Even now, I notice that Apple still doesn't automatically update software by default, so, the only people who tend to install the update are those who are security-minded anyway.
False. By default OSX automatically checks for updates on a weekly basis.
Stop! You're both right!;-)
On all Macs I've encountered, there is an automatic check for updates done weekly, but it doesn't automatically update the software. It pops up a window showing the list of available updates (with links to explanations), and it asks if the updates should be done. There is a way to tell your machine "Always apply all updates without asking", but I've never seen this installed as the default.
So both of the above quoted claims are true, and are not in conflict.
Since "science" cannot prove historical events, the only thing left is opinion. By definition, if something is repeatable or testable, it cannot be "proven" by scientific methods. All you are left with is belief.
It'd be difficult to find a more misleading characterization of science.
First off, as various historians and theoreticians of science have observed, scientific methods rarely (if ever) "prove" anything. Scientific methods are all based on 1) proposing explanations for observations, and the 2) attempting to disprove those explanations. After sufficiently many such attempts at disproof have failed, an explanation gets promoted to "hypothesis", and then to "theory". But these are only tentative, with further attempts at disproval continuing whenever anyone can come up with a new test that hasn't been tried.
As part of this, an explanation that is untestable isn't considered scientific at all. It's neither true nor false by scientific standards, until someone comes up with tests that could possibly disprove it. Some explanations (e.g., "God did it") have remained in this state for centuries.
Actually, there is one situation where there is a sort of scientific "proof". This is dealing with negative claims of the form "There are no X".A canonical example is the old "There are no Black Swans". This was disproved by the discovery of a species of swan that is (mostly) black. It lives in Australia, so at one time it was Unknown to Science. You can rephrase this in the positive form, "There are Black Swans", and such existence statements can be "proved" by simply presenting examples. But this is generally classified as data collection, which is understood to always be incomplete. And such negative claims are generally not taken seriously by scientists unless you can give good reasons why X can't exist, based on previously accepted theories. Even then, a single (non-fraudulent) example can suffice to shoot down your reasoned argument against X existing.
In any case, "proof" is something done by mathematicians, not scientists. If you reject science that doesn't present proof, you reject all science, since proof isn't what science does.
If all you have left is belief, then you are susceptible to being defrauded by anyone who comes along with a new belief. But history shows that science's testing process has been pretty good at disproving most beliefs. In the process, the leftover ("not disproved") beliefs that fell out of the process have led to all the technical advances of the previous several centuries, something that the earlier purveyors of belief systems ("religions") have failed to do for as long as we have recorded history.
Multiple universes exist where all bugs are found. Therefore, all bugs are found, fixed, and patched automatically, making it impossible to hack Linux.
Hey, Hush!! We don't want Earthlings to know about the interuniversenet. They'll all want to use it, and then the comm system developed on Earth will be obsolete and all the phone and cable companies will go out of business. We wouldn't want that, would we?
No, brick and mortar is dying because we are too lazy to drive to buy stuff,...
Well, most of the stuff I've ordered from Amazon isn't even available in any nearby bookstore. There were even some good technical bookstores around here, near the universities, 15 years ago. But when I called them asking if they had a book in stock, they usually said "No, but we can order it for you." And I usually replied, "Thanks, but I can order it from Amazon myself just as easily, with no chance of something being heard wrong over the crappy phone line and me getting the wrong book."
Eventually, I gave up, and just ordered everything online, sometimes from the publisher if they had a usable web site, or from Amazon if they didn't.
My wife likes to tell people that her first job title, back in the 1970s, was "computer". This was at a civil engineering firm, and her job involved doing the calculations for drafters, who in turn made the drawings that were turned into blueprints (which were produced by a cheap copying process so that the valuable originals wouldn't be carried around and used outside in the weather). She actually used some of the early scientific calculators to do much of the work, but she got the job because she was one of the few young people in the area who actually understood math up through trigonometry, and could do the calculations by hand (or in her head) if need be. That job title has pretty much disappeared by now, though smaller models of the calculators are still in use.
's an example: swastika. Immediately, you're thinking of 40s era Europe, right?
Heh. Go to google maps, and ask it for "ToJi Temple, Kyoto, Japan". Note the swastika at the site, and the others scattered around the area. Swastikas are still used routinely in Asian maps to indicate (mostly Buddhist) temples. That probably isn't going to change. It's an ancient usage that wasn't much affected by the misuse of the symbol on the other side of the world for a decade or so by a group of people who aren't around any more.
It's only is a small part of the world (mostly Europe and North America) where the swastika has any political meaning today. Elsewhere, it's still in use with its traditional meanings.
My favorite example lately can also be seen on google maps. Enter "Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, San Diego, CA", and zoom in on the little rectangular peninsula sticking out northeast from the barrier beach.
It is not being a 'stupid 10 year old' to insist on the proper use of words, especially when it's the ones who invented the word asking for it to be used properly.
It's also somewhat of a pointless exercise to waste time trying to correct such mass misuses of technical terminology. There's a long history of such misuse, and efforts to educate the public (or even the media) in correct usage have generally failed miserably.
One of my favorite examples is the word "quantum", which to physicists primarily means the smallest quantity of something that can exist. The media/popular use is pretty much an antonym of that. A while ago, I read a news story that claimed a "quantum leap" in a company's income over the previous year. My immediate thought was "Did the company's income really increase by exactly one cent?" But of course I understood what the writer actually meant. In this case, there's a tipoff: the use of the phrase "quantum leap". A scientist would say "quantum jump" to mean the smallest possible change. Anyone who writes "quantum leap" generally means a very large change, and probably wouldn't understand the physicists' uses of the term.
But in other cases, there's no tipoff like this; the technical term is simply misused with a definition that's a wildly-wrong interpretation of the technical meaning. I'll invite others to submit their favorite examples.
Actually, it sometimes goes the other direction. Mathematicians in particular have often adopted popular/media insults as technical terminology. Thus, quite a few centuries ago, it was demonstrated that the length of diagonal of a square couldn't be represented as the length of a side times the ratio of two integers. Since a square's diagonal can be easily drawn, it clearly has a length, so there are numbers that aren't the ratio of two integers. Supposedly, the mathematician(s) who demonstrated this were attacked as "illogical", "irrational", and other insulting terms. Their response was to adopt the unused term "irrational" to describe this new sort of number, and "rational" for the smaller set of numbers that are the ratio of two integers. Similar insults led to the adoption of "imaginary" to mean a number whose square is negative.
More recently, some mathematicians have been exploring the properties of surreal numbers, which are based on a new set of axioms that generate all the rational and real numbers, but also a larger set of others that aren't real but are still well ordered. This terminology doesn't seem to derive from any insult, though; it was apparently proposed by Donald Knuth as a fun bit of word play.
Anyway, attempting to switch the general public (or the media) to the technical use of "hacker" is probably a hopeless quest. The best we can probably do is to distinguish the two usages, with the technical term used as a badge of belonging to the software community.
Lest you think that the latter point is silly, consider what would happen to a physics student if they used "quantum" in the popular sense while talking among scientists and science students. Correct terminology is routinely used in many technical fields to distinguish competent people from outsiders. There are signs (including in this discussion) that "hack" and its derivatives are being used in just this fashion today.
If you had your way, I assume there would be a swat team outside his home, his assets seized and his ass thrown in jail.
Whatcha wanna bet that the team is being organized right now? As someone else just pointed out, this guy has cost the US movie industry trillions of dollars (by the MPAA's math). Cutting into the profit of big corporations is one of the most serious crimes in the US, you know. The movie industry was founded on the principle that a customer pays for every viewing, and this is just one more story about modern criminals finding ways to deprive the movie industry of the income that it depends on to continue producing the wonderful movies that it has always produced.
(Hmmm... You might want to wait a while before clicking on that link. The front-page examples as I post this might give you the wrong impression of the US movie industry's quality standards.;-)
... there are plenty of constructed by postulate math systems that don't correspond to any part of the real world....
And one of the ongoing topics of humor among mathematicians is the mathematician who carefully constructs a set of axioms that lead to an especially beautiful new bit of math, and is proud of the fact that nothing it it applies to anything in the real world. Then one day, a physicist announces that this math system has solved an important problem in physics, and publishes papers showing what part of the real wold it applies to. The mathematician is, of course, heartbroken.
It's not that it isn't taught but that it isn't learned.
Indeed. I've recently seen people using calculators to add 10 to 5. I'd bet that all of them "passed" their school math classes.
I've also seen a number of cases of people presented with a grid of numbers, needing to know how many items were in the grid, and laboriously counting them one by one. They probably "passed" tests on multiplying, but have no concept of why they were taught multiplication or how it might actually be used. It's just a mysterious rite of passage that they're required to perform for no apparent reason.
But this isn't really anything very new. You can find complaints about such ignorance from before everyone had cheap, portable calculators or computers.
Oh no! It's the old "There was no year zero in the Western calendar" bugbear appearing to drag yet another discussion into the depths and devour it.
So far, my favorite comment on that topic is that the years 1 through 524 also didn't exist in our Western calendar. The numbering we use, usually called "A.D." (for Anno Domini" was devised in the year 525, and wasn't used before that time. Actually, it was hardly used by anyone except a few monks for several centuries after that.
My other favorite comment on the topic is that today is also the start of a century - the century that starts today and ends 19 April 2112. Every day is the start of a century. So arguing against a popular "start of century" year is basically silly.
Any group of people is free to settle on an arbitrary "epoch" as the start of their calendar, and many of us do just that. Thus, the unix crowd uses the start of 1970-01-01 UTC as the start of their time(1) date/time system, and nobody seems to chide them for missing the first 1969 years of the calendar. Astronomers also have their own favorite zero time, but use only years (with a decimal point and lots more digits to whatever precision they need at the moment).
It's very simple: split up the apps, call the whole thing "iTunes Suite" (or "iTunes Pack", or "iTunes $WHATEVER...
Or call the whose suite "iTunes". 99% of the users won't know or care that it's made of separate cooperating processes. Chrome works this way, and I've yet to hear anyone say that it makes Chrome confusing to users. Some other things might get complaints, but not the multiple processes.
Why is this even an issue for anyone but the implementers?
When I saw that bit of weirdness, I hit my Back button, and sure enough, the preview showed "... from the first year on." So this is a clear case of something, probably some clever text-munging routine in the SlashCode, that decided that the 'f' should really be an 'i' with an umlaut. Slashdot has been doing some strange things lately...
Let's see what happens to this chunk of text...
Hmmm... Now the preview shows an 'A' with a tilde, while showing the 'i'-umlaut in the entry box. Sigh...
I would also claim that the parent post to your has never got their hands dirty in anything even distantly related to farming, if they think desert returns to anything close to productive in a year of non-use. it is pretty damn obvious from simple rainfall figures that those lands cannot be productive, and the reasons for those changes is also well known, and have little to do with over-farming (and lots to do with geography..)
Heh; that "one year" was mainly the time to restore a (minimal) plant cover. This consists mostly of "pioneer" forbs that can survive without topsoil. It can be used for (limited) grazing but usually won't grow commercial farm crops, which do need topsoil. And doing it in a single farm usually won't have much effect on the local climate; that takes a bit more acreage. Reaching full productivity (for the local area) will take more than one year. But the main problem isn't time; it's education. And people who are at risk of not surviving for a year aren't generally good prospects for such education. It requires people who can invest several years to develop the site, and can expect that they'll be allowed to continue there for decades.
In any case, the studies have been ongoing, and have had some notable successes. One that I found with a quick google was at Facts Reports, that includes a nice aerial photo of a "bocage" area with a bit of the much less green original landscape visible in the foreground.
The evidence so far is that the desertification process has little to do with things like geography, except in the sense that the latitudes in question tend to be on the arid side. The above article includes some numbers: 49% overgrazing, 14% other removal of vegetation (mostly for wood), 24% to bad agricultural practices (whatever that means). Those number are probably overly precise, and could use some error bars. But the reasons are primarily things that are controlled by humans, and about half of "the problem" is overgrazing by human-controlled animals. The Sahel and southwest Asia shouldn't be deserts; they should mostly be arid grasslands with scattered stands of trees. The humans remove the trees, and our grazing animals remove the forbs, leaving deserts.
There is lots of research to show that the original experiment wasn't a fluke, and most of the land outside the core Sahara area can be returned to productive dry-land farming in a few years, if the lands' owners understand how to do it right and have enough land to produce the local micro-climate that makes it viable. But just telling people it's possible doesn't do much. It does require a bit of education, which politically translates to funding. Mostly, the funding has been in the form of "research", as described in that article and many more. Note that the author(s) of the above article acknowledge the "capitalized on traditional knowledge and practices of the region". Such research does usually include "mining" the knowledge of the local people and recording it for the use of others.
One problem for discussions such as this is that the literature is mostly in French. For this reason, most of the story isn't available to people who read only English. A good keyword to use in searches is "bocage", though as usual you have to dig through all the irrelevant matches for that ordinary French word, including a number of company names.
Another good keyword is "goat-proof".;-) It turns out that goats are the grazers that are the most difficult to exclude. If you can keep out a goat, you can keep out pretty much any grazer. Well, except for geese, but they're not usually agricultural pests, and when they are, they fly slow enough that they quickly turn into dinner for humans.
We might also note the author's point 23: "This technique allows to restore degraded land while providing good yields from the ïrst year on." So the idea that it takes many years is wrong; that
A number of historians have written about this topic, and what history says isn't encouraging.
Quite a lot has been written about the history of the "Fertile Crescent", whose core area was what we now call Syria and Iraq. 3000 years ago, it was a a fertile area, semi-arid but covered with forests and farmland. Now most photos you see from anywhere in the area show a rocky, plant-free landscape. The change is generally attributed to salination that was the result of irrigation projects that started about 8000 years ago, but reached their peak extent maybe 3000 years ago. Historians have said that there is a lot of evidence that the people then (farmers and hydro engineers) understood the problem of soil salinification, and understood that the solution is over-watering to leach out the salts. The problem was that, in the short term (of a human life span;-), it was more profitable to use the limited water supply on the maximal crop area. So salts slowly accumulated, and eventually the farming died out because nothing would grow there any more. This process has been documented in other areas, but this is one area in which we know that the people continued maximizing their short-term profit even though they knew of the long-term disaster that would result.
Actually, it seems that the problems there aren't as serious as they look. Back in the 1970s and 80s, an interesting series of experiments were conducted: The researchers leased plots of land of 1 to 2 square-km, built goat-proof fences around them, then sat back and watched. This was done across the southwest-Asian "desert" area, roughly from Syria to Pakistan. The results were that a year later, every such experimental plot of land had turned into "grassland" (or prairie if you prefer). The conclusion was that the entire southwest-Asian desert is artificial. If we would remove the grazing animals from the area for one year, it would all revert to grasslands. Then the grazing animals could be brought back, since the land would support them. As long as the population of grazers was then kept low enough, the area could become several orders of magnitude more productive than it is now. But the result has been to ignore this. There's no way you can get the governments or the farmers in that area to cooperate with such a project, when it requires taking the land out of production for a year.
In both of these cases, the general population may not have understood the issue. The local technical experts (including the farmers) did and do. But their short-term interests have always been to maximize this year's profit, partly because if they don't do that, they'll be bankrupt and out of business. So the ongoing disaster continues.
The "global warming" issue is pretty much the same story. We've documented the process for centuries, and have detailed information for the last half-century showing conclusively that the changes are primarily due to human activity. But the people who run our economies have the usual interest in short-term profit, partly because if they don't behave this way, they'll lose to the others who go with the short term.
Anyway, history says that we probably won't do much about the issue, even though we have enough information to know how to do so. And, since the evidence says that the recent warming is mostly due to human activity, we can say that we now have the ability to control our climate if we wish. But we can only do this on a rather large scale, and we know pretty well that humanity won't organize on the scale that it takes to actually carry out such projects.
And how are we going to do that? I've come across countless people who basically say, "If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?"
Well, I just suggest that they put all their account names, numbers and passwords online. They have nothing in those accounts to hide, right? Most people have the sense to understand why this is a really bad idea. If they didn't have that much sense, they've probably already had an account drained or seen someone else post something online in their name, so they've been taught "the hard way".
Giving the government the "right" to intercept and record our electronic communications is guaranteed to result in interception of your identifying info for your bank accounts and credit cards. It's just a matter of time before some government employee sells that information to someone who wants to use it.
One of the growing risks is that with "smart phones", online banking has such a risk that few people understand. You expect that banking links would be encrypted. But with cell phones, they are often sent in the clear to the phone company's server, where they are encrypted. Thus, the bank thinks it's an encrypted link, but the phone company in fact has the ability to record the plain-text data and do with it as they like.
This is especially hard to get good information about, though, because even Android cell phones have a lot of proprietary software in them that the user has no way of inspecting. That software could be recording everything you do and keeping it in the phone company's databases.
(And no, I won't believe any denials until the source is available and we "hackers" have the ability to recompile and reinstall it ourselves. Without this, no claims of privacy can be believed.;-)
Targetted ads bother me far less than malicious editing and hate-filled distribution of pictures of non-public figures intended to mock and offend.
And both should be legal.
Well, the world's political cartoonists will certainly thank you for writing that.;-)
And, lest you think I'm being silly, consider that here in the US, judges have ruled that computer-generated pictures that look like naked children are legally child pornography. Even when no children were involved in the creation of the images.
It's only a small step from there to considering a political cartoon image of people to be equivalent to an actual photo of those people. We do have cases of 'shopped images of real people to be considered at least misdemeanors. (Have any criminal charges been seen for such altered images?)
Of course, this is an area that is currently in legal limbo, as the legal system tries to catch up with advancing technology. There are computers involved, after all, and the presence of a computer has a history of cancelling all legal precedent. We're slowly repeating the process that led to the pre-computer "rights" in large parts of the world. One law at a time, the legal system is trying to decide whether the law still applies when a computer is involved. We can expect that various judges will continue to decide "yes" or "no" for idiosyncratic reasons, until all rights laws are sorted out yet again. In the meantime, all governments and other authority figures will act as if those rights no longer exist in the modern electronic world.
When you throw a dice, your first throw may be a six. Why are you trying to do statistics with a single event?
Except that, as far as the main topic goes, there were in effect billions and billions of "events". True, the impact itself was one event (or maybe a small number of events, if the asteroid broke up before impact). But for the "panspermia" topic, the result was a cloud of chunks of rock, each with its own trajectory. So a large number of projectiles were tossed randomly into the solar system, and some of them into the galaxy at large. Each one amounts to a separate attempt to infect some other planet somewhere with a sample of material from our planet.
One of the interesting observations from the (very few) deep-drilling projects has been that there are bacteria-like living organisms as far down as we've managed to drill. The evidence is that the Earth's entire crust is a mass of life-bearing rocks. When the K/T impact happened, there were almost certainly just as many tiny living critters in the rock then, most of which would have transformed to spores as soon as their warm, comfortable home cooled too much. The ejected rocks that were big enough to shield the spores from radiation have been expanding in a cloud since then. Well, OK; many have already impacted something in the solar system. And, as the article describes, a subset has reached other solar systems, and impacted something there.
This was much more than a single "event", as far as the resulting rock cloud is concerned. It was (and probably still is) a massive natural "experiment" as infecting the rest of the galaxy with whatever life from Earth can survive the trip.
Of course, we don't know that the chances of survival are zero or higher.
In any case, some astronomers were writing of this scenario back in the 1970s. And they didn't have much evidence then, either, except that they could calculate roughly the rate that ejecta from Earth and the contents of Earth's "dust tail" have been escaping to the outside galaxy. This is just the latest in a sequence of such articles over the past few decades.
The ID propenents are on very solid ground in their belief that something as complex as an eye, a flagellum or the blood clotting cascade could not evolve given that the partially formed proto-systems are useless.
Actually, their argument really reduces to "I don't see how the intermediate stages could be adaptive, so they weren't." But an interesting example appeared in the biological literature about a decade ago: A group of starfish called "brittle stars" (because of their hard surface made of silicate crystals) are in the very early stages of evolving a compound eye, and it's quite adaptive.
The critical part of this discovery is that their hard crystalline surface contains scattered lenses that focus incoming light on light-sensitive cells in the underlying skin surface. It is estimated that the resulting proto-eyes has an angular resolution of only about 1 degree, which isn't very good. It's about twice the angular diameter of the sun and moon, so these important light sources would be only around 1 pixel to them. But this does give them the ability to locate light sources and shadows, and to spot moving objects that are in good contrast to their background.
These critters' eyes are nowhere near as accurate as ours, or (to make a more relevant comparison) the eyes of crustacea or insects. But they are apparently beneficial to the stars, and are at a very early stage of development. In fact, there have been a number of comments on the high optical quality of their little lenses, comparable to the best lenses that humans can manufacture.
The paper suggests that evolution favors cooperation but that it also favors low-cost solutions (i.e. lots of little dumb brains (ants) vs. singular powerful brains (humans))....
Are you saying that large complex brains (humans) can not and do not cooperate?
Well, they can, but not nearly as well as ants.;-)
It has been pointed out that our planet has a much larger biomass of ants than of humans. By just about any measure of "success", ants are much more successful than we are. They are certainly more social.
Of course, we're all part of a biosphere that requires a wide variety of species. So picking one feature (biomass, IQ, habitat volume, flight speed, etc.) as the prime measure of success is somewhat beside the point. Neither we nor the ants has the ability to exterminate the other, so by the popular "social Darwinism" metric, we're incommensurable, and neither is more successful than the other.
Offering music for download (without showing downloads) has been used as grounds for copyright infringement lawsuits.
And something that's perhaps more relevant to this case: There have been infringement lawsuits over the "arranging" of sets of public-domain tunes into medleys. It used to be that you could avoid copyright problems by just having proof that all the music you played was published in the 17th or 18th century. But no longer; if you play two or three old tunes together without pausing to gab (and/or drink) in between, you've produced a "medley", and if it's the same tunes as in a commercially-produced recording, you've infringed their copyright on the "arrangement".
What's especially troublesome about this is that in general you can't locate such commercially-produced medleys online (or in any other manner). I've tried, using the tune names in a couple of albums that I've bought. I can sometimes find a reference to the album online by feeding the tune titles to a search site, but not usually. You could argue that my google-fu just isn't strong enough, and you'd probably be right, but I'd bet that most musicians aren't any better than I am. To my knowledge, there is no single registry that lists all recorded tune medleys that have ever been recorded. There isn't even one per country (and if there were, I wouldn't be able to type most of the tunes' titles in their local alphabet;-).
So the situation seems to be that if you play more than one tune in a row (and maybe even if you do pause to gab or drink between them), the only way to find out if you've violated a copyright in some unknown recording from some previous decade is to wait and see if they file suit against you.
This does really seem to be the sort of thing that the lawyers in this case and many of the posters here are saying is "right". Having got my tunes/ideas from a public-domain source doesn't protect me from copyright infringement charges. But one might also argue that if there's no way I can know that an arrangement of tunes/ideas is copyrighted, I should be allowed to make my own arrangements without worry about being bankrupted by legal fees defending myself against some corporation that I've never heard of (e.g., Pearson, Cengage Learning and Macmillan Higher Education) for some publication (e.g., a recording) that I've never heard of.
Or maybe someone knows of a universal music lookup site that will reliably tell me about every recording that has ever been made of a tune (under any title, anywhere in the world)...
And, lest someone think that "anywhere in the world" is a joke, I'll share a link to a song that anyone at all familiar with tradition Scottish songs will instantly recognize from the first phrase. Note that the usual title isn't mentioned on that page, though there is one comment from someone in Scotland who recognized it. A title search for "Annie Laurie" or "Maxwelton's braes" won't get you a link to this page, or any other that mentions the modern Mandarin song that uses the tune. Actually, adding "site:youtube.com" does return a link to a Japanese guy singing a translation of the Scottish song. But Angela uses unrelated lyrics (a song whose title translates as "Eternal Daylight"), so it isn't found.
So how would a musician who's part of the "Celtic" crowd know that there's a lawsuit risk with using this old (1830s) tune in a recording? It's pretty easy for recordings to make their way to China these days, and vice versa. If you can type in Chinese titles to youtube (as I just did but can't do here;-), you can find lots of nice recordings of music, but I don't know any way to find a tune using the original titles for tunes like this that are from a different part of the world. And these days, copyright charges can come from anywhere in the world.
Taking a text book, and mechanically recreating its content substituting other content intended to convey the same essential information is about as textbook a defnition of creating derivative work as youcan get.
So if I were to rewrite a section of a textbook, but "merely" rephrase the text so that it's easier to understand, I would be guilty of copyright infringement.
This is pretty much how copyright and patent have always been used, of course, and it's a very effective way to block improvements in textbooks (or "Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the US Constitution phrases it).
It hasn't escaped my notice that the discussion here seems to have casually avoided the question of whether a rephrasing is an improvement or not.
As for a textbook, it only makes sense that any such book is going to be similar to most other textbooks on the same subject material, because there's a natural flow to learning.
Or, more to the point, it's often because of restrictions imposed by school curricula. If you don't use the "flow" of information and ideas required by a school district's curriculum, that is ground for banning your product.
It's quite well understood in the US, for example, that most textbooks are consciously written to the requirements of the school boards of California and Texas, because they're the largest mass purchasers of textbooks. If your textbook doesn't match the specs for those two states, you'll lose out in two of your biggest markets. And there's a positive-feedback loop, in which smaller states copy those two states' requirements, because otherwise they won't find very many textbooks that fit their "variant" standards.
Given this fact-of-life about the textbook market, it's no surprise that all the textbooks on a given topic would be similar. And if this court case is decided in the publishers' favor, it could be a disaster to smaller publishers, not just the electronic upstarts. This case has the potential of locking out all but the very largest publishers from making sellable products, since if you write a textbook to fit the California or Texas specs, you'll automatically be "copying" what the largest publishers have already done.
Slashdot Mirror
Even now, I notice that Apple still doesn't automatically update software by default, so, the only people who tend to install the update are those who are security-minded anyway.
False. By default OSX automatically checks for updates on a weekly basis.
Stop! You're both right! ;-)
On all Macs I've encountered, there is an automatic check for updates done weekly, but it doesn't automatically update the software. It pops up a window showing the list of available updates (with links to explanations), and it asks if the updates should be done. There is a way to tell your machine "Always apply all updates without asking", but I've never seen this installed as the default.
So both of the above quoted claims are true, and are not in conflict.
Since "science" cannot prove historical events, the only thing left is opinion. By definition, if something is repeatable or testable, it cannot be "proven" by scientific methods. All you are left with is belief.
It'd be difficult to find a more misleading characterization of science.
First off, as various historians and theoreticians of science have observed, scientific methods rarely (if ever) "prove" anything. Scientific methods are all based on 1) proposing explanations for observations, and the 2) attempting to disprove those explanations. After sufficiently many such attempts at disproof have failed, an explanation gets promoted to "hypothesis", and then to "theory". But these are only tentative, with further attempts at disproval continuing whenever anyone can come up with a new test that hasn't been tried.
As part of this, an explanation that is untestable isn't considered scientific at all. It's neither true nor false by scientific standards, until someone comes up with tests that could possibly disprove it. Some explanations (e.g., "God did it") have remained in this state for centuries.
Actually, there is one situation where there is a sort of scientific "proof". This is dealing with negative claims of the form "There are no X".A canonical example is the old "There are no Black Swans". This was disproved by the discovery of a species of swan that is (mostly) black. It lives in Australia, so at one time it was Unknown to Science. You can rephrase this in the positive form, "There are Black Swans", and such existence statements can be "proved" by simply presenting examples. But this is generally classified as data collection, which is understood to always be incomplete. And such negative claims are generally not taken seriously by scientists unless you can give good reasons why X can't exist, based on previously accepted theories. Even then, a single (non-fraudulent) example can suffice to shoot down your reasoned argument against X existing.
In any case, "proof" is something done by mathematicians, not scientists. If you reject science that doesn't present proof, you reject all science, since proof isn't what science does.
If all you have left is belief, then you are susceptible to being defrauded by anyone who comes along with a new belief. But history shows that science's testing process has been pretty good at disproving most beliefs. In the process, the leftover ("not disproved") beliefs that fell out of the process have led to all the technical advances of the previous several centuries, something that the earlier purveyors of belief systems ("religions") have failed to do for as long as we have recorded history.
Multiple universes exist where all bugs are found. Therefore, all bugs are found, fixed, and patched automatically, making it impossible to hack Linux.
Hey, Hush!! We don't want Earthlings to know about the interuniversenet. They'll all want to use it, and then the comm system developed on Earth will be obsolete and all the phone and cable companies will go out of business. We wouldn't want that, would we?
No, brick and mortar is dying because we are too lazy to drive to buy stuff, ...
Well, most of the stuff I've ordered from Amazon isn't even available in any nearby bookstore. There were even some good technical bookstores around here, near the universities, 15 years ago. But when I called them asking if they had a book in stock, they usually said "No, but we can order it for you." And I usually replied, "Thanks, but I can order it from Amazon myself just as easily, with no chance of something being heard wrong over the crappy phone line and me getting the wrong book."
Eventually, I gave up, and just ordered everything online, sometimes from the publisher if they had a usable web site, or from Amazon if they didn't.
At one time a "computer" was a person. ...
My wife likes to tell people that her first job title, back in the 1970s, was "computer". This was at a civil engineering firm, and her job involved doing the calculations for drafters, who in turn made the drawings that were turned into blueprints (which were produced by a cheap copying process so that the valuable originals wouldn't be carried around and used outside in the weather). She actually used some of the early scientific calculators to do much of the work, but she got the job because she was one of the few young people in the area who actually understood math up through trigonometry, and could do the calculations by hand (or in her head) if need be. That job title has pretty much disappeared by now, though smaller models of the calculators are still in use.
And "intercourse" used to mean conversation.
's an example: swastika. Immediately, you're thinking of 40s era Europe, right?
Heh. Go to google maps, and ask it for "ToJi Temple, Kyoto, Japan". Note the swastika at the site, and the others scattered around the area. Swastikas are still used routinely in Asian maps to indicate (mostly Buddhist) temples. That probably isn't going to change. It's an ancient usage that wasn't much affected by the misuse of the symbol on the other side of the world for a decade or so by a group of people who aren't around any more.
It's only is a small part of the world (mostly Europe and North America) where the swastika has any political meaning today. Elsewhere, it's still in use with its traditional meanings.
My favorite example lately can also be seen on google maps. Enter "Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, San Diego, CA", and zoom in on the little rectangular peninsula sticking out northeast from the barrier beach.
It is not being a 'stupid 10 year old' to insist on the proper use of words, especially when it's the ones who invented the word asking for it to be used properly.
It's also somewhat of a pointless exercise to waste time trying to correct such mass misuses of technical terminology. There's a long history of such misuse, and efforts to educate the public (or even the media) in correct usage have generally failed miserably.
One of my favorite examples is the word "quantum", which to physicists primarily means the smallest quantity of something that can exist. The media/popular use is pretty much an antonym of that. A while ago, I read a news story that claimed a "quantum leap" in a company's income over the previous year. My immediate thought was "Did the company's income really increase by exactly one cent?" But of course I understood what the writer actually meant. In this case, there's a tipoff: the use of the phrase "quantum leap". A scientist would say "quantum jump" to mean the smallest possible change. Anyone who writes "quantum leap" generally means a very large change, and probably wouldn't understand the physicists' uses of the term.
But in other cases, there's no tipoff like this; the technical term is simply misused with a definition that's a wildly-wrong interpretation of the technical meaning. I'll invite others to submit their favorite examples.
Actually, it sometimes goes the other direction. Mathematicians in particular have often adopted popular/media insults as technical terminology. Thus, quite a few centuries ago, it was demonstrated that the length of diagonal of a square couldn't be represented as the length of a side times the ratio of two integers. Since a square's diagonal can be easily drawn, it clearly has a length, so there are numbers that aren't the ratio of two integers. Supposedly, the mathematician(s) who demonstrated this were attacked as "illogical", "irrational", and other insulting terms. Their response was to adopt the unused term "irrational" to describe this new sort of number, and "rational" for the smaller set of numbers that are the ratio of two integers. Similar insults led to the adoption of "imaginary" to mean a number whose square is negative.
More recently, some mathematicians have been exploring the properties of surreal numbers, which are based on a new set of axioms that generate all the rational and real numbers, but also a larger set of others that aren't real but are still well ordered. This terminology doesn't seem to derive from any insult, though; it was apparently proposed by Donald Knuth as a fun bit of word play.
Anyway, attempting to switch the general public (or the media) to the technical use of "hacker" is probably a hopeless quest. The best we can probably do is to distinguish the two usages, with the technical term used as a badge of belonging to the software community.
Lest you think that the latter point is silly, consider what would happen to a physics student if they used "quantum" in the popular sense while talking among scientists and science students. Correct terminology is routinely used in many technical fields to distinguish competent people from outsiders. There are signs (including in this discussion) that "hack" and its derivatives are being used in just this fashion today.
If you had your way, I assume there would be a swat team outside his home, his assets seized and his ass thrown in jail.
Whatcha wanna bet that the team is being organized right now? As someone else just pointed out, this guy has cost the US movie industry trillions of dollars (by the MPAA's math). Cutting into the profit of big corporations is one of the most serious crimes in the US, you know. The movie industry was founded on the principle that a customer pays for every viewing, and this is just one more story about modern criminals finding ways to deprive the movie industry of the income that it depends on to continue producing the wonderful movies that it has always produced.
(Hmmm ... You might want to wait a while before clicking on that link. The front-page examples as I post this might give you the wrong impression of the US movie industry's quality standards. ;-)
... there are plenty of constructed by postulate math systems that don't correspond to any part of the real world. ...
And one of the ongoing topics of humor among mathematicians is the mathematician who carefully constructs a set of axioms that lead to an especially beautiful new bit of math, and is proud of the fact that nothing it it applies to anything in the real world. Then one day, a physicist announces that this math system has solved an important problem in physics, and publishes papers showing what part of the real wold it applies to. The mathematician is, of course, heartbroken.
What kind of result do you think Mr. Churchill might have received if he had stated, "Them Nazis is bad, we gots to beat em."
Here in the US, we'd just elect him president.
It's not that it isn't taught but that it isn't learned.
Indeed. I've recently seen people using calculators to add 10 to 5. I'd bet that all of them "passed" their school math classes.
I've also seen a number of cases of people presented with a grid of numbers, needing to know how many items were in the grid, and laboriously counting them one by one. They probably "passed" tests on multiplying, but have no concept of why they were taught multiplication or how it might actually be used. It's just a mysterious rite of passage that they're required to perform for no apparent reason.
But this isn't really anything very new. You can find complaints about such ignorance from before everyone had cheap, portable calculators or computers.
Except that year 2000 was still 20st century...
Oh no! It's the old "There was no year zero in the Western calendar" bugbear appearing to drag yet another discussion into the depths and devour it.
So far, my favorite comment on that topic is that the years 1 through 524 also didn't exist in our Western calendar. The numbering we use, usually called "A.D." (for Anno Domini" was devised in the year 525, and wasn't used before that time. Actually, it was hardly used by anyone except a few monks for several centuries after that.
My other favorite comment on the topic is that today is also the start of a century - the century that starts today and ends 19 April 2112. Every day is the start of a century. So arguing against a popular "start of century" year is basically silly.
Any group of people is free to settle on an arbitrary "epoch" as the start of their calendar, and many of us do just that. Thus, the unix crowd uses the start of 1970-01-01 UTC as the start of their time(1) date/time system, and nobody seems to chide them for missing the first 1969 years of the calendar. Astronomers also have their own favorite zero time, but use only years (with a decimal point and lots more digits to whatever precision they need at the moment).
But silliness can be fun, so go at it ...
It's very simple: split up the apps, call the whole thing "iTunes Suite" (or "iTunes Pack", or "iTunes $WHATEVER ...
Or call the whose suite "iTunes". 99% of the users won't know or care that it's made of separate cooperating processes. Chrome works this way, and I've yet to hear anyone say that it makes Chrome confusing to users. Some other things might get complaints, but not the multiple processes.
Why is this even an issue for anyone but the implementers?
... from the Ãrst year on.
When I saw that bit of weirdness, I hit my Back button, and sure enough, the preview showed "... from the first year on." So this is a clear case of something, probably some clever text-munging routine in the SlashCode, that decided that the 'f' should really be an 'i' with an umlaut. Slashdot has been doing some strange things lately ...
Let's see what happens to this chunk of text ...
Hmmm ... Now the preview shows an 'A' with a tilde, while showing the 'i'-umlaut in the entry box. Sigh ...
I would also claim that the parent post to your has never got their hands dirty in anything even distantly related to farming, if they think desert returns to anything close to productive in a year of non-use. it is pretty damn obvious from simple rainfall figures that those lands cannot be productive, and the reasons for those changes is also well known, and have little to do with over-farming (and lots to do with geography..)
Heh; that "one year" was mainly the time to restore a (minimal) plant cover. This consists mostly of "pioneer" forbs that can survive without topsoil. It can be used for (limited) grazing but usually won't grow commercial farm crops, which do need topsoil. And doing it in a single farm usually won't have much effect on the local climate; that takes a bit more acreage. Reaching full productivity (for the local area) will take more than one year. But the main problem isn't time; it's education. And people who are at risk of not surviving for a year aren't generally good prospects for such education. It requires people who can invest several years to develop the site, and can expect that they'll be allowed to continue there for decades.
In any case, the studies have been ongoing, and have had some notable successes. One that I found with a quick google was at Facts Reports, that includes a nice aerial photo of a "bocage" area with a bit of the much less green original landscape visible in the foreground.
The evidence so far is that the desertification process has little to do with things like geography, except in the sense that the latitudes in question tend to be on the arid side. The above article includes some numbers: 49% overgrazing, 14% other removal of vegetation (mostly for wood), 24% to bad agricultural practices (whatever that means). Those number are probably overly precise, and could use some error bars. But the reasons are primarily things that are controlled by humans, and about half of "the problem" is overgrazing by human-controlled animals. The Sahel and southwest Asia shouldn't be deserts; they should mostly be arid grasslands with scattered stands of trees. The humans remove the trees, and our grazing animals remove the forbs, leaving deserts.
There is lots of research to show that the original experiment wasn't a fluke, and most of the land outside the core Sahara area can be returned to productive dry-land farming in a few years, if the lands' owners understand how to do it right and have enough land to produce the local micro-climate that makes it viable. But just telling people it's possible doesn't do much. It does require a bit of education, which politically translates to funding. Mostly, the funding has been in the form of "research", as described in that article and many more. Note that the author(s) of the above article acknowledge the "capitalized on traditional knowledge and practices of the region". Such research does usually include "mining" the knowledge of the local people and recording it for the use of others.
One problem for discussions such as this is that the literature is mostly in French. For this reason, most of the story isn't available to people who read only English. A good keyword to use in searches is "bocage", though as usual you have to dig through all the irrelevant matches for that ordinary French word, including a number of company names.
Another good keyword is "goat-proof". ;-) It turns out that goats are the grazers that are the most difficult to exclude. If you can keep out a goat, you can keep out pretty much any grazer. Well, except for geese, but they're not usually agricultural pests, and when they are, they fly slow enough that they quickly turn into dinner for humans.
We might also note the author's point 23: "This technique allows to restore degraded land while providing good yields from the ïrst year on." So the idea that it takes many years is wrong; that
A number of historians have written about this topic, and what history says isn't encouraging.
Quite a lot has been written about the history of the "Fertile Crescent", whose core area was what we now call Syria and Iraq. 3000 years ago, it was a a fertile area, semi-arid but covered with forests and farmland. Now most photos you see from anywhere in the area show a rocky, plant-free landscape. The change is generally attributed to salination that was the result of irrigation projects that started about 8000 years ago, but reached their peak extent maybe 3000 years ago. Historians have said that there is a lot of evidence that the people then (farmers and hydro engineers) understood the problem of soil salinification, and understood that the solution is over-watering to leach out the salts. The problem was that, in the short term (of a human life span ;-), it was more profitable to use the limited water supply on the maximal crop area. So salts slowly accumulated, and eventually the farming died out because nothing would grow there any more. This process has been documented in other areas, but this is one area in which we know that the people continued maximizing their short-term profit even though they knew of the long-term disaster that would result.
Actually, it seems that the problems there aren't as serious as they look. Back in the 1970s and 80s, an interesting series of experiments were conducted: The researchers leased plots of land of 1 to 2 square-km, built goat-proof fences around them, then sat back and watched. This was done across the southwest-Asian "desert" area, roughly from Syria to Pakistan. The results were that a year later, every such experimental plot of land had turned into "grassland" (or prairie if you prefer). The conclusion was that the entire southwest-Asian desert is artificial. If we would remove the grazing animals from the area for one year, it would all revert to grasslands. Then the grazing animals could be brought back, since the land would support them. As long as the population of grazers was then kept low enough, the area could become several orders of magnitude more productive than it is now. But the result has been to ignore this. There's no way you can get the governments or the farmers in that area to cooperate with such a project, when it requires taking the land out of production for a year.
In both of these cases, the general population may not have understood the issue. The local technical experts (including the farmers) did and do. But their short-term interests have always been to maximize this year's profit, partly because if they don't do that, they'll be bankrupt and out of business. So the ongoing disaster continues.
The "global warming" issue is pretty much the same story. We've documented the process for centuries, and have detailed information for the last half-century showing conclusively that the changes are primarily due to human activity. But the people who run our economies have the usual interest in short-term profit, partly because if they don't behave this way, they'll lose to the others who go with the short term.
Anyway, history says that we probably won't do much about the issue, even though we have enough information to know how to do so. And, since the evidence says that the recent warming is mostly due to human activity, we can say that we now have the ability to control our climate if we wish. But we can only do this on a rather large scale, and we know pretty well that humanity won't organize on the scale that it takes to actually carry out such projects.
And how are we going to do that? I've come across countless people who basically say, "If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?"
Well, I just suggest that they put all their account names, numbers and passwords online. They have nothing in those accounts to hide, right? Most people have the sense to understand why this is a really bad idea. If they didn't have that much sense, they've probably already had an account drained or seen someone else post something online in their name, so they've been taught "the hard way".
Giving the government the "right" to intercept and record our electronic communications is guaranteed to result in interception of your identifying info for your bank accounts and credit cards. It's just a matter of time before some government employee sells that information to someone who wants to use it.
One of the growing risks is that with "smart phones", online banking has such a risk that few people understand. You expect that banking links would be encrypted. But with cell phones, they are often sent in the clear to the phone company's server, where they are encrypted. Thus, the bank thinks it's an encrypted link, but the phone company in fact has the ability to record the plain-text data and do with it as they like.
This is especially hard to get good information about, though, because even Android cell phones have a lot of proprietary software in them that the user has no way of inspecting. That software could be recording everything you do and keeping it in the phone company's databases.
(And no, I won't believe any denials until the source is available and we "hackers" have the ability to recompile and reinstall it ourselves. Without this, no claims of privacy can be believed. ;-)
Targetted ads bother me far less than malicious editing and hate-filled distribution of pictures of non-public figures intended to mock and offend. And both should be legal.
Well, the world's political cartoonists will certainly thank you for writing that. ;-)
And, lest you think I'm being silly, consider that here in the US, judges have ruled that computer-generated pictures that look like naked children are legally child pornography. Even when no children were involved in the creation of the images.
It's only a small step from there to considering a political cartoon image of people to be equivalent to an actual photo of those people. We do have cases of 'shopped images of real people to be considered at least misdemeanors. (Have any criminal charges been seen for such altered images?)
Of course, this is an area that is currently in legal limbo, as the legal system tries to catch up with advancing technology. There are computers involved, after all, and the presence of a computer has a history of cancelling all legal precedent. We're slowly repeating the process that led to the pre-computer "rights" in large parts of the world. One law at a time, the legal system is trying to decide whether the law still applies when a computer is involved. We can expect that various judges will continue to decide "yes" or "no" for idiosyncratic reasons, until all rights laws are sorted out yet again. In the meantime, all governments and other authority figures will act as if those rights no longer exist in the modern electronic world.
When you throw a dice, your first throw may be a six. Why are you trying to do statistics with a single event?
Except that, as far as the main topic goes, there were in effect billions and billions of "events". True, the impact itself was one event (or maybe a small number of events, if the asteroid broke up before impact). But for the "panspermia" topic, the result was a cloud of chunks of rock, each with its own trajectory. So a large number of projectiles were tossed randomly into the solar system, and some of them into the galaxy at large. Each one amounts to a separate attempt to infect some other planet somewhere with a sample of material from our planet.
One of the interesting observations from the (very few) deep-drilling projects has been that there are bacteria-like living organisms as far down as we've managed to drill. The evidence is that the Earth's entire crust is a mass of life-bearing rocks. When the K/T impact happened, there were almost certainly just as many tiny living critters in the rock then, most of which would have transformed to spores as soon as their warm, comfortable home cooled too much. The ejected rocks that were big enough to shield the spores from radiation have been expanding in a cloud since then. Well, OK; many have already impacted something in the solar system. And, as the article describes, a subset has reached other solar systems, and impacted something there.
This was much more than a single "event", as far as the resulting rock cloud is concerned. It was (and probably still is) a massive natural "experiment" as infecting the rest of the galaxy with whatever life from Earth can survive the trip.
Of course, we don't know that the chances of survival are zero or higher.
In any case, some astronomers were writing of this scenario back in the 1970s. And they didn't have much evidence then, either, except that they could calculate roughly the rate that ejecta from Earth and the contents of Earth's "dust tail" have been escaping to the outside galaxy. This is just the latest in a sequence of such articles over the past few decades.
The ID propenents are on very solid ground in their belief that something as complex as an eye, a flagellum or the blood clotting cascade could not evolve given that the partially formed proto-systems are useless.
Actually, their argument really reduces to "I don't see how the intermediate stages could be adaptive, so they weren't." But an interesting example appeared in the biological literature about a decade ago: A group of starfish called "brittle stars" (because of their hard surface made of silicate crystals) are in the very early stages of evolving a compound eye, and it's quite adaptive.
The critical part of this discovery is that their hard crystalline surface contains scattered lenses that focus incoming light on light-sensitive cells in the underlying skin surface. It is estimated that the resulting proto-eyes has an angular resolution of only about 1 degree, which isn't very good. It's about twice the angular diameter of the sun and moon, so these important light sources would be only around 1 pixel to them. But this does give them the ability to locate light sources and shadows, and to spot moving objects that are in good contrast to their background.
These critters' eyes are nowhere near as accurate as ours, or (to make a more relevant comparison) the eyes of crustacea or insects. But they are apparently beneficial to the stars, and are at a very early stage of development. In fact, there have been a number of comments on the high optical quality of their little lenses, comparable to the best lenses that humans can manufacture.
The paper suggests that evolution favors cooperation but that it also favors low-cost solutions (i.e. lots of little dumb brains (ants) vs. singular powerful brains (humans)). ...
Are you saying that large complex brains (humans) can not and do not cooperate?
Well, they can, but not nearly as well as ants. ;-)
It has been pointed out that our planet has a much larger biomass of ants than of humans. By just about any measure of "success", ants are much more successful than we are. They are certainly more social.
Of course, we're all part of a biosphere that requires a wide variety of species. So picking one feature (biomass, IQ, habitat volume, flight speed, etc.) as the prime measure of success is somewhat beside the point. Neither we nor the ants has the ability to exterminate the other, so by the popular "social Darwinism" metric, we're incommensurable, and neither is more successful than the other.
Offering music for download (without showing downloads) has been used as grounds for copyright infringement lawsuits.
And something that's perhaps more relevant to this case: There have been infringement lawsuits over the "arranging" of sets of public-domain tunes into medleys. It used to be that you could avoid copyright problems by just having proof that all the music you played was published in the 17th or 18th century. But no longer; if you play two or three old tunes together without pausing to gab (and/or drink) in between, you've produced a "medley", and if it's the same tunes as in a commercially-produced recording, you've infringed their copyright on the "arrangement".
What's especially troublesome about this is that in general you can't locate such commercially-produced medleys online (or in any other manner). I've tried, using the tune names in a couple of albums that I've bought. I can sometimes find a reference to the album online by feeding the tune titles to a search site, but not usually. You could argue that my google-fu just isn't strong enough, and you'd probably be right, but I'd bet that most musicians aren't any better than I am. To my knowledge, there is no single registry that lists all recorded tune medleys that have ever been recorded. There isn't even one per country (and if there were, I wouldn't be able to type most of the tunes' titles in their local alphabet ;-).
So the situation seems to be that if you play more than one tune in a row (and maybe even if you do pause to gab or drink between them), the only way to find out if you've violated a copyright in some unknown recording from some previous decade is to wait and see if they file suit against you.
This does really seem to be the sort of thing that the lawyers in this case and many of the posters here are saying is "right". Having got my tunes/ideas from a public-domain source doesn't protect me from copyright infringement charges. But one might also argue that if there's no way I can know that an arrangement of tunes/ideas is copyrighted, I should be allowed to make my own arrangements without worry about being bankrupted by legal fees defending myself against some corporation that I've never heard of (e.g., Pearson, Cengage Learning and Macmillan Higher Education) for some publication (e.g., a recording) that I've never heard of.
Or maybe someone knows of a universal music lookup site that will reliably tell me about every recording that has ever been made of a tune (under any title, anywhere in the world) ...
And, lest someone think that "anywhere in the world" is a joke, I'll share a link to a song that anyone at all familiar with tradition Scottish songs will instantly recognize from the first phrase. Note that the usual title isn't mentioned on that page, though there is one comment from someone in Scotland who recognized it. A title search for "Annie Laurie" or "Maxwelton's braes" won't get you a link to this page, or any other that mentions the modern Mandarin song that uses the tune. Actually, adding "site:youtube.com" does return a link to a Japanese guy singing a translation of the Scottish song. But Angela uses unrelated lyrics (a song whose title translates as "Eternal Daylight"), so it isn't found.
So how would a musician who's part of the "Celtic" crowd know that there's a lawsuit risk with using this old (1830s) tune in a recording? It's pretty easy for recordings to make their way to China these days, and vice versa. If you can type in Chinese titles to youtube (as I just did but can't do here ;-), you can find lots of nice recordings of music, but I don't know any way to find a tune using the original titles for tunes like this that are from a different part of the world. And these days, copyright charges can come from anywhere in the world.
Taking a text book, and mechanically recreating its content substituting other content intended to convey the same essential information is about as textbook a defnition of creating derivative work as youcan get.
So if I were to rewrite a section of a textbook, but "merely" rephrase the text so that it's easier to understand, I would be guilty of copyright infringement.
This is pretty much how copyright and patent have always been used, of course, and it's a very effective way to block improvements in textbooks (or "Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the US Constitution phrases it).
It hasn't escaped my notice that the discussion here seems to have casually avoided the question of whether a rephrasing is an improvement or not.
As for a textbook, it only makes sense that any such book is going to be similar to most other textbooks on the same subject material, because there's a natural flow to learning.
Or, more to the point, it's often because of restrictions imposed by school curricula. If you don't use the "flow" of information and ideas required by a school district's curriculum, that is ground for banning your product.
It's quite well understood in the US, for example, that most textbooks are consciously written to the requirements of the school boards of California and Texas, because they're the largest mass purchasers of textbooks. If your textbook doesn't match the specs for those two states, you'll lose out in two of your biggest markets. And there's a positive-feedback loop, in which smaller states copy those two states' requirements, because otherwise they won't find very many textbooks that fit their "variant" standards.
Given this fact-of-life about the textbook market, it's no surprise that all the textbooks on a given topic would be similar. And if this court case is decided in the publishers' favor, it could be a disaster to smaller publishers, not just the electronic upstarts. This case has the potential of locking out all but the very largest publishers from making sellable products, since if you write a textbook to fit the California or Texas specs, you'll automatically be "copying" what the largest publishers have already done.