More to the point, the writers of 18th century English grammars took it upon themselves to "improve" the language. "A double negative is the same as a positive" is a rule that they attempted to add to the language, in hopes that it would make teaching the students logic later on easier. It didn't, since the real problem with teaching students logic is that human brains aren't wired up in terms of formal logic. For the same reason, though, once the new rule was established in a few textbooks, it kept being taught, and quickly spread to other textbooks.
(Why did it spread to other textbooks? One of the selling points authors of grammar books used was a "feature count" -- that is, boasting of how many grammar rules their books had. As tends to happen when feature count is a selling point, this led to copying of features from others, and the addition of useless features just to up the count -- in this case, more 'rules' added to the grammar texts that were not, in fact, pre-existing grammatical rules of English, but were simply things the writers made up.)
The problem that you're seeing here is that there are two forms of grammar: descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar.
Descriptive grammar is what linguists mean by "grammar" -- it comprises the rules for how sentences in the language are constructed. In English, examples of descriptive grammar would be things like "A declarative sentence is written in the order subject-verb-object" or "An adjective is placed before the noun it modifies".
Prescriptive grammar is part of what English teachers teach -- it is a set of rules for how the language "should" be spoken. In English, two of the typical examples are "'ain't' is not a word" and "never split an infinitive".
Historically, the teaching of prescriptive grammar in England arose from rising social mobility: newly wealthy people were ridiculed for not sounding like their new peers, so they went to schools (and sent their children to schools) to learn to speak that way. Thus, "grammar schools" taught people to speak like the London upper-middle and lower-upper class. Books were also published about "how to speak properly", and the writers of those books competed, among other ways, in the number of rules that they offered. Some of them were also reformers who aimed to "improve" English.
This led to the teaching of rules that were not, in fact, rules of English grammar (in the descriptive sense), and some that had no grounding whatsoever in English. At the time, Latin was held by many of the educated to be a "better" language than English, so many of the rules that were added were intended to make English more like Latin (or, from an alternative point of view, to make it easier for the students being taught to later learn Latin). "Never split an infinitive" is such a rule -- in Latin, an infinitive is a single word, and thus, cannot be split. The rule was never an actual rule of English until educators decided to try to make it one.
As the famous linguist Steven Pinker has put it, the prescriptive grammar rules taught in English classes in school have as much to do with what English actually is as the rules for judging breeds at a dog show have to do with what a dog actually is. "Never split an infinitive" is one of those, and bears as much relation to a sentence being grammatically understandable as the AKC's rule that a Yorkshire Terrier's head hair should be "tied with one bow in center of head or parted in the middle and tied with two bows" has to do with the dog in question being healthy.
Actually, the law said it was a misdemeanor to "intentionally send false data". Now, you could parse that as "(intentionally) (send false data)", but you could also parse that as "(intentionally send) (false data)". Under the second parsing, it would be a crime not only to lie, but even to be mistaken about something!
Here's the problem: creationism doesn't answer the question at hand. The question is: "How did the complex systems we see around us arise?" The creationist answer is "They were designed." This, however, begs the question, because the posited designer is as or more complex than the systems the designer is supposed to explain. Thus, the question is merely pushed back a step to become "How did the designer arise?"
Now, at this point, one option is to posit a designer-designer. This, however, leads to an infinite regress -- "How did the designer-designer arise? How did the designer-designer-designer arise?" etc.
Another option is to give up trying to answer the question: "We don't know. The designer is ineffable and beyond understanding" or "The designer is pre-existing; it was never created, but has always been." While this is an answer it's not a scientific answer without solid proof that the designer exists and is as described; without that proof, you've moved into the realms of faith, religion, and mysticism.
So, if you want to answer the original question in a scientific manner, you have to come up with some means by which complex systems could arise from only simpler systems. Evolution through natural selection is the best answer that has been found so far.
Patents, unfortunately, are not the same thing as copyrights. Just because an API can't be copyrighted doesn't mean it can't be patented. You might want to read the full ruling -- Alsup actually talks about that in it. (Now, most likely Microsoft's patents on wireless APIs have prior art and shouldn't have been granted, but this ruling doesn't affect their patents at all.)
Yes, modern use has deviated from the original meaning of the word. This is only a "problem", however, for pedants. (And pedants should note that while one in ten was the most common decimation, the Romans sometimes "decimated" units by one in five, one in eight, or other measures... but did not bother using different words for that. They simply used "decimatio" as the term for the punishment, regardless of the proportion actually chosen. Thus, even the Romans didn't adhere to the literal meaning in their use of the word.)
How would you apply this, to, say, FreeDOS? The DOS system calls can be considered a library that the running programs are using. FreeDOS is GPL. Since DOS has no memory protection, any program run under FreeDOS is running in the same memory address space as FreeDOS.
So... must any program that runs under FreeDOS be GPL? Even programs that were written years before FreeDOS ever existed? To posit such seems ridiculous.
(And note that FreeDOS is *not* distributed under the LGPL -- it's under the full GPL. Further, if the reason that the GPL doesn't become infectious here is that the API's copyright doesn't belong to FreeDOS' creators, then the same argument would apply to, say, glibc -- GNU doesn't own the C library APIs, so glibc shouldn't be able to "infect" a program that calls it through them. And if APIs in general are not copyrightable, then the argument applies to *any* library, as long as all you are doing is accessing it via its API.)
Symphonic musicians don't sell *their* music - they're paid to perform *someone else's* music. The equivalent in the recording industry would be "session musicians", who are paid to play in recording studios when a band needs an extra person, someone who plays an instrument no one in the band plays, etc. Depending on the area, they charge $75 - $150 an hour for their work. There are people in LA, Nashville, and NYC who make their sole living doing that.
Keep in mind, though, that this is meant to be a textbook for an advanced biology course, not a "general interest" book. The author therefore assumes that readers will have the requisite background and doesn't explain biological jargon, just as the author of a calculus textbook doesn't explain terms from algebra, geometry, etc.
One major problem is that concluding that there was an actual designer simply pushes the problem back a step: where did the designer come from? Opting for a designer requires either acceptance of a miracle ("the designer's existence can't be explained"), an infinite regress ("the designer was designed by a designer-designer, who was designed by a designer-designer-designer, who..."), or brings you back to needing a method for a complex being to arise without a designer.
You might want to go back and read the history written by those involved yourself. Specifically, the stories on folklore.org, written by people who participated in the creation of the Macintosh. The bit about not knowing that Xerox's interface didn't allow drawing into a covered window and didn't automatically redraw parts of windows when they were uncovered comes from there. (Specifically, from the story "On Xerox, Apple, and Progress", written by Bruce Horn -- who worked first at Xerox, then later at Apple.)
Actually, Apple didn't "license" it from Xerox. This was before anyone had decided that a UI could be protected by copyright. Rather, Apple and Xerox negotiated for Apple's engineers to be allowed to visit PARC and see Xerox's UI in action. Apple didn't get an actual working Xerox Alto to play with, nor did they get any materials, code, or anything else but a few demos. Their source of knowledge about Xerox's UI when they began designing the Lisa/Mac UI was seeing it in action on their visits.
Didn't think you were trying to troll, which is why I gave a simple and direct answer! And I'll note that Jobs wasn't responsible for each and every improvement of the Apple UI over the Xerox one -- he came up with the ideas for some of them, and exercised a lot of control over the UI's appearance, but he wasn't the source of everything, which is why I keep saying "Apple's people" in my post. A lot of people contributed to the Mac's UI.
Interestingly enough, Apple's people came away from their quick tour through PARC thinking that Xerox's interface did things that it didn't actually do. For example, Xerox's interface didn't allow programs to draw into a portion of a window that was obscured, and didn't have self-repairing windows -- when you dragged one window off of another, you had to click the revealed window to get it to repaint. Apple's people didn't realize that Xerox's system didn't allow those things, and thus, designed QuickDraw and the Lisa/Mac Window Manager so they *did* allow those.
Another example is drag-and-drop file management. It seems like such an obvious thing with icons for files and a mouse, but Xerox's interface didn't have it. Apple's people invented it on their own for the Lisa/Mac interface. Some other things that the Lisa/Mac interface did that Xerox's didn't:
* "Direct manipulation" of file/folder/etc. names (i.e., click on the name and type to edit it)
* Pull-down menus
* Resource forks for files, allowing for easy, clean internationalization of applications
* Files having type IDs and creator IDs embedded, so you could simply double-click a file and have it open in the appropriate application, no matter what folder it was in
* The clipboard holding typed data (and holding multiple representations of the same data)
* Desk accessories and control panels
So, as you can see, the Lisa/Mac interface was *not* just a copy of Xerox's. Quite a few things were added by Apple's team.
Never said it did. It's just that the surge suppressor doesn't help if the lightning strike goes through your house. Thus, if lightning strikes are the worry, having both would be a good idea.
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You would post that comment on a day that I don't have mod points. Dammit.
(Why did it spread to other textbooks? One of the selling points authors of grammar books used was a "feature count" -- that is, boasting of how many grammar rules their books had. As tends to happen when feature count is a selling point, this led to copying of features from others, and the addition of useless features just to up the count -- in this case, more 'rules' added to the grammar texts that were not, in fact, pre-existing grammatical rules of English, but were simply things the writers made up.)
Descriptive grammar is what linguists mean by "grammar" -- it comprises the rules for how sentences in the language are constructed. In English, examples of descriptive grammar would be things like "A declarative sentence is written in the order subject-verb-object" or "An adjective is placed before the noun it modifies".
Prescriptive grammar is part of what English teachers teach -- it is a set of rules for how the language "should" be spoken. In English, two of the typical examples are "'ain't' is not a word" and "never split an infinitive".
Historically, the teaching of prescriptive grammar in England arose from rising social mobility: newly wealthy people were ridiculed for not sounding like their new peers, so they went to schools (and sent their children to schools) to learn to speak that way. Thus, "grammar schools" taught people to speak like the London upper-middle and lower-upper class. Books were also published about "how to speak properly", and the writers of those books competed, among other ways, in the number of rules that they offered. Some of them were also reformers who aimed to "improve" English.
This led to the teaching of rules that were not, in fact, rules of English grammar (in the descriptive sense), and some that had no grounding whatsoever in English. At the time, Latin was held by many of the educated to be a "better" language than English, so many of the rules that were added were intended to make English more like Latin (or, from an alternative point of view, to make it easier for the students being taught to later learn Latin). "Never split an infinitive" is such a rule -- in Latin, an infinitive is a single word, and thus, cannot be split. The rule was never an actual rule of English until educators decided to try to make it one.
As the famous linguist Steven Pinker has put it, the prescriptive grammar rules taught in English classes in school have as much to do with what English actually is as the rules for judging breeds at a dog show have to do with what a dog actually is. "Never split an infinitive" is one of those, and bears as much relation to a sentence being grammatically understandable as the AKC's rule that a Yorkshire Terrier's head hair should be "tied with one bow in center of head or parted in the middle and tied with two bows" has to do with the dog in question being healthy.
Innovators in the last 40 years in operating systems? Who could that Be?
I do it, and have for all of the 26 years I've been driving, having read about it before I ever started driving.
However, far too many people try to drive *while* doing those things.
If you really want to know what the machine is doing, write microcode.
Actually, the law said it was a misdemeanor to "intentionally send false data". Now, you could parse that as "(intentionally) (send false data)", but you could also parse that as "(intentionally send) (false data)". Under the second parsing, it would be a crime not only to lie, but even to be mistaken about something!
That's because their plan is to use those guns to intimidate others into digging privies and farming *for* them.
Now, at this point, one option is to posit a designer-designer. This, however, leads to an infinite regress -- "How did the designer-designer arise? How did the designer-designer-designer arise?" etc.
Another option is to give up trying to answer the question: "We don't know. The designer is ineffable and beyond understanding" or "The designer is pre-existing; it was never created, but has always been." While this is an answer it's not a scientific answer without solid proof that the designer exists and is as described; without that proof, you've moved into the realms of faith, religion, and mysticism.
So, if you want to answer the original question in a scientific manner, you have to come up with some means by which complex systems could arise from only simpler systems. Evolution through natural selection is the best answer that has been found so far.
Patents, unfortunately, are not the same thing as copyrights. Just because an API can't be copyrighted doesn't mean it can't be patented. You might want to read the full ruling -- Alsup actually talks about that in it. (Now, most likely Microsoft's patents on wireless APIs have prior art and shouldn't have been granted, but this ruling doesn't affect their patents at all.)
Yes, modern use has deviated from the original meaning of the word. This is only a "problem", however, for pedants. (And pedants should note that while one in ten was the most common decimation, the Romans sometimes "decimated" units by one in five, one in eight, or other measures... but did not bother using different words for that. They simply used "decimatio" as the term for the punishment, regardless of the proportion actually chosen. Thus, even the Romans didn't adhere to the literal meaning in their use of the word.)
I don't think they could charge all of Oracle's customers twice what Oracle already charged them. I'm not sure there's that much money in the world.
How would you apply this, to, say, FreeDOS? The DOS system calls can be considered a library that the running programs are using. FreeDOS is GPL. Since DOS has no memory protection, any program run under FreeDOS is running in the same memory address space as FreeDOS. So... must any program that runs under FreeDOS be GPL? Even programs that were written years before FreeDOS ever existed? To posit such seems ridiculous. (And note that FreeDOS is *not* distributed under the LGPL -- it's under the full GPL. Further, if the reason that the GPL doesn't become infectious here is that the API's copyright doesn't belong to FreeDOS' creators, then the same argument would apply to, say, glibc -- GNU doesn't own the C library APIs, so glibc shouldn't be able to "infect" a program that calls it through them. And if APIs in general are not copyrightable, then the argument applies to *any* library, as long as all you are doing is accessing it via its API.)
Symphonic musicians don't sell *their* music - they're paid to perform *someone else's* music. The equivalent in the recording industry would be "session musicians", who are paid to play in recording studios when a band needs an extra person, someone who plays an instrument no one in the band plays, etc. Depending on the area, they charge $75 - $150 an hour for their work. There are people in LA, Nashville, and NYC who make their sole living doing that.
Keep in mind, though, that this is meant to be a textbook for an advanced biology course, not a "general interest" book. The author therefore assumes that readers will have the requisite background and doesn't explain biological jargon, just as the author of a calculus textbook doesn't explain terms from algebra, geometry, etc.
One major problem is that concluding that there was an actual designer simply pushes the problem back a step: where did the designer come from? Opting for a designer requires either acceptance of a miracle ("the designer's existence can't be explained"), an infinite regress ("the designer was designed by a designer-designer, who was designed by a designer-designer-designer, who..."), or brings you back to needing a method for a complex being to arise without a designer.
You might want to go back and read the history written by those involved yourself. Specifically, the stories on folklore.org, written by people who participated in the creation of the Macintosh. The bit about not knowing that Xerox's interface didn't allow drawing into a covered window and didn't automatically redraw parts of windows when they were uncovered comes from there. (Specifically, from the story "On Xerox, Apple, and Progress", written by Bruce Horn -- who worked first at Xerox, then later at Apple.)
Actually, Apple didn't "license" it from Xerox. This was before anyone had decided that a UI could be protected by copyright. Rather, Apple and Xerox negotiated for Apple's engineers to be allowed to visit PARC and see Xerox's UI in action. Apple didn't get an actual working Xerox Alto to play with, nor did they get any materials, code, or anything else but a few demos. Their source of knowledge about Xerox's UI when they began designing the Lisa/Mac UI was seeing it in action on their visits.
Didn't think you were trying to troll, which is why I gave a simple and direct answer! And I'll note that Jobs wasn't responsible for each and every improvement of the Apple UI over the Xerox one -- he came up with the ideas for some of them, and exercised a lot of control over the UI's appearance, but he wasn't the source of everything, which is why I keep saying "Apple's people" in my post. A lot of people contributed to the Mac's UI.
Another example is drag-and-drop file management. It seems like such an obvious thing with icons for files and a mouse, but Xerox's interface didn't have it. Apple's people invented it on their own for the Lisa/Mac interface. Some other things that the Lisa/Mac interface did that Xerox's didn't:
* "Direct manipulation" of file/folder/etc. names (i.e., click on the name and type to edit it)
* Pull-down menus
* Resource forks for files, allowing for easy, clean internationalization of applications
* Files having type IDs and creator IDs embedded, so you could simply double-click a file and have it open in the appropriate application, no matter what folder it was in
* The clipboard holding typed data (and holding multiple representations of the same data)
* Desk accessories and control panels
So, as you can see, the Lisa/Mac interface was *not* just a copy of Xerox's. Quite a few things were added by Apple's team.
And a surge suppressor won't help if your house itself is struck. Ideally, you want both if you're in a lightning-prone area and worried about it.
Never said it did. It's just that the surge suppressor doesn't help if the lightning strike goes through your house. Thus, if lightning strikes are the worry, having both would be a good idea.
There, fixed that for you.
If lightning is your worry, have you thought about installing a lightning rod?