As you have only been introduced to elementary math(s), you may not be aware that median is also an average. Half of programmers *are* below average using one of the three usual rivals for 'average'. It would be hard to use mean, as it's not clear that you could find a rating system for which using mean would make sense.
Of course, it's not clear that there is any sensible numeric rating scale for programmers, and it would be interesting to argue about what the modal average would be, but it's just a throwaway comment which doesn't need to be analysed in such depth. The meaning and sense of the comment is clear.
If you are going to play the role of overly pedantic nerd, at least do it correctly so you don't get laughed at.
Choose between a thousand words or so for each word, and you have a password you can actually remember, with just as much entropy as the standard 8-digit random nonsense. Something like "original horse tuesday" or "memorable yacht Tasmania" is also much easier to remember than "r3!xp20.".
If you want more strength, then increase the number of words. Four words aren't much harder to remember than three.
Thousand and million have always been the same in the US and UK, and the British billion has just about died about in the UK, sadly -- 'billion' means 'thousand million' to us these days, just like it does for you.
It's a pity, as I did like the name 'milliard' for a thousand million (a billion used to be a million million), but I suppose the gain in consistency is worth it.
How about you start using metric measurements in return?:)
No, the movie was much better than the book, which was Heinlein's standard unreadable tripe. The movie on the other hand, while limited, had some interesting aspects, including the vision of a fascist-style world state. I've never been able to work out why people hate the movie so much.
Sounds interesting. Have you contributing the text to Project Gutenberg? Anything printed before 1923 is public domain in the US, so you're not even breaking any laws:). For their records they need you to submit scans of the front and back of the title page (they require this for all books, so they won't get sued by people who claim they're using modern editions).
I've contributed a lot of books to PG, so I know the system fairly well. Let me know if you're interested.
... but companies that track new game purchases will almost certainly not count the money I spent, because it went into second hand games and private purchases on eBay.
Pygame was also used to write one of my favourite 'play for 5 minutes' games: SolarWolf, a modern reimplementation of the Atari 2600 classic SolarFox. It even has a Windows executable download!
Importantly, the review will also examine whether the current term of copyright protection (70 years after the author's death) is appropriate.
As a UK citizen, this has got me worried. I don't think there has ever been a government that has *reduced* the copyright term. This move also probably ties in with the announcement earlier this year that they were going to extend the copyright term on recordings from 50 years to 100 years (after all, we couldn't have any of the Beatles' material get into the public domain, could we?).
No need. If the image was originally published before 1923 then it's public domain, and can be used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without having to pay anything or credit anyone.
The scans won't be added to Project Gutenberg, but it's very likely that the scans will be used by Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading project, which I'm involved in. We're already 'harvesting' images from quite a few sites, as well as all the images our volunteers scan. Now that there are several large and relatively well funded scanning operations getting off the ground, I imagine that over time an ever increasing proportion of the works that go through DP will be based from harvested images.
I maintain several lists that show the DP harvesting status of several image collections, including The Internet Archive's Canadian Libraries collection, Google Print, and Early Canadiana Online. As you can see, we will not be running short of material to work on for a very long time, even without any of these recently announced initiatives. That said, it's always great to see more material be made freely available, rather than locked up behind expensive subscription services like Jstor and EEBO.
I vaguely remember Windows 95 SP2 being a service pack you had to pay for, although my memory's getting a little fuzzy:).
After that they started releasing the service packs as new editions of Windows -- there was basically nothing in Windows 98 which justified giving it a new version number.
While we're on the subject, I might as well reply to myself and point out a selective advantage to multi-stage lifecycles, namely that the different stages do not compete with each other: they eat different food, and fill different evolutionary niches. This means that in times of scarcity there is little advantage in adults behaving like those of some non-metamorphising species, who will kill youngsters, as they are in direct competition with them for resources.
It is also very unlikely that full-blown metamorphosis arrived on the scene ex nilho. There is apparently ample evidence in the historical record for incomplete metamorphosis, via a 'nymph' stage.
In a more general context you're talking about the existence of larval stages in the lifecycle of certain animals, and the interesting thing isn't the butterfly itself, but the larval/adult division. The mechanisms through which these divisions evolved are still the subject of much debate, but it's likely to be much more complicated than an adult-butterfly-shaped-thing 'suddenly acquiring' a caterpillar-shaped-thing stage, or vice versa.
Once this life cycle appears on the scene, you can easily see how it could lead to a butterfly. The larval stage becomes more and more specialised toward eating, and the adult stage becomes specialised toward procreation, and creating as many children as it can.
You're right -- TV series in the UK tend to be lower budget than US shows. You can explain most of this just by noting that the UK is a much smaller market than the US (population of 60 million vs. 260 million), and that the UK's much more likely to buy US programming for the main channels than the US is to buy UK programming. We also have a much smaller number of channels. Ignoring the minor satellite channels, only have four networks: the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Five. The main satellite network, Sky, are responsible for a small amount of original content, but almost all the material they show are US imports. Less competition means less need to spend millions of pounds on a show to differentiate it from its competitors. On the other hand, the smaller number of networks means that they tend to stick with shows, even if the first few episodes aren't particularly popular. It's very rare to see the sort of mid-season show cancellation common in the US.
So, you have to realise that the TV landscape in the UK is very different from that in the US. TV is also not the be-all and end-all in the UK: thanks to the BBC we have a flourishing radio network, which commissions new drama, comedy, and quizzes. Many popular TV shows are adaptations of shows which first appeared on radio.
We also traditionally have much shorter series lengths: it's quite typical for a series to only have 6 programmes long, or 12/13 for a longer run, compared to the 22/24 episodes in a typical season of a US show. There are several reasons for this, one of which is that in the UK TV shows are typically written by a very small number of people, compared to the committee-based script writing common in the US.
There's already an excellent Wikipedia article on the bombs here -- it's being continually updated, contains emergency phone numbers, and seems to be a good accurate summary of what we know so far.
Yes, it's easy to be pessimistic and think that copyright terms will be extended every few years until, basically, the public domain gets frozen forever... but living under that assumption would depress the hell out of me. I live in the UK, and although I wasn't really aware enough politically when the 20 year retroactive copyright term extension happened, the fact that it happened has made me even more determined to help preserve the material which *is* public domain. It's not much, but it's better than doing nothing.
What happens in a few decades once DP has digitized all "important" English literary works first published on or before 1922?
First, DP isn't just for works in English, important works, or literary works. Indeed, a significant proportion of the items we're currently processing are non-fiction -- and there are works in fifteen different languages in the first proofing round alone. Secondly, it will take a very long time to exhaust the amount of material which is currently public domain. Thirdly, in just about every country except the US, more information is added to the public domain every year. In Canada, for example, the copyright term is life+50 years. This means that, currently, every work written by someone who died before 1955 is public domain -- and on the 1st of January that will move up a year. So, as the years go on, our efforts outside the US (such as DP Europe) will become more important. There's no danger of the world running out of new public domain material -- at least, not outside the US.
Slashdot Mirror
As you have only been introduced to elementary math(s), you may not be aware that median is also an average. Half of programmers *are* below average using one of the three usual rivals for 'average'. It would be hard to use mean, as it's not clear that you could find a rating system for which using mean would make sense.
Of course, it's not clear that there is any sensible numeric rating scale for programmers, and it would be interesting to argue about what the modal average would be, but it's just a throwaway comment which doesn't need to be analysed in such depth. The meaning and sense of the comment is clear.
If you are going to play the role of overly pedantic nerd, at least do it correctly so you don't get laughed at.
No, it should be 'median', not 'mean'... but see the comment by cusco also.
Or he could just stay with 3.6, like I have, which works perfectly NOW.
Choose between a thousand words or so for each word, and you have a password you can actually remember, with just as much entropy as the standard 8-digit random nonsense. Something like "original horse tuesday" or "memorable yacht Tasmania" is also much easier to remember than "r3!xp20.".
If you want more strength, then increase the number of words. Four words aren't much harder to remember than three.
The moon is made of biscuit, therefore 1+1=2.
If the premise is false, then the conclusion *may* be false. Or true. Or neither.
Thousand and million have always been the same in the US and UK, and the British billion has just about died about in the UK, sadly -- 'billion' means 'thousand million' to us these days, just like it does for you.
It's a pity, as I did like the name 'milliard' for a thousand million (a billion used to be a million million), but I suppose the gain in consistency is worth it.
How about you start using metric measurements in return? :)
No, the movie was much better than the book, which was Heinlein's standard unreadable tripe. The movie on the other hand, while limited, had some interesting aspects, including the vision of a fascist-style world state. I've never been able to work out why people hate the movie so much.
Sounds interesting. Have you contributing the text to Project Gutenberg? Anything printed before 1923 is public domain in the US, so you're not even breaking any laws :). For their records they need you to submit scans of the front and back of the title page (they require this for all books, so they won't get sued by people who claim they're using modern editions).
I've contributed a lot of books to PG, so I know the system fairly well. Let me know if you're interested.
... but companies that track new game purchases will almost certainly not count the money I spent, because it went into second hand games and private purchases on eBay.
Pygame was also used to write one of my favourite 'play for 5 minutes' games: SolarWolf, a modern reimplementation of the Atari 2600 classic SolarFox. It even has a Windows executable download!
But was it as ironic as ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife?
Importantly, the review will also examine whether the current term of copyright protection (70 years after the author's death) is appropriate.
As a UK citizen, this has got me worried. I don't think there has ever been a government that has *reduced* the copyright term. This move also probably ties in with the announcement earlier this year that they were going to extend the copyright term on recordings from 50 years to 100 years (after all, we couldn't have any of the Beatles' material get into the public domain, could we?).
No need. If the image was originally published before 1923 then it's public domain, and can be used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without having to pay anything or credit anyone.
The scans won't be added to Project Gutenberg, but it's very likely that the scans will be used by Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading project, which I'm involved in. We're already 'harvesting' images from quite a few sites, as well as all the images our volunteers scan. Now that there are several large and relatively well funded scanning operations getting off the ground, I imagine that over time an ever increasing proportion of the works that go through DP will be based from harvested images.
I maintain several lists that show the DP harvesting status of several image collections, including The Internet Archive's Canadian Libraries collection, Google Print, and Early Canadiana Online. As you can see, we will not be running short of material to work on for a very long time, even without any of these recently announced initiatives. That said, it's always great to see more material be made freely available, rather than locked up behind expensive subscription services like Jstor and EEBO.
Like I said, my mind's gone :). I have slightly more important things filling it these days than a history of every Windows revision.
Ah, my memory's unfuzzing a little. It was the transition from Windows 98 to Windows 98SE.
I vaguely remember Windows 95 SP2 being a service pack you had to pay for, although my memory's getting a little fuzzy :).
After that they started releasing the service packs as new editions of Windows -- there was basically nothing in Windows 98 which justified giving it a new version number.
While we're on the subject, I might as well reply to myself and point out a selective advantage to multi-stage lifecycles, namely that the different stages do not compete with each other: they eat different food, and fill different evolutionary niches. This means that in times of scarcity there is little advantage in adults behaving like those of some non-metamorphising species, who will kill youngsters, as they are in direct competition with them for resources.
It is also very unlikely that full-blown metamorphosis arrived on the scene ex nilho. There is apparently ample evidence in the historical record for incomplete metamorphosis, via a 'nymph' stage.
You may find the following page interesting: "How did the process of metamorphosis evolve?".
In a more general context you're talking about the existence of larval stages in the lifecycle of certain animals, and the interesting thing isn't the butterfly itself, but the larval/adult division. The mechanisms through which these divisions evolved are still the subject of much debate, but it's likely to be much more complicated than an adult-butterfly-shaped-thing 'suddenly acquiring' a caterpillar-shaped-thing stage, or vice versa.
Once this life cycle appears on the scene, you can easily see how it could lead to a butterfly. The larval stage becomes more and more specialised toward eating, and the adult stage becomes specialised toward procreation, and creating as many children as it can.
I suppose someone who liked The Mighty Boosh would like Nathan Barley... personally I found them both mediocre. Peep Show wasn't that great, either.
15 Stories High, on the other hand, was genius. "Blue Rat: All the Power of a Rat, in a Can".
You're right -- TV series in the UK tend to be lower budget than US shows. You can explain most of this just by noting that the UK is a much smaller market than the US (population of 60 million vs. 260 million), and that the UK's much more likely to buy US programming for the main channels than the US is to buy UK programming. We also have a much smaller number of channels. Ignoring the minor satellite channels, only have four networks: the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Five. The main satellite network, Sky, are responsible for a small amount of original content, but almost all the material they show are US imports. Less competition means less need to spend millions of pounds on a show to differentiate it from its competitors. On the other hand, the smaller number of networks means that they tend to stick with shows, even if the first few episodes aren't particularly popular. It's very rare to see the sort of mid-season show cancellation common in the US.
So, you have to realise that the TV landscape in the UK is very different from that in the US. TV is also not the be-all and end-all in the UK: thanks to the BBC we have a flourishing radio network, which commissions new drama, comedy, and quizzes. Many popular TV shows are adaptations of shows which first appeared on radio.
We also traditionally have much shorter series lengths: it's quite typical for a series to only have 6 programmes long, or 12/13 for a longer run, compared to the 22/24 episodes in a typical season of a US show. There are several reasons for this, one of which is that in the UK TV shows are typically written by a very small number of people, compared to the committee-based script writing common in the US.
There's already an excellent Wikipedia article on the bombs here -- it's being continually updated, contains emergency phone numbers, and seems to be a good accurate summary of what we know so far.
Yes, it's easy to be pessimistic and think that copyright terms will be extended every few years until, basically, the public domain gets frozen forever... but living under that assumption would depress the hell out of me. I live in the UK, and although I wasn't really aware enough politically when the 20 year retroactive copyright term extension happened, the fact that it happened has made me even more determined to help preserve the material which *is* public domain. It's not much, but it's better than doing nothing.
What happens in a few decades once DP has digitized all "important" English literary works first published on or before 1922?
First, DP isn't just for works in English, important works, or literary works. Indeed, a significant proportion of the items we're currently processing are non-fiction -- and there are works in fifteen different languages in the first proofing round alone. Secondly, it will take a very long time to exhaust the amount of material which is currently public domain. Thirdly, in just about every country except the US, more information is added to the public domain every year. In Canada, for example, the copyright term is life+50 years. This means that, currently, every work written by someone who died before 1955 is public domain -- and on the 1st of January that will move up a year. So, as the years go on, our efforts outside the US (such as DP Europe) will become more important. There's no danger of the world running out of new public domain material -- at least, not outside the US.
If only their existed somewhere a company ... with the gumption to take on a project as large as OCRing such an immense Public Domain repository.
Or, indeed, a volunteer organisation.