Yep. I teach physics at a community college. The school seems all too ready to accept propaganda from the publishers. At one of our yearly convocation breakfasts, they passed out a little booklet about copyright to all the faculty. The booklet was written by a publishing industry association, and you'd better believe that the words "fair use" occurred absolutely nowhere inside.
Most college professors don't know how many high-quality free books there are to choose from -- see my sig. I use free books in all my courses. I just had an interesting talk with an econ professor at my school who has just adopted a free book put out by flatworldknowledge.com.
One thing I see in the halls of the faculty offices that's really scary is that the textbook reps are pushing electronic books like crazy -- but these books are apparently distributed with DRM, on a rental basis, so that as soon as the student stops paying, the book stops working.
I've gotten several people in my family started with Ubuntu, and one weird thing I've observed is that none of them ever seem to spontaneously figure out how to install applications -- they don't even seem to realize that the open-source apps are out there, or that it might be desirable to install them.
Okay, maybe this is a good thing, because maybe it just means that a default Ubuntu does a very good job of including enough apps that the average user can do everything they need to do. Or maybe it just means that most people, unlike me, don't enjoy playing with software.
But it really does make me wonder whether the Linux community could be doing a better job of selling itself based on the availability of a huge number of free, high-quality applications. Apt-cache stats says that I have 25,000 packages installed on my desktop machine at home, all of them free. If even 1% of those cost $10 each, we'd be talking about a massive investment in order to build up a similar software library using proprietary software.
Now it might seem obvious to linux geeks that you should say, "I want to do x, therefore I search on freshmeat for an app that does x, and then I install it." But most people don't even think that way about computer software. They're in the habit of buying it in a store, or on amazon, and they expect it to cost money. Synaptic doesn't exactly advertise itself very well, either. Users seem to putter around for years in Gnome without ever noticing that there's a utility built into the menus that would allow them to download a ton of free software.
My advice would be not to make an affectation of reading original works.
Here is a good article that discusses this "Great Books" paradigm, and points out how poorly it fits in the sciences especially.
One example you gave was Newton's Principia. Well, I'm a physicist, and I've read most of the Principia. I would not recommend it to anyone. First off, it's all written in the language of Euclidean geometry, merely because most of Newton's audience wasn't familiar with algebra, and certainly not with calculus, which had only been published a few years before the Principia came out. Today, the way to approach the subject is to read a treatment that uses modern math that you're familiar with. If you know calculus and analytic geometry, you can read a two-page proof of the elliptical orbit law, a result that took Newton the bulk of his entire book to prove because of the mathematical tools to which he limited himself.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule. I think the first 1/3 of Euclid's Elements is still something that everyone interested in mathematics should read.
Actually you'd need a sample that was much bigger than that. There are two issues: (1) you need to get a sample that accurately represents the entire population, so you need to include lots of different groups; (2) you need a big enough sample size to get decent error bars. If Linux's market share is 2%, then out of 1000 people, the mean number of linux users is 20, and the margin of error is sqrt(np(1-p))=4, so your result would be 2.0+-0.4%, which is such a big range that it wouldn't tell you much that you didn't already know. The error bars only go down like the square root of the sample size, so, e.g., polling 4000 people would only cut them down by a factor of 2.
The other big problem is properly accounting for sample biases. Rich people are more likely to use mac or linux. Americans are more likely to use windows. These days, the vast majority of people refuse to answer polls (presumably because of their experiences with telemarketers) -- IIRC a typical refusal rate is something like 90%. So you have to worry about whether the people who refuse to answer are more likely to be windows users or whatever. (As a linux fanboy, I'd be like, "Pick me, pick me!") This kind of thing is extremely hard to do well.
If you took reports from major websites (Google, ESPN, Yahoo, MSN, etc, etc), I think that would be the best metric for filling in any gaps.
That would give you a percentage of an OS actually used.
Counting web hits is a very common technique. Here is a recent survey showing 2% market share for Linux, and here is one showing 1%. That shows that the technique is very crude -- uncertain by at least a factor of two. There are all kinds of reasons for that uncertainty. Many user agent strings are bogus, often because someone is trying to work around servers that lock you out unless you have a certain string. Every web site is going to have its own demographic. Unique users are notoriously hard to identify in server logs.
My mother recently tried to collect on travel insurance when she had to cancel a vacation because her boyfriend had a health problem that came up at the last minute. Note that word "tried." It's been a horror story. Phone call after phone call, letter after letter. No money. Based on her experience, I would never buy travel insurance.
Insurance is for catastrophic expenses that would totally mess up your life: you get cancer, your house burns down. For minor stuff like missing a vacation, I'd say just take the risk, and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. Over the years, there is no possible way that the payout from the insurance company will be greater than what you put in; if it were, the insurance company wouldn't be profitable.
After spending some time looking into this, here's some info I've collected about a possible fork or alternative tool.
There are intros here and here on how to write extensions for Firefox. You use javascript and XUL (an XML grammar that describes GUI widgets).
TFA has comments by Wladimir Palant saying "I have pity with anybody who tries to fork NoScript, the code is a huge mess. It is much better to rewrite it from scratch."
NoScript is actually pretty complex. It does a lot of complicated stuff to try to guard against XSS attacks, etc. It also has something called "surrogates." The idea is that some sites serve up ads, and use javascript to detect whether the ads have been served. If the ads haven't been served, then it uses javascript to prevent the content of the page from being displayed properly. Surrogates are scripts that set the same flags or whatever that would have been set by the ad script, making it appear that the ad has been served. This requires that Giorgio Maone engage in an arms race with the people whose sites do this kind of thing.
So AFAICT the only sane thing to do would be not to fork NoScript but to write an alternative version from scratch. At least initially, the alternative version should be nothing more than a whitelisting mechanism for javascript. If that was done, then one could look at whether to go on and reproduce the security and surrogates stuff that NoScript has. My guess would be that that would simply be a bad idea. Better to avoid the bloat, and also to avoid the situation where one has to spend a huge amount of time actively maintaining it. I'm guessing that the reason Maone feels justified in his actions is that he really does have to devote a lot of time to actively tending all the bells and whistles, and that suggests that the OSS model may just not be well suited to biting off that much. Eliminating surrogates would break some sites, but only those that use aggressive measures to try to force you to view their ads.
If you look on the NoScript forums and FAQ, there seems to be a huge amount of support work involved. Someone reports that some feature on foo.com breaks, and then Maone has to look into it and see if that's really a bug in NoScript. The need for intensive support is probably another thing driving Maone's sense of entitlement to his ad revenue, and it's probably another good reason that an alternative project should avoid all the fancy stuff and just concentrate on making a simple and well-designed whitelist for javascript.
I've clicked around for a long time on the noscript site trying to find the source code, and I can't find it. I've seen posts by others here on slashdot saying the same thing. It must be publicly available somewhere, but I'm darned if I can find it.
So are you already donating $5 a year to the current NoScript author? That is the entire issue, he just wants to get some kind of payment for his obviously valuable work.
According to apt-cache stats, I currently have 34,319 open-source software packages installed on my ubuntu system. Obviously I can't afford to donate $5/year to every single one of those projects. However, if there's software that is really useful to me, and I know that the nature of the project is such that it probably needs user donations to survive, then I'm willing to help. In the past, I've donated money to OpenBSD to support development of OpenSSH, which happens to be a project that needs donations in order to survive. I also donate $50 to ubuntu on the third Sunday in October of every year (set up in my calendar to remind me), and $50/yr to the EFF.
Different projects have different setups. Some need money, some need non-monetary contributions of various kinds. Here are a few examples. Firefox is a huge project that needs a lot of resources, but they have good revenue from monetizing the browser's homepage. Inkscape is a project that I use a lot, and I've contributed a couple of minor patches, but they've never expressed a need for donations; they have 3-4 main developers, who seem to be able to manage it quite well as a hobby project. I use tex a lot, but tex has been mature software for decades, and Donald Knuth doesn't need financial contributions to support the small amount of maintenance work he still needs to do.
So if there's a piece of OSS that I find really useful, and that by its nature requires financial contributions from users in order to be healthy, and if they request it politely, I've always been willing to help. But if they start down the slippery slope toward malware, I'm outta there.
You're certainly welcome to take that position, but be aware you'd be filtering about a third of the Internet: Google Analytics is everywhere.
If I'm understanding correctly, the issue is that some sites use javascript to actively detect whether or not the ad was displayed to the user. If the ad wasn't displayed, the page doesn't get displayed. Those sites surely aren't a third of the internet, and they're the only ones that we wouldn't be able to see if we had a version of NoScript without the surrogates.
From what I understand, on sites that use returns from ad-tracking scripts like google-analytics or yieldmanager to block access, NoScript has the ability to run surrogate scripts that give the appropriate return without the ad-tracking. This seems non-trivial.
Interesting. I'd actually prefer that the site just fail to work in that situation. Then I can make the decision for myself: do I care enough about this site's content, and trust its owners enough, to run their javascript? I suspect that in most cases the answer would be no. I'd mosey on by, and they wouldn't get my eyeballs.
It is a useful tool, it shouldn't be too hard to strip out all the dodgy code and host it on another site.
Yes, please. If someone will fork it, I will happily donate five bucks every year. What I will not do is run code on my machine that's obfuscated or that attempts to mess with things it shouldn't mess with.
I'd never understood why NoScript had to have such frequent updates. It seemed like several times a week, sometimes even more than once in a day. It was a nuisance, but I figured the author must just be working really hard. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that it was because the author was playing cat and mouse with adblock.
Why is this even a nontrivial software project? Don't run javascript unless it comes from a site that's on a whitelist. That doesn't seem like it should be a big deal.
The really troubling trend, from my point of view as an OSS fanboy, is that netbooks are reverting to Windows. I teach at a community college. A year or two ago, one my students showed me his eeePC running Linux, which was the first eee I'd seen. This year my wife saw a eee with Linux in Target for $270. "Wow," I thought, "Linux in Target!" I bought her a eee with Linux (not the Target one, but a $400-ish model, via Amazon) as a birthday present, but the wifi was misconfigured. Asus tech support told me the wrong card was installed, and there was no way to fix it in software. We returned it and gave up on the netbook idea. If you look at the reviews on Amazon, you'll see tons of customers complaining about problems with their eee/Linux boxes. Now when I walk through the cafeteria at work, I see lots of students using netbooks, but when I sneak a peek over their shoulders, it's always Windows. IMO Asus really dropped the ball by not getting the quality of their Linux configuration right. They were supposed to be the flagship of the new wave of Linux on netbooks, and it just didn't happen. I guess this kind of thing is just expensive to get right.
It will be interesting to see if this predicted new wave of ARM-based netbooks really comes to market, and whether they really have a decent price-to-performance ratio. If so, it would be great, because Windows doesn't run on ARM, and if the price gets down to $100-200, there's really no room for profit for MS even if they did make an ARM version of Windows. But so far, the history of netbooks has all been bait and switch. They keep saying they're going to have them at price x, but they're always really at price 2x. Performance is still a problem, too. I'd hate for people to get the impression that Linux is slow and crappy, simply because netbooks are underpowered to run Firefox/js/flash.
Here's what I don't understand. TFA states that it's believed to be common for black holes to merge. Why would this be common? A supermassive black hole has an event horizon with a radius of about 0.1 AU, which makes a collision cross-section on the order of 10^-2 AU. Given that typical orbital periods in a galaxy are something like 10^8 years, the two black holes are only going to get ~100 chances to collide over the present age of the universe, so I would think the probability of a direct collision would be extremely low. Are there dissipative mechanisms that tend to bring the captured hole closer and closer to the galactic center?
Self-modifying code hasn't been a win for performance since the Intel 286 (PC-AT era, 1985) or so. It might not have hurt on a 386. Anything later, it's a lose.
Performance isn't the only reason for writing self-modifying code. For instance, the Motorola 68k had instructions for doing I/O to special hardware ports numbered 0-255. I had to write OS-level routines in C to do in(port) and out(port,byte). Because of the way the addressing modes worked, there was actually no possible way to implement this without writing self-modifying code. My boss didn't like it when he first saw it, but once he studied the addressing modes, he agreed that it was necessary. One worry was that the code would already be in cache before you modified it, so IIRC we did some jumps back and forth to make sure that the cache would get refreshed.
I did a ton of work in THINK C 5 on Mac OS 7. Programming in C on a computer with no memory protection is something I never want to experience again. Misplace a single character, and it's reboot time-- for the 13th time today.
Yep, I had exactly the same experience. What helped to make it particularly painful was that an error in my code could cause a null pointer to be dereferenced somewhere deep inside the Mac toolkit, but it could be really, really hard to find the place where that was happening, because the system would just crash. You got no core dump. You didn't have access to the source code for the toolkit code. You didn't have a symbol table for the toolkit code. I actually had an easier time coding in C on the really early Macs, ca. 1985, because it was closer to the metal, so if there was a crash it was usually pretty close to the bug in my code, not down seventeen layers deep in the GUI toolkit.
Circa 1984, when I did summer programming jobs at Digital Research (purveyors of CP/M), one of the programmers there showed me how you could put a transistor radio inside the case of your computer. You could tell what the computer was doing by listing to the sounds it picked up via the RF emissions from the computer. For instance, it would go into a certain loop, and you could tell because the radio would buzz like a fly.
Documentation was a lot harder to come by. If you wanted the documentation for X11, you could go to a big bookstore like Cody's in Berkeley, and they would have it in multiple hardcover volumes. Each volume was very expensive. The BSD documentation was available in the computer labs at UC Berkeley in the form of 6-foot-wide trays of printouts. (Unix man pages existed too, but since you were using an ADM3A terminal, it was often more convenient to walk over to the hardcopy.)
On the early microcomputers, there was no toolchain for programming other than MS BASIC in ROM. Assemblers and compilers didn't exist. Since BASIC was slow, if you wanted to write a fast program, you had to code it on paper in assembler and translate it by hand into machine code. But then in order to run your machine code, you were stuck because there was no actual operating system that would allow you to load it into memory from a peripheral such as a cassette tape drive. So you would first convert the machine code to a string of bytes expressed in decimal, and then write a BASIC program that would do a dummy assignment into a string variable like 10 A$="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx". Then you would write self-modifying code in BASIC that would find the location where the string literal "xxx...." was stored, and overwrite it with your machine code. So now if you gave the LIST command, it would display the program on the screen, with the string literal displayed as goofy unprintable characters. Then you would code the program so it would execute the machine code stored at the address of the variable A$. Finally you'd save the program onto cassette.
Because it's an open format, if Adobe doesn't "innovate" on it and stay king-of-the-hill, they will lose market share to other products that will embed movies and such. Adobe has to continue to innovate or they risk losing their status as the big cheese, and they make lots of money with Acrobat professional.
Yep. They want flash, pdf, and AIR to be ubiquitous. This article shows their point of view: "What's wonderful for Adobe is, we are pretty much everywhere you look. [...] Just about every Web site uses Flash. Every tax form you download off the IRS is done in PDF. So it's OK if the average consumer does not know who Adobe is. We're almost like air." They want their suite of tools to be a ubiquitous consumer-level software tool like Windows, and they understand that if they're going to make money that way, they have to convince people that their tool is better than the free alternatives, just as MS has to convince people to desire Windows rather than Linux.
Adobe is very clever about making their formats and implementations open enough to get them widely adopted, while maintaining their market position via a combination of (a) the first-move advantage when they release new features, and (b) keeping certain aspects of their formats and implementations just proprietary enough to maintain the perception that the competition isn't as good. You see it with flash, where they've opened up a lot recently, but for most developers there is really no viable alternative to using Adobe's tools. You see it with pdf, where they sell people snake oil, e.g., convincing them that the DRM features are useful, even though they're trivial to circumvent.
One of the big things working in their favor is patents. E.g., flash supports mp3 but not ogg, which makes it difficult to make a legal, OSS toolchain for flash development, because the license for mp3 forbids distribution of encoders in large numbers without paying a royalty. Ditto for patented color management and patented video codecs. Any patented special sauce they can add to their apps makes it easier for them to differentiate themselves from the free competition.
You create multiple amazon accounts and register several "complaints" from "offended users", and magically the book will vanish from the site as if it had never existed.
I'm not sure it's actually that easy to create sockpuppet accounts on amazon. I know for sure that they will not allow you to post a review until you make at least one purchase, which means you've not only had to spend some money, but presumably also had to supply them with a credit card that correlated with your real-world identity. Also, IIRC amazon backed off on the censorship thing, claiming it was all a mistake.
Take, for instance, JPLs bullying to prevent the publication of the fact that its Titan lander photos -- which contain smoke plumes, amazingly enough -- actually are left-right reversed photos of Pearl Harbor, taken from a Japanese plane.
I find this hard to believe. If you're going to make this statement, I would suggest that each time you say it, you also provide a URL or some other information that would allow the reader to verify your claims. Otherwise it just comes off like a kooky conspiracy theory.
Are they your lectures and who owns the copyright on the lectures? Does the university or do you? Since your work product was for hire . ..
Hold on there, cowboy. It's not that simple. In the US, work for hire status depends on three criteria, and those criteria are somewhat ambiguous as applied to university professors. Here is a more detailed discussion of the law. There isn't a clear legal precedent addressing the issue, but that's because the issue almost never comes up. The issue doesn't come up because there's a solid consensus in the world of education that the professor owns the copyright to things like lectures, textbooks, and journal articles. (Note that when it comes to articles, a journal that requires a copyright transfer asks the author, not the school, to sign it.) Regardless of the law, it's clear that there are overwhelmingly strong reasons (e.g., academic freedom) why universities know they shouldn't cross this line. It's sort of like Mia Farrow's famous remark that "you don't fuck the kids." Doesn't matter if it's theoretically legal to go there, you just don't go there.
More relevant questions to ask the OP would be (1) where we can take a look at these materials, and (2) whether he's put them under a free license such as CC-BY-SA. If the answer to #2 is no, then probably nobody will be interested in doing the translations for free.
In answer to the OP's original question, I know of two approaches that could be used. One would be to create a wiki of the English version and then allow translators to use the wiki to produce translations. Another would be to put the English version in some kind of format that's amenable to version control (e.g., plain text or latex), and use version control software such as git.
I have some experience with this because I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed physics textbooks, and over the years I've been contacted by roughly 10 people who were enthusiastic about translating them. None of those people ever translated any significant amount of text. It's a huge amount of work to do this kind of translation, and people's enthusiasm seems to evaporate quickly. A good example of the fragility of enthusiasm, in a slightly different context, is wikibooks, which is basically an abysmal failure, at least if you compare what it's accomplished over all the years of existence with its original stated goals, which were to revolutionize education. Writing or translating a book is just too much work for most people to tackle without some kind of financial or nonfinancial reward. It's not analogous to software, which is a functional product rather than a creative one.
In my opinion, plagiarism is indeed a heinous crime in an academic setting because it goes against everything the pursuit of academics is supposed to be about. Given that, the punishment should be severe. [...] the student should be expelled after the first offense
I teach physics at a community college, and although I don't assign the kind of term papers you'd see in an English course, I do grade homework, lab writeups, and exams, and plagiarism is an issue that comes up. My school's policy is that the only punishment the professor can give for cheating is to assign a zero on that particular assignment. This is, in my opinion, almost no punishment at all; typically the reason people cheat is because they know they're going to fail, so assigning an F isn't a punishment, it's more like assigning the grade that the student actually earned. The school's administration tells us that this policy is the way it is because of a recent legal decision in California. Before this rule was imposed on us, my policy had been to give the student an F in the course if it was a serious case of cheating. In any case, my school, like most community colleges, has an extremely late drop deadline (the 14th week of the semester), so, e.g., if I give a student an F on an exam for cheating on the exam, the student will typically just drop the course, resulting in no penalty on his transcript other than a W, which will not affect his GPA.
My school does provide a process where the professor can file a form to report academic misconduct. The form is then supposed to be followed up on by the dean, filed somewhere, and referred to later if the student shows a repeating pattern of cheating. Theoretically the student can be expelled, but never on the first offense. My experience is that this process doesn't actually seem to work, because the administrators involved aren't interested in spending the time and meeting with angry students. The threat hanging over the heads of the profs and deans is always that the parents will sue. Avoiding lawsuits is always the administration's top priority, far higher than education.
The long and the short of it is that when a student makes a calculated decision to risk cheating, he's usually doing it based on a realistic assessment that the consequences of getting caught are extremely mild.
However, since the punishment for plagiarism should be severe, there should be great care to investigate it properly. If you can show a preponderance of evidence that not only is a paper plagiarized, but you can accurately identify the source(s) from which each plagiarized section of it was copied, then the student should be expelled after the first offense. If you can't come up with that evidence, though, you should not be punishing the student.
There is absolutely no way, at least at my school, that a student would ever be expelled for plagiarism. To get expelled, you would have to physically attack someone. You seem to be imagining a situation in which the professor and/or the school punishes the student just because a particular piece of software flashes a message on the screen saying "plagiarized." I can't believe that anyone would ever do that. Of course you're going to look at the text that matched, and see whether you really believe that it looks like it was plagiarized.
I thought professors had legions of grad students to ferret this sort of thing out, why do they need these programs?
No, most professors do not have grad students to do this. I work at a community college. No grad students. My wife teaches at Cal State LA. They have grad students, but the grad students don't work as TAs or graders; the professors have to grade 100% of the written work.
Trusting a decision that could permanently impact a student's entire life to a computer program seems careless and dangerous.
I don't think anyone does trust such a decision to a program. They use the program as a first step.
I've also worked at a national lab (Argonne, near Chicago), where I did nuclear physics research, and although the other scientists I worked with there were nice people, and very honest and competent, I have to agree with AC's general assessment of the inefficiency of government-funded research. The big problem with government-funded research (which, in dollar terms, is almost all science and engineering research) is the same as the big problem with all research: the problem is that the vast majority of articles published of journals are of absolutely no interest to anyone, even people in the relevant sub-subfield. There are simply too many smart, highly motivated people chasing after too few possibilities for research. The publish-or-perish mentality encourages everyone to pad their c.v. with a gazillion publications, each of which is basically not important. The AC's remarks about the political momentum that keeps research programs going, regardless of results, is also spot-on. I think the US government could cut funding for basic research to 1/3 of its current level with essentially no negative effect on the amount of valuable science produced. All that would happen would be that fewer people would participating in the easter egg hunt, but all the really good easter eggs would end up getting found anyway.
A particularly egregious example of government waste was the Nixon administration's war on cancer. Sounded great, right? We all want to cure cancer, right? Well, the problem is that cancer researchers spent the last 40 years trying to fulfill Nixon's pledge to find a complete cure for cancer Real Soon Now, rather than working on the fundamental biology of cancer. The results? Since 1976, the death rate from cancer has only dropped by 5%, when you control for all the other variables.
Another example is the crewed space program. The shuttle's only purpose is to get people to the ISS, and the only purpose of the ISS is to give the shuttle somewhere to go. If you compare the bang for the buck that we get from uncrewed space probes to what we get from the crewed space program, it's like night and day -- and yet scientific research keeps being offered as a justification for a government-funded crewed space program.
Thanks! As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper package for a bunch of other stuff like flashplugin-nonfree and icedtea6-plugin, which were already working in intrepid. For example, flashplugin-nonfree was broken on intrepid for x64 for a long time, and then starting sometime in the fall of 2008 it got fixed.
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Yep. I teach physics at a community college. The school seems all too ready to accept propaganda from the publishers. At one of our yearly convocation breakfasts, they passed out a little booklet about copyright to all the faculty. The booklet was written by a publishing industry association, and you'd better believe that the words "fair use" occurred absolutely nowhere inside.
Most college professors don't know how many high-quality free books there are to choose from -- see my sig. I use free books in all my courses. I just had an interesting talk with an econ professor at my school who has just adopted a free book put out by flatworldknowledge.com.
One thing I see in the halls of the faculty offices that's really scary is that the textbook reps are pushing electronic books like crazy -- but these books are apparently distributed with DRM, on a rental basis, so that as soon as the student stops paying, the book stops working.
That's what freshmeat.net is for.
Oops, you're probably right. I think it's reporting the number available, not the number actually installed. Thanks for the correction.
I've gotten several people in my family started with Ubuntu, and one weird thing I've observed is that none of them ever seem to spontaneously figure out how to install applications -- they don't even seem to realize that the open-source apps are out there, or that it might be desirable to install them.
Okay, maybe this is a good thing, because maybe it just means that a default Ubuntu does a very good job of including enough apps that the average user can do everything they need to do. Or maybe it just means that most people, unlike me, don't enjoy playing with software.
But it really does make me wonder whether the Linux community could be doing a better job of selling itself based on the availability of a huge number of free, high-quality applications. Apt-cache stats says that I have 25,000 packages installed on my desktop machine at home, all of them free. If even 1% of those cost $10 each, we'd be talking about a massive investment in order to build up a similar software library using proprietary software.
Now it might seem obvious to linux geeks that you should say, "I want to do x, therefore I search on freshmeat for an app that does x, and then I install it." But most people don't even think that way about computer software. They're in the habit of buying it in a store, or on amazon, and they expect it to cost money. Synaptic doesn't exactly advertise itself very well, either. Users seem to putter around for years in Gnome without ever noticing that there's a utility built into the menus that would allow them to download a ton of free software.
My advice would be not to make an affectation of reading original works. Here is a good article that discusses this "Great Books" paradigm, and points out how poorly it fits in the sciences especially.
One example you gave was Newton's Principia. Well, I'm a physicist, and I've read most of the Principia. I would not recommend it to anyone. First off, it's all written in the language of Euclidean geometry, merely because most of Newton's audience wasn't familiar with algebra, and certainly not with calculus, which had only been published a few years before the Principia came out. Today, the way to approach the subject is to read a treatment that uses modern math that you're familiar with. If you know calculus and analytic geometry, you can read a two-page proof of the elliptical orbit law, a result that took Newton the bulk of his entire book to prove because of the mathematical tools to which he limited himself.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule. I think the first 1/3 of Euclid's Elements is still something that everyone interested in mathematics should read.
Actually you'd need a sample that was much bigger than that. There are two issues: (1) you need to get a sample that accurately represents the entire population, so you need to include lots of different groups; (2) you need a big enough sample size to get decent error bars. If Linux's market share is 2%, then out of 1000 people, the mean number of linux users is 20, and the margin of error is sqrt(np(1-p))=4, so your result would be 2.0+-0.4%, which is such a big range that it wouldn't tell you much that you didn't already know. The error bars only go down like the square root of the sample size, so, e.g., polling 4000 people would only cut them down by a factor of 2.
The other big problem is properly accounting for sample biases. Rich people are more likely to use mac or linux. Americans are more likely to use windows. These days, the vast majority of people refuse to answer polls (presumably because of their experiences with telemarketers) -- IIRC a typical refusal rate is something like 90%. So you have to worry about whether the people who refuse to answer are more likely to be windows users or whatever. (As a linux fanboy, I'd be like, "Pick me, pick me!") This kind of thing is extremely hard to do well.
Counting web hits is a very common technique. Here is a recent survey showing 2% market share for Linux, and here is one showing 1%. That shows that the technique is very crude -- uncertain by at least a factor of two. There are all kinds of reasons for that uncertainty. Many user agent strings are bogus, often because someone is trying to work around servers that lock you out unless you have a certain string. Every web site is going to have its own demographic. Unique users are notoriously hard to identify in server logs.
My mother recently tried to collect on travel insurance when she had to cancel a vacation because her boyfriend had a health problem that came up at the last minute. Note that word "tried." It's been a horror story. Phone call after phone call, letter after letter. No money. Based on her experience, I would never buy travel insurance.
Insurance is for catastrophic expenses that would totally mess up your life: you get cancer, your house burns down. For minor stuff like missing a vacation, I'd say just take the risk, and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. Over the years, there is no possible way that the payout from the insurance company will be greater than what you put in; if it were, the insurance company wouldn't be profitable.
After spending some time looking into this, here's some info I've collected about a possible fork or alternative tool.
There are intros here and here on how to write extensions for Firefox. You use javascript and XUL (an XML grammar that describes GUI widgets).
TFA has comments by Wladimir Palant saying "I have pity with anybody who tries to fork NoScript, the code is a huge mess. It is much better to rewrite it from scratch."
NoScript is actually pretty complex. It does a lot of complicated stuff to try to guard against XSS attacks, etc. It also has something called "surrogates." The idea is that some sites serve up ads, and use javascript to detect whether the ads have been served. If the ads haven't been served, then it uses javascript to prevent the content of the page from being displayed properly. Surrogates are scripts that set the same flags or whatever that would have been set by the ad script, making it appear that the ad has been served. This requires that Giorgio Maone engage in an arms race with the people whose sites do this kind of thing.
So AFAICT the only sane thing to do would be not to fork NoScript but to write an alternative version from scratch. At least initially, the alternative version should be nothing more than a whitelisting mechanism for javascript. If that was done, then one could look at whether to go on and reproduce the security and surrogates stuff that NoScript has. My guess would be that that would simply be a bad idea. Better to avoid the bloat, and also to avoid the situation where one has to spend a huge amount of time actively maintaining it. I'm guessing that the reason Maone feels justified in his actions is that he really does have to devote a lot of time to actively tending all the bells and whistles, and that suggests that the OSS model may just not be well suited to biting off that much. Eliminating surrogates would break some sites, but only those that use aggressive measures to try to force you to view their ads.
If you look on the NoScript forums and FAQ, there seems to be a huge amount of support work involved. Someone reports that some feature on foo.com breaks, and then Maone has to look into it and see if that's really a bug in NoScript. The need for intensive support is probably another thing driving Maone's sense of entitlement to his ad revenue, and it's probably another good reason that an alternative project should avoid all the fancy stuff and just concentrate on making a simple and well-designed whitelist for javascript.
I've clicked around for a long time on the noscript site trying to find the source code, and I can't find it. I've seen posts by others here on slashdot saying the same thing. It must be publicly available somewhere, but I'm darned if I can find it.
According to apt-cache stats, I currently have 34,319 open-source software packages installed on my ubuntu system. Obviously I can't afford to donate $5/year to every single one of those projects. However, if there's software that is really useful to me, and I know that the nature of the project is such that it probably needs user donations to survive, then I'm willing to help. In the past, I've donated money to OpenBSD to support development of OpenSSH, which happens to be a project that needs donations in order to survive. I also donate $50 to ubuntu on the third Sunday in October of every year (set up in my calendar to remind me), and $50/yr to the EFF.
Different projects have different setups. Some need money, some need non-monetary contributions of various kinds. Here are a few examples. Firefox is a huge project that needs a lot of resources, but they have good revenue from monetizing the browser's homepage. Inkscape is a project that I use a lot, and I've contributed a couple of minor patches, but they've never expressed a need for donations; they have 3-4 main developers, who seem to be able to manage it quite well as a hobby project. I use tex a lot, but tex has been mature software for decades, and Donald Knuth doesn't need financial contributions to support the small amount of maintenance work he still needs to do.
So if there's a piece of OSS that I find really useful, and that by its nature requires financial contributions from users in order to be healthy, and if they request it politely, I've always been willing to help. But if they start down the slippery slope toward malware, I'm outta there.
If I'm understanding correctly, the issue is that some sites use javascript to actively detect whether or not the ad was displayed to the user. If the ad wasn't displayed, the page doesn't get displayed. Those sites surely aren't a third of the internet, and they're the only ones that we wouldn't be able to see if we had a version of NoScript without the surrogates.
Interesting. I'd actually prefer that the site just fail to work in that situation. Then I can make the decision for myself: do I care enough about this site's content, and trust its owners enough, to run their javascript? I suspect that in most cases the answer would be no. I'd mosey on by, and they wouldn't get my eyeballs.
Yes, please. If someone will fork it, I will happily donate five bucks every year. What I will not do is run code on my machine that's obfuscated or that attempts to mess with things it shouldn't mess with.
I'd never understood why NoScript had to have such frequent updates. It seemed like several times a week, sometimes even more than once in a day. It was a nuisance, but I figured the author must just be working really hard. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that it was because the author was playing cat and mouse with adblock.
Why is this even a nontrivial software project? Don't run javascript unless it comes from a site that's on a whitelist. That doesn't seem like it should be a big deal.
The really troubling trend, from my point of view as an OSS fanboy, is that netbooks are reverting to Windows. I teach at a community college. A year or two ago, one my students showed me his eeePC running Linux, which was the first eee I'd seen. This year my wife saw a eee with Linux in Target for $270. "Wow," I thought, "Linux in Target!" I bought her a eee with Linux (not the Target one, but a $400-ish model, via Amazon) as a birthday present, but the wifi was misconfigured. Asus tech support told me the wrong card was installed, and there was no way to fix it in software. We returned it and gave up on the netbook idea. If you look at the reviews on Amazon, you'll see tons of customers complaining about problems with their eee/Linux boxes. Now when I walk through the cafeteria at work, I see lots of students using netbooks, but when I sneak a peek over their shoulders, it's always Windows. IMO Asus really dropped the ball by not getting the quality of their Linux configuration right. They were supposed to be the flagship of the new wave of Linux on netbooks, and it just didn't happen. I guess this kind of thing is just expensive to get right.
It will be interesting to see if this predicted new wave of ARM-based netbooks really comes to market, and whether they really have a decent price-to-performance ratio. If so, it would be great, because Windows doesn't run on ARM, and if the price gets down to $100-200, there's really no room for profit for MS even if they did make an ARM version of Windows. But so far, the history of netbooks has all been bait and switch. They keep saying they're going to have them at price x, but they're always really at price 2x. Performance is still a problem, too. I'd hate for people to get the impression that Linux is slow and crappy, simply because netbooks are underpowered to run Firefox/js/flash.
Here's what I don't understand. TFA states that it's believed to be common for black holes to merge. Why would this be common? A supermassive black hole has an event horizon with a radius of about 0.1 AU, which makes a collision cross-section on the order of 10^-2 AU. Given that typical orbital periods in a galaxy are something like 10^8 years, the two black holes are only going to get ~100 chances to collide over the present age of the universe, so I would think the probability of a direct collision would be extremely low. Are there dissipative mechanisms that tend to bring the captured hole closer and closer to the galactic center?
Performance isn't the only reason for writing self-modifying code. For instance, the Motorola 68k had instructions for doing I/O to special hardware ports numbered 0-255. I had to write OS-level routines in C to do in(port) and out(port,byte). Because of the way the addressing modes worked, there was actually no possible way to implement this without writing self-modifying code. My boss didn't like it when he first saw it, but once he studied the addressing modes, he agreed that it was necessary. One worry was that the code would already be in cache before you modified it, so IIRC we did some jumps back and forth to make sure that the cache would get refreshed.
Yep, I had exactly the same experience. What helped to make it particularly painful was that an error in my code could cause a null pointer to be dereferenced somewhere deep inside the Mac toolkit, but it could be really, really hard to find the place where that was happening, because the system would just crash. You got no core dump. You didn't have access to the source code for the toolkit code. You didn't have a symbol table for the toolkit code. I actually had an easier time coding in C on the really early Macs, ca. 1985, because it was closer to the metal, so if there was a crash it was usually pretty close to the bug in my code, not down seventeen layers deep in the GUI toolkit.
Circa 1984, when I did summer programming jobs at Digital Research (purveyors of CP/M), one of the programmers there showed me how you could put a transistor radio inside the case of your computer. You could tell what the computer was doing by listing to the sounds it picked up via the RF emissions from the computer. For instance, it would go into a certain loop, and you could tell because the radio would buzz like a fly.
Documentation was a lot harder to come by. If you wanted the documentation for X11, you could go to a big bookstore like Cody's in Berkeley, and they would have it in multiple hardcover volumes. Each volume was very expensive. The BSD documentation was available in the computer labs at UC Berkeley in the form of 6-foot-wide trays of printouts. (Unix man pages existed too, but since you were using an ADM3A terminal, it was often more convenient to walk over to the hardcopy.)
On the early microcomputers, there was no toolchain for programming other than MS BASIC in ROM. Assemblers and compilers didn't exist. Since BASIC was slow, if you wanted to write a fast program, you had to code it on paper in assembler and translate it by hand into machine code. But then in order to run your machine code, you were stuck because there was no actual operating system that would allow you to load it into memory from a peripheral such as a cassette tape drive. So you would first convert the machine code to a string of bytes expressed in decimal, and then write a BASIC program that would do a dummy assignment into a string variable like 10 A$="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx". Then you would write self-modifying code in BASIC that would find the location where the string literal "xxx...." was stored, and overwrite it with your machine code. So now if you gave the LIST command, it would display the program on the screen, with the string literal displayed as goofy unprintable characters. Then you would code the program so it would execute the machine code stored at the address of the variable A$. Finally you'd save the program onto cassette.
Yep. They want flash, pdf, and AIR to be ubiquitous. This article shows their point of view: "What's wonderful for Adobe is, we are pretty much everywhere you look. [...] Just about every Web site uses Flash. Every tax form you download off the IRS is done in PDF. So it's OK if the average consumer does not know who Adobe is. We're almost like air." They want their suite of tools to be a ubiquitous consumer-level software tool like Windows, and they understand that if they're going to make money that way, they have to convince people that their tool is better than the free alternatives, just as MS has to convince people to desire Windows rather than Linux.
Adobe is very clever about making their formats and implementations open enough to get them widely adopted, while maintaining their market position via a combination of (a) the first-move advantage when they release new features, and (b) keeping certain aspects of their formats and implementations just proprietary enough to maintain the perception that the competition isn't as good. You see it with flash, where they've opened up a lot recently, but for most developers there is really no viable alternative to using Adobe's tools. You see it with pdf, where they sell people snake oil, e.g., convincing them that the DRM features are useful, even though they're trivial to circumvent.
One of the big things working in their favor is patents. E.g., flash supports mp3 but not ogg, which makes it difficult to make a legal, OSS toolchain for flash development, because the license for mp3 forbids distribution of encoders in large numbers without paying a royalty. Ditto for patented color management and patented video codecs. Any patented special sauce they can add to their apps makes it easier for them to differentiate themselves from the free competition.
I'm not sure it's actually that easy to create sockpuppet accounts on amazon. I know for sure that they will not allow you to post a review until you make at least one purchase, which means you've not only had to spend some money, but presumably also had to supply them with a credit card that correlated with your real-world identity. Also, IIRC amazon backed off on the censorship thing, claiming it was all a mistake.
I find this hard to believe. If you're going to make this statement, I would suggest that each time you say it, you also provide a URL or some other information that would allow the reader to verify your claims. Otherwise it just comes off like a kooky conspiracy theory.
Hold on there, cowboy. It's not that simple. In the US, work for hire status depends on three criteria, and those criteria are somewhat ambiguous as applied to university professors. Here is a more detailed discussion of the law. There isn't a clear legal precedent addressing the issue, but that's because the issue almost never comes up. The issue doesn't come up because there's a solid consensus in the world of education that the professor owns the copyright to things like lectures, textbooks, and journal articles. (Note that when it comes to articles, a journal that requires a copyright transfer asks the author, not the school, to sign it.) Regardless of the law, it's clear that there are overwhelmingly strong reasons (e.g., academic freedom) why universities know they shouldn't cross this line. It's sort of like Mia Farrow's famous remark that "you don't fuck the kids." Doesn't matter if it's theoretically legal to go there, you just don't go there.
More relevant questions to ask the OP would be (1) where we can take a look at these materials, and (2) whether he's put them under a free license such as CC-BY-SA. If the answer to #2 is no, then probably nobody will be interested in doing the translations for free.
In answer to the OP's original question, I know of two approaches that could be used. One would be to create a wiki of the English version and then allow translators to use the wiki to produce translations. Another would be to put the English version in some kind of format that's amenable to version control (e.g., plain text or latex), and use version control software such as git.
I have some experience with this because I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed physics textbooks, and over the years I've been contacted by roughly 10 people who were enthusiastic about translating them. None of those people ever translated any significant amount of text. It's a huge amount of work to do this kind of translation, and people's enthusiasm seems to evaporate quickly. A good example of the fragility of enthusiasm, in a slightly different context, is wikibooks, which is basically an abysmal failure, at least if you compare what it's accomplished over all the years of existence with its original stated goals, which were to revolutionize education. Writing or translating a book is just too much work for most people to tackle without some kind of financial or nonfinancial reward. It's not analogous to software, which is a functional product rather than a creative one.
I teach physics at a community college, and although I don't assign the kind of term papers you'd see in an English course, I do grade homework, lab writeups, and exams, and plagiarism is an issue that comes up. My school's policy is that the only punishment the professor can give for cheating is to assign a zero on that particular assignment. This is, in my opinion, almost no punishment at all; typically the reason people cheat is because they know they're going to fail, so assigning an F isn't a punishment, it's more like assigning the grade that the student actually earned. The school's administration tells us that this policy is the way it is because of a recent legal decision in California. Before this rule was imposed on us, my policy had been to give the student an F in the course if it was a serious case of cheating. In any case, my school, like most community colleges, has an extremely late drop deadline (the 14th week of the semester), so, e.g., if I give a student an F on an exam for cheating on the exam, the student will typically just drop the course, resulting in no penalty on his transcript other than a W, which will not affect his GPA.
My school does provide a process where the professor can file a form to report academic misconduct. The form is then supposed to be followed up on by the dean, filed somewhere, and referred to later if the student shows a repeating pattern of cheating. Theoretically the student can be expelled, but never on the first offense. My experience is that this process doesn't actually seem to work, because the administrators involved aren't interested in spending the time and meeting with angry students. The threat hanging over the heads of the profs and deans is always that the parents will sue. Avoiding lawsuits is always the administration's top priority, far higher than education.
The long and the short of it is that when a student makes a calculated decision to risk cheating, he's usually doing it based on a realistic assessment that the consequences of getting caught are extremely mild.
There is absolutely no way, at least at my school, that a student would ever be expelled for plagiarism. To get expelled, you would have to physically attack someone. You seem to be imagining a situation in which the professor and/or the school punishes the student just because a particular piece of software flashes a message on the screen saying "plagiarized." I can't believe that anyone would ever do that. Of course you're going to look at the text that matched, and see whether you really believe that it looks like it was plagiarized.
No, most professors do not have grad students to do this. I work at a community college. No grad students. My wife teaches at Cal State LA. They have grad students, but the grad students don't work as TAs or graders; the professors have to grade 100% of the written work.
I don't think anyone does trust such a decision to a program. They use the program as a first step.
I've also worked at a national lab (Argonne, near Chicago), where I did nuclear physics research, and although the other scientists I worked with there were nice people, and very honest and competent, I have to agree with AC's general assessment of the inefficiency of government-funded research. The big problem with government-funded research (which, in dollar terms, is almost all science and engineering research) is the same as the big problem with all research: the problem is that the vast majority of articles published of journals are of absolutely no interest to anyone, even people in the relevant sub-subfield. There are simply too many smart, highly motivated people chasing after too few possibilities for research. The publish-or-perish mentality encourages everyone to pad their c.v. with a gazillion publications, each of which is basically not important. The AC's remarks about the political momentum that keeps research programs going, regardless of results, is also spot-on. I think the US government could cut funding for basic research to 1/3 of its current level with essentially no negative effect on the amount of valuable science produced. All that would happen would be that fewer people would participating in the easter egg hunt, but all the really good easter eggs would end up getting found anyway.
A particularly egregious example of government waste was the Nixon administration's war on cancer. Sounded great, right? We all want to cure cancer, right? Well, the problem is that cancer researchers spent the last 40 years trying to fulfill Nixon's pledge to find a complete cure for cancer Real Soon Now, rather than working on the fundamental biology of cancer. The results? Since 1976, the death rate from cancer has only dropped by 5%, when you control for all the other variables.
Another example is the crewed space program. The shuttle's only purpose is to get people to the ISS, and the only purpose of the ISS is to give the shuttle somewhere to go. If you compare the bang for the buck that we get from uncrewed space probes to what we get from the crewed space program, it's like night and day -- and yet scientific research keeps being offered as a justification for a government-funded crewed space program.
Thanks! As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper package for a bunch of other stuff like flashplugin-nonfree and icedtea6-plugin, which were already working in intrepid. For example, flashplugin-nonfree was broken on intrepid for x64 for a long time, and then starting sometime in the fall of 2008 it got fixed.