It depends on what you mean by "interested in math". If you mean, like what your daughter is doing, then by all means, take a course from your local community college. You'll get the basics, with an emphasis on doing problems and getting the right result in the end.
If you're interested in math as in what a mathematician does (hint: real mathematicians don't use calculators, they use pencil, paper, programs like Mathematica, and direct programming sometimes), then you're going to want a continuing education plan from a university. In other words, if you're looking at taking courses eventually that don't even exist at your community college, then don't start there.
With no offense intended to anybody, everybody going "Hey, yeah, community colleges are better then universities!", the reason they are saying this is the focus is different. If you just want to progress to basic calculus and stats, then a community college's emphasis on results is fine. If you intend to go farther, you'll find yourself regretting not taking the U courses.
Also, courtesy of those people, most U courses at the calc level have had most vestiges of math removed, so there may not be much difference between U and community college before calc 3, except price.
I think the litmus test is to ask yourself, "What is math about?" If you answered "numbers", a community college will be fine. If you answered "the study of various axioms and their consequences" or something similar, go university.
(Note to those who would flame this message: It doesn't matter what math is or what math is "better". The question is, what does the original poster think he's asking for?)
To condense njj's excellent post on the topic, if you can explain a concept to a layman in such a way that they actually understand it, then virtually by definition, the concept was not advanced, as it did not require extensive pre-education.
However, advanced concepts exist. Therefore, there exist concepts which by definition can not be adequately explained to a layman.
In fact, sir, the arrogance is yours. You are arrogant in assuming that it's possible for a layman, i.e., you, to understand everything, and that if you don't understand it, the fault must lie with the explanation.
There are things which are hard. Deal with it. (This arrogance is regrettably quite popular.)
Another source of joysticks are Commodore 64 joysticks, which can be up to ten years younger, and IMHO many of them were much better designed and more likely to last. They can make River Raid a lot more fun, since it's far less frustrating to crash when you feel more like it was your fault, and not your input device's fault.
Commodore 64 joysticks can do diagonal, but it doesn't seem to confuse the Atari's too much.
Also an option are the original Genesis controllers. Use "B" as the fire button, and the pad as the directions. Again, Genesis can do diagonal, but that's OK.
Like I said, I can't accept that planets like Earth are as common as dust. Perhaps life is, but I think there's good reason to think that advanced multi-celluar life, with millions or billions of species, is a bit more rare. Consult one of many tables of "Things we need to live"; large moon, proximity in the past but not present to supernovas, a certain element mix, relatively placid position in the galaxy (a recent article suggested as little as 10% of our galaxy may be habitable in the long term, as too many stars routinely pass through excessively active areas), high elements, perhaps a routine asteroid cleansing, the list goes on. It's by no means a done deal that Earth is uninteresting.
And even if it is perfectly common... so what? An advanced civilization would still leave a probe, just to see if anything interesting happens. It's not like a probe is very expensive on their terms.
Think like a scientist... Earth doesn't have to be interesting, just potentially be interesting at some point in the future. That's why I say it could have happened millions of years ago.
The purpose of copyright law is to control the copying and distribution of materials.
No. The purpose of copyright law is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," Straight from the Constitution. That's why copyright so critically depends on these value considerations.
I've said my piece (as the rest of the issue is covered elsewhere), since I'm just speaking for the people silently reading this, so again, I encourage people not to take my work for it, but to learn for themselves.
Then WHY AREN'T YOU BEING PAID FOR THE ADS GATOR SHOWS YOU?
Follow the money... you aren't doing the modification. Gator does through their agent. End of story. You aren't chosing the modifications, indeed they may be happening without your knowlege. You don't intercept the page, their agent does, again, possibly without your knowlege. You can't selectively chose to replace an ad with a picture of a ducky... because you aren't in control. You can't replace an ad with the text of the GPL... because it's Gator in control, not you.
You're free to write your own proxy and use it; note that this happens all the time and no debate occurs about it, so there must be something different about this.
The knowlege point is doubly telling... You can't be said to be giving consent to a behavior occuring without your knowlege, which is what happened to a lot of people. That proves it's Gator doing it, not you. (As it turns out, your permission is insufficient for Gator to modify somebody else's content, which is also a major point, so merely consenting on one side does not end the problem.)
How is it that you can claim that the users are somehow responsible for modifying the contents of the page when "the users" aren't even necessarily aware of it occurring? A strange idea of "responsibility" you have.
(Note this all goes away if the Post had granted permission, not that it would in this case. Acts between three consenting parties are OK.)
I would be guilty of libel not because I modified your page or anyone elses page, but because my published program was broadcasting the libelous modification on a mass scale.
I rest my case. Broadcasting libel on a large scale is libel. For the same reason, broadcasting copyright infringement on a large scale is infringement. Theft of market value from the work is the very definition of copyright infringement. Gator's gonna get toasted.
Trying to work out a system where this simple fact is violated leaves gaping holes where anyone can crawl through. Do I have the right to secretly install software on everybody's computer who will read your post that will intercept their page requests to Slashdot and make it seem you actually agree with me by changing your posts? By defending Gator, you are defending that "right" and action, even the secret part of that. (Plus you wouldn't mind having product plugs added to your post, in your name.)
Perhaps you don't mind tossing away your right to be heard with integrity by people; I value it a bit more strongly.
Criteria for fair use posted elsewhere in this thread. While I apologize for the broken link (which still works for me... I just tried the IP address (128.228.100.102) but they must be using virtual hosts), it still doesn't excuse continuing to lecture me in your ignorance about what fair use it; it really isn't my responsibility to explain to you something you should know before lecturing me about it. Please don't try to 'rebut' the law point-by-point, just by casually reading it. Many, many court decisions have refined the meaning of the law, in non-obvious (an invariably stricter, not freer) ways.
I'm not sure if you understand the points I'm making, but I understand exactly what you're trying to say. You're just wrong, sorry.
Ditto, only I've got documentation for my points. I guess we won't be getting anywhere soon on that point. So, to the silent readers, I encourage you to find documentation links and read for themselves, rather then take two random Slashdot yahoo's opinions on the topic.
It's still working for me. Don't understand what the problem is. It's not even slow. Google doesn't have a cache.
Well, you can try http://www.cetus.org/ , "Fair Use of Copyrighted Works" (in the Discussion section down a bit), the "Fair Use: Overview and Meaning for Higher Education" on that page.
Here's section 107 of the US Copyright Act:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified in that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Amplification: I'd recommend reading more about it then just the raw text, though. Each of those terms is a technically defined term, given meaning by many court decisions.
Historically, the courts have been pretty strict about this, and demanded complete satisfaction of all four criteria, not just one. As in my original post, 1 and 4 are complete, abject failures for Gator. 3 is almost certainly one too, though as that's the crux of the debate, that can be argued. But from a fair use perspective, it doesn't matter; failure on two of the points is already enough to judge it not fair use.
Along with the other holes pointed out in the article, one big one is that the author has apparently never read 2001.
Perhaps "They" visited us some time ago, and decided the planet was interesting. This decision may have occurred millions of years ago; scientific optimism aside, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that Earth is a perfectly normal, usual planet with nothing exceptional about that fact that it is teeming with billions of varieties of life. So they leave themselves a probe that can be triggered by something, probably the same radio signals that everyone points out. (Detectable, and much easier to be certain of intelligent origination then nuclear blasts, which can look an awful lot like asteroid strikes from far away. You can do signal analysis on the radio...)
Then they pushed a grant through the Galatic Science Foundation, hopped into their FTL spacecraft, came here, and started anally probing lots and lots of drunk and mentally distrubed people.
Don't believe in aliens myself, but this scenario is a major gaping hole in the article. In fact, any intelligence half as curious as us would need some good reason not to leave a probe around something as interesting as Earth...
That's the problem -- it IS being done with the consent of the originator.
Trivially false; if the Washington Post consented to the modification, they would not be suing.
The payment is in the form of the services Gator provides (it DOES have some useful functions, by the way).
Also trivially false. The ads Gator are replacing in your webpages are paid for in checks written to Gator. You are not paid at all; the features of Gator such as they are are hooks to get you to use the service, just as you are not a customer of television, except inasmuch as you may pay a cable bill.
What I don't think you're seeing is that Gator is supplying work-for-hire.
Work-for-hire is an irrelevent concept here. Work-for-hire can't appropriate someone else's copyright. In fact, pursuing this angle is a quick loss for you; if Gator is doing work for hire, then QED copyright issues apply. And it turns out Gator has no right to do those modifications. Oops.
See, you aren't even 'hiring' them for content modification; to the extend that you've 'hired' them, it's for convenient storage and selected dissemenation of personal data. To the extend that you are a 'customer' of Gator, it has nothing to do with copyright at all!
You seem to think it's illegal for me to replace ads in something that I download. I seriously doubt that you can make that case.
Actually fairly easy to make. Nobody cares because when you do something, the damages are zero anyhow. Copyright law is heavily based on damages, which is one of the reasons this case is an inevitable win for the Washington Post. When Gator is doing it, that's a different story, then when you're doing it. (If they aren't the ones doing the replacement, they exactly how are they involved anyhow?)
If I want to download your web site and then hire someone to replace all the content with "Jerf beats his wife", that is fine, too.
But if your software caused thousands of viewers to see your modification, I'd sue you for libel. Large scale, systematic on-the-fly modifications are indistinguishable in results from actual modification. Shall we open this loophole to every person who can technically take advantage of it?
Also, you're missing a point; Gator is being sued, not you. What you can do with a page completely fails to defend Gator.
Once it is in my computer, my fair use rights say I can do whatever I want with it for my own personal use.
Again, flatly, totally, utterly, inarguably wrong. What "fair use" is isn't up for debate, it's a matter of law, and you don't understand it. (And the link works for me...)
Look, I hate to be snotty here, but your post is so riddled with errors that it's hard to take it seriously. You don't understand who "the originators" of the copyrighted works are (Washington Post et. al.). You don't seem to understand the economics of advertising. You don't understand "fair use" at all. You don't even know what "work-for-hire" is. Those are facts not open to debate. Your lack of understanding of those basics leads me to not be surprised that you can't seem to follow what I'm saying, let alone address the issues in a refutation, rather then re-iterate your misconceptions of what's going on and what the law says about it. You can't even seem to keep track of who's getting in trouble for what actions.
I think you need to make a distinction between morality and legality.
Pot calling the kettle black, I'd say, for someone who has demonstrated a lack of understanding of legality on this subject from top to bottom. Your belief in what is ethical does not determine the law, the law does.
Once a page leaves a server and enters my computer, my fair-use rights take over and I can do ANYTHING I want to that page, except rebroadcast it.
First, do you choose what ads to add in? No?
You aren't doing a thing to the page. It's being done by a third party, specifically Gator, without consent of the originator. Personally, I call that censorship, though YMMV.
Proof: If it were you doing that to the page, where are your payments for the ad space? What, Gator gets them? Clearly, they are the ones modifying the page, if they are selling this ad space to others.
Second, fair use applies only under very specific and limited circumstances... it's not the carte blanche you seem to think it is. In this case, of the four factors to be considered in whether or not something is fair use, this completely fails three of them; Gator's use is solely commercial (1), they use the entire copyrighted work (3), and the market for the work (as defined in copyright terms which tends to talk about money) is eliminated entirely for that viewing (4). Fair use is not a defense in this case.
It's none of the magazine's business if I do that, and it's none of anyone else's business if I choose to use Gator.
It is the magazine's business. They may not want to be a party to this third-party transaction. (You can make a case for choosing on your own not to view ads, but when you add a third-party in like Gator the situation changes dramatically, especially since Gator is directly profiting.)
Frankly, it doesn't matter if Gator informs them. What they're doing is highly unethical, and almost certainly illegal.
By the way, you need to be exceptionally careful about this. If you let Gator do this, then there's really nothing stopping them from modifying the contents of the page, since from a copyright point of view, that's exactly what they're doing. If they can modify for the purpose of commerical profit, then they can do it for any purpose, since that's the highest purpose in our broken copyright laws. Of course, if Gator can do it, anyone can.
Letting Gator doing this, and defending them is handing everybody in the world free reign to modify anything they can technically get access to, just because they can. ("Might makes right?") There's just no difference. I for one do not want to hand this power to anybody. That it will be abused pretty much goes without saying. We must defend the right to integrity.
It should be obvious that on this point, the right to integrity is more importent to us little guys then the Washington Post, which has the resources to defend itself.
I've been around this debate more then a few times; please, before replying (not Reality Master 101 personally, everybody), at least read the fair use link and educate yourself about the current state of the law. You're free to think it's not perfect, and should be some other way (as I do), but please, for the love of Gnu, no lengthy, fact-bereft lectures on personal misconceptions of copyright law...
If you want to swim in the financial waters, you need to speak the financial language.
Being able to sling around financial buzzwords no more implies technical incompetence then being able to sling around Linux buzzwords implies programming competence. (Not to mention that it is not a given that technical competence is necessary to run a technical business; it's just so few CEOs, or indeed people, can stand to trust the tech people enough to make good decisions just based on their word.)
While it can annoy people like us to slog through a language with a lower informational density (caused by the higher density of words meant to signal things to the listener's subconcious like 'conformity' and 'if I sound like this, I must know what I'm doing', annoying to us but CEOs who don't use this language aren't CEOs for long), the true test of the value remains the content of the speech.
On that measure, this CEO did quite well, and your harshness is incredibly unfair, and your moderation probably undeserved. They equally justifiably think the same thing about people who are only concerned about tech, and never the business. ("What actually puts food on the table? Do the techies think they can eat their server?")
Why should I allow a cpu-intensive process to dominate my system, thereby dragging everything else down?
First, CPU-intensive processes need not drag the system down. As the low-latency patch and better locking gets into mainstream Linux kernels, instead of patches as I've applied, you'll find it easier to watch movies and still do other things.
The other point, which I think you missed, is that movie playing isn't processor intensive. I had a 486/100 that could barely play 128 Kbps MP3s, if I didn't make it decode in stereo and wasn't doing anything else, including just moving the mouse. Does that mean that we should all have MP3 chips? Hell no! Now decoding a complicated MP3 is a couple of percent of the CPU at best. In just a couple of years, the same will be true of movie playing. In fact, it really already is true, for a well-tuned, top-of-the-line system. My system isn't top-of-the-line, but it IS well tuned.
Here's a real stat: I just played back an xvid-encoded movie. CPU usage was approx. 40%. It's a Gentoo system, using the NVidia implementation of the X extensions, and basically everything else optimized. And it's a Duron 800, with slow memory. You already can't buy a chip that slow! Projecting linearly (which is wrong, I know, you know, let's just pretend for a moment), on a well-tuned Athlon 1900+XP, you should be able to play this movie on roughly 10%, assuming the faster memory and better cache gives a significant speedup. It's even possible the better architecture could speed it up enough to get it into the single digits.
Hardware movie playing is soooooo 1997 (or embedded systems).
And I hardly hold up "WinModems" as a "shining example", it's just an exemplar of the trend. The fact they don't work on anything but Windows is the manufacturer's fault, not Linux. On a better OS, like a well-tuned Linux, they'd be fine. So why not save the $10 or $20?
A decent postscript printer although expensive won't hammer the system nearly as badly.
(Emphasis mine.) Price, price, price. How much "hammering" is the price difference worth? Probably quite a bit. In fact, the invisible hand says it's worth enough to do it on the system CPU. How much printing do you do? I'm glad I can print postscript on a $150 printer; ten years ago that would have been hopeless, for lots of reasons.
Upshot: Fight all you want, but while there are many short-term trends moving new apps onto new hardware while main systems aren't powerful enough to do them, the long-term trend is that they almost always come back to the main CPU... and stay there. How silly would it be to insist on a specialized MP3-playing chip now? (And how silly is it that there are some soundcards advertising that feature? It's a schmuck feature.) Shall I uninstall my Linux framebuffer because my silicon has a compatibility char mode specially made for char-only consoles? (Leaving aside the fact that the framebuffer is actually faster on my system...) Shall I go spend hundreds of dollars on a new Postscript printer when the setup I have works fine, printing once or twice a week? Your argument will seem just as silly in two years. Even contemporary systems can already handle it fine...
People, realise this, in a couple of years your PC architecture is going to be a CPU that delegates tasks to the dedicated sub-CPUs. Look at the 3D card industry if you want an example.
People keep saying this, over and over, for the last, oh, let's say ten years or so. And people, no matter how snottily they may say it, have always been wrong.
History in fact shows a strong trend in the opposite direction, for better or worse. Winmodems now run off the CPU. The whole "PCI" soundcard means roughly that the soundcard is just a prettified ADC and DAC on a card, with some assorted supporting circuitry. Not like an Adlib card, which did everything on board, back when a computer couldn't simulate even FM sound in any reasonable amount of time, let alone multitask. Movie decoding is moving onto the CPU, and staying there. (Three or four years ago, you had to get a hardware decoder. In another couple of years, this product notwithstanding, they'll be largely a thing of the past.)
Integrated motherboard video graphics w/ AGP directly sharing the system memory means that the CPU does slightly more work shuffling around memory in 2D mode, even for graphics cards.
The only reason graphics cards remain seperate is that our need for speed is such that the graphics card is often more powerful then the CPU; if the general-purpose CPU tried to keep up with a 200MHz Geforce 2 or 3, it's anybody's guess how many GHz the CPU chip would need. I'd guestimate around 5 or 6, running at full power, maybe more, and of course that's 100% utilization.
Upshot, this device is fighting market trends. My measly Duron 800 can encode with xvid at roughly 1/3 real time speed (everything I have is Duron-optimized courtesy Gentoo); it's only a matter of time before that gets to realtime for the majority of people.
(That would be one advantage of Linux TiVo-like software products: The ability to use DiVX, instead of MPEG, blowing away TiVo's recording capabilities.)
As a tech person, I am *not* insensitive to this
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 4, Interesting
In fact, as a 'tech' person, I switch versions and machines more often then your average Joe.
My Linux friends are often amazed at how uncool my Linux desktops are, or my emacs config files are, or a whole slew of other things. The reason for that is that I am f'in sick of having to completely reconfigure the system every time I upgrade, or hop machines (which is almost always an upgrade or a downgrade; otherwise I could at least carry my config), or change software packages.
I switched which machine was doing my email processing last week, and I just wanted to copy the config across from one to the other. No dice; one ran exim3, the other ran exim4, which has a whole new, completely incompatible config file. The conversion script was wholly unhelpful for my config, so I had to do it by hand.
If versions weren't changing so often, or if it were easier in general to carry configurations around even across versions (an impossible task in general), I'd be much more likely to actually configure things. As it is, I carry around a *small*.emacs file, and have gotten quite adept at fiddling with window manager parameters in short order to get focus-follows-mouse, and that's about all the config I care to do. It'll just get blown away tommorow, why bother?
Granted, I'm more violent to my systems then your average user, even more then your average Linux user, but it's still exasperating.
People, it's not a mark of manliness that your program requires text file twiddling to configure. Give me an easy, easy, easy method of at least setting the the basic parameters. Like Mozilla: The basic parameters are in the config box, but there's a lot of obscure ones you need to hit the prefs.js directly. That's fine with me.
And don't even get me started on re-re-re-re-re-re-learning keyboard shortcuts.
There are really two issues: 1. Should the archives be made? Which is what everyone seems to be discussing, and 2. Should the archives be publically accessible?
I agree that any interpretation of copyright law that says the answer to "1" is "No" means that copyright law needs to be changed, not that it is "illegal and therefore immoral".
But a case can be made for "2" that the distribution should only be made for when copyright on the material has either expired, or could reasonably be expected to be expired. Which brings up two other issues, which are the absurd lenght of copyright materials, and the near impossibilty of determining if a material is still copyrighted.
So, I don't have any answers, just better questions.
Ratbert: "I'm going to interview successful people and write a book of their tips. I'll start with you, Dobert."
Dogbert: "Set your alarm clock to go off every hour. Keep a big vat of 'Jell-O' by the bed. When the alarm clock goes of, stick your head in the 'Jell-O' and yell, 'Boy, I'm tired!'"
Ratbert: "Thanks!"
Dogbert (thinking): "Beware the advice of successful people; they do not seek company."
Since patents only last 17 years, "invalidating all patents since 1980-ish" === "invalidating all patents", unless there are term exceptions buried in the law somewhere.
Not that I'm agreeing or disagreeing with your post, just thought I'd point that out. You may or may not want to reconsider your position. Not that the USPTO gives a fig what we, the Consuming Public, think.
You negate yourself: how can something you admit to be highly complicated be summarized by something you admit to be simple?
Incorrect. The two subjects of the statements are totally different. There is no conflict. The system as a whole is really complicated. The system can merely slow down or speed up the basic thermodynamic processes, though, it can't do away with them, thus I feel justified in claiming that the heat will sooner or later dissapate.
If you, with your knowlege of atmospheric thermodynamics, know of a way to fully violate the normal processes of thermodynamics such that the heat totally fails to disappate, please share it with us instead of creating non-existant logical conflicts. (Don't fiddle with scale-jumping; I was already talking planetary scales.)
The heating of the world has been well and truely observed.
I don't mean to deny the evidence, I just mean that on a global scale, we're just recently and just barely capable of showing it. To a large degree, we're still inferring off of limited data (a scientifically valid thing to do), rather then looking at trillions upon trillions direct measurements of temperature from now to several hundred thousand years ago, which would eliminate the need to infer through direct and complete evidence. It's a scale thing; I meant "barely capable" literally; capable, but not really by a lot.
The second I don't have much to say. As for the third, I know I'm not a climatologist, but I do know exactly how easy it is to tweak a computer model to make it say what you want it to. There's too much politics involved IMHO to get a clear view of what climate change will mean. And from a sampling of the document you pointed me at, I smell politics more then I smell science. Two reasons: I refuse to believe that global warming would be an unmitigated disaster, and the report seems to be sitting around thinking up ways things might go wrong. Well, that's great and has its place, but things are always going 'wrong', for some rather narrow human definition of 'wrong'.
Change happens, with or without humans. "Adapt or die" is the motto of nature. It's easy to cast me as excessively blase on this issue by taking this line to the extreme, but that's not my position. I'm just saying that there is nothing holy about the configuration that the world is currently in. That's a good thing, because this configuration is temporary, whether we like it or not. Some forests will die, some grasslands will become forest, some deserts will grow and others shrink. Take the paper you referenced, and replace the concerns in it with new ones concerned about "global cooling". In the parts I sampled, you can hardly tell the difference. "Arid ecosystems are very sensitive to water issues because of a lack of reserves of water and nutrients. Global warming could stress these systems." So could global cooling, an epidemic of rats, or even things staying the same.
"In conclusion", as you may have guessed, the paper didn't impress me. (Though you are right, it did interest me.) I don't it was a waste of time, but I'm not sure it's all that useful in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is very good.
It depends on what you mean by "interested in math". If you mean, like what your daughter is doing, then by all means, take a course from your local community college. You'll get the basics, with an emphasis on doing problems and getting the right result in the end.
If you're interested in math as in what a mathematician does (hint: real mathematicians don't use calculators, they use pencil, paper, programs like Mathematica, and direct programming sometimes), then you're going to want a continuing education plan from a university. In other words, if you're looking at taking courses eventually that don't even exist at your community college, then don't start there.
With no offense intended to anybody, everybody going "Hey, yeah, community colleges are better then universities!", the reason they are saying this is the focus is different. If you just want to progress to basic calculus and stats, then a community college's emphasis on results is fine. If you intend to go farther, you'll find yourself regretting not taking the U courses.
Also, courtesy of those people, most U courses at the calc level have had most vestiges of math removed, so there may not be much difference between U and community college before calc 3, except price.
I think the litmus test is to ask yourself, "What is math about?" If you answered "numbers", a community college will be fine. If you answered "the study of various axioms and their consequences" or something similar, go university.
(Note to those who would flame this message: It doesn't matter what math is or what math is "better". The question is, what does the original poster think he's asking for?)
To condense njj's excellent post on the topic, if you can explain a concept to a layman in such a way that they actually understand it, then virtually by definition, the concept was not advanced, as it did not require extensive pre-education.
However, advanced concepts exist. Therefore, there exist concepts which by definition can not be adequately explained to a layman.
In fact, sir, the arrogance is yours. You are arrogant in assuming that it's possible for a layman, i.e., you, to understand everything, and that if you don't understand it, the fault must lie with the explanation.
There are things which are hard. Deal with it. (This arrogance is regrettably quite popular.)
That's OK, though. Localized discontinuities in the ionic ozone layer can be repaired using a inverted phase burst of chronometric thermions.
Technology saves the day again!
A probability this complex can only be observed, not computed. Observed probabilities are meaningless with a sample size of one.
Really? I guess you can tell I've never owned a new one. ;-)
Another source of joysticks are Commodore 64 joysticks, which can be up to ten years younger, and IMHO many of them were much better designed and more likely to last. They can make River Raid a lot more fun, since it's far less frustrating to crash when you feel more like it was your fault, and not your input device's fault.
Commodore 64 joysticks can do diagonal, but it doesn't seem to confuse the Atari's too much.
Also an option are the original Genesis controllers. Use "B" as the fire button, and the pad as the directions. Again, Genesis can do diagonal, but that's OK.
Like I said, I can't accept that planets like Earth are as common as dust. Perhaps life is, but I think there's good reason to think that advanced multi-celluar life, with millions or billions of species, is a bit more rare. Consult one of many tables of "Things we need to live"; large moon, proximity in the past but not present to supernovas, a certain element mix, relatively placid position in the galaxy (a recent article suggested as little as 10% of our galaxy may be habitable in the long term, as too many stars routinely pass through excessively active areas), high elements, perhaps a routine asteroid cleansing, the list goes on. It's by no means a done deal that Earth is uninteresting.
And even if it is perfectly common... so what? An advanced civilization would still leave a probe, just to see if anything interesting happens. It's not like a probe is very expensive on their terms.
Think like a scientist... Earth doesn't have to be interesting, just potentially be interesting at some point in the future. That's why I say it could have happened millions of years ago.
The purpose of copyright law is to control the copying and distribution of materials.
No. The purpose of copyright law is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," Straight from the Constitution. That's why copyright so critically depends on these value considerations.
I've said my piece (as the rest of the issue is covered elsewhere), since I'm just speaking for the people silently reading this, so again, I encourage people not to take my work for it, but to learn for themselves.
I AM THE ONE DOING IT.
Then WHY AREN'T YOU BEING PAID FOR THE ADS GATOR SHOWS YOU?
Follow the money... you aren't doing the modification. Gator does through their agent. End of story. You aren't chosing the modifications, indeed they may be happening without your knowlege. You don't intercept the page, their agent does, again, possibly without your knowlege. You can't selectively chose to replace an ad with a picture of a ducky... because you aren't in control. You can't replace an ad with the text of the GPL... because it's Gator in control, not you.
You're free to write your own proxy and use it; note that this happens all the time and no debate occurs about it, so there must be something different about this.
The knowlege point is doubly telling... You can't be said to be giving consent to a behavior occuring without your knowlege, which is what happened to a lot of people. That proves it's Gator doing it, not you. (As it turns out, your permission is insufficient for Gator to modify somebody else's content, which is also a major point, so merely consenting on one side does not end the problem.)
How is it that you can claim that the users are somehow responsible for modifying the contents of the page when "the users" aren't even necessarily aware of it occurring? A strange idea of "responsibility" you have.
(Note this all goes away if the Post had granted permission, not that it would in this case. Acts between three consenting parties are OK.)
I would be guilty of libel not because I modified your page or anyone elses page, but because my published program was broadcasting the libelous modification on a mass scale.
I rest my case. Broadcasting libel on a large scale is libel. For the same reason, broadcasting copyright infringement on a large scale is infringement. Theft of market value from the work is the very definition of copyright infringement. Gator's gonna get toasted.
Trying to work out a system where this simple fact is violated leaves gaping holes where anyone can crawl through. Do I have the right to secretly install software on everybody's computer who will read your post that will intercept their page requests to Slashdot and make it seem you actually agree with me by changing your posts? By defending Gator, you are defending that "right" and action, even the secret part of that. (Plus you wouldn't mind having product plugs added to your post, in your name.)
Perhaps you don't mind tossing away your right to be heard with integrity by people; I value it a bit more strongly.
Criteria for fair use posted elsewhere in this thread. While I apologize for the broken link (which still works for me... I just tried the IP address (128.228.100.102) but they must be using virtual hosts), it still doesn't excuse continuing to lecture me in your ignorance about what fair use it; it really isn't my responsibility to explain to you something you should know before lecturing me about it. Please don't try to 'rebut' the law point-by-point, just by casually reading it. Many, many court decisions have refined the meaning of the law, in non-obvious (an invariably stricter, not freer) ways.
I'm not sure if you understand the points I'm making, but I understand exactly what you're trying to say. You're just wrong, sorry.
Ditto, only I've got documentation for my points. I guess we won't be getting anywhere soon on that point. So, to the silent readers, I encourage you to find documentation links and read for themselves, rather then take two random Slashdot yahoo's opinions on the topic.
Well, you can try http://www.cetus.org/ , "Fair Use of Copyrighted Works" (in the Discussion section down a bit), the "Fair Use: Overview and Meaning for Higher Education" on that page.
Here's section 107 of the US Copyright Act:
Amplification: I'd recommend reading more about it then just the raw text, though. Each of those terms is a technically defined term, given meaning by many court decisions.
Historically, the courts have been pretty strict about this, and demanded complete satisfaction of all four criteria, not just one. As in my original post, 1 and 4 are complete, abject failures for Gator. 3 is almost certainly one too, though as that's the crux of the debate, that can be argued. But from a fair use perspective, it doesn't matter; failure on two of the points is already enough to judge it not fair use.
Thanks for the note.
Along with the other holes pointed out in the article, one big one is that the author has apparently never read 2001.
Perhaps "They" visited us some time ago, and decided the planet was interesting. This decision may have occurred millions of years ago; scientific optimism aside, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that Earth is a perfectly normal, usual planet with nothing exceptional about that fact that it is teeming with billions of varieties of life. So they leave themselves a probe that can be triggered by something, probably the same radio signals that everyone points out. (Detectable, and much easier to be certain of intelligent origination then nuclear blasts, which can look an awful lot like asteroid strikes from far away. You can do signal analysis on the radio...)
Then they pushed a grant through the Galatic Science Foundation, hopped into their FTL spacecraft, came here, and started anally probing lots and lots of drunk and mentally distrubed people.
Don't believe in aliens myself, but this scenario is a major gaping hole in the article. In fact, any intelligence half as curious as us would need some good reason not to leave a probe around something as interesting as Earth...
That's the problem -- it IS being done with the consent of the originator.
Trivially false; if the Washington Post consented to the modification, they would not be suing.
The payment is in the form of the services Gator provides (it DOES have some useful functions, by the way).
Also trivially false. The ads Gator are replacing in your webpages are paid for in checks written to Gator. You are not paid at all; the features of Gator such as they are are hooks to get you to use the service, just as you are not a customer of television, except inasmuch as you may pay a cable bill.
What I don't think you're seeing is that Gator is supplying work-for-hire.
Work-for-hire is an irrelevent concept here. Work-for-hire can't appropriate someone else's copyright. In fact, pursuing this angle is a quick loss for you; if Gator is doing work for hire, then QED copyright issues apply. And it turns out Gator has no right to do those modifications. Oops.
See, you aren't even 'hiring' them for content modification; to the extend that you've 'hired' them, it's for convenient storage and selected dissemenation of personal data. To the extend that you are a 'customer' of Gator, it has nothing to do with copyright at all!
You seem to think it's illegal for me to replace ads in something that I download. I seriously doubt that you can make that case.
Actually fairly easy to make. Nobody cares because when you do something, the damages are zero anyhow. Copyright law is heavily based on damages, which is one of the reasons this case is an inevitable win for the Washington Post. When Gator is doing it, that's a different story, then when you're doing it. (If they aren't the ones doing the replacement, they exactly how are they involved anyhow?)
If I want to download your web site and then hire someone to replace all the content with "Jerf beats his wife", that is fine, too.
But if your software caused thousands of viewers to see your modification, I'd sue you for libel. Large scale, systematic on-the-fly modifications are indistinguishable in results from actual modification. Shall we open this loophole to every person who can technically take advantage of it?
Also, you're missing a point; Gator is being sued, not you. What you can do with a page completely fails to defend Gator.
Once it is in my computer, my fair use rights say I can do whatever I want with it for my own personal use.
Again, flatly, totally, utterly, inarguably wrong. What "fair use" is isn't up for debate, it's a matter of law, and you don't understand it. (And the link works for me...)
Look, I hate to be snotty here, but your post is so riddled with errors that it's hard to take it seriously. You don't understand who "the originators" of the copyrighted works are (Washington Post et. al.). You don't seem to understand the economics of advertising. You don't understand "fair use" at all. You don't even know what "work-for-hire" is. Those are facts not open to debate. Your lack of understanding of those basics leads me to not be surprised that you can't seem to follow what I'm saying, let alone address the issues in a refutation, rather then re-iterate your misconceptions of what's going on and what the law says about it. You can't even seem to keep track of who's getting in trouble for what actions.
I think you need to make a distinction between morality and legality.
Pot calling the kettle black, I'd say, for someone who has demonstrated a lack of understanding of legality on this subject from top to bottom. Your belief in what is ethical does not determine the law, the law does.
Once a page leaves a server and enters my computer, my fair-use rights take over and I can do ANYTHING I want to that page, except rebroadcast it.
First, do you choose what ads to add in? No?
You aren't doing a thing to the page. It's being done by a third party, specifically Gator, without consent of the originator. Personally, I call that censorship, though YMMV.
Proof: If it were you doing that to the page, where are your payments for the ad space? What, Gator gets them? Clearly, they are the ones modifying the page, if they are selling this ad space to others.
Second, fair use applies only under very specific and limited circumstances... it's not the carte blanche you seem to think it is. In this case, of the four factors to be considered in whether or not something is fair use, this completely fails three of them; Gator's use is solely commercial (1), they use the entire copyrighted work (3), and the market for the work (as defined in copyright terms which tends to talk about money) is eliminated entirely for that viewing (4). Fair use is not a defense in this case.
It's none of the magazine's business if I do that, and it's none of anyone else's business if I choose to use Gator.
It is the magazine's business. They may not want to be a party to this third-party transaction. (You can make a case for choosing on your own not to view ads, but when you add a third-party in like Gator the situation changes dramatically, especially since Gator is directly profiting.)
Frankly, it doesn't matter if Gator informs them. What they're doing is highly unethical, and almost certainly illegal.
By the way, you need to be exceptionally careful about this. If you let Gator do this, then there's really nothing stopping them from modifying the contents of the page, since from a copyright point of view, that's exactly what they're doing. If they can modify for the purpose of commerical profit, then they can do it for any purpose, since that's the highest purpose in our broken copyright laws. Of course, if Gator can do it, anyone can.
Letting Gator doing this, and defending them is handing everybody in the world free reign to modify anything they can technically get access to, just because they can. ("Might makes right?") There's just no difference. I for one do not want to hand this power to anybody. That it will be abused pretty much goes without saying. We must defend the right to integrity.
It should be obvious that on this point, the right to integrity is more importent to us little guys then the Washington Post, which has the resources to defend itself.
I've been around this debate more then a few times; please, before replying (not Reality Master 101 personally, everybody), at least read the fair use link and educate yourself about the current state of the law. You're free to think it's not perfect, and should be some other way (as I do), but please, for the love of Gnu, no lengthy, fact-bereft lectures on personal misconceptions of copyright law...
Can you speak both financial and tech speak? I can't.
Insisting on only listening to people who speak your exact sub-dialect is a great way to fatally narrow your worldview.
I'm gonna have to disagree.
If you want to swim in the financial waters, you need to speak the financial language.
Being able to sling around financial buzzwords no more implies technical incompetence then being able to sling around Linux buzzwords implies programming competence. (Not to mention that it is not a given that technical competence is necessary to run a technical business; it's just so few CEOs, or indeed people, can stand to trust the tech people enough to make good decisions just based on their word.)
While it can annoy people like us to slog through a language with a lower informational density (caused by the higher density of words meant to signal things to the listener's subconcious like 'conformity' and 'if I sound like this, I must know what I'm doing', annoying to us but CEOs who don't use this language aren't CEOs for long), the true test of the value remains the content of the speech.
On that measure, this CEO did quite well, and your harshness is incredibly unfair, and your moderation probably undeserved. They equally justifiably think the same thing about people who are only concerned about tech, and never the business. ("What actually puts food on the table? Do the techies think they can eat their server?")
Look past the surface.
Why should I allow a cpu-intensive process to dominate my system, thereby dragging everything else down?
First, CPU-intensive processes need not drag the system down. As the low-latency patch and better locking gets into mainstream Linux kernels, instead of patches as I've applied, you'll find it easier to watch movies and still do other things.
The other point, which I think you missed, is that movie playing isn't processor intensive. I had a 486/100 that could barely play 128 Kbps MP3s, if I didn't make it decode in stereo and wasn't doing anything else, including just moving the mouse. Does that mean that we should all have MP3 chips? Hell no! Now decoding a complicated MP3 is a couple of percent of the CPU at best. In just a couple of years, the same will be true of movie playing. In fact, it really already is true, for a well-tuned, top-of-the-line system. My system isn't top-of-the-line, but it IS well tuned.
Here's a real stat: I just played back an xvid-encoded movie. CPU usage was approx. 40%. It's a Gentoo system, using the NVidia implementation of the X extensions, and basically everything else optimized. And it's a Duron 800, with slow memory. You already can't buy a chip that slow! Projecting linearly (which is wrong, I know, you know, let's just pretend for a moment), on a well-tuned Athlon 1900+XP, you should be able to play this movie on roughly 10%, assuming the faster memory and better cache gives a significant speedup. It's even possible the better architecture could speed it up enough to get it into the single digits.
Hardware movie playing is soooooo 1997 (or embedded systems).
And I hardly hold up "WinModems" as a "shining example", it's just an exemplar of the trend. The fact they don't work on anything but Windows is the manufacturer's fault, not Linux. On a better OS, like a well-tuned Linux, they'd be fine. So why not save the $10 or $20?
A decent postscript printer although expensive won't hammer the system nearly as badly.
(Emphasis mine.) Price, price, price. How much "hammering" is the price difference worth? Probably quite a bit. In fact, the invisible hand says it's worth enough to do it on the system CPU. How much printing do you do? I'm glad I can print postscript on a $150 printer; ten years ago that would have been hopeless, for lots of reasons.
Upshot: Fight all you want, but while there are many short-term trends moving new apps onto new hardware while main systems aren't powerful enough to do them, the long-term trend is that they almost always come back to the main CPU... and stay there. How silly would it be to insist on a specialized MP3-playing chip now? (And how silly is it that there are some soundcards advertising that feature? It's a schmuck feature.) Shall I uninstall my Linux framebuffer because my silicon has a compatibility char mode specially made for char-only consoles? (Leaving aside the fact that the framebuffer is actually faster on my system...) Shall I go spend hundreds of dollars on a new Postscript printer when the setup I have works fine, printing once or twice a week? Your argument will seem just as silly in two years. Even contemporary systems can already handle it fine...
I really should have save "to use xvid" in particular and MPEG2 instead of just MPEG. Good catch. ;-)
People, realise this, in a couple of years your PC architecture is going to be a CPU that delegates tasks to the dedicated sub-CPUs. Look at the 3D card industry if you want an example.
People keep saying this, over and over, for the last, oh, let's say ten years or so. And people, no matter how snottily they may say it, have always been wrong.
History in fact shows a strong trend in the opposite direction, for better or worse. Winmodems now run off the CPU. The whole "PCI" soundcard means roughly that the soundcard is just a prettified ADC and DAC on a card, with some assorted supporting circuitry. Not like an Adlib card, which did everything on board, back when a computer couldn't simulate even FM sound in any reasonable amount of time, let alone multitask. Movie decoding is moving onto the CPU, and staying there. (Three or four years ago, you had to get a hardware decoder. In another couple of years, this product notwithstanding, they'll be largely a thing of the past.)
Integrated motherboard video graphics w/ AGP directly sharing the system memory means that the CPU does slightly more work shuffling around memory in 2D mode, even for graphics cards.
The only reason graphics cards remain seperate is that our need for speed is such that the graphics card is often more powerful then the CPU; if the general-purpose CPU tried to keep up with a 200MHz Geforce 2 or 3, it's anybody's guess how many GHz the CPU chip would need. I'd guestimate around 5 or 6, running at full power, maybe more, and of course that's 100% utilization.
Upshot, this device is fighting market trends. My measly Duron 800 can encode with xvid at roughly 1/3 real time speed (everything I have is Duron-optimized courtesy Gentoo); it's only a matter of time before that gets to realtime for the majority of people.
(That would be one advantage of Linux TiVo-like software products: The ability to use DiVX, instead of MPEG, blowing away TiVo's recording capabilities.)
In fact, as a 'tech' person, I switch versions and machines more often then your average Joe.
.emacs file, and have gotten quite adept at fiddling with window manager parameters in short order to get focus-follows-mouse, and that's about all the config I care to do. It'll just get blown away tommorow, why bother?
My Linux friends are often amazed at how uncool my Linux desktops are, or my emacs config files are, or a whole slew of other things. The reason for that is that I am f'in sick of having to completely reconfigure the system every time I upgrade, or hop machines (which is almost always an upgrade or a downgrade; otherwise I could at least carry my config), or change software packages.
I switched which machine was doing my email processing last week, and I just wanted to copy the config across from one to the other. No dice; one ran exim3, the other ran exim4, which has a whole new, completely incompatible config file. The conversion script was wholly unhelpful for my config, so I had to do it by hand.
If versions weren't changing so often, or if it were easier in general to carry configurations around even across versions (an impossible task in general), I'd be much more likely to actually configure things. As it is, I carry around a *small*
Granted, I'm more violent to my systems then your average user, even more then your average Linux user, but it's still exasperating.
People, it's not a mark of manliness that your program requires text file twiddling to configure. Give me an easy, easy, easy method of at least setting the the basic parameters. Like Mozilla: The basic parameters are in the config box, but there's a lot of obscure ones you need to hit the prefs.js directly. That's fine with me.
And don't even get me started on re-re-re-re-re-re-learning keyboard shortcuts.
There are really two issues: 1. Should the archives be made? Which is what everyone seems to be discussing, and 2. Should the archives be publically accessible?
I agree that any interpretation of copyright law that says the answer to "1" is "No" means that copyright law needs to be changed, not that it is "illegal and therefore immoral".
But a case can be made for "2" that the distribution should only be made for when copyright on the material has either expired, or could reasonably be expected to be expired. Which brings up two other issues, which are the absurd lenght of copyright materials, and the near impossibilty of determining if a material is still copyrighted.
So, I don't have any answers, just better questions.
The exact error message is "Calculating dependencies !!! Couldn't find match for love; aborting."
;-)
Interpret that as you will. Sounds violent and possible pedophiliac to me...
Ratbert: "I'm going to interview successful people and write a book of their tips. I'll start with you, Dobert."
Dogbert: "Set your alarm clock to go off every hour. Keep a big vat of 'Jell-O' by the bed. When the alarm clock goes of, stick your head in the 'Jell-O' and yell, 'Boy, I'm tired!'"
Ratbert: "Thanks!"
Dogbert (thinking): "Beware the advice of successful people; they do not seek company."
Seven Years of Highly Defective People, p. 137.
Since patents only last 17 years, "invalidating all patents since 1980-ish" === "invalidating all patents", unless there are term exceptions buried in the law somewhere.
Not that I'm agreeing or disagreeing with your post, just thought I'd point that out. You may or may not want to reconsider your position. Not that the USPTO gives a fig what we, the Consuming Public, think.
You negate yourself: how can something you admit to be highly complicated be summarized by something you admit to be simple?
Incorrect. The two subjects of the statements are totally different. There is no conflict. The system as a whole is really complicated. The system can merely slow down or speed up the basic thermodynamic processes, though, it can't do away with them, thus I feel justified in claiming that the heat will sooner or later dissapate.
If you, with your knowlege of atmospheric thermodynamics, know of a way to fully violate the normal processes of thermodynamics such that the heat totally fails to disappate, please share it with us instead of creating non-existant logical conflicts. (Don't fiddle with scale-jumping; I was already talking planetary scales.)
The heating of the world has been well and truely observed.
I don't mean to deny the evidence, I just mean that on a global scale, we're just recently and just barely capable of showing it. To a large degree, we're still inferring off of limited data (a scientifically valid thing to do), rather then looking at trillions upon trillions direct measurements of temperature from now to several hundred thousand years ago, which would eliminate the need to infer through direct and complete evidence. It's a scale thing; I meant "barely capable" literally; capable, but not really by a lot.
The second I don't have much to say. As for the third, I know I'm not a climatologist, but I do know exactly how easy it is to tweak a computer model to make it say what you want it to. There's too much politics involved IMHO to get a clear view of what climate change will mean. And from a sampling of the document you pointed me at, I smell politics more then I smell science. Two reasons: I refuse to believe that global warming would be an unmitigated disaster, and the report seems to be sitting around thinking up ways things might go wrong. Well, that's great and has its place, but things are always going 'wrong', for some rather narrow human definition of 'wrong'.
Change happens, with or without humans. "Adapt or die" is the motto of nature. It's easy to cast me as excessively blase on this issue by taking this line to the extreme, but that's not my position. I'm just saying that there is nothing holy about the configuration that the world is currently in. That's a good thing, because this configuration is temporary, whether we like it or not. Some forests will die, some grasslands will become forest, some deserts will grow and others shrink. Take the paper you referenced, and replace the concerns in it with new ones concerned about "global cooling". In the parts I sampled, you can hardly tell the difference. "Arid ecosystems are very sensitive to water issues because of a lack of reserves of water and nutrients. Global warming could stress these systems." So could global cooling, an epidemic of rats, or even things staying the same.
"In conclusion", as you may have guessed, the paper didn't impress me. (Though you are right, it did interest me.) I don't it was a waste of time, but I'm not sure it's all that useful in the end.