I refer you to the Robustness Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle). It applies to natural languages as well as artificial ones.
As a presumable geek (since you're on Slashdot), you might want to refresh your memory about the Robustness Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle). It applies to natural languages as well as artificial ones. In both the cases you ridiculed, the intended meaning was plain.
Regarding your statement "a _valid_ argument and/or statement should be able to transform in such a manner" (i.e., by substituting the word 'baseball' for the word religion), on the other hand, is completely nonsensical. Many statements about religion will no longer be valid if you substitute the word 'baseball' instead. For example: "Religion has been blamed for many wars." This is a true statement (note the phrasing "blamed for" - I'm not speaking of whether religion was actually at fault). However, "Baseball has been blamed for many wars" is not a true statement. Or "most adherents of a religion find it to be a source of comfort and stability in their lives" versus "most adherents of a baseball find it to be a source of comfort and stability in their lives". If you change the subject of an argument or statement, naturally other portions of it will have to be changed to match, unless you change it to something that is a synonym or closely related.
And yes, he was bashing religion indirectly. But guess what? A religion is a choice. You compare it to racial minorities, but it's not at all the same, because being of a certain race is not a choice.
Quite a few people have advanced logical, coherent arguments against the statements that the poster you first replied to in this thread, treating them as respectfully as they were phrased. You, however, chose to be far less generous, both in your acceptance of grammatical mistakes, and in your assessment of the person making them. You might want to think about the way you're trying to defend religion, and how it makes religious people look.
If you're looking for something free to work with Dbase III+ files, try Visual Foxpro (version 9.0 is freely downloadable from MS) on Windows or DollyBase on Mac. Or look at the xBase (the generic term for dBase-compatibles) article on Wikipedia.
Forth (it's not an acronym - early versions wrote it in all caps just because the systems they were on didn't have lowercase) is still in use today, although cheap, powerful computing has made Linux and C move into a lot of the embedded systems niches where it used to be popular. It was briefly popular again on the Palm computers, thanks to the excellent implementation of a native Forth compiler (Quartus).
If you want software impact, though, it might be better to go with PostScript, which had syntax inspired by Forth - and essentially took over the printing world. Its descendant, Portable Document Format (PDF), has taken over the field of document transfer.
Umm... released in 1968. Commercial passenger flight was a few decades old at that point. It may have made it easier, but certainly didn't make it possible.
Here's the thing: breaking and entering wasn't the crime he was being charged with. If he had been charged with that, checking the Massachusetts sentencing guidelines, the worst he could have gotten was 12 months. More likely, he'd get a fine or probation.
The crime the federal prosector decided to charge him with was "unauthorized access of a computer system". However, MIT has an open-access network policy, allowing anyone to use their network, and he had a legal account with JSTOR through his status at Harvard, which allowed him to download articles from them free of charge. Further, JSTOR did not ask for criminal charges to be pressed.
We don't know what the prosecutor's theory for how his access was unauthorized was, and likely never will know, since the prosecutor won't have to present the case. As people have said, though, the facts of the case, taking into account only the charges the federal prosecutor decided to go with, basically seem to boil down to checking too many books out of a library. The only possible harm that resulted was that other people's downloads were a bit slower because of his traffic. This isn't something that should be punishable by jail time at all.
Now, if it were the breaking and entering charges that he had been pursued under, I'd have to agree with you - what he did in that regard was stupid, and obviously illegal. But again, that is not the charge that he was facing, and the maximum sentence for that would have been 12 months.
Apparently he did break and enter a wiring closet to connect his laptop. Still, though, given the traditions at MIT of what sort of pranks and hacks happen, this seems like a huge overreaction... and the government's case against him seems to have centered around "unauthorized downloading", rather than the breaking and entering.
He had a lawfully acquired account on the system he was downloading from. He had a lawfully acquired account on the network he was using. He didn't "break and enter" anything - at most, he may have violated rules on the amount of downloading permitted. Neither JSTOR (the company from which he was downloading) nor MIT (the university whose network he was using to do the downloading) asked for charges to be pressed - the prosecutor decided to do that on his own.
In point of fact, we don't know what theory the prosecutor intended to present to show that his access was "unauthorized", and therefore a crime under current US law, and we may never know, since the case will now never be presented.
The oxygen in the acid came from the water. The oxygen that's coming from the atmosphere to to combine with the hydrogen when burning it becomes water - specifically, water vapor which goes off in the flame to mix with the rest of the atmosphere... where it can then be used by plants for photosynthesis.
For the acid itself, if you'll read the article, you'll see that it's silicic acid. You can then look up 'silicic acid' on Google, which took me to the Wikipedia page for it, where it mentions that silicic acids (apparently there's a whole family of them): (a) tend to lose their water content easily, drying out to become silica gel and water; (b) have been suggested as a possible nutritional supplement to help prevent Alzheimer's, since they tend to absorb aluminum, which has been implicated in Alzheimers, and (c) in the ocean are used by diatoms to build their silicon-based 'skeletons'. So, it doesn't look like disposal of the acid would be much of a problem.
Flames of pure hydrogen are very hard to see - however, when there are impurities present and also burning, the flame can be very easy to see. See, for example, photos of the Hindenburg burning. Using sea water, the flame would likely be very visible. See, for example, this video showing sea water being burned using a different process for extracting hydrogen from it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8utkoK2DhA
Well, in fairness, I'm not sure that any beancounters decided that. They're using DriveThruRPG (with a customized site for their products), and from what I remember, DriveThruRPG's system watermarks everything you download from them automatically. Even stuff that's free as in beer, under a Creative Commons License, whatever - it's just something their back-end does, and they don't seem to have an option for vendors to select to turn it off.
Of course, there's a good chance that they consider that a feature rather than a bug, but it isn't anything that anyone at WotC specifically requested that DriveThruRPG do. It's just the way their stuff already worked.
Further note, after looking through everything being offered on dndclassics.com - they have the 1981 Basic Rulebook available there... but they don't have any of the "core three" from any edition of AD&D. Back in 2000, when Ryan Dancey was talking about what Wizards had discovered by looking through TSR's sales records, he mentioned that the perennial best sellers were the three core AD&D books, and that the Player's Handbook was the best selling of those. (Which makes sense, as there are a lot more players than DMs.)
Wizards has already released new in-print versions of the core three for 1st edition AD&D, and announced it for "3.5". My guess is that they're going to release print versions of the 2nd edition core books as well, and that's why they're not putting up PDF versions of those. As for Basic... well, the Basic Rulebook only covers levels 1-3 anyway, and Basic/Expert/etc. was never as popular as AD&D. If they're going to re-release a book in print there, they'll probably do the D&D Cyclopedia.
Interesting - no one had mentioned so far that they were putting up 4e products as well.
Note, though, that they only have nine products listed for 4e - all of which are older products from the line, but which doesn't include any core products. Unfortunately, Wizard's site doesn't give in-print/out-of-print status for their books, but I'd be willing to bet that all nine of those products are ones that Wizards is no longer producing in print. In that case, while there may still be copies in the supply chain, there's no more money flowing to Wizards from print versions of them - so, again, they would have no print sales to risk by putting out electronic versions.
You do realize that they are not forcing you to buy any of it, right? Do you really think that just because you don't want it, they shouldn't make it available at all?
You obviously didn't look at it much. The 'battle cards' you're referring to are simply cards that list different abilities and what they do, to make it easier to keep track of what your character can do, instead of looking up the ability in the books all the time. They're no different from the spell cards that were produced for earlier editions - the difference is that instead of only spell-casting classes getting interesting abilities, everyone does in 4e.
The underlying mechanics are still the "d20 System" that was used in 3.x, with an extension for handling group tasks.
You know that almost no one outside of academia actually used troff, right?
He didn't say that computerized typesetting didn't exist then. He said the original Chainmail almost certainly wasn't laid out with it. Do you have some evidence to indicate otherwise?
The first 3 books (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual) weren't originally digitally typeset, but WotC has already gone through the process of doing that for the "1e premium" releases and they're in InDesign, so there should be clean text available without OCR.
For those three books, yes. That still leaves all of Original D&D (eight books), the other books of first edition AD&D (nine books, if I'm remembering right, though the last couple may have been typeset), the 1980 Basic and Expert sets (they probably re-typset the '78 Basic Rulebook when they reissued it for the Silver Anniversary), and the adventure modules for Basic/Expert and 1st edition AD&D. Some of the later modules might have been digitally typeset, but the pre-1985 stuff most likely wasn't.
Of course, for those truly interested in the history of the game, it would be nice to have different editions of the books available - and I don't mean their marketing editions. The "first edition" AD&D core books, for example, went through multiple editions, with various corrections made along the way. So did original D&D - the early editions of it make references to ents, hobbits, and balrogs, for example, which were later changed (to treants, halflings, and 'type vi demons') under legal threat from the Tolkein estate.
WotC probably isn't interested in that, though, and might not even have copies of all the various editions of each book any more.
Whether it's "your family jewels" depends on what your business is. Honestly, if you've got low enough IT needs that all you need is one person, you're probably not in any IT-related business... which means that all your computer stuff is simply support for the part of your business that actually makes money.
Except that they can't, because none of the books that WotC is putting up in digital format is being sold physically. They're only putting out old stuff that they no longer have in print. So there is no "published books market" of this content to cut into.
So, your argument is that getting money from zero percent of the potential market is better than getting money from a small percentage of the potential market?
Quark or Pagemaker files? You do realize that a lot of this dates back to the '70s and '80s, right? I doubt any of it before the late '80s was done with any sort of desktop publishing software. They may have been using professional publishing software, like And, of course, until writable CD drives became reasonably affordable in the mid-90s, they were probably storing any files they were creating on floppies, then later on Zip drives. Chances are good that all the early stuff only existed in dead-tree format before they started scanning it.
At a guess, I'd say that all the original D&D, the first two versions of Basic D&D, and most of the first edition AD&D materials would be in that boat.
I just downloaded the free one they have, though, and the scan is very clean - clean enough that I'm sure they've gone to the trouble of cleaning it up. They've also OCR'ed it at the least, since I can do text searches in it. The module in question is B1, "In Search of the Unknown", with a copyright date of 1981.
Oh... and they are watermarking the PDFs, with the purchaser's name and the order number at the bottom of every page.
Update: misleading summary is misleading. In the actual article, the "none of that will be useful in four years" was referring to commercial election software, not the code that OFA wrote. *Sigh*. I really should stop expecting the summary to actually give proper context to quotes....
Why would they put it on ice for four years? There are plenty of state elections, local elections, and Congressional elections between now and the next presidential election, and I find it hard to believe that the software is so specialized that it's only good for presidential elections - for one thing, if it were that specialized, open sourcing it likely wouldn't help, since no one's going to bother working on code that's of no use for anything else.
And also, "none of that will be useful in four years" sounds like BS to me. The hyped usage was in targeting who to have workers phone or visit. Polls, addresses, phones, etc. aren't going to change significantly in four years, and unless they did some seriously messed-up stuff, their code should still compile and run with only minor tweaks at worst four years from now.
On that note... one place I worked tried hiring HP a couple of times to conduct studies and make recommendations for our network and systems. They tried that because they'd had a long relationship with DEC, and this was shortly after HP bought Compaq (who had bought DEC before that), and they were expecting the work done to be of the quality they'd gotten from DEC consultants in the past.
They supposedly spent weeks doing the study and writing up the reports... and when they came in, they were obviously generic company boilerplate that someone had edited, including many missed instances of things like COMPANY NAME. And - surprise! - all their recommendations were for HP products and services, with the only comparisons being to companies well known for being expensive. For extra fun, a good part of the body of the report was taken from a white paper that had been produced by a group at some university - they'd accidentally left in some of the text identifying the authors and where they were in the first version they gave to us.
We never hired HP to do a study for us again after that. As I recall, my boss also refused to pay them for giving us a report that we could have gotten ourselves from a Google search. Not sure what happened in the end with payment, but their local people, who were former DEC people, were deeply embarrassed.
Slashdot Mirror
I refer you to the Robustness Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle). It applies to natural languages as well as artificial ones.
As a presumable geek (since you're on Slashdot), you might want to refresh your memory about the Robustness Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle). It applies to natural languages as well as artificial ones. In both the cases you ridiculed, the intended meaning was plain.
Regarding your statement "a _valid_ argument and/or statement should be able to transform in such a manner" (i.e., by substituting the word 'baseball' for the word religion), on the other hand, is completely nonsensical. Many statements about religion will no longer be valid if you substitute the word 'baseball' instead. For example: "Religion has been blamed for many wars." This is a true statement (note the phrasing "blamed for" - I'm not speaking of whether religion was actually at fault). However, "Baseball has been blamed for many wars" is not a true statement. Or "most adherents of a religion find it to be a source of comfort and stability in their lives" versus "most adherents of a baseball find it to be a source of comfort and stability in their lives". If you change the subject of an argument or statement, naturally other portions of it will have to be changed to match, unless you change it to something that is a synonym or closely related.
And yes, he was bashing religion indirectly. But guess what? A religion is a choice. You compare it to racial minorities, but it's not at all the same, because being of a certain race is not a choice.
Quite a few people have advanced logical, coherent arguments against the statements that the poster you first replied to in this thread, treating them as respectfully as they were phrased. You, however, chose to be far less generous, both in your acceptance of grammatical mistakes, and in your assessment of the person making them. You might want to think about the way you're trying to defend religion, and how it makes religious people look.
If you're looking for something free to work with Dbase III+ files, try Visual Foxpro (version 9.0 is freely downloadable from MS) on Windows or DollyBase on Mac. Or look at the xBase (the generic term for dBase-compatibles) article on Wikipedia.
Forth (it's not an acronym - early versions wrote it in all caps just because the systems they were on didn't have lowercase) is still in use today, although cheap, powerful computing has made Linux and C move into a lot of the embedded systems niches where it used to be popular. It was briefly popular again on the Palm computers, thanks to the excellent implementation of a native Forth compiler (Quartus).
If you want software impact, though, it might be better to go with PostScript, which had syntax inspired by Forth - and essentially took over the printing world. Its descendant, Portable Document Format (PDF), has taken over the field of document transfer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Control_Program Made commercial flying possible.
Umm... released in 1968. Commercial passenger flight was a few decades old at that point. It may have made it easier, but certainly didn't make it possible.
Here's the thing: breaking and entering wasn't the crime he was being charged with. If he had been charged with that, checking the Massachusetts sentencing guidelines, the worst he could have gotten was 12 months. More likely, he'd get a fine or probation.
The crime the federal prosector decided to charge him with was "unauthorized access of a computer system". However, MIT has an open-access network policy, allowing anyone to use their network, and he had a legal account with JSTOR through his status at Harvard, which allowed him to download articles from them free of charge. Further, JSTOR did not ask for criminal charges to be pressed.
We don't know what the prosecutor's theory for how his access was unauthorized was, and likely never will know, since the prosecutor won't have to present the case. As people have said, though, the facts of the case, taking into account only the charges the federal prosecutor decided to go with, basically seem to boil down to checking too many books out of a library. The only possible harm that resulted was that other people's downloads were a bit slower because of his traffic. This isn't something that should be punishable by jail time at all.
Now, if it were the breaking and entering charges that he had been pursued under, I'd have to agree with you - what he did in that regard was stupid, and obviously illegal. But again, that is not the charge that he was facing, and the maximum sentence for that would have been 12 months.
No, he wasn't breaking and entering a library he wasn't invited to. He had a legitimate account with JSTOR.
Apparently he did break and enter a wiring closet to connect his laptop. Still, though, given the traditions at MIT of what sort of pranks and hacks happen, this seems like a huge overreaction... and the government's case against him seems to have centered around "unauthorized downloading", rather than the breaking and entering.
He had a lawfully acquired account on the system he was downloading from. He had a lawfully acquired account on the network he was using. He didn't "break and enter" anything - at most, he may have violated rules on the amount of downloading permitted. Neither JSTOR (the company from which he was downloading) nor MIT (the university whose network he was using to do the downloading) asked for charges to be pressed - the prosecutor decided to do that on his own.
In point of fact, we don't know what theory the prosecutor intended to present to show that his access was "unauthorized", and therefore a crime under current US law, and we may never know, since the case will now never be presented.
The oxygen in the acid came from the water. The oxygen that's coming from the atmosphere to to combine with the hydrogen when burning it becomes water - specifically, water vapor which goes off in the flame to mix with the rest of the atmosphere... where it can then be used by plants for photosynthesis.
For the acid itself, if you'll read the article, you'll see that it's silicic acid. You can then look up 'silicic acid' on Google, which took me to the Wikipedia page for it, where it mentions that silicic acids (apparently there's a whole family of them): (a) tend to lose their water content easily, drying out to become silica gel and water; (b) have been suggested as a possible nutritional supplement to help prevent Alzheimer's, since they tend to absorb aluminum, which has been implicated in Alzheimers, and (c) in the ocean are used by diatoms to build their silicon-based 'skeletons'. So, it doesn't look like disposal of the acid would be much of a problem.
Flames of pure hydrogen are very hard to see - however, when there are impurities present and also burning, the flame can be very easy to see. See, for example, photos of the Hindenburg burning. Using sea water, the flame would likely be very visible. See, for example, this video showing sea water being burned using a different process for extracting hydrogen from it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8utkoK2DhA
Well, in fairness, I'm not sure that any beancounters decided that. They're using DriveThruRPG (with a customized site for their products), and from what I remember, DriveThruRPG's system watermarks everything you download from them automatically. Even stuff that's free as in beer, under a Creative Commons License, whatever - it's just something their back-end does, and they don't seem to have an option for vendors to select to turn it off.
Of course, there's a good chance that they consider that a feature rather than a bug, but it isn't anything that anyone at WotC specifically requested that DriveThruRPG do. It's just the way their stuff already worked.
Further note, after looking through everything being offered on dndclassics.com - they have the 1981 Basic Rulebook available there... but they don't have any of the "core three" from any edition of AD&D. Back in 2000, when Ryan Dancey was talking about what Wizards had discovered by looking through TSR's sales records, he mentioned that the perennial best sellers were the three core AD&D books, and that the Player's Handbook was the best selling of those. (Which makes sense, as there are a lot more players than DMs.)
Wizards has already released new in-print versions of the core three for 1st edition AD&D, and announced it for "3.5". My guess is that they're going to release print versions of the 2nd edition core books as well, and that's why they're not putting up PDF versions of those. As for Basic... well, the Basic Rulebook only covers levels 1-3 anyway, and Basic/Expert/etc. was never as popular as AD&D. If they're going to re-release a book in print there, they'll probably do the D&D Cyclopedia.
Interesting - no one had mentioned so far that they were putting up 4e products as well.
Note, though, that they only have nine products listed for 4e - all of which are older products from the line, but which doesn't include any core products. Unfortunately, Wizard's site doesn't give in-print/out-of-print status for their books, but I'd be willing to bet that all nine of those products are ones that Wizards is no longer producing in print. In that case, while there may still be copies in the supply chain, there's no more money flowing to Wizards from print versions of them - so, again, they would have no print sales to risk by putting out electronic versions.
You do realize that they are not forcing you to buy any of it, right? Do you really think that just because you don't want it, they shouldn't make it available at all?
You obviously didn't look at it much. The 'battle cards' you're referring to are simply cards that list different abilities and what they do, to make it easier to keep track of what your character can do, instead of looking up the ability in the books all the time. They're no different from the spell cards that were produced for earlier editions - the difference is that instead of only spell-casting classes getting interesting abilities, everyone does in 4e.
The underlying mechanics are still the "d20 System" that was used in 3.x, with an extension for handling group tasks.
You know that almost no one outside of academia actually used troff, right?
He didn't say that computerized typesetting didn't exist then. He said the original Chainmail almost certainly wasn't laid out with it. Do you have some evidence to indicate otherwise?
The first 3 books (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual) weren't originally digitally typeset, but WotC has already gone through the process of doing that for the "1e premium" releases and they're in InDesign, so there should be clean text available without OCR.
For those three books, yes. That still leaves all of Original D&D (eight books), the other books of first edition AD&D (nine books, if I'm remembering right, though the last couple may have been typeset), the 1980 Basic and Expert sets (they probably re-typset the '78 Basic Rulebook when they reissued it for the Silver Anniversary), and the adventure modules for Basic/Expert and 1st edition AD&D. Some of the later modules might have been digitally typeset, but the pre-1985 stuff most likely wasn't.
Of course, for those truly interested in the history of the game, it would be nice to have different editions of the books available - and I don't mean their marketing editions. The "first edition" AD&D core books, for example, went through multiple editions, with various corrections made along the way. So did original D&D - the early editions of it make references to ents, hobbits, and balrogs, for example, which were later changed (to treants, halflings, and 'type vi demons') under legal threat from the Tolkein estate.
WotC probably isn't interested in that, though, and might not even have copies of all the various editions of each book any more.
Whether it's "your family jewels" depends on what your business is. Honestly, if you've got low enough IT needs that all you need is one person, you're probably not in any IT-related business... which means that all your computer stuff is simply support for the part of your business that actually makes money.
Except that they can't, because none of the books that WotC is putting up in digital format is being sold physically. They're only putting out old stuff that they no longer have in print. So there is no "published books market" of this content to cut into.
So, your argument is that getting money from zero percent of the potential market is better than getting money from a small percentage of the potential market?
Quark or Pagemaker files? You do realize that a lot of this dates back to the '70s and '80s, right? I doubt any of it before the late '80s was done with any sort of desktop publishing software. They may have been using professional publishing software, like And, of course, until writable CD drives became reasonably affordable in the mid-90s, they were probably storing any files they were creating on floppies, then later on Zip drives. Chances are good that all the early stuff only existed in dead-tree format before they started scanning it.
At a guess, I'd say that all the original D&D, the first two versions of Basic D&D, and most of the first edition AD&D materials would be in that boat.
I just downloaded the free one they have, though, and the scan is very clean - clean enough that I'm sure they've gone to the trouble of cleaning it up. They've also OCR'ed it at the least, since I can do text searches in it. The module in question is B1, "In Search of the Unknown", with a copyright date of 1981.
Oh... and they are watermarking the PDFs, with the purchaser's name and the order number at the bottom of every page.
Update: misleading summary is misleading. In the actual article, the "none of that will be useful in four years" was referring to commercial election software, not the code that OFA wrote. *Sigh*. I really should stop expecting the summary to actually give proper context to quotes....
Why would they put it on ice for four years? There are plenty of state elections, local elections, and Congressional elections between now and the next presidential election, and I find it hard to believe that the software is so specialized that it's only good for presidential elections - for one thing, if it were that specialized, open sourcing it likely wouldn't help, since no one's going to bother working on code that's of no use for anything else.
And also, "none of that will be useful in four years" sounds like BS to me. The hyped usage was in targeting who to have workers phone or visit. Polls, addresses, phones, etc. aren't going to change significantly in four years, and unless they did some seriously messed-up stuff, their code should still compile and run with only minor tweaks at worst four years from now.
On that note... one place I worked tried hiring HP a couple of times to conduct studies and make recommendations for our network and systems. They tried that because they'd had a long relationship with DEC, and this was shortly after HP bought Compaq (who had bought DEC before that), and they were expecting the work done to be of the quality they'd gotten from DEC consultants in the past.
They supposedly spent weeks doing the study and writing up the reports... and when they came in, they were obviously generic company boilerplate that someone had edited, including many missed instances of things like COMPANY NAME. And - surprise! - all their recommendations were for HP products and services, with the only comparisons being to companies well known for being expensive. For extra fun, a good part of the body of the report was taken from a white paper that had been produced by a group at some university - they'd accidentally left in some of the text identifying the authors and where they were in the first version they gave to us.
We never hired HP to do a study for us again after that. As I recall, my boss also refused to pay them for giving us a report that we could have gotten ourselves from a Google search. Not sure what happened in the end with payment, but their local people, who were former DEC people, were deeply embarrassed.