Not only do I want to hear the questions, but I also would like to know what explanation is given for them. I live in a house of medics at a top 10 university that I won't name. None of them had heard of Intelligent Design, and why would they have done? They don't read Wired, and they don't check US Science web sites. I would say 90% of my non-geek friends haven't heard of it.
That some of the cleverest people I know haven't heard of Intelligent Design makes the 20+% of people very tough to swallow. They must have been presented with an explanation of the options. I would say there is also a sizable minority of Britons that don't understand Evolution, because they didn't care enough about school or science to listen.
You could present the options in such a way to make Intelligent Design sound like an attractive middle ground.
"Do you believe God created everything?" "Do you believe we all are descended from single cells in a big soup millions of years ago?" "Do you believe that there are things that Science can't explain, and that's where a higher power must have done something?"
You can't believe in ID if you've never been taught about it.
ID has a place in schools, and so does creationism. It's in Religious Education. I really valued that class; it opens your mind to other cultures and religions, and question your own beliefs. I was brought up in a church school, but a secular secondary school. It was when I did the project on "Does God exist?" that I ever questioned what I was told. I think ID is an important idea; a lot of belief systems seem to feel there are things that can't be explained (like Taoism). But I don't personally buy it. Evolution does happen. What creationis- sorry, ID proponents... should be looking for is looking at reasons why a deity might have set off evolution, or whether evolution is controlled. I mean, isn't it AMAZING how complex the brain and human body actually is?! That's as good a reason for a deity existing as any.
We can talk a lot about what is and isn't allowed without a license, AFAIK its never been tested in court with open source because it is a frivolous case.
The part about the GPL claiming to not extend to use is poorly worded at best. I suggest reading the paper "Debugging open source licensing" (uni. of Pittsburgh Law Review Vol 64:75), which covers this very section.
"...the GPL does not grant a license to run a program... user of a copyrighted work outside the scope of a license is not only a breach of contract but it is a violation of the Copyright Act"
The author concludes that the piece does intend to allow use, but is worded in a contradictory fashion that muddies this issue.
You must agree to a license in order to use software with today's copyright law. Without any agreement made, copyright law does not allow you to use the software. TBH, I don't know *why* this is the case, it just is. I'd kinda blanked out during those lectures, they were damn early.
Finally! I was reading through this thread waiting for someone to get this. I have no idea why the parent posted as an AC, he is entirely correct. I am writing a term paper right now about these very licenses.
If you do not agree to the GPL, you have not made any contractual agreement to be a licensee of the software. Without any license being agreed to, the software is protected by standard copyright law. Standard copyright law does not allow you to use the program, distribute it, or do anything else.
The parent's analgy is OK, but I prefer thinking of it as a bicycle. If I leave my bicycle outside, and you start riding it, you've stolen my bicycle. If we've already agreed you can ride it, everything is cool. The same thing applies to copyrighted works.
By using GPL software, you must agree to be bound by the GPLs terms.
For those that can't be bothered to RTFA, down the bottom you'll see:
"The amendment was approved 30 to 28, with 22 members of the UMP voting in favor. While there are 577 members of the lower house, few were present for last night's vote."
And if you look back up the article (obviously the author was trying to sensationalise this):
"The government can overturn the amendment, either by re- opening debate or if the Senate votes it down when the bill moves to the upper house. French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has asked that parliament re-open debate on the amendment today, Agence France Presse reported."
So only one-tenth of the house were present for the amendment. It seems like everyone else had gone home. 22 of the votes in favour were by a (what appears to be) minority party. As soon as parliament reconvenes, this will be gone. It's way too crazy/stupid/radical, I very much doubt the majority party want this, and you'd need a serious rebellion from that party in order to push this through.
It's not news so much as a political machination that happens all the time ("Quick! They're asleep! Slip in that amendment!")
You're right about the ships. I would lovvvvveeeeeee if the game had instanced ships, and you levelled on them. So you pay your dues in the USS ElCrappo, and work your way up to the Enterprise. Your character slept on the ship, and performed a function on it, and the Enterprise needs a raid team of like 60 players just to man it. And you could sleep on it, and go on week-long missions.
It would be *immense*. I would get just as much satisafaction of being a cog in the system for the Captain as I would be actually being him.
You could make guilds have their own ships and work it that way.
Problem: You would have to roleplay it. If my Captain radios "w00t, we pwned the Klingon nubs!" that would be it for me.
You might be interested to known that Jim Rossingol is a journalist for Future Publishing in the UK (home of PC Gamer, Edge, Gamesmaster and others). He may have gone freelance, I stopped reading the last publication he was publically credited with a long time ago:)
Well yes, this is a case in point. He is on the front page usually once a day. Albeit this is often by a scattergun approach, a lot of people like what he does, have them on their friends list and wait and see if he posts stuff, and digg it. He is already almost what I described as a pseudo-editor.
You're right about the crap problem, and it will only get worse. As Digg continues to expand, so the number of users submitting stories is increasing. If we assume there's only so much interesting news a day, the crap ratio is going to increase as well. This seems to be happening already.
Digg will implode if the expansion continues, because no-one will be bothered to digg for anything that isn't on the front page. So in the end, those that have the time/inclination to wade through the stories will end up becoming pseudo-editors (you can promote a story on just 50 diggs if you submit at the right time), and then it'll either get dugg more by people who enjoyed it and can't be bothered to digg for stories, or it'll be reported out. Front page stories will only end up being the ones that the pseudo-editors like.
Losing the Digg we're-all-equal-community ethos seems inevitable. They should give up, and start weighting user votes. For example: users who post stories that are often promoted; those who digg stories that are often promoted; or those that comment well should have their submitted stories in one pool. Stories below this privledged status go into another one. The stories for all will still go to the front page, but the more esoteric stuff that a sizable majority enjoy reading about (which really made Digg; getting stories interesting to you that editors didn't think were worthy) will end up in the privaledged pool.
Like Taco said, scalability is going to be a big problem if you aren't ruling from the top-down.
IANAL, but I am sure their copying is legit. Libraries have certain exemptions in copyright law. Do you think that Stanford, Oxford et al are really all going to be wrong on what they can and cannot allow their visitors to do with their books? I'm not a librarian, but I trust Ivy League schools way more than I trust op-ed columns in newspapers for getting the law right.
Google can display those results under fair use. It is allowed to extract text that is not "substantional" (legalese for important, not amount taken). It is highly doubtful, under any reasonable interpretation of the law, that Google's snippets (assuming they look a lot like they do now) could ever be considered "substantial", regardless of which piece of text it displays to the user. However, Google is not a library, and needs (and probably will) take into account how many of these snippets are available. Obviously, allowing a user, however difficult, to piece together a book will be a copyright violation.
The op-ed piece made no legal points, but was a lot of huffing and puffing. They won't blow Google's house down with just hot air.
HTML is a lot harder to write a parser for, because of all the special cases it allows. You put an XML parser on an XHTML document, and bam, it's read. Do I know if parsers are any different speed wise? No (a slashdotter admitting there's something he doesn't know? Crazy!;) ). I've never written an HTML parser. What I do know, is that because an XML parser is quicker and easier to write, it should be easier to optimize. Most complaints you might read about XML speed happen when it's shoved into pigeonholes it shouldn't be, flabbing out the physical size and creating a *lot* of redundant information, such as when its used when a database should be. This isn't what XHTML is trying to do, it adds a little bit extra, hardly noticable.
You apparently didn't read the parent to what I replied to. He was asking why XHTML was better than HTML at all. Taco can't control it, which is fine. Not his fault.
This is a lot like the argument for why bothering to comment, or why bothering to make code easy to understand, or why bother to code a web page in a half-arsed way as long as IE renders it OK.
Because its the Right Thing To Do.
Sure, it works fine as is. That's great. But if you can code in XHTML, why not? There are no good reasons not to apart from the fact you are lazy (I don't buy any of the arguments from that.ch site). Good HTML will look almost exactly like XHTML, why not make that extra step?
XHTML enforces nice, clean code. None of the HTML fanboys can argue that. It can be parsed nicely in an XML parser, making it portable into all sorts of applications, from automagic web spiders making massive search engines, to little Java programs. HTML makes parsing more complicated, and the error handling an even bigger pain. Getting everyone to XHTML, especially technology flagwavers like/. should be easy.
Um, am I the only one wondering what the point of sending a CD is? Apart from the "prestiege" for the people on said CD, if any intelligent life picks it up, they're not exactly going to be able to read it are they?
I have trouble enough making sure my Windows using friends don't send me documents in PowerPoint format, let alone intelligent life understanding our alphabet, then working out ASCII code, then working out binary.
It's a standards nightmare to make Tim Berners-Lee cry.
Re:interface isn't compelling until you've used it
on
GMail Sign-Ups Via Mobile
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I switched from all email clients to Gmail a year ago, and I've never looked back.
Conversation view is marvellous. I am not talking about threading, I'm talking about about conversations. Seeing what I said, seeing what they said in response, hiding the quoted text... Searching email is also a pleasure. Why standard email clients show you a relevant snippet of text when you search for something when GMail has been doing it for at least a year just defies reasonable explanation. If I search for an email from a professor about a certain project, I don't want to sift through the text of five emails, I want to know which one I want. GMail shows you quickly.
Email - conversations - intelligent search = Dark Ages.
You really haven't used GMail, or you would understand this too. It's a moment of realisation, when you see your disjointed email world come together, is when you see it. It takes about a week, otherwise it's just like every other webmail app, just prettier.
Oh, and Google doesn't need to advertise anything. Word of mouth will do it for them.
Because the algorithm that filters results that are relevant? Perhaps Yahoo! only returns results with all search terms, and Google starts returning results with only some search terms.
Seriously, there are so many ways, I don't even know why you asked this.
This is a very important question, I wanted to ask it myself. Player retainment is very tightly bounded to player discovery in a genre, where, let's fact it, gameplay is not the main reason you are there. Exploration, social interaction, achievement. These are the reasons you play MMOs (exception PlanetSide?)
Once you reach endgame, there is nothing more to see. WoW has given all it can. There is nothing new, save starting a new class.
I *had* two level 40s stuck because I felt no need to progress, I wasn't going to get any new skills (cancelled my account, got too bored). The same goes for the game world; if it stays static players become bored. This does not not not mean adding a new instance you polish off in 3 hours, or adding one that needs a raid of 800 and a 24 time period. It just means making sure players have something new to see in the world they inhabit. Everything has been done before, there is nothing new to see.
World events were actually going to be part of the game world; see Stitches in Darkshire. Then a lot of plans were ditched, and now you have a world where there is no story or excitement. No-one is shouting in my guild chat about the super-amazing Darkmoon Faire opening up.
Asheron's Call should have been a new era in interactivity and content delivery. It should have ushered in a way of getting players, but retaining them well past the original game sell-by date which wasn't just the obsessive players losing their lifes to grinding and guild chat. It wasn't. Why?
Agreed, whoever conducted this "research" is pretty idiotic. The pages returned != pages available.
This isn't worthy of the NCSA, or indeed any university, to be shown in any public format with any conclusions at *all*. You'd be laughed out of the conference hall if you presented this.
Google uses a derivative of Brin and Wall's PageRank research that was published at Stanford. So we have a fair idea of how the algorithm works, even though, as martin rightly points out, its been tweaked and moulded into something very different now.
But we *do* know PageRank improves as the dataset does. But yes, you are right, both are essentially black boxes. My main point is this isn't necessarily such a great thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only do I want to hear the questions, but I also would like to know what explanation is given for them. I live in a house of medics at a top 10 university that I won't name. None of them had heard of Intelligent Design, and why would they have done? They don't read Wired, and they don't check US Science web sites. I would say 90% of my non-geek friends haven't heard of it.
That some of the cleverest people I know haven't heard of Intelligent Design makes the 20+% of people very tough to swallow. They must have been presented with an explanation of the options. I would say there is also a sizable minority of Britons that don't understand Evolution, because they didn't care enough about school or science to listen.
You could present the options in such a way to make Intelligent Design sound like an attractive middle ground.
"Do you believe God created everything?"
"Do you believe we all are descended from single cells in a big soup millions of years ago?"
"Do you believe that there are things that Science can't explain, and that's where a higher power must have done something?"
You can't believe in ID if you've never been taught about it.
ID has a place in schools, and so does creationism. It's in Religious Education. I really valued that class; it opens your mind to other cultures and religions, and question your own beliefs. I was brought up in a church school, but a secular secondary school. It was when I did the project on "Does God exist?" that I ever questioned what I was told. I think ID is an important idea; a lot of belief systems seem to feel there are things that can't be explained (like Taoism). But I don't personally buy it. Evolution does happen. What creationis- sorry, ID proponents... should be looking for is looking at reasons why a deity might have set off evolution, or whether evolution is controlled. I mean, isn't it AMAZING how complex the brain and human body actually is?! That's as good a reason for a deity existing as any.
"Not going through a PR person, either. "
You did read the Blizzard interview didn't you?
We can talk a lot about what is and isn't allowed without a license, AFAIK its never been tested in court with open source because it is a frivolous case.
The part about the GPL claiming to not extend to use is poorly worded at best. I suggest reading the paper "Debugging open source licensing" (uni. of Pittsburgh Law Review Vol 64:75), which covers this very section.
"...the GPL does not grant a license to run a program... user of a copyrighted work outside the scope of a license is not only a breach of contract but it is a violation of the Copyright Act"
The author concludes that the piece does intend to allow use, but is worded in a contradictory fashion that muddies this issue.
You must agree to a license in order to use software with today's copyright law. Without any agreement made, copyright law does not allow you to use the software. TBH, I don't know *why* this is the case, it just is. I'd kinda blanked out during those lectures, they were damn early.
It was startling to me too.
Finally! I was reading through this thread waiting for someone to get this. I have no idea why the parent posted as an AC, he is entirely correct. I am writing a term paper right now about these very licenses.
If you do not agree to the GPL, you have not made any contractual agreement to be a licensee of the software. Without any license being agreed to, the software is protected by standard copyright law. Standard copyright law does not allow you to use the program, distribute it, or do anything else.
The parent's analgy is OK, but I prefer thinking of it as a bicycle. If I leave my bicycle outside, and you start riding it, you've stolen my bicycle. If we've already agreed you can ride it, everything is cool. The same thing applies to copyrighted works.
By using GPL software, you must agree to be bound by the GPLs terms.
For those that can't be bothered to RTFA, down the bottom you'll see:
"The amendment was approved 30 to 28, with 22 members of the UMP voting in favor. While there are 577 members of the lower house, few were present for last night's vote."
And if you look back up the article (obviously the author was trying to sensationalise this):
"The government can overturn the amendment, either by re- opening debate or if the Senate votes it down when the bill moves to the upper house. French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has asked that parliament re-open debate on the amendment today, Agence France Presse reported."
So only one-tenth of the house were present for the amendment. It seems like everyone else had gone home. 22 of the votes in favour were by a (what appears to be) minority party. As soon as parliament reconvenes, this will be gone. It's way too crazy/stupid/radical, I very much doubt the majority party want this, and you'd need a serious rebellion from that party in order to push this through.
It's not news so much as a political machination that happens all the time ("Quick! They're asleep! Slip in that amendment!")
2004 eh? Those comments have a long time coming. Jeez, and I thought waiting for WoW 1.9 was taking too long.
I'm rather upset I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of my +4 threshold comments page before *someone* understood what was going on.
El Reg are going to have a field day.
I mean, it's just a little sad that everyone here thought it was real, isn't it?
You're right about the ships. I would lovvvvveeeeeee if the game had instanced ships, and you levelled on them. So you pay your dues in the USS ElCrappo, and work your way up to the Enterprise. Your character slept on the ship, and performed a function on it, and the Enterprise needs a raid team of like 60 players just to man it. And you could sleep on it, and go on week-long missions.
It would be *immense*. I would get just as much satisafaction of being a cog in the system for the Captain as I would be actually being him.
You could make guilds have their own ships and work it that way.
Problem: You would have to roleplay it. If my Captain radios "w00t, we pwned the Klingon nubs!" that would be it for me.
I love these doodles! Google should have a user-submitted doodle every day; spice it up a bit.
Maybe there's a Greasemonkey script here...
You might be interested to known that Jim Rossingol is a journalist for Future Publishing in the UK (home of PC Gamer, Edge, Gamesmaster and others). He may have gone freelance, I stopped reading the last publication he was publically credited with a long time ago :)
Well yes, this is a case in point. He is on the front page usually once a day. Albeit this is often by a scattergun approach, a lot of people like what he does, have them on their friends list and wait and see if he posts stuff, and digg it. He is already almost what I described as a pseudo-editor.
You're right about the crap problem, and it will only get worse. As Digg continues to expand, so the number of users submitting stories is increasing. If we assume there's only so much interesting news a day, the crap ratio is going to increase as well. This seems to be happening already.
Digg will implode if the expansion continues, because no-one will be bothered to digg for anything that isn't on the front page. So in the end, those that have the time/inclination to wade through the stories will end up becoming pseudo-editors (you can promote a story on just 50 diggs if you submit at the right time), and then it'll either get dugg more by people who enjoyed it and can't be bothered to digg for stories, or it'll be reported out. Front page stories will only end up being the ones that the pseudo-editors like.
Losing the Digg we're-all-equal-community ethos seems inevitable. They should give up, and start weighting user votes. For example: users who post stories that are often promoted; those who digg stories that are often promoted; or those that comment well should have their submitted stories in one pool. Stories below this privledged status go into another one. The stories for all will still go to the front page, but the more esoteric stuff that a sizable majority enjoy reading about (which really made Digg; getting stories interesting to you that editors didn't think were worthy) will end up in the privaledged pool.
Like Taco said, scalability is going to be a big problem if you aren't ruling from the top-down.
IANAL, but I am sure their copying is legit. Libraries have certain exemptions in copyright law. Do you think that Stanford, Oxford et al are really all going to be wrong on what they can and cannot allow their visitors to do with their books? I'm not a librarian, but I trust Ivy League schools way more than I trust op-ed columns in newspapers for getting the law right.
Google can display those results under fair use. It is allowed to extract text that is not "substantional" (legalese for important, not amount taken). It is highly doubtful, under any reasonable interpretation of the law, that Google's snippets (assuming they look a lot like they do now) could ever be considered "substantial", regardless of which piece of text it displays to the user. However, Google is not a library, and needs (and probably will) take into account how many of these snippets are available. Obviously, allowing a user, however difficult, to piece together a book will be a copyright violation.
The op-ed piece made no legal points, but was a lot of huffing and puffing. They won't blow Google's house down with just hot air.
HTML is a lot harder to write a parser for, because of all the special cases it allows. You put an XML parser on an XHTML document, and bam, it's read. Do I know if parsers are any different speed wise? No (a slashdotter admitting there's something he doesn't know? Crazy! ;) ). I've never written an HTML parser. What I do know, is that because an XML parser is quicker and easier to write, it should be easier to optimize. Most complaints you might read about XML speed happen when it's shoved into pigeonholes it shouldn't be, flabbing out the physical size and creating a *lot* of redundant information, such as when its used when a database should be. This isn't what XHTML is trying to do, it adds a little bit extra, hardly noticable.
You apparently didn't read the parent to what I replied to. He was asking why XHTML was better than HTML at all. Taco can't control it, which is fine. Not his fault.
This is a lot like the argument for why bothering to comment, or why bothering to make code easy to understand, or why bother to code a web page in a half-arsed way as long as IE renders it OK.
.ch site). Good HTML will look almost exactly like XHTML, why not make that extra step?
/. should be easy.
Because its the Right Thing To Do.
Sure, it works fine as is. That's great. But if you can code in XHTML, why not? There are no good reasons not to apart from the fact you are lazy (I don't buy any of the arguments from that
XHTML enforces nice, clean code. None of the HTML fanboys can argue that. It can be parsed nicely in an XML parser, making it portable into all sorts of applications, from automagic web spiders making massive search engines, to little Java programs. HTML makes parsing more complicated, and the error handling an even bigger pain. Getting everyone to XHTML, especially technology flagwavers like
No, you don't have to do XHTML. But you should.
Um, am I the only one wondering what the point of sending a CD is? Apart from the "prestiege" for the people on said CD, if any intelligent life picks it up, they're not exactly going to be able to read it are they?
I have trouble enough making sure my Windows using friends don't send me documents in PowerPoint format, let alone intelligent life understanding our alphabet, then working out ASCII code, then working out binary.
It's a standards nightmare to make Tim Berners-Lee cry.
I switched from all email clients to Gmail a year ago, and I've never looked back.
Conversation view is marvellous. I am not talking about threading, I'm talking about about conversations. Seeing what I said, seeing what they said in response, hiding the quoted text... Searching email is also a pleasure. Why standard email clients show you a relevant snippet of text when you search for something when GMail has been doing it for at least a year just defies reasonable explanation. If I search for an email from a professor about a certain project, I don't want to sift through the text of five emails, I want to know which one I want. GMail shows you quickly.
Email - conversations - intelligent search = Dark Ages.
You really haven't used GMail, or you would understand this too. It's a moment of realisation, when you see your disjointed email world come together, is when you see it. It takes about a week, otherwise it's just like every other webmail app, just prettier.
Oh, and Google doesn't need to advertise anything. Word of mouth will do it for them.
Because the algorithm that filters results that are relevant? Perhaps Yahoo! only returns results with all search terms, and Google starts returning results with only some search terms.
Seriously, there are so many ways, I don't even know why you asked this.
This is a very important question, I wanted to ask it myself. Player retainment is very tightly bounded to player discovery in a genre, where, let's fact it, gameplay is not the main reason you are there. Exploration, social interaction, achievement. These are the reasons you play MMOs (exception PlanetSide?)
Once you reach endgame, there is nothing more to see. WoW has given all it can. There is nothing new, save starting a new class.
I *had* two level 40s stuck because I felt no need to progress, I wasn't going to get any new skills (cancelled my account, got too bored). The same goes for the game world; if it stays static players become bored. This does not not not mean adding a new instance you polish off in 3 hours, or adding one that needs a raid of 800 and a 24 time period. It just means making sure players have something new to see in the world they inhabit. Everything has been done before, there is nothing new to see.
World events were actually going to be part of the game world; see Stitches in Darkshire. Then a lot of plans were ditched, and now you have a world where there is no story or excitement. No-one is shouting in my guild chat about the super-amazing Darkmoon Faire opening up.
Asheron's Call should have been a new era in interactivity and content delivery. It should have ushered in a way of getting players, but retaining them well past the original game sell-by date which wasn't just the obsessive players losing their lifes to grinding and guild chat. It wasn't. Why?
Agreed, whoever conducted this "research" is pretty idiotic. The pages returned != pages available.
This isn't worthy of the NCSA, or indeed any university, to be shown in any public format with any conclusions at *all*. You'd be laughed out of the conference hall if you presented this.
Apple is a brand that is based on quality. What you're advocating is running the brand through the mud, exactly what the company doesn't want.
Not supporting things is sure-fire way for customer support to decline.
Supporting things that cause it to run like crap is a sure-fire way for customer support to decline.
Apple can only, and should only, release OS X on their own hardware, where the quality of user experience is assured.
This is what will happen.
Google uses a derivative of Brin and Wall's PageRank research that was published at Stanford. So we have a fair idea of how the algorithm works, even though, as martin rightly points out, its been tweaked and moulded into something very different now.
Let's not blow the bias whistle on this one, hmm?
But we *do* know PageRank improves as the dataset does. But yes, you are right, both are essentially black boxes. My main point is this isn't necessarily such a great thing.