plagiarism or not, its the only resort in classes where the teachers dont allow internet citations
If academic dishonesty is your only resort, you might oughta rethink your strategy.
It's much less likely that you would be guilty of plagiarism if you used the web to find allowed sources and then read those sources before writing the paper. Writing the paper based on secondhand comments of original sources and citing the originals without mention of the internet resources used is just dishonest.
Doing so without a very careful reading of the originals would be dishonest and foolish.
i tend to use resources on the web to write my papers. then ill go to the library to find the books the web site cites and cite them.
Presumably after first reading the relevant text to be sure that it agrees with the paper you've already written.
Of course, even if you do check the original sources like you ought, failing to cite the web site where you originally obtained the information might be a form of plagiarism. Especially if the information is presented in your paper more like the web site presented it and less like the original.
Am I the only one that tried this thing out and thought, "Damn. Look at that real estate."
I'd like it more if I was uploading in the background and my queries had a lighter, smaller interface, say a shell interface. Better yet (much better) an xemacs interface that works well with reftex.
I know that the latter is much too much to ask for a young product, but I hope that the authors give developers (not me) some APIs to get some lighter weight clients out there.
Assuming I ever get a non-local match for my queries, that is.
Well, don't answer that. This isn't really about me. I hope.
I've installed the thing. It seems to see peers. So I thought I'd search for a very, very common author. I entered Dana Scott. Nothing. I entered Tanenbaum. Nothing. I entered local boy Vaandrager. Nothing. I entered Barendregt. Nothing. I entered "concurrent". Nothing.
I entered my name. I got everything I've ever published. But then I had imported my own Bibtex files, so I'm not surprised (I've never cited any matches for the above). I entered "coalgebra". I got matches from phiwum again.
Is the user base small? Skewed? Am I just incapable of using the damn thing?
(Note: I don't *think* it's firewall problems, but I could be wrong. I don't see anything in the logs though. But I'm a liberal arts moron, so don't expect much from me.) Worse than this: I'm a philosopher now. I'm not really doing computer science. I'm starting to guess that this tool won't be too useful for me. At least not for a while. Not until Metaphysics gets its ACM topic category.
If an author doesn't know enough about an article to tell whether basic bibliographic information is right or wrong, he shouldn't cite the article.
Authors, titles, approximate year of publication, etc... Anyone citing an article should see at a glance that these are correct. So what damage can a forger do? Start inserting false publisher fields? A bit embarrassing for the author, perhaps, but nothing too serious.
There's a fallacy at work here, though I can't quite put my finger on it. People are arguing that copyright infringement isn't the same crime as theft, but they don't stop there. Without arguing it, they jump from there to the conclusion that copyright infringement isn't as serious a crime as theft. That's really the role these arguments play on slashdot, and we all know it.
I'm with you so far.
For my part, I say that copyright infringement is a subset of the crime of theft. Specifically, theft of information. Is the difference between theft of object and theft of information any larger than the difference between the theft of patio table and the theft of moped? I don't think so.
But here you utterly lost me.
Copyright infringement is wrong, but I don't see how it's properly called theft and you didn't give any explanation. I don't have any issues with the word piracy in this context, since it has a long history here. But adopting terminology for theft here doesn't make much sense to me.
This could be a scandal that might rock the comparatively-new EU system for a loop. Ministers were being trusted to represent the view of the government that sent them... but it seems as if business interests have found that these individuals are a weak link that can easily be "bought off" and convinced to act on their own.
You have any evidence at all that this was a case of bribery? If not, why use phrases like "bought off"?
The Baghdad LUG was co-founded by Adam Davidson, a reporter who regularly does stories for NPR and PRI's "This American Life". Davidson is a good reporter and also entertaining on "This Life", but I was surprised to hear about his involvement with the Baghdad LUG.
Too bad that Davidson hasn't found the opportunity to report on Linux and open source on "This Life" so far. As far as I know, he hasn't really done any geek news stories on the NPR shows either. Let's hope that he finds the right topic to share with a wider audience. Nice to have a well-spoken nerd out there.
His site, www.adamdavison.com, is close to Slashdot-proof, since it has consisted of a "temporary" site down warning for months now.
Sorry! Even "preview" doesn't help me spot all my errors.
Chaitin also defines technical terms (like random) and then pretends he uses them in their usual, non-technical sense. But his definition of random is not the same as its usual sense. For Chaitin, there is a non-zero probability that a random source of 0's and 1's produce a "non-random" string. This probability goes to 0 as the length of the string goes to infinity, but even then the random source may produce a non-random string (it is a possible event with probability 0).
A word of warning: Chaitin is an entertaining writer, but he is not a careful writer. His purely mathematical theorems and proofs are perfectly fine, of course, but when his thoughts turn philosophical, he is prone to fairly idiosyncratic and dubious thinking.
For example, in one article he inexplicably quotes Einstein to make a point about philosophy of math. In the quote, Einstein alleges that mathematical axioms are invented by humans. Chaitin proudly proclaims that this shows Einstein is an "empiricist". This is a very unusual use of the term "empiricist", not at all consistent with what philosophers of mathematics would mean if they used the term.
Chaitin also defines technical terms (like random) and then pretends he uses them in their usual, non-technical sense. But his definition of random is not the same as its usual sense. For Chaitin, there is a non-zero probability that a random source of 0's and 1's produce a "random" string. This probability goes to 0 as the length of the string goes to infinity, but even then the random source may produce a non-random string (it is a possible event with probability 0).
Finally, Chaitin produces his "random" number Omega, and proudly proclaims that he has proven some mathematical claims are "true for no reason". I don't really know what this would even mean, but unless it means "some equations involve random numbers" then it's not clear how he's proved it.
Anyway, my comments are not referring to this new book, which I have not read, but only to a few articles of Chaitin's that I've read in preparation for a course. For a coherent and clear criticism of Chaitin's work, see Panu Raatikainen's articles.
P.S. Just started reading this thread, and I couldn't help but wonder. There are ~1,400 comments, yet I doubt there are 1,400 readers of slashdot who use Linux exclusively at home. I find it kinda funny.
Odd sense of humor.
1400 comments doesn't imply 1400 commenters.
Commenting in this thread doesn't imply one doesn't use Windows. Many comments do not directly answer the question, "What keeps you off Windows?" Instead, they answer other comments.
The question wasn't "Why do you use only Linux?" but "Why not Windows?" Don't forget Mac, BSD, etc.
Finally: what is so hard to believe about 1400 Slashdot-reading geeks using only Linux at home? Slashdot has a big audience. I would be surprised if fewer than 1400 of this geek audience used only Linux at home.
I use only Linux at home. I have five computers here, and all of them have only Slackware Linux on them. My wife uses only Linux. My three-year-old son uses only Linux (but doesn't know what that means -- I must indoctrinate him well before schools try to subvert him to Windows).
I also know a few others that use only Linux or Linux and OSX at home. Of course, they are grad students, post-docs and professors in computer science, but that's a fairly common background for Slashdot readers, I'd guess.
Evidently, you think the question was mis-placed. You must believe that no one is "really" avoiding Windows at home. I'm pretty sure you're just wrong.
Simple. DRM in BIOSes at the hardware level. Attacks on Linux via SCO etc at the OS level. FUD, loathing, and lock-in at the applications level. Patents, DRM, EULAs and DMCA at the legal level.
Remember the hidden APIs in Windows 3.x? They'll be at it again. Even better, Microsoft could put in "Trusted Computing safeguards" so they can Trust that only Microsoft's applications suite, IDE, etc will run. Bypass these safeguards, and it's charges under the DMCA and 20 years in max security prison as an evil godless communist hippie software pirate terrorist hacker for you, buddy!
Oh, and meanwhile they'll sue you for breaking the clause buried in the Longhorn EULA where you agree to only install Microsoft applications. Good luck in fighting off their army of rabid jackals with law degrees.
This isn't insightful. This is paranoid ranting with no connection to reality.
Microsoft is a monopoly and aims to continue as a monopoly. On this we agree. But there is not a snowball's chance in hell that the court or legislature (no matter how corrupted by money) would allow a monopoly to enforce that computers run only Microsoft software by means of an EULA, the DMCA or shotguns loaded with salt peter. And not even Microsoft is so ignorant and arrogant enough to try.
Microsoft's real life abuses are egregious enough to piss off most folk if we just point them out. We don't have to invent fantasies about the machinations of Evil Bill and his minions.
The argument behind the charge being that by using an ad-blocker you are denying authorization to use computer resources and services. So, by bypassing the the blocker they are knowingly accessing a part of the computer that they are not authorized to access.
Perhaps a bit more plausible than the DMCA claim (well, a lot more plausible). I don't know that it would stand up in a court of law, but it's less obviously just wrong.
Besides, what I know about courts of law is limited to a few misdemeanors.
"This exception permits circumvention of access control measures..."
Now that to me implies that circumventing the control measure represented by an ad-blocker, without the authorization of its owner, would violate the DMCA.
I think you mis-read that entirely. The passage expresses a condition in which defeating copyright access control is allowable: namely, it is allowable when one is testing the security of blah, blah, blah, blah.
This passage does not say that defeating security features violates the DMCA. The DMCA is not about computer security per se, but about encryption (and other?) schemes for protecting copyrighted content. Specifically, defeating such schemes violates the DMCA (fair use rights be damned). Reacting to popup-blocking by presenting alternative delivery of ads is not in violation of the DMCA, regardless of how distasteful the practice is.
Sue them under the DMCA claiming that they are bypassing a security feature that you installed to block ads?
The DMCA regulates encryption techniques intended to protect copyrighted content. I don't see how that applies to "security features" like ad-blockers.
You would never buy the product anyway, but you are costing the web site money for bandwidth. By visiting the site, you are agreeing to pay them in the form of viewing the ad, even if you have no intent of buying the product.
What bollocks. I don't remember any such agreement, either implicit or explicit. There is nothing in the foundations of the World Wide Web which supports such an implicit contract. There is no "site use license" which suggests such an agreement.
This is just nonsense that advertisers and their supporters make up out of nothing. This isn't to say that one shouldn't support advertising or that ads are a bad thing. But one shouldn't support any particular practice by making up spurious contractual obligations (or any other plain and simple fictions).
Gnome is, for all intents and purposes, a part of "Linux". And Linux is in quotes because it's simply a colloquial abbreviation for "Linux based operating systems."
So what? A complaint that applies only to Gnome is not a complaint about Linux. If Gnome has some oddities or lacks some features, that does not mean that Linux has those oddities or lacks those features, since there are alternatives to Gnome.
I don't know what the other guy was refering to, but it is very likely that a criticism of Gnome is not properly called a criticism of Linux.
Come on now, most slashdotters don't even manage to read the article, let alone read, download, extract, compile and execute the article. I think you're pissing into the wind with this one.
Unless, of course, it's something really useful. Like a tool for sysadmin duties via Doom.
If it replaces the old Baker Hall National City ATM, it's right in the middle of the hallway, and not right next to any classrooms. The closest offices are, I believe, philosophy.
That's what I was guessing too, but I haven't been back to Baker since 2001, when I got my PhD from the philosophy dept.
Slashdot Mirror
plagiarism or not, its the only resort in classes where the teachers dont allow internet citations
If academic dishonesty is your only resort, you might oughta rethink your strategy.
It's much less likely that you would be guilty of plagiarism if you used the web to find allowed sources and then read those sources before writing the paper. Writing the paper based on secondhand comments of original sources and citing the originals without mention of the internet resources used is just dishonest.
Doing so without a very careful reading of the originals would be dishonest and foolish.
i tend to use resources on the web to write my papers. then ill go to the library to find the books the web site cites and cite them.
Presumably after first reading the relevant text to be sure that it agrees with the paper you've already written.
Of course, even if you do check the original sources like you ought, failing to cite the web site where you originally obtained the information might be a form of plagiarism. Especially if the information is presented in your paper more like the web site presented it and less like the original.
Some people think it's wrong to cavalierly profit from the misery of others, even if you don't cause that misery.
Hey. Reality TV rules, dude.
(Well, at least Real Stories of the Highway Patrol ruled back in the day.)
Am I the only one that tried this thing out and thought, "Damn. Look at that real estate."
I'd like it more if I was uploading in the background and my queries had a lighter, smaller interface, say a shell interface. Better yet (much better) an xemacs interface that works well with reftex.
I know that the latter is much too much to ask for a young product, but I hope that the authors give developers (not me) some APIs to get some lighter weight clients out there.
Assuming I ever get a non-local match for my queries, that is.
Well, don't answer that. This isn't really about me. I hope.
I've installed the thing. It seems to see peers. So I thought I'd search for a very, very common author. I entered Dana Scott. Nothing. I entered Tanenbaum. Nothing. I entered local boy Vaandrager. Nothing. I entered Barendregt. Nothing. I entered "concurrent". Nothing.
I entered my name. I got everything I've ever published. But then I had imported my own Bibtex files, so I'm not surprised (I've never cited any matches for the above). I entered "coalgebra". I got matches from phiwum again.
Is the user base small? Skewed? Am I just incapable of using the damn thing?
(Note: I don't *think* it's firewall problems, but I could be wrong. I don't see anything in the logs though. But I'm a liberal arts moron, so don't expect much from me.)
Worse than this: I'm a philosopher now. I'm not really doing computer science. I'm starting to guess that this tool won't be too useful for me. At least not for a while. Not until Metaphysics gets its ACM topic category.
If an author doesn't know enough about an article to tell whether basic bibliographic information is right or wrong, he shouldn't cite the article.
Authors, titles, approximate year of publication, etc... Anyone citing an article should see at a glance that these are correct. So what damage can a forger do? Start inserting false publisher fields? A bit embarrassing for the author, perhaps, but nothing too serious.
There's a fallacy at work here, though I can't quite put my finger on it. People are arguing that copyright infringement isn't the same crime as theft, but they don't stop there. Without arguing it, they jump from there to the conclusion that copyright infringement isn't as serious a crime as theft. That's really the role these arguments play on slashdot, and we all know it.
I'm with you so far.
For my part, I say that copyright infringement is a subset of the crime of theft. Specifically, theft of information. Is the difference between theft of object and theft of information any larger than the difference between the theft of patio table and the theft of moped? I don't think so.
But here you utterly lost me.
Copyright infringement is wrong, but I don't see how it's properly called theft and you didn't give any explanation. I don't have any issues with the word piracy in this context, since it has a long history here. But adopting terminology for theft here doesn't make much sense to me.
This could be a scandal that might rock the comparatively-new EU system for a loop. Ministers were being trusted to represent the view of the government that sent them... but it seems as if business interests have found that these individuals are a weak link that can easily be "bought off" and convinced to act on their own.
You have any evidence at all that this was a case of bribery? If not, why use phrases like "bought off"?
You're lucky. Right now, I'm getting:
Sorry, no results were found containing "linux"
Dunno why. "Microsoft XP" returns a single hit too. Funky.
The Baghdad LUG was co-founded by Adam Davidson, a reporter who regularly does stories for NPR and PRI's "This American Life". Davidson is a good reporter and also entertaining on "This Life", but I was surprised to hear about his involvement with the Baghdad LUG.
Too bad that Davidson hasn't found the opportunity to report on Linux and open source on "This Life" so far. As far as I know, he hasn't really done any geek news stories on the NPR shows either. Let's hope that he finds the right topic to share with a wider audience. Nice to have a well-spoken nerd out there.
His site, www.adamdavison.com, is close to Slashdot-proof, since it has consisted of a "temporary" site down warning for months now.
Sorry! Even "preview" doesn't help me spot all my errors.
Chaitin also defines technical terms (like random) and then pretends he uses them in their usual, non-technical sense. But his definition of random is not the same as its usual sense. For Chaitin, there is a non-zero probability that a random source of 0's and 1's produce a "non-random" string. This probability goes to 0 as the length of the string goes to infinity, but even then the random source may produce a non-random string (it is a possible event with probability 0).
Originally, I wrote "random". Sorry again.
A word of warning: Chaitin is an entertaining writer, but he is not a careful writer. His purely mathematical theorems and proofs are perfectly fine, of course, but when his thoughts turn philosophical, he is prone to fairly idiosyncratic and dubious thinking.
For example, in one article he inexplicably quotes Einstein to make a point about philosophy of math. In the quote, Einstein alleges that mathematical axioms are invented by humans. Chaitin proudly proclaims that this shows Einstein is an "empiricist". This is a very unusual use of the term "empiricist", not at all consistent with what philosophers of mathematics would mean if they used the term.
Chaitin also defines technical terms (like random) and then pretends he uses them in their usual, non-technical sense. But his definition of random is not the same as its usual sense. For Chaitin, there is a non-zero probability that a random source of 0's and 1's produce a "random" string. This probability goes to 0 as the length of the string goes to infinity, but even then the random source may produce a non-random string (it is a possible event with probability 0).
Finally, Chaitin produces his "random" number Omega, and proudly proclaims that he has proven some mathematical claims are "true for no reason". I don't really know what this would even mean, but unless it means "some equations involve random numbers" then it's not clear how he's proved it.
Anyway, my comments are not referring to this new book, which I have not read, but only to a few articles of Chaitin's that I've read in preparation for a course. For a coherent and clear criticism of Chaitin's work, see Panu Raatikainen's articles.
Odd sense of humor.
I use only Linux at home. I have five computers here, and all of them have only Slackware Linux on them. My wife uses only Linux. My three-year-old son uses only Linux (but doesn't know what that means -- I must indoctrinate him well before schools try to subvert him to Windows).
I also know a few others that use only Linux or Linux and OSX at home. Of course, they are grad students, post-docs and professors in computer science, but that's a fairly common background for Slashdot readers, I'd guess.
Evidently, you think the question was mis-placed. You must believe that no one is "really" avoiding Windows at home. I'm pretty sure you're just wrong.
> How does Microsoft Intend to Survive?
Simple. DRM in BIOSes at the hardware level. Attacks on Linux via SCO etc at the OS level. FUD, loathing, and lock-in at the applications level. Patents, DRM, EULAs and DMCA at the legal level.
Remember the hidden APIs in Windows 3.x? They'll be at it again. Even better, Microsoft could put in "Trusted Computing safeguards" so they can Trust that only Microsoft's applications suite, IDE, etc will run. Bypass these safeguards, and it's charges under the DMCA and 20 years in max security prison as an evil godless communist hippie software pirate terrorist hacker for you, buddy!
Oh, and meanwhile they'll sue you for breaking the clause buried in the Longhorn EULA where you agree to only install Microsoft applications. Good luck in fighting off their army of rabid jackals with law degrees.
This isn't insightful. This is paranoid ranting with no connection to reality.
Microsoft is a monopoly and aims to continue as a monopoly. On this we agree. But there is not a snowball's chance in hell that the court or legislature (no matter how corrupted by money) would allow a monopoly to enforce that computers run only Microsoft software by means of an EULA, the DMCA or shotguns loaded with salt peter. And not even Microsoft is so ignorant and arrogant enough to try.
Microsoft's real life abuses are egregious enough to piss off most folk if we just point them out. We don't have to invent fantasies about the machinations of Evil Bill and his minions.
The argument behind the charge being that by using an ad-blocker you are denying authorization to use computer resources and services. So, by bypassing the the blocker they are knowingly accessing a part of the computer that they are not authorized to access.
Perhaps a bit more plausible than the DMCA claim (well, a lot more plausible). I don't know that it would stand up in a court of law, but it's less obviously just wrong.
Besides, what I know about courts of law is limited to a few misdemeanors.
"This exception permits circumvention
of access control measures..."
Now that to me implies that circumventing the control measure represented by an ad-blocker, without the authorization of its owner, would violate the DMCA.
I think you mis-read that entirely. The passage expresses a condition in which defeating copyright access control is allowable: namely, it is allowable when one is testing the security of blah, blah, blah, blah.
This passage does not say that defeating security features violates the DMCA. The DMCA is not about computer security per se, but about encryption (and other?) schemes for protecting copyrighted content. Specifically, defeating such schemes violates the DMCA (fair use rights be damned). Reacting to popup-blocking by presenting alternative delivery of ads is not in violation of the DMCA, regardless of how distasteful the practice is.
Sue them under the DMCA claiming that they are bypassing a security feature that you installed to block ads?
The DMCA regulates encryption techniques intended to protect copyrighted content. I don't see how that applies to "security features" like ad-blockers.
You would never buy the product anyway, but you are costing the web site money for bandwidth. By visiting the site, you are agreeing to pay them in the form of viewing the ad, even if you have no intent of buying the product.
What bollocks. I don't remember any such agreement, either implicit or explicit. There is nothing in the foundations of the World Wide Web which supports such an implicit contract. There is no "site use license" which suggests such an agreement.
This is just nonsense that advertisers and their supporters make up out of nothing. This isn't to say that one shouldn't support advertising or that ads are a bad thing. But one shouldn't support any particular practice by making up spurious contractual obligations (or any other plain and simple fictions).
Gnome is, for all intents and purposes, a part of "Linux". And Linux is in quotes because it's simply a colloquial abbreviation for "Linux based operating systems."
So what? A complaint that applies only to Gnome is not a complaint about Linux. If Gnome has some oddities or lacks some features, that does not mean that Linux has those oddities or lacks those features, since there are alternatives to Gnome.
I don't know what the other guy was refering to, but it is very likely that a criticism of Gnome is not properly called a criticism of Linux.
Come on now, most slashdotters don't even manage to read the article, let alone read, download, extract, compile and execute the article. I think you're pissing into the wind with this one.
Unless, of course, it's something really useful. Like a tool for sysadmin duties via Doom.
Cool, glad things are working out for you, but sadly, not everyone defines 'usable' in the same way.
You don't suppose that fact has something to do with his subject line, do you?
Naw, never mind. Couldn't be.
Good point. Well-deserving of the "insightful" mod.
Thanks. That certainly does it.
I note that Bill Gates is one of the largest single shareholders in Home Depot, if not THE largest.
Really?
Is there some easily found verification of this claim? And your other claims about Bill Gates's investments?
It is indeed the old Baker Hall ATM location. I emailed a philosophy dept. professor and confirmed that it was that ATM and also that he unplugged it.
If it replaces the old Baker Hall National City ATM, it's right in the middle of the hallway, and not right next to any classrooms. The closest offices are, I believe, philosophy.
That's what I was guessing too, but I haven't been back to Baker since 2001, when I got my PhD from the philosophy dept.