learning it, since I plan to put most of my efforts into Linux from now on. So for me, the quickest way to get the job done is to port it as an old-style Mac program.
I can answer the issues you raise, but it's far enough off topic that I think we ought to take it to email. Send me your address if you want to discuss it further.
Actually, this depends on which version of Godwin's Law you're assuming. I've seen other formulations in which you have to actually draw a parallel between Nazi thinking and the thinking of one of the participants in the discussion; mere mention of Nazis doesn't suffice.
There's an important distinction here.
If it were a rally against intellectual property laws where meat coincidentally happened to be served, I wouldn't be opposed to the event.
However, it's clear from the posts that the intent is specifically to eat meat as a way of getting back at PETA, because you know that they oppose it.
You're making a specific, calculated statement that PETA's views on meat-eating are wrong-- even tho the real issue here is one of free speech, not meat-eating.
What I'm trying to point out is this: whether you intend it or not, your plan is a slap in the face to the Slashdotters who happen to abstain from meat-eating for moral reasons.
Yes. I'm committed to the right to free speech, so I concede that individuals have a right to parody PETA-- even tho the parody in question makes me very angry.
Let me see if I can put this in perspective. Suppose the case in hand didn't involve PETA; suppose it involved a parody of a Jewish organization written by Nazis, and suppose the Jewish organization sues to have to web page taken down. Well, as offensive as I would find such a parody, I'd concede that even Nazis have a right to free speech, including parody. Now suppose that the judge wrongly ruled (in violation of the First Amendment) that the Nazi web site has to be taken down. I'd be with you in disagreeing with that ruling.
However, if you decide to "support free speech" by organizing a session of pork-eating and reading from Mein Kampf (just to thumb your nose at the Jewish organization), you're going to offend and alienate some people who might otherwise agree with you on the free speech question. You are within your rights to make such a response, but I'd argue that it's a tactical mistake.
Since we disagree on the morals of meat-eating, I'd recommend that we stay silent on that issue and focus on what we agree on: namely, the right of individuals to create and share information without being fettered by "intellectual property" laws.
I think they are wrong to do that. That's not the point. I'm not defending PETA's actions in this case, even if I do happen to agree with their views on animals.
The proposal was to organize a barbeque as a way of getting back at PETA members, by doing what PETA finds most offensive (eating animals). However, there are some vegetarians in the free software camp. I don't think it's in the free software movement's interests to anger and alienate your allies who happen to be vegetarian.
You might find it amusing to hold a barbeque as a way of thumbing your nose at PETA, but it will be of no practical use in correcting a bad court ruling; and it will have the negative effects I just desribed. It seems to me that your efforts would better be put into e.g. organizing a fund drive for the EFF, writing letters to your representatives against UCITA, etc.
1. Defending the First Amendment
2. Attacking vegetarians in general by doing things to deliberately offend them
You can do #1 without doing #2.
I'm with you on #1, but as an ethical vegetarian, I'd find it hard to continue to stand with you if you're doing #2, since it's a deliberate attack on moral values which I cherish. #2 would be a good thing to do if your intent is to attack your own allies and to create fragmentation and infighting among the defenders of the First Amendment.
Some of us are committed BOTH to vegetarianism AND to the principles of freedom of intellectual materials. For me, this PETA case is one of those really painful cases where two issues are in conflict, because the parody makes me very angry.
Here's a comparison. Suppose you were a Jew committed to freedom of speech, and a case arose involving speech by modern Nazis claiming that the Holocaust never happened (never mind that you lost half your family in the Holocaust). That's much what this case is like for me; it is REALLY hard to set your emotions aside and stick to your principles.
I think I have to side with most of the Slashdotters who disagree with the finding of law in this case. However, I don't appreciate having my other cherished moral principles heckled by my so-called allies in the free information movement. That's how rifts develop; it's how movements become fragmented by infighting and become ineffective.
The Qt code was only about eighty thousand lines long (probably longer now), versus many hundreds of thousand of lines of code for KDE.
It seems to me that the answer is just to finish the Harmony project so we're freed from the QPL, and so that we can get this issue behind us once and for all.