The height of a horse is measured to the withers, basically its shoulders. I suspect that applies to quadrupeds in general. It's because it's a fairly stable place to measure to, but it's hard to keep a horse steady.
This bird isn't a quadruped, but if it has a long and neck it's more meaningful to measure to the shoulder than the top of its head.
The 8 meters is length, rather than height: tip of its head to the top of its tail, and the height is measured foot to shoulder. (I'm inferring that the thing has a tail. I'd much rather get my science news from Science News than from the BBC.)
If you're not a scientist, how do you know the difference between one and the other? If you're not a scientist, are you planning to make your decision based solely on your understanding of his potential biases?
His biases provide you only negative and indirect information about his case. But you're not capable of evaluating the positive and direct information about his case. What do you expect to achieve from this except a reason to dismiss his arguments without actually being able to examine them?
"They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence."
That is:
"You need to tell me if you have any political thoughts that I can turn into an ad hominem argument rather than discuss your data or your methods because I'm not a physicist and I can't follow the math."
Not only possible, but some nifty new avenues, too. What a coup to slip a bit of malicious code into the code base of some important open-source project that accepts contributions (which is one of the big wins of open-sourced software). Obfuscating holes is so much easier than trying to get a buffer overrun to do more than crash the program (even if you have the source).
Anonymous Coward is correct. AC is also a semantics-playing jackass. File sharing is not a crime, per se.
It is, however, a tort. That means they can sue you if you do it, and the court can impose very large financial penalties (but not jail time).
So it's "not illegal" in a narrow, technical sense. In a broader sense, that the law says you may find your ass in court and forced to pay money, it's very much illegal.
It is possible that he had a latest-and-greatest typewriter. One of his favorite projects was a typewriter (the Canon Cat), and he may even have been trying to prove a point with it. I never asked, and he died not long after finishing that book (and before it was published).
My copy had been photocopied, so any corrections might have been hidden. And if his typewriter was one of those line-at-a-time things, he could have corrected individual letter typos before they hit the page.
Personally, I'd rather use a computer to produce the same effect. Paper... harrumph.
Having written a few books myself, I can say that the biggest advantage of a computer over a typewriter is the ability to correct and reorganize.
I once reviewed a preliminary copy of a text by Jef Raskin, one of the Mac designers. It was double-spaced Courier, with hand-drawn diagrams. I found that ironic, coming from him, but it made sense. There were professionals to make the drawings look nice and format the text. His job was the words and the gist of the diagrams.
Nonetheless, it was typed on a computer. (It's easy to spot typewritten text; it will always have some typos or irregular letters). I'm sure it's because it let him rearrange sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters without having to re-type from scratch, and it's no harder than typing. The diagrams, however, are still more work than hand-drawing. (At least, I know of no tool that's as easy, even with a drawing tablet.)
Some writers prefer the notion of organizing everything in your head before typing anything, but that's more memory than I've got. I relied on the ability of the word processor so I could start a paragraph and come back to it later without having to change the paper in my typewriter a huge time boost.
Despite what I've just said, I concur that the article is mostly silly. Others are making that point as well as I can. I just wanted to show why I thought a computer was much better than a typewriter, for different reasons than you gave.
Fundamentalist philosophies have the advantage of logical consistency. When you sit down and argue about them, you can't assail the logic, even though they lead to absurd situations in practice.
You can avoid the absurdities with compromise, as you say, but you lose the logical coherency. You introduce gray areas with no logical solution, only an appeal to what's practical.
Democracy is about creating these compromises, either by accumulation of cruft in laws over time as power switches, or by compromises between sides to get a law passed. Either way you end up with truly insane compromises which just (barely) happen to work, mostly-kinda.
It's more fun to argue fundamentalism on message boards, where all you have to do is be right. Real life and real politics is much messier and vastly less fun.
They do, in fact, say that. I think they consider it obvious that they're selling you a copy of the disc for, say, $16, the same way only you get to see a movie for the price of a ticket. (You don't really think you're renting a chair for $10 at the theater, do you?) They didn't expect the price to go to zero just because you happen to know people, and they'd probably raise the price if they thought you were entitled to make copies.
I can't vouch for "illegal" (IANAL) but can I ask why you don't think it's wrong? Is it some sort of statement about how they rip off musicians? Protesting the price? Punishing suckers not putting DRM into CDs in the first place? Figure that by giving it away you're improving their lives with free advertising?
An order of magnitude is pretty wrong, but it demonstrates the parent's point: as a community, we develop really important stuff in common. Your share of it could be $50k or $500k, but the roads and other infrastructure are a huge common benefit that would be hard to replicate in a completely libertarian society.
The exact value is less important, though the half-mill figure is at least arresting. (I'm still withholding judgment on it until I see the original poster's justification.)
But it's not really making any new arguments; it's just the classic objection to libertarianism that there are commons that are best maintained communally because of the free riders. In many ways, the non-infrastructure elements of the budget (like the military) are a much better demonstration of that argument.
I'm really not trying to make that argument here; it's been well hashed out elsewhere. I was just trying to demonstrate that the number isn't completely ludicrous; there is considerable value in the infrastructure.
This is also one of those "Check mark: $1 Knowing where to put it: $49,999" problems. It takes you a minute to comment a function... times 50 methods a day... times the 1% of comments you ever actually need to go back and read.
Suddenly that "one minute" is a lot of hours spent writing comments that you'll never read, cluttering up your code and getting wronger as you don't maintain them.
If I knew which comment to write, sure, I'd write it. And I do, when I think it's appropriate. There are plenty of times I wish I'd commented something, but they're way outweighed by times I didn't bother. Good function and variables names are more important to me.
If you can't come up with a good name, refactor until you can. A unit of code should do something coherent and easily describable, preferably until you don't need a comment.
Yeah, you'll have to document dependencies, but you should keep them as few as possible. A good language decreases dependencies. I don't have to write "I expect you to free the space for this string" or "This string is stored in a static; do not reuse" because I write in Java.
That works nicely, though you still lose when your true address+personal email address leaks out. Your friends will insist on sending you e-greeting cards, mailing you articles from newspapers, including you on large mailings that get forwarded to some jackass spammer... and once your name leaks out to one, it's leaked out to all of them.
I'm as curious as you about the grandparent's source, but don't forget to count state infrastructure as well as national infrastructure. Schools and roads are built with state revenue, and that's paid for via income taxes, property taxes, etc. I don't know how much that comes to; I doubt it's as much as $500k per person.
Also, don't forget about the fact that stuff accumulates. If they're spending $1 trillion a year on infrastructure, and we've accumulated the infrastructure over the last 150 years, it works out. Government spent less money in the past, so they weren't spending $1 trillion a year 150 years ago (even accounting for inflation, which we'd have to), but it suggests that we're not completely off the mark.
We can run the calculation in reverse: how much does a person pay in taxes over his or her lifetime? Back-of-the-envelope: a $50k salary, half of it going to either the feds or the state, times a 40 year working life, comes to a million bucks. Much of that is spend on non-infrastructure stuff (i.e. paying bureaucrats, feeding soldiers, subsidizing farms, etc.), but if even half of it goes to infrastructure, that would work out.
There are huge flaws in that calculation (the fact that roads have to be maintained on one side; the fact that infrastructure accumulates over time on the other) so it's at least an order of magnitude wrong either way.
But it's not a completely ludicrous suggestion. I'd still like to know where the GP got the numbers.
In fact, Semantic Web isn't even vaguely about search. Semantic Web doesn't index text. It's much closer to a database, with a stronger ability to define relationships between fields than you can do with data schemas. (It's the sort of work you used to have to do with SQL, and some capabilities you couldn't do with SQL.)
So it's Web only in the sense that we're sharing data over port 80; it's not any sort of add-on to HTML. As for Semantic... well, we can debate FOL vs DL vs whatever you want in a different thread.
They may be based in Hong Kong, but they're importing stuff into the UK. Since it doesn't mention another company, I assume that they have a presence in the UK themselves.
As I understand international law (and IANAL) that usually means a separate company incorporated in the UK under UK laws, owned by the Hong Kong company. So the British law applies to the UK company, and the Hong Kong-based owners of that company have to comply, if they want to keep doing business in the UK.
They could hide in Hong Kong to evade enforcement, but the world isn't completely anarchic. Hong Kong has various agreements with the UK and doesn't want to damage them; they'll help the Brits enforce this. Probably. Or maybe they're willing to risk an incident and figure that the Brits will let it blow over. International political chicken; gotta love it.
The fact that some altruistic activity is beneficial does not mean that all altruistic activity is beneficial. Both capitalism and evolution are highly effective (in their very different spheres) because each involves a certain amount of selfishness.
Our brains are wired to support certain kinds of generosity, but it's competing with other parts of our brains which are rightly and effectually selfish.
I don't know if the complaints about the GPL and open source are the right kind or the wrong kind. I do know that it's a reasonable thing to debate. I myself believe that most open source is ultimately funded by closed-source projects, by programmers who are able to create open source in their spare time because somebody else is paying them to create something private. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's enough to say that it's a false leap to conclude that people who complain about the GPL and open source are necessarily defective.
I'd intended to add that since you were posting at 1 you might have a low(ish) ID but simply not spend a lot of time around here. Most likely, though, you probably just lurk.
You've got a user ID low enough that you should be granted mod points, so I can't help but suspect you're being sarcastic. Nonetheless, here is the FAQ.
I'd like to know what he uses that grants you more control over the communication than email. You can ditch anything you don't want to deal with, which is far more impolite in person or on the phone. You can do that with a physical letter, but the latency is just horrible.
You can blacklist or even whitelist. Again, that's harder on a phone.
And if people can't send you email, then you have to use some mechanism which involves both of you communicating at the same time. There are some conversations for which that's far better, but for low-bandwidth conversations I find that very inconvenient.
So what is he using? Cuz he's a very smart man and if he knows something I don't I'd happily switch to it.
But it's suggestive that his greatest development, TeX, was largely obsolete by the time it was ready. He wrote it to replace TROFF, but WYSIWYG editors could do most of what TeX did (including the equations for some of them), and with a much more pleasant user interface.
His development methods produce reliable code, but the market mostly wants good code now than perfect code later. (Even if "good" is merely "good enough", or even "not really good enough but we'll live with it".)
Yeah... if there's anything worse than patent trolls, it's the jackasses who figure that it's often cheaper to pay them to go away than to fight their meritless lawsuits. That goes for the jackass class-action lawyers as well.
I agree; I think that patent trolls are clearly a violation of the intent of patents. You should be able to use an independently-developed idea, especially one for which it would be more work to find it in the published patents rather than creating it yourself. You see that a LOT in software.
But proving that you weren't inspired by the published patent is tricky. If Sony pulls the data directly from the patent records, or even from my discussions with them, they are using my work, not just creating the idea themselves.
Patent trolls are obviously evil bastards: if you haven't even tried to put your patent into practice then you're just useless and your patent should be taken away.
But there are enough gray areas here to make me question whether patents are worth it at all. We'd lose the concept of the independent inventor selling his idea, which is sad, but making a system to sell an idea is hard (and, many on Slashdot would argue, utterly absurd).
Slashdot Mirror
The height of a horse is measured to the withers, basically its shoulders. I suspect that applies to quadrupeds in general. It's because it's a fairly stable place to measure to, but it's hard to keep a horse steady.
This bird isn't a quadruped, but if it has a long and neck it's more meaningful to measure to the shoulder than the top of its head.
The 8 meters is length, rather than height: tip of its head to the top of its tail, and the height is measured foot to shoulder. (I'm inferring that the thing has a tail. I'd much rather get my science news from Science News than from the BBC.)
His biases provide you only negative and indirect information about his case. But you're not capable of evaluating the positive and direct information about his case. What do you expect to achieve from this except a reason to dismiss his arguments without actually being able to examine them?
Or maybe we'd see nothing else.
"They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence."
That is:
"You need to tell me if you have any political thoughts that I can turn into an ad hominem argument rather than discuss your data or your methods because I'm not a physicist and I can't follow the math."
Not only possible, but some nifty new avenues, too. What a coup to slip a bit of malicious code into the code base of some important open-source project that accepts contributions (which is one of the big wins of open-sourced software). Obfuscating holes is so much easier than trying to get a buffer overrun to do more than crash the program (even if you have the source).
Anonymous Coward is correct. AC is also a semantics-playing jackass. File sharing is not a crime, per se.
It is, however, a tort. That means they can sue you if you do it, and the court can impose very large financial penalties (but not jail time).
So it's "not illegal" in a narrow, technical sense. In a broader sense, that the law says you may find your ass in court and forced to pay money, it's very much illegal.
To repeat: AC is a jackass.
I was just about to guess "rm /lib/modules/`uname -r`/net/ipv6/ipv6.ko".
It is possible that he had a latest-and-greatest typewriter. One of his favorite projects was a typewriter (the Canon Cat), and he may even have been trying to prove a point with it. I never asked, and he died not long after finishing that book (and before it was published).
My copy had been photocopied, so any corrections might have been hidden. And if his typewriter was one of those line-at-a-time things, he could have corrected individual letter typos before they hit the page.
Personally, I'd rather use a computer to produce the same effect. Paper... harrumph.
Having written a few books myself, I can say that the biggest advantage of a computer over a typewriter is the ability to correct and reorganize.
I once reviewed a preliminary copy of a text by Jef Raskin, one of the Mac designers. It was double-spaced Courier, with hand-drawn diagrams. I found that ironic, coming from him, but it made sense. There were professionals to make the drawings look nice and format the text. His job was the words and the gist of the diagrams.
Nonetheless, it was typed on a computer. (It's easy to spot typewritten text; it will always have some typos or irregular letters). I'm sure it's because it let him rearrange sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters without having to re-type from scratch, and it's no harder than typing. The diagrams, however, are still more work than hand-drawing. (At least, I know of no tool that's as easy, even with a drawing tablet.)
Some writers prefer the notion of organizing everything in your head before typing anything, but that's more memory than I've got. I relied on the ability of the word processor so I could start a paragraph and come back to it later without having to change the paper in my typewriter a huge time boost.
Despite what I've just said, I concur that the article is mostly silly. Others are making that point as well as I can. I just wanted to show why I thought a computer was much better than a typewriter, for different reasons than you gave.
Fundamentalist philosophies have the advantage of logical consistency. When you sit down and argue about them, you can't assail the logic, even though they lead to absurd situations in practice.
You can avoid the absurdities with compromise, as you say, but you lose the logical coherency. You introduce gray areas with no logical solution, only an appeal to what's practical.
Democracy is about creating these compromises, either by accumulation of cruft in laws over time as power switches, or by compromises between sides to get a law passed. Either way you end up with truly insane compromises which just (barely) happen to work, mostly-kinda.
It's more fun to argue fundamentalism on message boards, where all you have to do is be right. Real life and real politics is much messier and vastly less fun.
They do, in fact, say that. I think they consider it obvious that they're selling you a copy of the disc for, say, $16, the same way only you get to see a movie for the price of a ticket. (You don't really think you're renting a chair for $10 at the theater, do you?) They didn't expect the price to go to zero just because you happen to know people, and they'd probably raise the price if they thought you were entitled to make copies.
I can't vouch for "illegal" (IANAL) but can I ask why you don't think it's wrong? Is it some sort of statement about how they rip off musicians? Protesting the price? Punishing suckers not putting DRM into CDs in the first place? Figure that by giving it away you're improving their lives with free advertising?
An order of magnitude is pretty wrong, but it demonstrates the parent's point: as a community, we develop really important stuff in common. Your share of it could be $50k or $500k, but the roads and other infrastructure are a huge common benefit that would be hard to replicate in a completely libertarian society.
The exact value is less important, though the half-mill figure is at least arresting. (I'm still withholding judgment on it until I see the original poster's justification.)
But it's not really making any new arguments; it's just the classic objection to libertarianism that there are commons that are best maintained communally because of the free riders. In many ways, the non-infrastructure elements of the budget (like the military) are a much better demonstration of that argument.
I'm really not trying to make that argument here; it's been well hashed out elsewhere. I was just trying to demonstrate that the number isn't completely ludicrous; there is considerable value in the infrastructure.
This is also one of those "Check mark: $1 Knowing where to put it: $49,999" problems. It takes you a minute to comment a function... times 50 methods a day... times the 1% of comments you ever actually need to go back and read.
Suddenly that "one minute" is a lot of hours spent writing comments that you'll never read, cluttering up your code and getting wronger as you don't maintain them.
If I knew which comment to write, sure, I'd write it. And I do, when I think it's appropriate. There are plenty of times I wish I'd commented something, but they're way outweighed by times I didn't bother. Good function and variables names are more important to me.
If you can't come up with a good name, refactor until you can. A unit of code should do something coherent and easily describable, preferably until you don't need a comment.
Yeah, you'll have to document dependencies, but you should keep them as few as possible. A good language decreases dependencies. I don't have to write "I expect you to free the space for this string" or "This string is stored in a static; do not reuse" because I write in Java.
That works nicely, though you still lose when your true address+personal email address leaks out. Your friends will insist on sending you e-greeting cards, mailing you articles from newspapers, including you on large mailings that get forwarded to some jackass spammer... and once your name leaks out to one, it's leaked out to all of them.
Or maybe I just need smarter friends.
I'm as curious as you about the grandparent's source, but don't forget to count state infrastructure as well as national infrastructure. Schools and roads are built with state revenue, and that's paid for via income taxes, property taxes, etc. I don't know how much that comes to; I doubt it's as much as $500k per person.
Also, don't forget about the fact that stuff accumulates. If they're spending $1 trillion a year on infrastructure, and we've accumulated the infrastructure over the last 150 years, it works out. Government spent less money in the past, so they weren't spending $1 trillion a year 150 years ago (even accounting for inflation, which we'd have to), but it suggests that we're not completely off the mark.
We can run the calculation in reverse: how much does a person pay in taxes over his or her lifetime? Back-of-the-envelope: a $50k salary, half of it going to either the feds or the state, times a 40 year working life, comes to a million bucks. Much of that is spend on non-infrastructure stuff (i.e. paying bureaucrats, feeding soldiers, subsidizing farms, etc.), but if even half of it goes to infrastructure, that would work out.
There are huge flaws in that calculation (the fact that roads have to be maintained on one side; the fact that infrastructure accumulates over time on the other) so it's at least an order of magnitude wrong either way.
But it's not a completely ludicrous suggestion. I'd still like to know where the GP got the numbers.
In fact, Semantic Web isn't even vaguely about search. Semantic Web doesn't index text. It's much closer to a database, with a stronger ability to define relationships between fields than you can do with data schemas. (It's the sort of work you used to have to do with SQL, and some capabilities you couldn't do with SQL.)
So it's Web only in the sense that we're sharing data over port 80; it's not any sort of add-on to HTML. As for Semantic... well, we can debate FOL vs DL vs whatever you want in a different thread.
They may be based in Hong Kong, but they're importing stuff into the UK. Since it doesn't mention another company, I assume that they have a presence in the UK themselves.
As I understand international law (and IANAL) that usually means a separate company incorporated in the UK under UK laws, owned by the Hong Kong company. So the British law applies to the UK company, and the Hong Kong-based owners of that company have to comply, if they want to keep doing business in the UK.
They could hide in Hong Kong to evade enforcement, but the world isn't completely anarchic. Hong Kong has various agreements with the UK and doesn't want to damage them; they'll help the Brits enforce this. Probably. Or maybe they're willing to risk an incident and figure that the Brits will let it blow over. International political chicken; gotta love it.
The fact that some altruistic activity is beneficial does not mean that all altruistic activity is beneficial. Both capitalism and evolution are highly effective (in their very different spheres) because each involves a certain amount of selfishness.
Our brains are wired to support certain kinds of generosity, but it's competing with other parts of our brains which are rightly and effectually selfish.
I don't know if the complaints about the GPL and open source are the right kind or the wrong kind. I do know that it's a reasonable thing to debate. I myself believe that most open source is ultimately funded by closed-source projects, by programmers who are able to create open source in their spare time because somebody else is paying them to create something private. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's enough to say that it's a false leap to conclude that people who complain about the GPL and open source are necessarily defective.
I'd intended to add that since you were posting at 1 you might have a low(ish) ID but simply not spend a lot of time around here. Most likely, though, you probably just lurk.
You've got a user ID low enough that you should be granted mod points, so I can't help but suspect you're being sarcastic. Nonetheless, here is the FAQ.
I'd like to know what he uses that grants you more control over the communication than email. You can ditch anything you don't want to deal with, which is far more impolite in person or on the phone. You can do that with a physical letter, but the latency is just horrible.
You can blacklist or even whitelist. Again, that's harder on a phone.
And if people can't send you email, then you have to use some mechanism which involves both of you communicating at the same time. There are some conversations for which that's far better, but for low-bandwidth conversations I find that very inconvenient.
So what is he using? Cuz he's a very smart man and if he knows something I don't I'd happily switch to it.
And the way Lucas appears to be milking it, it sounds like the mourners will be able to catch it on the way home from your funerals.
(Mazel tov on the 30th anniversary of your first date with her.)
Damn straight. I learned to program from him.
But it's suggestive that his greatest development, TeX, was largely obsolete by the time it was ready. He wrote it to replace TROFF, but WYSIWYG editors could do most of what TeX did (including the equations for some of them), and with a much more pleasant user interface.
His development methods produce reliable code, but the market mostly wants good code now than perfect code later. (Even if "good" is merely "good enough", or even "not really good enough but we'll live with it".)
Yeah... if there's anything worse than patent trolls, it's the jackasses who figure that it's often cheaper to pay them to go away than to fight their meritless lawsuits. That goes for the jackass class-action lawyers as well.
I agree; I think that patent trolls are clearly a violation of the intent of patents. You should be able to use an independently-developed idea, especially one for which it would be more work to find it in the published patents rather than creating it yourself. You see that a LOT in software.
But proving that you weren't inspired by the published patent is tricky. If Sony pulls the data directly from the patent records, or even from my discussions with them, they are using my work, not just creating the idea themselves.
Patent trolls are obviously evil bastards: if you haven't even tried to put your patent into practice then you're just useless and your patent should be taken away.
But there are enough gray areas here to make me question whether patents are worth it at all. We'd lose the concept of the independent inventor selling his idea, which is sad, but making a system to sell an idea is hard (and, many on Slashdot would argue, utterly absurd).