Isn't the Earth-Moon system also technically a binary planet?
Yeah, some astronomers have suggested that. The problem is, as explained in an adjacent article, the term "planet" has never actually had a proper astronomical definition. There's an IAU panel working now to settle the terminological debate. The current proposal is that "planet" by itself be delisted as an astronomical term. They suggest that a modifier be required before "planet".
Part of the debate is that there's a significant crowd that objects to classification terms that depend on things that are not properties of the object. Or, at least, we should make a strict distinction between terms that describe an object, and terms that describe its relationship to other objects.
This would mean, for example, that the question of whether Luna and Titan are planets or moons would be answered "Yes." They are planets that are orbiting another planet as moons. But others insists that they won't allow something to be both a planet and a moon.
The Earth-Luna pair is an interesting case, because it's somewhat borderline. The common center of gravity is inside the Earth, but close to the surface. Another interesting bit of trivia is that the Lunar path around the Sun is everywhere convex (relative to the Sun) This means that it's more accurate to describe Earth-Luna as a pair that share an orbit around their common primary, rather than one orbiting the other.
But it's all rather silly, because there's no agreed-on definition of "planet". The term just refers to a historical list that is looking less and less relevant with time.
Anyway, stay tuned. Maybe the IAU will settle the matter, at least for those of us who consider their opinion important. Most likely, they'll just discard the term. If they do define it as an isolated term, the result will be a rewriting of the list of planets in the Solar System, as the current list is starting to look somewhat inappropriate.
It's too bad that the universe isn't cooperative enough to fit into a classification scheme that someone invented a few centuries back.
I cannot understand why people think this is a good policy. It's welfare for techies.
Well, as one of those techies, all I can say is "Sounds good to me!" If hiring people to provide a wanted service is "welfare", I'll take the label along with the job. I've been insulted in worse ways by the neocon crowd.
Anyway, if you're not a techie (aka "nerd"), WTF are you doing here? Didn't you read the line at the top of the main page? Do we have a non-nerd spy in our midst?
Leaving internet access to the commercial guys makes just about as much sense as leaving the road system to them. They've had over a decade to convince us, and what they've done is supply service only to the cities. As with roads, electricity, and telephone service a century ago, they can't be bothered with the low-density areas. And now they have the gall to fight "community" internet politically. They won't supply service, and they want to make it illegal for us to supply our own service.
If they can't and won't do the job, the hell with them. Give the job to the people who are willing to do it. (Hey, that's us techies. And a lot of our hick rural buddies out in the sticks.;-)
Well,then, you just need to get together an equally noisy gang of porn afficionados, and make an equally big stink about people intruding on your right to download your favorite entertainment.
And while you're at it, point out the availability of all sorts of content-filtering software that they can install. You don't like left-wing politics? Here's a package that will keep it out of your machine. You don't like bonsai kittens? Here's another package to filter that out. Here's a package to block religious speech of various types. And so on.
That'll keep them confused.
(Hmm... I wonder if the bonsai kitten satire is still out there somewhere? I know that bonsaikitten.com got shut down some time back.;-)
This week's issue of Nature has an article titled "Astronomers reject the term 'planet'". (Subscription required for full article.)
It seems that an "expert panel" was assembled by the IAU last year to settle this and other questions. Their current proposal is to eliminate the use of the unmodified term "planet" altogether. If their suggestion is adopted, you will have to include an adjective with the term.
The remaining question to be settled is whether acceptable modifiers may include location-related terms (orbit, distance to primary, etc.), or whether only adjectives describing a property of the planet are accepted.
Thus, one suggestion is that UB313, Pluto and Charon be classified as "Trans-Neptunian planets". But some panel members object to this on the grounds that "Trans-Neptunian" isn't a property of the objects themselves; it's a property of their orbits.
The current concensus seems to be that the panel may list a few acceptable adjectives, and leave the full list as a topic for further IAU discussion.
I suspect that the issue of people being upset by the planet count being other than 9 is something that the panel would consider a joke. Neither the media nor textbook publishers should be the ones deciding technical astronomical terminology.
It does seem to some people that objects like Ganymede and Titan should qualify as planets, though their primary isn't the Sun. And the Earth/Luna pair is often described as a "binary planet", as is the Pluto/Charon pair.
OTOH, there's a certain elegance to a definition that says planets must orbit the Sun. This makes the question of extrasolar planets quite trivial to answer: There clearly can't be any. Of course, that just means we'll have to think up another name for them. It's more economical to call them all "planets", with one or more adjectives attached, to point out what sort of physical object they are.
If a Luna-sized rock orbiting a white dwarf is a planet, why wouldn't a similar-sized rock orbiting Jupiter or Saturn be a planet?
And why would people outside the atronomical community presume to pontificate on the topic? (The good old First Ammendment, I suppose.;-)
What's this "allow" nonsense? In America there's this thing called "the Constitution". Everyone is allowed to have air time.
Well, I was going to point out why this isn't at all true, but then you explained it yourself:
They have to convince someone to actually broadcast it, but we have this other thing called "money" that's good for that.
There is the old observation that the "Free Press" is available only to those who can afford to buy and operate a press. The same principle applies to TV, which is the only "news" source seen by most Americans.
There is a technical problem with television: We don't have an infinite supply of broadcast channels. If everyone were allowed to broadcast freely, whether via the airwaves or via cable, we'd have the situation you see repeatedly on many "discussion" shows, where you get N people all talking loudly and you can't understand what anyone is saying.
The Internet provides a practical solution to this. You can't broadcast, of course; the Internet really doesn't do broadcast. But you can put something online, where interested people can read your thoughts (or rants) and link to them if they like.
What we need is the obvious followup to Free Speech and Free Press: The list should include the inaliable right to have a web site where you can post your thoughts (or rants) for the world to see. Neither governments nor ISPs should be allowed to prevent us from running our own web servers. Neither governments nor ISPs should be allowed to block packets (except to limit total throughput, since bandwidth isn't unlimited).
This would give us a better situation that the cacophony of free speech or the spam from a free press: Everyone could put their ideas (or rants) out before the world, but nobody would be forced to listen.
It's probably not going to happen soon, though. Consider that here in the US, where we hear "free speech" as a rhetorical device all the time, most of us have only one available ISP, and that ISP has a "no servers" rule. If we can't even do it here in the US, what are the chances for the rest of the world?
, IE is not free. It is as free as the bread they serve you at restaurants (stale, cold, moldy bread at that).
Heh. Hereabouts (the Boston area) there's a local pizza chain (Bertucci's) that a lot of people say is their favorite. And they'll often tell you that the main reason is the wonderful bread. When you sit down, you get a basket of rolls made from their pizza dough, hot out of the oven. Everyone loves them. You can buy them, too, and I know a number of people who'll stop by on the way home to get a dozen rolls.
It has been a very good marketing tool. It helps that the rest of the menu is decent. But handing out free bread that's right out of the oven is a fairly good way to get people sitting down at your tables.
A few years ago, a friend told me she'd been introduced to the place by some people who went there after some event. She'd eaten earlier, and wasn't hungry, so she just ordered coffee. When the waitress asked if she wanted anything else, she just said "No, I'll just have another roll with my coffee." Some restaurants discourage this sort of thing. In this case, she reported that the waitress just grinned and said "You'll be back."
I suspect that the Opera folks have figured out the principle behind this, as have the Google gang. And, in both of those cases, there's the additional advantage that, with software, people feel more comfortable with your stuff if they've used it. All those free downloads of Opera probably have a lot to do with the successful sales of their handheld version. People learn to use Opera, know that it's small and doesn't need much in the way of resources to work, so of course they want it on their handheld gadget.
I think you'll find that at least 50% of the content on Wikipedia is just abstracted from other web sources.
Probably more than that. An example: I've found that when I want specifics about assorted objects in the Solar System, the best place to find the data is usually wikipedia. Each rock has its own page, with a table of the latest numbers, usually kept up to date by the appropriate astronomers.
Thus, some months back I wanted to find the mean surface temperature of Titan, for the benefit of a reply on/. The first place I found the number (94K) was in the wikipedia page for Titan. I did find it a couple of other places, all of which agreed to within about a degree. But wikipedia was the easy place to look.
Why I mention this here is that the information in such pages almost always does come from other web sources. Most raw astronomical data goes right to a web site these days, as a way to make it easily accessible to colleagues. In fact, wasn't that why the guys at places like CERN and the National Supercomputer Center built the web in the first place? And you won't find reliable data about Titan in many published books yet, other than its orbit and discovery history. If you're discussing ongoing news stories (as I was), the data is often available only on the web, until Science News shows up in your mailbox.
In the sciences in general, the web is rapidly becoming the primary place to find information. There are a lot of well-done web sites that are probably meaningless to people outside a narrow field, because they're mostly raw data files, perhaps with a highly-technical search page that makes sense only to people in that narrow field. But some of those people get together and build cross-discipline sites that abstract and summarize the other sites. And so on. They all build on each other. They put the preprints of their "papers" online. But the web is more and more the common substrate, not paper.
So I'd say that "at least 50% of the content on Wikipedia is just abstracted from other web sources" is not only true; it's becoming the way that technical information is usually distributed.
I agree that the FSMers have an important point: "If the Fundamentalists can demand equal time for their creation-in-6-days God, then I can demand equal time for my Flying Spaghetti Monster god." But having made that point, what more is there to say?
Perhaps. But one very real possibility is that this sort of satirical effort is what will eventually do in the religious fundies' attacks on the teaching of science. It's quite possible that, 100 years from now, historians will look on the FSM articles with a big grin, as they document the supreme silliness of the 20th century's anti-Darwin campaigns and how they were defeated.
Myself, I'm sorta been partial to the IPU (Invisible Pink Unicorn) theory. Their theological arguments are a bit subtler than the FSM crowd's. And there are several other good contenders for inclusion in the classroom, if ID succeeds in opening up science teaching to untested (and untestable) "theories".
Think of the fun if the Ojibwa, Navajo, Kwakiutl, and Mayan theologians started pushing to have their creation myths included in science texbooks. Is there any way we can encourage them to do this?
I think you're right, though it can be difficult to put the meager data from various decades into proper perspective. The extreme reaction to DAT was probably because it introduced something really new: A digital format can be copied repeatedly without introducing any further errors. The Nth generation can be the exact same bits as the first. So an important reason for wanting the first generation product had been eliminated.
Of course, history since then shows that DAT really didn't effect sales much, if at all. Similarly, sales seem to have grown after the introduction of the earlier tape formats, despite all the warnings that everyone would be driven out of business by piracy.
Anyway, the long history of these campaigns against "consumer" copying technology, none of which materially affected sales, should tell us that the current campaign is probably also totally bogus. They've cried "Wolf!" so many times that we should be demanding to see the teeth and claws before we believe them this time.
Let's face it; MP3 has been around for a decade or so, and the recording industry isn't dead yet. But maybe we'd be better off if it were.
Maybe what we need is a collection of quotes from the past about how the recording industry was going to be killed by piracy because of whatever was the latest recording hardware. Every time we read a story on the topic, we could post the long list of dire warnings, to educate readers on how the industry has always behaved.
4) "Copying to tape" has been sanctioned almost since the reel-to-reel was invented.
Only after battles much like the current battle. The recording industry objected to retail sale of tapes from the beginning, and their argument was the same: People would use tapes to copy each others' records, which was a copyright violation, stole money from starving artists, and all the rest of the litany.
This was especially blatant when cassettes first came out. The recording industry really fought these tiny tapes. People would just use them for criminal copying to avoid paying for music.
Some countries even added a tax to the sale of blank cassettes that was supposed to go to the artists to compensate them for lost sales. Of course, few if any of those artists ever received a penny of that money. What it really meant was that musicians who made (and sold) their own recordings had to pay the tax to the recording companies to compensate the companies for the lost income from artists that hadn't been signed.
Sorta, but as far as I can tell with my Powerbook, it's always off by default.
When downloading things like various archive file types, you get a popup window asking if you want to write it to disk or open it with a program. If you pick the latter, there is usually a default app, but you have the opportunity to change it if you like. There's also a checkbox for "Don't ask me about this again." If you check that, and said to run a program, that program will henceforth be run automatically for that file type. If there's a security hole in that app, and you download a file of its type that contains an exploit, it's too late. The exploit is run automatically, because some time in the past, you said that's what you wanted.
But it does take a bit of work and some understanding to opt in for automatic running of a program like this. If anything is opted in for you at purchase time, I haven't seen or heard of it. Which doesn't mean that Apple won't change this next month, of course. It just gives you a bit of confidence that they understand the problem and have Done It Right so far.
Not really. There are lots of people who view them as "backup".
The idea is, the first thing you do with a new CD is rip the music to your hard drive. Then you store the CD away somewhere.
Later, when your motherboard dies, and you find that the backups you've been making to that fancy USB or Firewire drive doesn't actually work right on your new machine, you haven't lost the music. You just sit down with your library and start ripping the things that you still want to listen to.
Your favorites you might want to store off-site somewhere, in case of fire or flood or whatever. Of course, you want that somewhere to be materially safer than your basement or spare bedroom. Considering the implications of recent events in New Orleans, good luck finding a reliable storage place.
Anyway, this is a lot more likely to save that music indefinitely than any other scheme you may have. So on to the next subtopic: With stuff downloaded off the Net, what guarantee is there that the site you got it from will still exist when you buy your next machine? If so, what are the chances that they'll have actually saved all that old music that isn't selling any more? Or maybe they'll have it, but the fine print of their contract says that they can change their policy at any time, and their policy now is that you have to pay 50% of the current price to replace an "inactive" music file (and if you don't like it, you can take them to court, which will cost you thousands of bucks even if you win).
What you want to do, of course, is burn all the downloaded stuff to CD and archive it with the rest.
Anyway, if you're thinking past the end of the week, there is good reason to want stuff on CDs. Or maybe DVDs, if there's a way to guarantee that they'll be readable on new equipment in 5 or 10 or 30 years.
The Swiss Army knife in my pocket has one of those little tweezers, and I find myself using it regularly, every couple days, for random purposes. To mess with the minds of people nearby, I often casually refer to it as my "roach clip". That often gets me some funny looks, but so far, I haven't been arrested for carrying drug paraphernalia.
(Once, quite a few years ago, it was actually used as a roach clip.;-)
It's safe to say that most handguns are used overwhelmingly for illegal activity. Most handguns are sitting idle waiting to protect someone who will never actually be attacked. The ones that are actually being used are predominantly being used to do the attacking....
This is a pretty bold claim - care to back it up with anything at all?
I think the writer was confusing "being used" with "being fired". If you only consider a gun to be used during the instant it's being fired, they he's likely correct. But this is based on the idea that, if your gun is sitting there idle in its normal protective role, it's not being "used". Of course, it is. But in many people's minds, something that's idle isn't being "used". Similarly, they'd likely think that a cop sitting in his car watching a scene is idle and not doing his job, or a fireman sitting in the station waiting for a call is idle and not working.
It's also safe to say that most automobiles are driven over the speed limit. Not a lot over, but most people do drive slightly above the posted speed limit.
So what? Speed limits are generally set to generate revenue. People will drive the speed they are comfortable with, regardless of limits.
But this is a fairly good parallel to the charges the ??AA are making against file-sharing packages. Driving slightly over the speed limit is, strictly speaking, illegal. But most people don't consider it a crime, just as they don't consider sharing copyrighted material with friends to be a crime.
In most people's minds, if you hear a good song, of course you share it with a friend. What, you say that's illegal? Yeah; next you're going to say I should be arrested for driving 5 mph over the speed limit on the freeway. What sort of nut are you?
This is basically what the music and movie industries are fighting. They've managed to get laws passed that outlaw the sort of sharing that people have always done, and that people naturally do just to be friendly. They may have heard that it's illegal, but they view it as a money grab, just as they view traffic tickets as a form of taxation.
I prefer an actual temp guage, and oil psi guage along with my ability to tell if my car is running well to sensors any day.
Ah, but the auto companies' official policy is that you and I are too stupid to understand complicated, technical things like temperature and pressure.
That's why they just give you an "idiot light". This is so that to find out whether there's a real problem, or it's just a sensor going bad, you have to pay someone else. That idiot light is a profit center for their dealers.
So what's the difference. I opened both in two mozilla windows, and they look exactly the same. I was expecting something that would eliminate the stupid horizontal scroll bar and wrap text dynamically, but that doesn't happen. As for wide, both fit ok side by side on my 1600x1200 screen, and also on my 1440x900 screen. This is with the right margin of both covering up the rightmost ad column.
The names of the constellations are useful for Astronomers. That's it.
So how often do astronomers make any actual use of constellations? All the astronomical tables I've seen have listed coordinates as two numbers (Right Ascension and Declination). This is precise; a constellation is a big, irregular chunk of sky and is sorta useless if you're trying to aim a large instrument at a tiny point out there.
OTOH, I'd bet that amateur astronomers use the constellations a bit more. They do a lot of the needed sky surveys, and the smaller telescopes used for that can be aimed by sight. But even then, the constellations are primarily a charming historical relic.
Any astronomers (amateur or professional) like to chime in about how they actually use the constellations?
You do know that DDT kills insects, not mammals, right?
Yeah, and not even all insects. For example, something I've seen listed as some sort of historical tragedy is that the honeybee is fairly immune to the effects of DDT. This is important, because the honeybee is our main pollinator, as well as the only insect that can be truly considered "domesticated". The argument went: If DDT had killed honeybees, it would have been obvious from the start that it was a mixed benefit, to be used very carefully.
But DDT appeared to kill only pest insects, while it spared our major pollinator. So it was viewed as a pure benefit, sent by a benevolent God to free us from agricultural pests. It was drastically overused, and it gave people the idea that pesticides are always beneficial.
We're still fighting to convince people that these chemicals should be viewed as "two-edged swords", and we're still seeing widespread over-use of pesticides for agricultural purposes. If DDT had killed bees, we'd probably be in a better position now.
OTOH, this may be attributing more intelligence to people than is wise. A lot of current pesticides do kill honeybees, and there's no strong sign that people are wising up.
While I obviously understand your arguments (and actually agree with them), continuing the "devil's advocate" style of argument would mean pointing out that the metaphors here really don't quite work.
You might be able to buy a black belt, but that doesn't mean you won't get kicked about by the first bunch of thugs you meet
Yes, but compare this with reselling a recording or movie. If I do this, nobody would take it to mean that I was one of the musicians or actors, unless I told them. Similarly, if I sell a black-belt or college degree certificate, that shouldn't imply that the knowledge of either was mine personally. I could have bought the certificate. I could claim that I did, since I had to pay money for it. And most college grads know one or more rich twit who paid others to take his tests, getting the degree without getting the knowledge. And some colleges are known as "degree mills" that award a degree to anyone who pays the appropriate fees. Having the degree doesn't mean that you won't be demolished in an argument with someone who actually knows the subject matter.
[I]n a very real sense, such a sale is morally very similar to forgery.
Again, if I resell a recording or movie, nobody would assume that I've forged it. Yes, in some areas people make a living doing this. But here in my suburban town, if sell my old CDs and DVDs in a yard sale, nobody would question whether they are forgeries. To take the "free market" approach, you'd think the situation would be the same with a degree certificate. Yes, I could have run off a bunch of copies. But even then, I could argue that it's "my" degree, so why shouldn't I be allowed to copy it?
It's difficult to distinguish these cases in a strictly logical fashion. Thus, the record, movie and software industries are saying that they own the information (music, movie, program), and they only sell you a license to it. If I can't resell my college degree, it sure sounds like the "education corportation" that sold it to me is claiming that they own the knowledge that it represents. They've only sold me a license to use that knowledge, but not to resell the physical representation of the knowledge that they gave me.
The traditional name for such reasoning is "sophistry", of course. It can be fun to toss out such parallels into discussions...
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the Earth-Moon system also technically a binary planet?
Yeah, some astronomers have suggested that. The problem is, as explained in an adjacent article, the term "planet" has never actually had a proper astronomical definition. There's an IAU panel working now to settle the terminological debate. The current proposal is that "planet" by itself be delisted as an astronomical term. They suggest that a modifier be required before "planet".
Part of the debate is that there's a significant crowd that objects to classification terms that depend on things that are not properties of the object. Or, at least, we should make a strict distinction between terms that describe an object, and terms that describe its relationship to other objects.
This would mean, for example, that the question of whether Luna and Titan are planets or moons would be answered "Yes." They are planets that are orbiting another planet as moons. But others insists that they won't allow something to be both a planet and a moon.
The Earth-Luna pair is an interesting case, because it's somewhat borderline. The common center of gravity is inside the Earth, but close to the surface. Another interesting bit of trivia is that the Lunar path around the Sun is everywhere convex (relative to the Sun) This means that it's more accurate to describe Earth-Luna as a pair that share an orbit around their common primary, rather than one orbiting the other.
But it's all rather silly, because there's no agreed-on definition of "planet". The term just refers to a historical list that is looking less and less relevant with time.
Anyway, stay tuned. Maybe the IAU will settle the matter, at least for those of us who consider their opinion important. Most likely, they'll just discard the term. If they do define it as an isolated term, the result will be a rewriting of the list of planets in the Solar System, as the current list is starting to look somewhat inappropriate.
It's too bad that the universe isn't cooperative enough to fit into a classification scheme that someone invented a few centuries back.
I cannot understand why people think this is a good policy. It's welfare for techies.
;-)
Well, as one of those techies, all I can say is "Sounds good to me!" If hiring people to provide a wanted service is "welfare", I'll take the label along with the job. I've been insulted in worse ways by the neocon crowd.
Anyway, if you're not a techie (aka "nerd"), WTF are you doing here? Didn't you read the line at the top of the main page? Do we have a non-nerd spy in our midst?
Leaving internet access to the commercial guys makes just about as much sense as leaving the road system to them. They've had over a decade to convince us, and what they've done is supply service only to the cities. As with roads, electricity, and telephone service a century ago, they can't be bothered with the low-density areas. And now they have the gall to fight "community" internet politically. They won't supply service, and they want to make it illegal for us to supply our own service.
If they can't and won't do the job, the hell with them. Give the job to the people who are willing to do it. (Hey, that's us techies. And a lot of our hick rural buddies out in the sticks.
Well,then, you just need to get together an equally noisy gang of porn afficionados, and make an equally big stink about people intruding on your right to download your favorite entertainment.
... I wonder if the bonsai kitten satire is still out there somewhere? I know that bonsaikitten.com got shut down some time back. ;-)
And while you're at it, point out the availability of all sorts of content-filtering software that they can install. You don't like left-wing politics? Here's a package that will keep it out of your machine. You don't like bonsai kittens? Here's another package to filter that out. Here's a package to block religious speech of various types. And so on.
That'll keep them confused.
(Hmm
This week's issue of Nature has an article
;-)
titled "Astronomers reject the term 'planet'". (Subscription required for full article.)
It seems that an "expert panel" was assembled by the IAU last year to settle this and other questions. Their current proposal is to eliminate the use of the unmodified term "planet" altogether. If their suggestion is adopted, you will have to include an adjective with the term.
The remaining question to be settled is whether acceptable modifiers may include location-related terms (orbit, distance to primary, etc.), or whether only adjectives describing a property of the planet are accepted.
Thus, one suggestion is that UB313, Pluto and Charon be classified as "Trans-Neptunian planets". But some panel members object to this on the grounds that "Trans-Neptunian" isn't a property of the objects themselves; it's a property of their orbits.
The current concensus seems to be that the panel may list a few acceptable adjectives, and leave the full list as a topic for further IAU discussion.
I suspect that the issue of people being upset by the planet count being other than 9 is something that the panel would consider a joke. Neither the media nor textbook publishers should be the ones deciding technical astronomical terminology.
It does seem to some people that objects like Ganymede and Titan should qualify as planets, though their primary isn't the Sun. And the Earth/Luna pair is often described as a "binary planet", as is the Pluto/Charon pair.
OTOH, there's a certain elegance to a definition that says planets must orbit the Sun. This makes the question of extrasolar planets quite trivial to answer: There clearly can't be any. Of course, that just means we'll have to think up another name for them. It's more economical to call them all "planets", with one or more adjectives attached, to point out what sort of physical object they are.
If a Luna-sized rock orbiting a white dwarf is a planet, why wouldn't a similar-sized rock orbiting Jupiter or Saturn be a planet?
And why would people outside the atronomical community presume to pontificate on the topic? (The good old First Ammendment, I suppose.
The parent message was quite a bit lower; it explained:
KDE is a graphical desktop environment used to access your computer's files.
It's hard to imagine a more clueless explanation of what KDE is about than that.
Myself, I access my computer's files by running programs that call open() and read(). I don't think you need KDE for that; just libc.
I mean, twm and fvwm both allowed programs to link to libc.
What's this "allow" nonsense? In America there's this thing called "the Constitution". Everyone is allowed to have air time.
Well, I was going to point out why this isn't at all true, but then you explained it yourself:
They have to convince someone to actually broadcast it, but we have this other thing called "money" that's good for that.
There is the old observation that the "Free Press" is available only to those who can afford to buy and operate a press. The same principle applies to TV, which is the only "news" source seen by most Americans.
There is a technical problem with television: We don't have an infinite supply of broadcast channels. If everyone were allowed to broadcast freely, whether via the airwaves or via cable, we'd have the situation you see repeatedly on many "discussion" shows, where you get N people all talking loudly and you can't understand what anyone is saying.
The Internet provides a practical solution to this. You can't broadcast, of course; the Internet really doesn't do broadcast. But you can put something online, where interested people can read your thoughts (or rants) and link to them if they like.
What we need is the obvious followup to Free Speech and Free Press: The list should include the inaliable right to have a web site where you can post your thoughts (or rants) for the world to see. Neither governments nor ISPs should be allowed to prevent us from running our own web servers. Neither governments nor ISPs should be allowed to block packets (except to limit total throughput, since bandwidth isn't unlimited).
This would give us a better situation that the cacophony of free speech or the spam from a free press: Everyone could put their ideas (or rants) out before the world, but nobody would be forced to listen.
It's probably not going to happen soon, though. Consider that here in the US, where we hear "free speech" as a rhetorical device all the time, most of us have only one available ISP, and that ISP has a "no servers" rule. If we can't even do it here in the US, what are the chances for the rest of the world?
Sorry, but it's one of my pet peeves when people anthropomorphize inanimate objects. ... such as the rules of the universe ;-)
;-)
Well, my pet peeve is when people reify abstract concepts.
, IE is not free. It is as free as the bread they serve you at restaurants (stale, cold, moldy bread at that).
Heh. Hereabouts (the Boston area) there's a local pizza chain (Bertucci's) that a lot of people say is their favorite. And they'll often tell you that the main reason is the wonderful bread. When you sit down, you get a basket of rolls made from their pizza dough, hot out of the oven. Everyone loves them. You can buy them, too, and I know a number of people who'll stop by on the way home to get a dozen rolls.
It has been a very good marketing tool. It helps that the rest of the menu is decent. But handing out free bread that's right out of the oven is a fairly good way to get people sitting down at your tables.
A few years ago, a friend told me she'd been introduced to the place by some people who went there after some event. She'd eaten earlier, and wasn't hungry, so she just ordered coffee. When the waitress asked if she wanted anything else, she just said "No, I'll just have another roll with my coffee." Some restaurants discourage this sort of thing. In this case, she reported that the waitress just grinned and said "You'll be back."
I suspect that the Opera folks have figured out the principle behind this, as have the Google gang. And, in both of those cases, there's the additional advantage that, with software, people feel more comfortable with your stuff if they've used it. All those free downloads of Opera probably have a lot to do with the successful sales of their handheld version. People learn to use Opera, know that it's small and doesn't need much in the way of resources to work, so of course they want it on their handheld gadget.
I'm not too surprised at their decision.
It would be very interesting if Wikipedia (which I use often - some weeks daily) contained a "Satirical" link - pointing to the Uncyclopedia entry.
Here ya are: a list of parodies of wikipedia.
If you find any more, add them to the list.
I think you'll find that at least 50% of the content on Wikipedia is just abstracted from other web sources.
/. The first place I found the number (94K) was in the wikipedia page for Titan. I did find it a couple of other places, all of which agreed to within about a degree. But wikipedia was the easy place to look.
Probably more than that. An example: I've found that when I want specifics about assorted objects in the Solar System, the best place to find the data is usually wikipedia. Each rock has its own page, with a table of the latest numbers, usually kept up to date by the appropriate astronomers.
Thus, some months back I wanted to find the mean surface temperature of Titan, for the benefit of a reply on
Why I mention this here is that the information in such pages almost always does come from other web sources. Most raw astronomical data goes right to a web site these days, as a way to make it easily accessible to colleagues. In fact, wasn't that why the guys at places like CERN and the National Supercomputer Center built the web in the first place? And you won't find reliable data about Titan in many published books yet, other than its orbit and discovery history. If you're discussing ongoing news stories (as I was), the data is often available only on the web, until Science News shows up in your mailbox.
In the sciences in general, the web is rapidly becoming the primary place to find information. There are a lot of well-done web sites that are probably meaningless to people outside a narrow field, because they're mostly raw data files, perhaps with a highly-technical search page that makes sense only to people in that narrow field. But some of those people get together and build cross-discipline sites that abstract and summarize the other sites. And so on. They all build on each other. They put the preprints of their "papers" online. But the web is more and more the common substrate, not paper.
So I'd say that "at least 50% of the content on Wikipedia is just abstracted from other web sources" is not only true; it's becoming the way that technical information is usually distributed.
I agree that the FSMers have an important point: "If the Fundamentalists can demand equal time for their creation-in-6-days God, then I can demand equal time for my Flying Spaghetti Monster god." But having made that point, what more is there to say?
Perhaps. But one very real possibility is that this sort of satirical effort is what will eventually do in the religious fundies' attacks on the teaching of science. It's quite possible that, 100 years from now, historians will look on the FSM articles with a big grin, as they document the supreme silliness of the 20th century's anti-Darwin campaigns and how they were defeated.
Myself, I'm sorta been partial to the IPU (Invisible Pink Unicorn) theory. Their theological arguments are a bit subtler than the FSM crowd's. And there are several other good contenders for inclusion in the classroom, if ID succeeds in opening up science teaching to untested (and untestable) "theories".
Think of the fun if the Ojibwa, Navajo, Kwakiutl, and Mayan theologians started pushing to have their creation myths included in science texbooks. Is there any way we can encourage them to do this?
I think you're right, though it can be difficult to put the meager data from various decades into proper perspective. The extreme reaction to DAT was probably because it introduced something really new: A digital format can be copied repeatedly without introducing any further errors. The Nth generation can be the exact same bits as the first. So an important reason for wanting the first generation product had been eliminated.
Of course, history since then shows that DAT really didn't effect sales much, if at all. Similarly, sales seem to have grown after the introduction of the earlier tape formats, despite all the warnings that everyone would be driven out of business by piracy.
Anyway, the long history of these campaigns against "consumer" copying technology, none of which materially affected sales, should tell us that the current campaign is probably also totally bogus. They've cried "Wolf!" so many times that we should be demanding to see the teeth and claws before we believe them this time.
Let's face it; MP3 has been around for a decade or so, and the recording industry isn't dead yet. But maybe we'd be better off if it were.
Maybe what we need is a collection of quotes from the past about how the recording industry was going to be killed by piracy because of whatever was the latest recording hardware. Every time we read a story on the topic, we could post the long list of dire warnings, to educate readers on how the industry has always behaved.
4) "Copying to tape" has been sanctioned almost since the reel-to-reel was invented.
...
Only after battles much like the current battle. The recording industry objected to retail sale of tapes from the beginning, and their argument was the same: People would use tapes to copy each others' records, which was a copyright violation, stole money from starving artists, and all the rest of the litany.
This was especially blatant when cassettes first came out. The recording industry really fought these tiny tapes. People would just use them for criminal copying to avoid paying for music.
Some countries even added a tax to the sale of blank cassettes that was supposed to go to the artists to compensate them for lost sales. Of course, few if any of those artists ever received a penny of that money. What it really meant was that musicians who made (and sold) their own recordings had to pay the tax to the recording companies to compensate the companies for the lost income from artists that hadn't been signed.
It's an old, old scam
Do macs have a similar autorun feature?
Sorta, but as far as I can tell with my Powerbook, it's always off by default.
When downloading things like various archive file types, you get a popup window asking if you want to write it to disk or open it with a program. If you pick the latter, there is usually a default app, but you have the opportunity to change it if you like. There's also a checkbox for "Don't ask me about this again." If you check that, and said to run a program, that program will henceforth be run automatically for that file type. If there's a security hole in that app, and you download a file of its type that contains an exploit, it's too late. The exploit is run automatically, because some time in the past, you said that's what you wanted.
But it does take a bit of work and some understanding to opt in for automatic running of a program like this. If anything is opted in for you at purchase time, I haven't seen or heard of it. Which doesn't mean that Apple won't change this next month, of course. It just gives you a bit of confidence that they understand the problem and have Done It Right so far.
CDs are a thing of the past anyway.
Not really. There are lots of people who view them as "backup".
The idea is, the first thing you do with a new CD is rip the music to your hard drive. Then you store the CD away somewhere.
Later, when your motherboard dies, and you find that the backups you've been making to that fancy USB or Firewire drive doesn't actually work right on your new machine, you haven't lost the music. You just sit down with your library and start ripping the things that you still want to listen to.
Your favorites you might want to store off-site somewhere, in case of fire or flood or whatever. Of course, you want that somewhere to be materially safer than your basement or spare bedroom. Considering the implications of recent events in New Orleans, good luck finding a reliable storage place.
Anyway, this is a lot more likely to save that music indefinitely than any other scheme you may have. So on to the next subtopic: With stuff downloaded off the Net, what guarantee is there that the site you got it from will still exist when you buy your next machine? If so, what are the chances that they'll have actually saved all that old music that isn't selling any more? Or maybe they'll have it, but the fine print of their contract says that they can change their policy at any time, and their policy now is that you have to pay 50% of the current price to replace an "inactive" music file (and if you don't like it, you can take them to court, which will cost you thousands of bucks even if you win).
What you want to do, of course, is burn all the downloaded stuff to CD and archive it with the rest.
Anyway, if you're thinking past the end of the week, there is good reason to want stuff on CDs. Or maybe DVDs, if there's a way to guarantee that they'll be readable on new equipment in 5 or 10 or 30 years.
... the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation together with the issue of ownership ...
So they're claiming that Open-Source and proprietary software really aren't all that different?
Isn't microsoft always saying that open-source software is OBVIOUSLY inferior?
They finally woke up to the fact that this makes it perfect for inclusion in MS Windows.
The Swiss Army knife in my pocket has one of those little tweezers, and I find myself using it regularly, every couple days, for random purposes. To mess with the minds of people nearby, I often casually refer to it as my "roach clip". That often gets me some funny looks, but so far, I haven't been arrested for carrying drug paraphernalia.
;-)
(Once, quite a few years ago, it was actually used as a roach clip.
It's safe to say that most handguns are used overwhelmingly for illegal activity. Most handguns are sitting idle waiting to protect someone who will never actually be attacked. The ones that are actually being used are predominantly being used to do the attacking....
This is a pretty bold claim - care to back it up with anything at all?
I think the writer was confusing "being used" with "being fired". If you only consider a gun to be used during the instant it's being fired, they he's likely correct. But this is based on the idea that, if your gun is sitting there idle in its normal protective role, it's not being "used". Of course, it is. But in many people's minds, something that's idle isn't being "used". Similarly, they'd likely think that a cop sitting in his car watching a scene is idle and not doing his job, or a fireman sitting in the station waiting for a call is idle and not working.
It's also safe to say that most automobiles are driven over the speed limit. Not a lot over, but most people do drive slightly above the posted speed limit.
So what? Speed limits are generally set to generate revenue. People will drive the speed they are comfortable with, regardless of limits.
But this is a fairly good parallel to the charges the ??AA are making against file-sharing packages. Driving slightly over the speed limit is, strictly speaking, illegal. But most people don't consider it a crime, just as they don't consider sharing copyrighted material with friends to be a crime.
In most people's minds, if you hear a good song, of course you share it with a friend. What, you say that's illegal? Yeah; next you're going to say I should be arrested for driving 5 mph over the speed limit on the freeway. What sort of nut are you?
This is basically what the music and movie industries are fighting. They've managed to get laws passed that outlaw the sort of sharing that people have always done, and that people naturally do just to be friendly. They may have heard that it's illegal, but they view it as a money grab, just as they view traffic tickets as a form of taxation.
It's gonna be a long battle.
... funding through some agency such as the Office of Navel Research.
That would be research funded by the Navel Academy, I presume.
I prefer an actual temp guage, and oil psi guage along with my ability to tell if my car is running well to sensors any day.
Ah, but the auto companies' official policy is that you and I are too stupid to understand complicated, technical things like temperature and pressure.
That's why they just give you an "idiot light". This is so that to find out whether there's a real problem, or it's just a sensor going bad, you have to pay someone else. That idiot light is a profit center for their dealers.
So what's the difference. I opened both in two mozilla windows, and they look exactly the same. I was expecting something that would eliminate the stupid horizontal scroll bar and wrap text dynamically, but that doesn't happen. As for wide, both fit ok side by side on my 1600x1200 screen, and also on my 1440x900 screen. This is with the right margin of both covering up the rightmost ad column.
What's supposed to happen that's different?
The names of the constellations are useful for Astronomers. That's it.
So how often do astronomers make any actual use of constellations? All the astronomical tables I've seen have listed coordinates as two numbers (Right Ascension and Declination). This is precise; a constellation is a big, irregular chunk of sky and is sorta useless if you're trying to aim a large instrument at a tiny point out there.
OTOH, I'd bet that amateur astronomers use the constellations a bit more. They do a lot of the needed sky surveys, and the smaller telescopes used for that can be aimed by sight. But even then, the constellations are primarily a charming historical relic.
Any astronomers (amateur or professional) like to chime in about how they actually use the constellations?
You do know that DDT kills insects, not mammals, right?
Yeah, and not even all insects. For example, something I've seen listed as some sort of historical tragedy is that the honeybee is fairly immune to the effects of DDT. This is important, because the honeybee is our main pollinator, as well as the only insect that can be truly considered "domesticated". The argument went: If DDT had killed honeybees, it would have been obvious from the start that it was a mixed benefit, to be used very carefully.
But DDT appeared to kill only pest insects, while it spared our major pollinator. So it was viewed as a pure benefit, sent by a benevolent God to free us from agricultural pests. It was drastically overused, and it gave people the idea that pesticides are always beneficial.
We're still fighting to convince people that these chemicals should be viewed as "two-edged swords", and we're still seeing widespread over-use of pesticides for agricultural purposes. If DDT had killed bees, we'd probably be in a better position now.
OTOH, this may be attributing more intelligence to people than is wise. A lot of current pesticides do kill honeybees, and there's no strong sign that people are wising up.
While I obviously understand your arguments (and actually agree with them), continuing the "devil's advocate" style of argument would mean pointing out that the metaphors here really don't quite work.
...
You might be able to buy a black belt, but that doesn't mean you won't get kicked about by the first bunch of thugs you meet
Yes, but compare this with reselling a recording or movie. If I do this, nobody would take it to mean that I was one of the musicians or actors, unless I told them. Similarly, if I sell a black-belt or college degree certificate, that shouldn't imply that the knowledge of either was mine personally. I could have bought the certificate. I could claim that I did, since I had to pay money for it. And most college grads know one or more rich twit who paid others to take his tests, getting the degree without getting the knowledge. And some colleges are known as "degree mills" that award a degree to anyone who pays the appropriate fees. Having the degree doesn't mean that you won't be demolished in an argument with someone who actually knows the subject matter.
[I]n a very real sense, such a sale is morally very similar to forgery.
Again, if I resell a recording or movie, nobody would assume that I've forged it. Yes, in some areas people make a living doing this. But here in my suburban town, if sell my old CDs and DVDs in a yard sale, nobody would question whether they are forgeries. To take the "free market" approach, you'd think the situation would be the same with a degree certificate. Yes, I could have run off a bunch of copies. But even then, I could argue that it's "my" degree, so why shouldn't I be allowed to copy it?
It's difficult to distinguish these cases in a strictly logical fashion. Thus, the record, movie and software industries are saying that they own the information (music, movie, program), and they only sell you a license to it. If I can't resell my college degree, it sure sounds like the "education corportation" that sold it to me is claiming that they own the knowledge that it represents. They've only sold me a license to use that knowledge, but not to resell the physical representation of the knowledge that they gave me.
The traditional name for such reasoning is "sophistry", of course. It can be fun to toss out such parallels into discussions