We've got much better motivators than slavery for making lasting works...
Name a few.
If you are aluding to the profit motive, which has moved so many carbon atoms into the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the earth, then it appears that by both tonnage and duration-of-impact we have dwarfed the achievement of the egomaniacal pharoah. If you find that example contentious, substitute the Panama Canal.
It is trivial given sufficient cruelty and a legal system that enforces slavery. You simply torment generations of slaves into piling up such a quantity of stones that only another generation of tormentees could disperse it again, and aim at being the most cruel, egotistical slave master for 5,000 years.
What in the article gives you the impression that the clock is intended to display the local time to the second?
When you read an article, read the sidebars too, and discover things such as:
HOW THE CLOCK CAN BE READ
The Clock of the Long Now prototype features an orrery, a simplified planetary display. The shperical cage of the orrery, called the firmament, is tilted at 23.27 degrees, the angle of he Earth's axis in relation to the flat plane of the planets as they radiate out form the sun. The cage includes a celestial equator with degree markings for measuring the alignment of the planets at any given time.
When you read an article, don't skip over the numbers, and you won't miss things such as:
A calculation that extends to 28 bits is accurate to one in 3.65 millionor in clock terms, one day in 10,000 years.
The clock is intended to be accurate to the day, not to the second.
Finally, when you read an article, read at least two thirds of it, and you won't miss things such as:
[W]hat to display gives Hillis the most pause. All cultures recognize days, months, and years because they spring from simple "once around" astronomical cycles, but hours, weeks, centuries, and other divisions are arbitrary, varying wildly across times and places. Hillis is still mulling how to handle that, but he knows for sure that the final clock will somehow mirror the positions of the planets relative to the stars and to one another. "That will be one of many displays it has," he says.
Longevity is trivial for a construction with no moving parts. Silbury Hill in better shape than the Great Pyramid, because its builders understood that no one would bother stealing chalk. The Great Pyramid is the most impressive big pile of rocks on the planet, but the Clock of the Long Now, if successful, will surpass it as a Wonder.
The project does not assume the people of 07005 will be more advanced. On the contrary, one of the constraints is "mechanism must be maintainable with bronze-age technology." Read the article.
That point, the contingency of time period names and divisions, is addressed in the article. Your comments will contribute more if you read the article. You will also become more informed.
You cannot seriously believe that "how to read the clock" is a bigger problem than "how to you build an accurate mechanism that will remain in motion for ten thousand years." The ancient engineers you cite failed to create a mechanism in the first place. Your argument makes a virtue of their necessity. Creating a mechanism was beyond them; they could focus on intelligibility, and they flunked at that. A single, broken Rosetta Stone is a shabby effort.
The works you cite are static, fixed, immobile. There is no precedent for a mechanism that can function accurately for ten thousand years. Stop worshiping the dead.
Based on the line drawing you linked to, that clock is built with gears. Gears wear down over time and make the clock inaccurate. Read the article, anonymous coward.
Can you point to a particular line in the Linux kernel or Apache, for example, and identify who screwed it up?
Are you familiar with Subversion's blame subcommand? From the documentation: Show author and revision information in-line for the specified files or URLs. Each line of text is annotated at the beginning with the author (username) and the revision number for the last change to that line.
So it is trivial to find who screwed up a particular line in a FOSS project where the repository is CVS or Subversion.
Then there are the people who just don't care, or the excuse-makers who always blame the "impedance mismatch" between two pieces of code on the other guy or say that you can't apply traditional software-engineering standards when anyone who doesn't like it can change it themselves, etc. etc.
People who just don't care about the code are more likely to be working for money in a closed-source proprietary environment, where there is the temptation to use obscure techniques to enhance job security, than they are to be contributing to a FOSS project.
The "other guy" that people who blame the other guy would like to blame is likely to be known to the project lead, and better known than the excuse-maker. Shifting fault to another department "works" in an environment where functional software is merely an expendable means to an end, the true end being promostion within the system to a more rewarding position; because the customer is a captive, and has the choice of tolerating whatever disfunctional mess you provide or incurring the cost of changing to another system. It fails in FOSS; there is no other guy to blame, because after all you can identify the problem in whatever codebase it may lie and provide the patch; and the customer who despairs of your ever solving your organizational psychodrama has everything needed to begin a fork-with-less-crankiness.
In FOSS, any compulsion to follow a software engineering principle arises from a desire to get your changes accepted by the maintainers, not from a desire for a promotion or fear of demotion. Maintainers who misjudge the balance between regulation and laxity will lack for contributors. In the closed proprietary environment, a programmer need please only the person who wields administrative authority (the ability to hire, fire, and adjust salary).
Do not by deliberate policy require taxpayers to purchase upgrades to operating systems deprecated as insufficiently modern by entities with a commercial interest in selling said upgrades. Policy must be to assure that documents created at taxpayer expense will never become unreadable because an entity with a commercial interest in the sale of novel document software issues an end of life statement. Use of a secret storage format whose details are known only to a vendor and whose details may not lawfully be reverse engineered is grossly irresponsible.
FOSS coders expect their code will be read and that every semicolon will be traceable to them in perpetuity. This suggests FOSS benefits from the Hawthorne Effect. Closed source suffers from the Gyges' Ring Moral Hazard.
Messages can have more than one label, right? So you can label everything from, say, the Linux Users' Group mailing list with both "LUG" and "autolabel," and everything from the Good Government Advocates "Policy" and "autolabel." Then you say "View everything not marked "autolabel" and you'll get all your unlabeled mail.
Google is not taking a copy for themselves; they are acting as agents of the libraries.
Participants in Google Print can limit their book's visibility, with a minimum of 20%. Google Print is akin to browsing and is designed to present whole pages. Google Library emulates the subject, author, and title section of a card catalog and is designed to guide readers to a whole copy.
You appear to be confusing Google Print and the Google Library project.
The work you mention is in Google Print only because the publisher asked for it to be. Part of the terms are
In addition, you can choose how much of your book a user will be able to view over a 30 day period, from 20% of your content up to 100%. Portions of your book will be available to all interested users, but those users wanting to browse additional pages must sign in with their Google Account to view the full pages. (They will still be restricted to the percentage of the book you choose to make available.)
From TFA:
Let's be clear: Google doesn't show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more).
Google provides a screenshot of how an indexed excerpt looks.
You appear to be mistaken. Google considers all books published since 1922 copyrighted. Excerpts, not whole works, of copyrighted works will appear with neither ads nor sales links. Copyright holders may opt in to ads and sales links and share revenue.
Opt-out is correct, and generous. Libraries have special privileges under copyright; Google is providing an archival service to the libraries for the libraries' own lawfully-held books. Authors cannot opt-out of the lending library system.
Slashdot Mirror
We've got much better motivators than slavery for making lasting works ...
Name a few.
If you are aluding to the profit motive, which has moved so many carbon atoms into the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the earth, then it appears that by both tonnage and duration-of-impact we have dwarfed the achievement of the egomaniacal pharoah. If you find that example contentious, substitute the Panama Canal.
What in the article leads you to believe that Brad Lemley is authoritative with respect to what the clock shall track?
It is trivial given sufficient cruelty and a legal system that enforces slavery. You simply torment generations of slaves into piling up such a quantity of stones that only another generation of tormentees could disperse it again, and aim at being the most cruel, egotistical slave master for 5,000 years.
When you read an article, read the sidebars too, and discover things such as:
When you read an article, don't skip over the numbers, and you won't miss things such as:
The clock is intended to be accurate to the day, not to the second.
Finally, when you read an article, read at least two thirds of it, and you won't miss things such as:
Longevity is trivial for a construction with no moving parts. Silbury Hill in better shape than the Great Pyramid, because its builders understood that no one would bother stealing chalk. The Great Pyramid is the most impressive big pile of rocks on the planet, but the Clock of the Long Now, if successful, will surpass it as a Wonder.
Read the article. The clock corrects itself for variations in day length.
The project does not assume the people of 07005 will be more advanced. On the contrary, one of the constraints is "mechanism must be maintainable with bronze-age technology." Read the article.
It was not being big that harmed Microsoft, it was being able to commit crimes and escape punishment.
The Great Pyramid at Giza fails to track precession. If it is a clock, it is a crummy one.
That point, the contingency of time period names and divisions, is addressed in the article. Your comments will contribute more if you read the article. You will also become more informed.
You cannot seriously believe that "how to read the clock" is a bigger problem than "how to you build an accurate mechanism that will remain in motion for ten thousand years." The ancient engineers you cite failed to create a mechanism in the first place. Your argument makes a virtue of their necessity. Creating a mechanism was beyond them; they could focus on intelligibility, and they flunked at that. A single, broken Rosetta Stone is a shabby effort.
It will show the position of the planets as seen from the surface of the origin world, as you would know if you had read the article before posting.
The works you cite are static, fixed, immobile. There is no precedent for a mechanism that can function accurately for ten thousand years. Stop worshiping the dead.
You are confused. 10,000 years is not permanence.
Based on the line drawing you linked to, that clock is built with gears. Gears wear down over time and make the clock inaccurate. Read the article, anonymous coward.
Are you familiar with Subversion's blame subcommand? From the documentation: Show author and revision information in-line for the specified files or URLs. Each line of text is annotated at the beginning with the author (username) and the revision number for the last change to that line.
CVS has blame as well; here's a screenshot.
So it is trivial to find who screwed up a particular line in a FOSS project where the repository is CVS or Subversion.
Do not by deliberate policy require taxpayers to purchase upgrades to operating systems deprecated as insufficiently modern by entities with a commercial interest in selling said upgrades. Policy must be to assure that documents created at taxpayer expense will never become unreadable because an entity with a commercial interest in the sale of novel document software issues an end of life statement. Use of a secret storage format whose details are known only to a vendor and whose details may not lawfully be reverse engineered is grossly irresponsible.
FOSS coders expect their code will be read and that every semicolon will be traceable to them in perpetuity. This suggests FOSS benefits from the Hawthorne Effect. Closed source suffers from the Gyges' Ring Moral Hazard.
Messages can have more than one label, right? So you can label everything from, say, the Linux Users' Group mailing list with both "LUG" and "autolabel," and everything from the Good Government Advocates "Policy" and "autolabel." Then you say "View everything not marked "autolabel" and you'll get all your unlabeled mail.
Google is not taking a copy for themselves; they are acting as agents of the libraries.
Participants in Google Print can limit their book's visibility, with a minimum of 20%. Google Print is akin to browsing and is designed to present whole pages. Google Library emulates the subject, author, and title section of a card catalog and is designed to guide readers to a whole copy.
The work you mention is in Google Print only because the publisher asked for it to be. Part of the terms are
From TFA:
Google provides a screenshot of how an indexed excerpt looks.
Do you understand now? Thanks!
Technically speaking, Google is not copying the books, it is creating an encoding which allows the contents of the books to be retrieved.
You appear to be mistaken. Google considers all books published since 1922 copyrighted. Excerpts, not whole works, of copyrighted works will appear with neither ads nor sales links. Copyright holders may opt in to ads and sales links and share revenue.
Opt-out is correct, and generous. Libraries have special privileges under copyright; Google is providing an archival service to the libraries for the libraries' own lawfully-held books. Authors cannot opt-out of the lending library system.