Well, I don't speak for FSF either, but I will say that I support FSF because I also believe that FSF would rather see copyright (at least ones on software) abolished than to keep its leverage of copyleft.
No, that's not the case. Stallman is pretty clear on this point. Going back to his original reason for creating GNU (the infamous printer incident at MIT), the core point has always been to create an environment in which software authors are encouraged to start from pieces which enforce good citizenship, which by his definition (no judgment, here) is defined as providing source and allowing modification.
The situation where a printer vendor doesn't ship sources with their drivers is *exactly* what Stallman wanted to prevent, and eliminating copyright doesn't prevent that in the least.
Oh, a few other points: you seem to be replying to a strawman. You suggest that "Feynman beats him in actual physics," which may or may not be a sane thing to try to compare (given the divergence of their specialties), but doesn't actually affect the original point, "Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century." I'd like to note that I'd include Feynman in that list as well, not because of his contributions to physics were game-changing, but because he contributed in such important areas while, by all accounts, remaining one of the most respected educators in his field.
Of course, it's always easiest for people from other fields to point to examples of people who are not only recognized within their field, but also have the ability to communicate with the public. A Brief History of Time and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman both demonstrate an ability to communicate with the layman which almost none of their peers can match.
Saying that Hawking is one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century doesn't diminish the impact of Dirac or Einstein or the brilliant minds in other fields. It just acknowledges that Hawking's ability to understand, contribute to and transform his field are to be reckoned with.
Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. The guy has achieved more than almost anyone on the planet
Primarily seem to be a direct result, and inseparable from:
being completely wheelchair bound and having a speech impediment
It's very easy to make this assumption if you don't know anything about his work. If you do know about his work, then you immediately realize that the opposite is true: the magnitude of his contributions is often under-appreciated. After all, if the same thing were said about a non-disabled person, you wouldn't blink. But with Hawking you find yourself questioning how much of an impact his disability had in the assessment.
He's essentially given an extra hurdle to pass through before he can be recognized for any contribution he makes.
With that said, no one gets to be the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge without having done something truly impressive. That's not a charity post. You earn that, and those who have held that position include Paul Dirac, Charles Babbage and Sir Isaac Newton.
Simply noting that his peers consider him to be one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, among whom number some of the rest of that set, should be proof enough. The fact that he has a form of radiation named for him should be proof enough. The fact that he changed the rules of our understanding of the nature of singularities should be enough.
Sad, really, that we can't accept someone's massive contribution to modern physics and math because of his disability.
Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks.
Oh, it was a direct effect? That means, of course, that Google negotiated your royalty checks down with your publisher?
Oh, you meant that there was an INdirect impact via a reduction in sales due, in part, you suspect, to Google making portions of your work available online.
Of course, you haven't done anything even approaching a rigorous study to confirm any of this. You don't even have a control, do you? You just have "I'm not making as much money as I think I should be."
That said, welcome to the nature of fair use. Fair use does impact sales. People who would otherwise purchase a book, in some cases (not all) are people who instead go to a library or borrow from a friend or leaf through a copy on someone else's desk or buy it used (first sale... now there's something that impacts your pocket!)
"guilty until proven innocent" is a bit of a stretch. The instructor is (at first) only checking. Does any act of investigation presume guilt?
There are a great many forms of investigation that we don't allow in criminal cases, for example, unless there is some justification for the suspicion of guilt. For example, you can't just stop random people on the street and search their belongings for illegal items.
I we apply the same logic, here (mind you, teachers aren't law enforcement, so they're not bound by the same rules), then you would ask teachers to refrain from using such tools without a reasonable suspicion of guilt (e.g. a paper doesn't match the voice of its author or a paper is very familiar to the teacher).
I never liked the idea of punishing students for plagiarism, though. I'd much rather that teachers/professors combine approaches to teaching so that plagiarism gains you nothing without the same hard work that everyone else puts in. IMHO, if turning in a paper that someone else wrote can get me a good grade, that's just a sign that the course wasn't actually teaching anything in the first place, but merely hoping that exposure to the material would magically lead to education of the students.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit. Bad teachers "plagiarize" in the sense that they just deliver the material they were given and grade papers/tests on the basis of their comparison to a hypothetical ideal.
GURPS started out fine, but now it is completely engineered by marketing.
This is going to sound flippant, but I'm being sincere: what does that mean?
First off, are you talking about 4th ed. or 3rd? Did you pick up any of the 3rd ed. supplements? Blood Types is a great example. It's less of a sourcebook (though it is that) and more of a tour of the history of vampirism around the world. It's comprehensive, informative and deeply fascinating. Did you know there was an African variety of vampire that's insectoid and drinks the life force of plants? I've been working on the perfect sort of campaign to pull that concept into for a while now... it's just so appealing and odd.
Now, the new line (4th ed.) is still getting past its core book phase. They've just started publishing a few supplemental books, but until recently they were putting out the Supers, Martial Arts and similar titles that form the ground-work. It's an excellent revision to the game, and anyone who played 3e seriously will appreciate the ways in which the game has changed to support the way it was already used and even moreso: the ways in which it remains the same, which is to say, most.
This is their second salvo, of course. The first was when they decided to yank the rights to Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo, the company that salvaged those two titles from their late-1990s slump and made them popular and useful again. Wizards is no longer the cool company that Richard Garfield and crew took from obscurity to gaming geek super-stardom. Since the Hasbro buyout, they've moved further and further into a campaign of systematically alienating and angering every one of their customers, partners, authors and fans.
It's sad, really. There were (and probably still are) some good people there. Oh well, Steve Jackson will enjoy the business, anyway. They still have plenty of PDFs for sale, and even a few for free!
Re:Who gives a shit about twitter?
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 1
Wow, Demi Moore? Really? Now that's an influential user!
Not really, but given that I was trying to give a sense of the breadth of the people interested as users, commentators and misc. interested parties, I think she fits in the list just fine.
Re:Who gives a shit about twitter?
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well... just to name a few:
Anyone watching which companies are growing during the recession
Anyone looking at how the latest high-volume services are building infrastructure on the Web
Well, at least we know they're not evil. Only Google can be evil (usually for having introduced something with the words "green" or "open source" in the name).
Scala looks and feels like Java with a tiny bit of Python thrown in for good measure. I'm really not certain why anyone would use it over, say, groovy or just plain Java.
The really odd part is trying to imagine Scala as a reasonable replacement for Ruby or any other higher level language.
Of course, the same has been said at various times about:
horse racing
the Internet
television
cars
books
religion
Everything that has ever captured the imagination of those engaging in it has attracted those who cannot balance their lives. It's sad to watch, but if we keep blaming each new thing to captivate an audience, we will fail to recognize the simple fact that some people can't put down the shiny thing.
Absolutely. Jabber is a great solution. You can do your own or you can use Google's. Google Apps (their business messaging package that comes with branded email for your domain, private IM, docs, etc) has instant messaging that you can lock down to just people in your company or you can allow them access to the Jabber network as a whole (including normal Google Talk users). If you do allow them external access, you can have a warning pop up whenever they talk to someone on an external connection so that they know it's not intra-company (e.g. a "don't share proprietary informtion" warning).
Either way Jabber is really the only choice these days. Legacy proprietary IM solutions are really just that at this point.
There was a bug in World of Warcraft after the Lich King release where you could end up flying across (and through) the entire would if you dueled a death knight who was on a particular boat. Here's a video of it.
Actually, they're not using ASCII, they're using ISO-Latin-1, which, to be fair, is the default Western character set, so it's not totally unreasonable, just unfortunate for those of us who expect UTF-8 to be the default.
Undersea cables are a notoriously problematic thing, and a wind farm is going to be running lots of live power back to shore. Would cut cables endanger sea life? If so, to what extent? It may not sound like a big deal on a one-off basis, but if you have thousands of these things surrounding the continental shelf, this could seriously impact the viability of our coastal wildlife populations, no?
I read this very differently, and I think this is just the case of a VERY bad Slashdot summary and a terminology barrier between the government and the geek community. "Data" doesn't appear to indicate live bits streaming over networks, here. I think this is saying, "relevant data" and meaning "information relevant to understanding the topology of critical networks." That is, if you run a backbone in the US you have to tell the Feds about it and give them specs.
As the Net becomes more of a critical piece of US infrastructure, I don't think that's terribly unreasonable.
Now, if someone can demonstrate that this is being pushed as a way to snoop on packets without a warrant, I'll stand corrected, but it just doesn't read that way at all to me.
Bah! Sorry about the character issues. Why Slashdot uses ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 encoding, I have absolutely no clue. Follow the link, though, it has lots of good info.
150 years since the publication of OoS just doesn't seem all that interesting to me. 400 years is a much rounder number.
In the year 2009, the world will celebrate the International Year of Astronomy as it commemorates the 400th anniversary of Galileoâ(TM)s use of a telescope to study the skies, and Keplerâ(TM)s publication of Astronomia Nova. 2009 is also the anniversary of many other historic events in science, including Huygenâ(TM)s 1659 publication of Systema Saturnium.This will be modern astronomyâ(TM)s quadricentennial, and the 2009 Year of Astronomy will be an international celebration of numerous astronomical and scientific milestones.
"having immune deficiency" is too general. There are a specific set of diseases which are symptomatic of the way HIV+ attacks the immune system (specifically the reduction of CD4+ T cells.)
Shouldn't (1) include something like "and never found in abundance in organisms not suffering from the disease"
Absolutely not.
It's always possible, and in fact quite likely, that there will be portions of the population who can carry the infection without developing symptoms. Carriers of HIV+ who do not develop symptoms of AIDS are not unheard of, but then again carriers of flu viruses who do not develop the flu are fairly common.
It looks like the default is to turn on the bells and whistles. Did you try going back into the preferences and turning off some of the features you didn't like?
Absolutely! This is a case of public indecency and nothing more. There's absolutely no reason for these prosecutors / police to have lept to the "register as a sex offender and go to jail" big guns. You don't ruin a young girls life for having made one dumb decision about how to use the Internet unless it literally destroyed someone's life.
On a more important note, throwing around the term "child porn" really hurts our sense of moral outrage at real child porn which is a business half a step removed from human trafficking; physical, mental and psychological abuse; and lots of other things that we really should be aiming the big guns at!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't speak for FSF either, but I will say that I support FSF because I also believe that FSF would rather see copyright (at least ones on software) abolished than to keep its leverage of copyleft.
No, that's not the case. Stallman is pretty clear on this point. Going back to his original reason for creating GNU (the infamous printer incident at MIT), the core point has always been to create an environment in which software authors are encouraged to start from pieces which enforce good citizenship, which by his definition (no judgment, here) is defined as providing source and allowing modification.
The situation where a printer vendor doesn't ship sources with their drivers is *exactly* what Stallman wanted to prevent, and eliminating copyright doesn't prevent that in the least.
Oh, a few other points: you seem to be replying to a strawman. You suggest that "Feynman beats him in actual physics," which may or may not be a sane thing to try to compare (given the divergence of their specialties), but doesn't actually affect the original point, "Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century." I'd like to note that I'd include Feynman in that list as well, not because of his contributions to physics were game-changing, but because he contributed in such important areas while, by all accounts, remaining one of the most respected educators in his field.
Of course, it's always easiest for people from other fields to point to examples of people who are not only recognized within their field, but also have the ability to communicate with the public. A Brief History of Time and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman both demonstrate an ability to communicate with the layman which almost none of their peers can match.
Saying that Hawking is one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century doesn't diminish the impact of Dirac or Einstein or the brilliant minds in other fields. It just acknowledges that Hawking's ability to understand, contribute to and transform his field are to be reckoned with.
His most fawning worshipful descriptions such as:
Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. The guy has achieved more than almost anyone on the planet
Primarily seem to be a direct result, and inseparable from :
being completely wheelchair bound and having a speech impediment
It's very easy to make this assumption if you don't know anything about his work. If you do know about his work, then you immediately realize that the opposite is true: the magnitude of his contributions is often under-appreciated. After all, if the same thing were said about a non-disabled person, you wouldn't blink. But with Hawking you find yourself questioning how much of an impact his disability had in the assessment.
He's essentially given an extra hurdle to pass through before he can be recognized for any contribution he makes.
With that said, no one gets to be the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge without having done something truly impressive. That's not a charity post. You earn that, and those who have held that position include Paul Dirac, Charles Babbage and Sir Isaac Newton.
Simply noting that his peers consider him to be one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, among whom number some of the rest of that set, should be proof enough. The fact that he has a form of radiation named for him should be proof enough. The fact that he changed the rules of our understanding of the nature of singularities should be enough.
Sad, really, that we can't accept someone's massive contribution to modern physics and math because of his disability.
Google directly has an effect on my royalty checks.
Oh, it was a direct effect? That means, of course, that Google negotiated your royalty checks down with your publisher?
Oh, you meant that there was an INdirect impact via a reduction in sales due, in part, you suspect, to Google making portions of your work available online.
Of course, you haven't done anything even approaching a rigorous study to confirm any of this. You don't even have a control, do you? You just have "I'm not making as much money as I think I should be."
That said, welcome to the nature of fair use. Fair use does impact sales. People who would otherwise purchase a book, in some cases (not all) are people who instead go to a library or borrow from a friend or leaf through a copy on someone else's desk or buy it used (first sale... now there's something that impacts your pocket!)
"guilty until proven innocent" is a bit of a stretch. The instructor is (at first) only checking. Does any act of investigation presume guilt?
There are a great many forms of investigation that we don't allow in criminal cases, for example, unless there is some justification for the suspicion of guilt. For example, you can't just stop random people on the street and search their belongings for illegal items.
I we apply the same logic, here (mind you, teachers aren't law enforcement, so they're not bound by the same rules), then you would ask teachers to refrain from using such tools without a reasonable suspicion of guilt (e.g. a paper doesn't match the voice of its author or a paper is very familiar to the teacher).
I never liked the idea of punishing students for plagiarism, though. I'd much rather that teachers/professors combine approaches to teaching so that plagiarism gains you nothing without the same hard work that everyone else puts in. IMHO, if turning in a paper that someone else wrote can get me a good grade, that's just a sign that the course wasn't actually teaching anything in the first place, but merely hoping that exposure to the material would magically lead to education of the students.
Good teachers rely on a suite of metrics to gauge student progress and adjust the curriculum to suit. Bad teachers "plagiarize" in the sense that they just deliver the material they were given and grade papers/tests on the basis of their comparison to a hypothetical ideal.
GURPS started out fine, but now it is completely engineered by marketing.
This is going to sound flippant, but I'm being sincere: what does that mean?
First off, are you talking about 4th ed. or 3rd? Did you pick up any of the 3rd ed. supplements? Blood Types is a great example. It's less of a sourcebook (though it is that) and more of a tour of the history of vampirism around the world. It's comprehensive, informative and deeply fascinating. Did you know there was an African variety of vampire that's insectoid and drinks the life force of plants? I've been working on the perfect sort of campaign to pull that concept into for a while now... it's just so appealing and odd.
Now, the new line (4th ed.) is still getting past its core book phase. They've just started publishing a few supplemental books, but until recently they were putting out the Supers, Martial Arts and similar titles that form the ground-work. It's an excellent revision to the game, and anyone who played 3e seriously will appreciate the ways in which the game has changed to support the way it was already used and even moreso: the ways in which it remains the same, which is to say, most.
This is their second salvo, of course. The first was when they decided to yank the rights to Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo, the company that salvaged those two titles from their late-1990s slump and made them popular and useful again. Wizards is no longer the cool company that Richard Garfield and crew took from obscurity to gaming geek super-stardom. Since the Hasbro buyout, they've moved further and further into a campaign of systematically alienating and angering every one of their customers, partners, authors and fans.
It's sad, really. There were (and probably still are) some good people there. Oh well, Steve Jackson will enjoy the business, anyway. They still have plenty of PDFs for sale, and even a few for free!
Wow, Demi Moore? Really? Now that's an influential user!
Not really, but given that I was trying to give a sense of the breadth of the people interested as users, commentators and misc. interested parties, I think she fits in the list just fine.
Well... just to name a few:
This, of course, does not make Twitter a panacea, but it certainly makes it interesting enough to warrant the occasional Slashdot article.
Well, at least we know they're not evil. Only Google can be evil (usually for having introduced something with the words "green" or "open source" in the name).
Scala looks and feels like Java with a tiny bit of Python thrown in for good measure. I'm really not certain why anyone would use it over, say, groovy or just plain Java.
The really odd part is trying to imagine Scala as a reasonable replacement for Ruby or any other higher level language.
Of course, the same has been said at various times about:
Everything that has ever captured the imagination of those engaging in it has attracted those who cannot balance their lives. It's sad to watch, but if we keep blaming each new thing to captivate an audience, we will fail to recognize the simple fact that some people can't put down the shiny thing.
Absolutely. Jabber is a great solution. You can do your own or you can use Google's. Google Apps (their business messaging package that comes with branded email for your domain, private IM, docs, etc) has instant messaging that you can lock down to just people in your company or you can allow them access to the Jabber network as a whole (including normal Google Talk users). If you do allow them external access, you can have a warning pop up whenever they talk to someone on an external connection so that they know it's not intra-company (e.g. a "don't share proprietary informtion" warning).
Either way Jabber is really the only choice these days. Legacy proprietary IM solutions are really just that at this point.
I think it would be much more amusing to have a bot keep submitting the name of the King of Thailand.
There was a bug in World of Warcraft after the Lich King release where you could end up flying across (and through) the entire would if you dueled a death knight who was on a particular boat. Here's a video of it.
Actually, they're not using ASCII, they're using ISO-Latin-1, which, to be fair, is the default Western character set, so it's not totally unreasonable, just unfortunate for those of us who expect UTF-8 to be the default.
Undersea cables are a notoriously problematic thing, and a wind farm is going to be running lots of live power back to shore. Would cut cables endanger sea life? If so, to what extent? It may not sound like a big deal on a one-off basis, but if you have thousands of these things surrounding the continental shelf, this could seriously impact the viability of our coastal wildlife populations, no?
I read this very differently, and I think this is just the case of a VERY bad Slashdot summary and a terminology barrier between the government and the geek community. "Data" doesn't appear to indicate live bits streaming over networks, here. I think this is saying, "relevant data" and meaning "information relevant to understanding the topology of critical networks." That is, if you run a backbone in the US you have to tell the Feds about it and give them specs.
As the Net becomes more of a critical piece of US infrastructure, I don't think that's terribly unreasonable.
Now, if someone can demonstrate that this is being pushed as a way to snoop on packets without a warrant, I'll stand corrected, but it just doesn't read that way at all to me.
Bah! Sorry about the character issues. Why Slashdot uses ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 encoding, I have absolutely no clue. Follow the link, though, it has lots of good info.
150 years since the publication of OoS just doesn't seem all that interesting to me. 400 years is a much rounder number.
-- http://astronomy2009.us/
"having immune deficiency" is too general. There are a specific set of diseases which are symptomatic of the way HIV+ attacks the immune system (specifically the reduction of CD4+ T cells.)
Shouldn't (1) include something like "and never found in abundance in organisms not suffering from the disease"
Absolutely not.
It's always possible, and in fact quite likely, that there will be portions of the population who can carry the infection without developing symptoms. Carriers of HIV+ who do not develop symptoms of AIDS are not unheard of, but then again carriers of flu viruses who do not develop the flu are fairly common.
Yeah, I'm really getting tired of the Wikipedia ethic. That is, "slap a citation tag on it and move along. Research is for chumps."
It looks like the default is to turn on the bells and whistles. Did you try going back into the preferences and turning off some of the features you didn't like?
Absolutely! This is a case of public indecency and nothing more. There's absolutely no reason for these prosecutors / police to have lept to the "register as a sex offender and go to jail" big guns. You don't ruin a young girls life for having made one dumb decision about how to use the Internet unless it literally destroyed someone's life.
On a more important note, throwing around the term "child porn" really hurts our sense of moral outrage at real child porn which is a business half a step removed from human trafficking; physical, mental and psychological abuse; and lots of other things that we really should be aiming the big guns at!