The answer, presumably, is that there's some sort of literary merit in Roman mythology. The "Jove theory of thunder" isn't taught in science class; it's taught in English class.
They also mention other long-debunked theories. They teach the "four humors" theory in conjunction with Shakespeare. But again, that's literature, not science.
They do briefly mention astrology, in conjunction with Shakespare's Julius Caesar: the whole "ides of March" thing is astrological.
Literature is about human experience, not "truth" in the physics sense. In order to understand how we live and think, we study about how other people lived and thought. Sometimes they believed the dumbest stuff, but put into proper historical context it does us no harm and much good to know what they thought.
The grandparent posts' point wasn't in favor of teaching astrology in schools. He was wondering why we teach about Roman mythology, gods and so forth. Does that have any more validity than astrology?
That's what I wanted the summary to say. And I wanted the article to say what kinds of events are unique to Second Life, how event processing in LSL is different from event processing in other languages, etc.
Be careful what you wish for in wishing to add features to languages. Java, for example, already has an event model. It's not as succinct as in a language designed explicitly for it, but when you add to much to a language it makes it hard to read and hard to get started in. That didn't stop Perl, but most language designers are much happier with a minimal set of constructs that do just the right things.
Ideally, I'd like a tag for the clump of "Computer science by people who haven't done the background reading" posts we get. I haven't seen "my algorithm compresses everything, even compressed files!" or "I've proved that P = NP!" posts in a while. But we should be prepared.
The article isn't much better. It spends a lot of time going over what most Slashdotters already know, like what an "integer" is, and very little on what's novel about a scripting language for an interactive world (or whatever you want to call Second Life.)
You're mixing up your Axis of Evil countries. The good old Iraqi Information Minister was a classic, and I would assume the exact opposite of anything that officially came out of North Korea. I think it was the North Koreans who claimed to have a cure for AIDS.
But Iran is, believe it or not, a considerably more open society. They're prone to under-playing their capabilities, not exaggerating them. The article didn't say it was a Shahab-4, but it's been known for a while that they've been working on it, and they're known to have the Shahab-3 and Fajr-3, with ranges of over a thousand kilometers.
So I suspect we'll have confirmation of this soon enough.
Downloading happens because people like free stuff. Trying to analyze the marginal reasons for a few percent of them misses the earth-spanning forest for a few twigs.
1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable.
Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
What is DRMed and also "high-priced"? Songs are a buck on iTunes. Movies are twenty bucks on DVD. It may be more than you want to pay but it's not a vast amount of money.
I can think of a few examples, like the language CDs I like (Pimsleur). They're expensive. But that's the minority of downloads. Again, DRM doesn't cause the infringement; it's the fact that these are expensive to produce and they're of great value, driving up the price. They'd be downloaded even without DRM.
3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.
Here he's got an argument, albeit a small one. iTMS is extremely convenient on 95%+ of the systems in the world, but not for Linux. And you can't buy its songs and use it on your non-iPod MP3 player.
But again, iPod owns the market, and so do Windows and Mac users. For the vast majority of illegal downloaders, you can't chalk it up either Linux or their MP3 player. Nor to the very few people who want to do something complicated, like edit the music.
Yeah, it happens. But mostly it's the fact that people like to get stuff for free, DRM or no DRM.
I used to do book evaluations for a major technical publisher. I got to see the manuscripts as the author wrote them.
I reviewed one book by Jef Raskin, one of the designers of the Mac and an expert on user interface design. How did he write his book? Double-spaced Courier and hand-drawn illustrations.
They were going to typeset it later and have the illustrations done by a pro anyway. If I'd known that I'd have saved myself all the work I put into formatting mine, which Word butchered on a regular basis.
I dun got this barn door nailed pretty darn shut, but I wanna weld it and and sink it in concrete, just to be sure. That horse may already be outside the barn but I fer gol dern sure don't want him to get any MORE out.
Government statements don't usually use phrases like "complete fucking retards", but it seems warranted in this case. It's offensive that a company would give a loan to somebody just because they know my SSN and then have the audacity to come to me for the money.
It doesn't matter if you see the bug. It matters if the bad guys see the bug.
To exploit a bug in closed source, you have to grovel like crazy through the code or just throw things at random at it. If you want to exploit a memory overflow bug you've got to do it entirely based on the disassembled binary, probably without any symbols. It's astonishing that anybody ever achieves it. Internet Explorer must REALLY be full of holes to have so many spotted.
In either open or closed source, the question is how long the hacker gets to exploit the bug. How many "zero-day" exploits in Firefox are really "minus-ninety-seven day" exploits which have been sucking down credit card numbers and passwords without anybody ever noticing? Nothing about "open source" prevents that, and if anything makes it a hell of a lot easier.
I know perfectly well that security through obscurity will never work. I use Firefox myself, mostly in the hope that the good guys are ahead of the bad guys in finding bugs.
Open source just means that the programmer is less tempted to let obscurity do the security for him when he write the code in the first place. The best way to fix a bug is not to put it in. You're still at the mercy of your own failures, but those are as hard for the bad guys to find as you.
I've come to the conclusion that there is not a correct way to use styles.
I've struggled with Word for years. I'd love to be able to define a hierarchical set of styles and manipulate them. But I've been unable to grasp what's really going on inside a style, and how the various dialogue boxes manipulate what elements of the style.
Maybe there's a way to produce a clean set of styles and set them in a.dot file and never touch them again, but I've never seen it.
It's vastly clearer in CSS, where the style is sitting in front of me, though it's a pain to have to cycle through an edit-render step trying to get what I want and the layout scheme is not well suited for anything except fixed-width pages (and doesn't even flow well there much of the time; I sure wouldn't want to write a book in it.)
I finally gave up on Word and went to OpenOffice. It's even worse, but at least the price is right. And most of the time I've simply concluded that the proper thing is to simply do less with styling and just write the text.
That's the thing: they don't have a name. They're just "comedy/tragedy masks".
Ironically, I did google my own answer at one point. I asked the question and put up twenty bucks (not five; I mis-remembered), but never received any notification that there was an answer. I forgot entirely about it until a few months later when I tried to answer the question, and my own question came up on Google.
Yeah, actually. I wanted to know the proper names of the tragedy/comedy masks. It seemed that they should have a proper Greek name.
It turns out that they don't, and that's why no amount of Googling found an answer. Sometimes you just have to ask an expert. It was worth five bucks to me.
Your analogy is also inaccurate. Building a copy of a Ferrari would take a lot of work. They don't really suffer a lot of financial loss to people trying it.
Slightly closer would be if you stole the plans to the Ferrari. If you managed to reverse-engineer a Ferrari and build your own the lawyers would be puzzled, and probably ignore you. You're probably an enthusiast and using it for maintenance, not to compete with them. (Maybe they'd get bitchy about you not buying parts from them.)
But if you stole the plans for one and put them on the Internet, I assure you they'd be all over your ass.
You're not a hypocrite if you like the indie music. Indie musicians are generally desperately in need of exposure, and so are not much hurt by free downloading and copying. (It's hard to get somebody to download you if they've never heard of you. You literally can't give it away, much less get paid for it.)
The grandparent post is complaining about the people who want the major-label music and use DRM as an excuse for not paying for it. Those major artists have plenty of exposure; their labels paid for it. They want to sell the music instead; you're not doing Britney Spears any favors in spreading the gospel of her music by giving it away.
Some people are content to let the labels and Clear Channel force-feed them their tastes, and don't want to go looking for anything more interesting among the indies. But it's hypocritical of them to then demand to download the music for free and claim that it's only the DRM that's preventing them from paying for it legally.
The grandparent isn't challenging users of eMusic. He's challenging users of P2P clients and, I suspect, allofmp3.com, whose legality is doubtful. Would they rather pay for genuinely legal music, or are they content to take technological and legal loopholes to get the same music for free?
Honestly, it's one of the big questions on the Web lately. Can a bunch of people work together and make something useful, even knowing that some of them are going to be assholes deliberately spitting in the pot?
Slashdot's moderation was an early pioneer. Wikipedia kicked it to a whole new level. Given the number of trolls Slashdot gets I was sure that Wiki would fail, but the number of people willing to revert graffiti is apparently enough that nearly all of the pages are useful nearly all of the time.
Tags are yet another experiment, and "Some people are assholes" is, sadly, a feature and not a bug. Begging the assholes not to be assholes never works, and you've got to design your system around it.
Both Wiki and Slashdot moderation share one feature: negative feedback. If something is trollish, people have to be able to say, "No, that's bad." As far as I can tell there's only positive feedback in tags, and that will limit its usefulness.
A case like this, though... jokes will be made, and this is one. Some jokes will take people's imagination, like "In Soviet Russia..." jokes that keep getting modded up. That, too, must be taken as a feature, one you'll have to live with.
If the term is three years, yeah, it's not a good plan. But if it buys us, say, two decades, that would be plenty of time to put the OPEC nations out of business.
In fact, even partial adoption over a mere five years would be enough to sink the price of oil dramatically and reduce the free income of the OPEC nations. That would give the US considerably more breathing room in its foreign policy with those nations. It's all about margins: right now the margins are massive and they take in oodles of cash. Drop the price of a barrel of oil by half and you're reducing their profit by more like 90%.
(I'm not trying to turn this political, at least not US political. I don't know if the President, either the current one or a future one, will be able to use that breathing room wisely or not.)
I will admit to a bias that I don't like the way many oil producing countries (both Middle Eastern and Venezuela) have tremendous antipathy towards the US, and that the profits from oil help turn that antipathy into action. So for me, at least in the term of a decade or so, I care a lot about replacing oil with anything that is a net energy win.
That certainly puts us at risk of other issues: another huge natural gas producer is Russia, and they're famous for not being real friendly with us, either. I'd pray that the US would be wise enough to use its time to develop even more technologies to free us from that, too, though I'm afraid that we've a history of being short-sighted.
1. Natural gas is something that the US has a fair bit of. If we swap our natural gas for Middle East oil, it shifts the balances of power in a way that's very positive for the US, even if it does nothing for greenhouse gas emissions or long-term energy stability.
2. Natural gas may be renewable. It's easier to produce biologically than gasoline is, and perhaps easier than ethanol. There's research to be done there, as well as on other natural sources like methane hydrates.
So it may or may not be a long-term solution, but managing a national economy involves short-term as well as long-term solutions.
That's a very good point. I am in fact an actor myself, and I find it kind of interesting that they would digitally add tears.
I've always found that the tears themselves were a form of "indicating": that is, using external signs to show an emotion rather than truly feeling it. Tears are a great trick if you can do them, but if they don't come, they don't come. The rest of your performance should carry it.
Mind you, I'm a stage actor. I'm used to having to do such things night after night rather than just once for a perfect take. (There are plenty of other things on a film set to make that take difficult; I'm not trying to claim that Jennifer Connelly somehow has it easy.)
So just adding water to Connelly's face doesn't seem like it would really improve her performance or its impact on the audience. But if more subtle work actually could produce better performances, then I think of it as one more tool in the actor's toolbox.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer, presumably, is that there's some sort of literary merit in Roman mythology. The "Jove theory of thunder" isn't taught in science class; it's taught in English class.
They also mention other long-debunked theories. They teach the "four humors" theory in conjunction with Shakespeare. But again, that's literature, not science.
They do briefly mention astrology, in conjunction with Shakespare's Julius Caesar: the whole "ides of March" thing is astrological.
Literature is about human experience, not "truth" in the physics sense. In order to understand how we live and think, we study about how other people lived and thought. Sometimes they believed the dumbest stuff, but put into proper historical context it does us no harm and much good to know what they thought.
The grandparent posts' point wasn't in favor of teaching astrology in schools. He was wondering why we teach about Roman mythology, gods and so forth. Does that have any more validity than astrology?
That's true, but there are enough of these stories floating around from different sources that it's safe to just pick some random examples.
Can I have a ride on the flying saucer, then?
(Or, to pick another snarky comment, the plural of anecdote != data).
Join a theater troupe. Works for me.
That's what I wanted the summary to say. And I wanted the article to say what kinds of events are unique to Second Life, how event processing in LSL is different from event processing in other languages, etc.
Be careful what you wish for in wishing to add features to languages. Java, for example, already has an event model. It's not as succinct as in a language designed explicitly for it, but when you add to much to a language it makes it hard to read and hard to get started in. That didn't stop Perl, but most language designers are much happier with a minimal set of constructs that do just the right things.
Ideally, I'd like a tag for the clump of "Computer science by people who haven't done the background reading" posts we get. I haven't seen "my algorithm compresses everything, even compressed files!" or "I've proved that P = NP!" posts in a while. But we should be prepared.
How about "badcomputerscience"?
The article isn't much better. It spends a lot of time going over what most Slashdotters already know, like what an "integer" is, and very little on what's novel about a scripting language for an interactive world (or whatever you want to call Second Life.)
Whoops. I'd forgotten about that one. Thanks.
You're mixing up your Axis of Evil countries. The good old Iraqi Information Minister was a classic, and I would assume the exact opposite of anything that officially came out of North Korea. I think it was the North Koreans who claimed to have a cure for AIDS.
But Iran is, believe it or not, a considerably more open society. They're prone to under-playing their capabilities, not exaggerating them. The article didn't say it was a Shahab-4, but it's been known for a while that they've been working on it, and they're known to have the Shahab-3 and Fajr-3, with ranges of over a thousand kilometers.
So I suspect we'll have confirmation of this soon enough.
Out of curiosity, have you tried sharing that song with some other computer? Windows installations rot over time.
Downloading happens because people like free stuff. Trying to analyze the marginal reasons for a few percent of them misses the earth-spanning forest for a few twigs.
1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable.
Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
What is DRMed and also "high-priced"? Songs are a buck on iTunes. Movies are twenty bucks on DVD. It may be more than you want to pay but it's not a vast amount of money.
I can think of a few examples, like the language CDs I like (Pimsleur). They're expensive. But that's the minority of downloads. Again, DRM doesn't cause the infringement; it's the fact that these are expensive to produce and they're of great value, driving up the price. They'd be downloaded even without DRM.
3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.
Here he's got an argument, albeit a small one. iTMS is extremely convenient on 95%+ of the systems in the world, but not for Linux. And you can't buy its songs and use it on your non-iPod MP3 player.
But again, iPod owns the market, and so do Windows and Mac users. For the vast majority of illegal downloaders, you can't chalk it up either Linux or their MP3 player. Nor to the very few people who want to do something complicated, like edit the music.
Yeah, it happens. But mostly it's the fact that people like to get stuff for free, DRM or no DRM.
I used to do book evaluations for a major technical publisher. I got to see the manuscripts as the author wrote them.
I reviewed one book by Jef Raskin, one of the designers of the Mac and an expert on user interface design. How did he write his book? Double-spaced Courier and hand-drawn illustrations.
They were going to typeset it later and have the illustrations done by a pro anyway. If I'd known that I'd have saved myself all the work I put into formatting mine, which Word butchered on a regular basis.
I dun got this barn door nailed pretty darn shut, but I wanna weld it and and sink it in concrete, just to be sure. That horse may already be outside the barn but I fer gol dern sure don't want him to get any MORE out.
Government statements don't usually use phrases like "complete fucking retards", but it seems warranted in this case. It's offensive that a company would give a loan to somebody just because they know my SSN and then have the audacity to come to me for the money.
It doesn't matter if you see the bug. It matters if the bad guys see the bug.
To exploit a bug in closed source, you have to grovel like crazy through the code or just throw things at random at it. If you want to exploit a memory overflow bug you've got to do it entirely based on the disassembled binary, probably without any symbols. It's astonishing that anybody ever achieves it. Internet Explorer must REALLY be full of holes to have so many spotted.
In either open or closed source, the question is how long the hacker gets to exploit the bug. How many "zero-day" exploits in Firefox are really "minus-ninety-seven day" exploits which have been sucking down credit card numbers and passwords without anybody ever noticing? Nothing about "open source" prevents that, and if anything makes it a hell of a lot easier.
I know perfectly well that security through obscurity will never work. I use Firefox myself, mostly in the hope that the good guys are ahead of the bad guys in finding bugs.
Open source just means that the programmer is less tempted to let obscurity do the security for him when he write the code in the first place. The best way to fix a bug is not to put it in. You're still at the mercy of your own failures, but those are as hard for the bad guys to find as you.
I've come to the conclusion that there is not a correct way to use styles.
.dot file and never touch them again, but I've never seen it.
I've struggled with Word for years. I'd love to be able to define a hierarchical set of styles and manipulate them. But I've been unable to grasp what's really going on inside a style, and how the various dialogue boxes manipulate what elements of the style.
Maybe there's a way to produce a clean set of styles and set them in a
It's vastly clearer in CSS, where the style is sitting in front of me, though it's a pain to have to cycle through an edit-render step trying to get what I want and the layout scheme is not well suited for anything except fixed-width pages (and doesn't even flow well there much of the time; I sure wouldn't want to write a book in it.)
I finally gave up on Word and went to OpenOffice. It's even worse, but at least the price is right. And most of the time I've simply concluded that the proper thing is to simply do less with styling and just write the text.
That's the thing: they don't have a name. They're just "comedy/tragedy masks".
i d=348285
Ironically, I did google my own answer at one point. I asked the question and put up twenty bucks (not five; I mis-remembered), but never received any notification that there was an answer. I forgot entirely about it until a few months later when I tried to answer the question, and my own question came up on Google.
Anyway, here's my query:
http://www.answers.google.com/answers/threadview?
Yeah, actually. I wanted to know the proper names of the tragedy/comedy masks. It seemed that they should have a proper Greek name.
It turns out that they don't, and that's why no amount of Googling found an answer. Sometimes you just have to ask an expert. It was worth five bucks to me.
Your analogy is also inaccurate. Building a copy of a Ferrari would take a lot of work. They don't really suffer a lot of financial loss to people trying it.
Slightly closer would be if you stole the plans to the Ferrari. If you managed to reverse-engineer a Ferrari and build your own the lawyers would be puzzled, and probably ignore you. You're probably an enthusiast and using it for maintenance, not to compete with them. (Maybe they'd get bitchy about you not buying parts from them.)
But if you stole the plans for one and put them on the Internet, I assure you they'd be all over your ass.
You're not a hypocrite if you like the indie music. Indie musicians are generally desperately in need of exposure, and so are not much hurt by free downloading and copying. (It's hard to get somebody to download you if they've never heard of you. You literally can't give it away, much less get paid for it.)
The grandparent post is complaining about the people who want the major-label music and use DRM as an excuse for not paying for it. Those major artists have plenty of exposure; their labels paid for it. They want to sell the music instead; you're not doing Britney Spears any favors in spreading the gospel of her music by giving it away.
Some people are content to let the labels and Clear Channel force-feed them their tastes, and don't want to go looking for anything more interesting among the indies. But it's hypocritical of them to then demand to download the music for free and claim that it's only the DRM that's preventing them from paying for it legally.
The grandparent isn't challenging users of eMusic. He's challenging users of P2P clients and, I suspect, allofmp3.com, whose legality is doubtful. Would they rather pay for genuinely legal music, or are they content to take technological and legal loopholes to get the same music for free?
Honestly, it's one of the big questions on the Web lately. Can a bunch of people work together and make something useful, even knowing that some of them are going to be assholes deliberately spitting in the pot?
Slashdot's moderation was an early pioneer. Wikipedia kicked it to a whole new level. Given the number of trolls Slashdot gets I was sure that Wiki would fail, but the number of people willing to revert graffiti is apparently enough that nearly all of the pages are useful nearly all of the time.
Tags are yet another experiment, and "Some people are assholes" is, sadly, a feature and not a bug. Begging the assholes not to be assholes never works, and you've got to design your system around it.
Both Wiki and Slashdot moderation share one feature: negative feedback. If something is trollish, people have to be able to say, "No, that's bad." As far as I can tell there's only positive feedback in tags, and that will limit its usefulness.
A case like this, though... jokes will be made, and this is one. Some jokes will take people's imagination, like "In Soviet Russia..." jokes that keep getting modded up. That, too, must be taken as a feature, one you'll have to live with.
If the term is three years, yeah, it's not a good plan. But if it buys us, say, two decades, that would be plenty of time to put the OPEC nations out of business.
In fact, even partial adoption over a mere five years would be enough to sink the price of oil dramatically and reduce the free income of the OPEC nations. That would give the US considerably more breathing room in its foreign policy with those nations. It's all about margins: right now the margins are massive and they take in oodles of cash. Drop the price of a barrel of oil by half and you're reducing their profit by more like 90%.
(I'm not trying to turn this political, at least not US political. I don't know if the President, either the current one or a future one, will be able to use that breathing room wisely or not.)
I will admit to a bias that I don't like the way many oil producing countries (both Middle Eastern and Venezuela) have tremendous antipathy towards the US, and that the profits from oil help turn that antipathy into action. So for me, at least in the term of a decade or so, I care a lot about replacing oil with anything that is a net energy win.
That certainly puts us at risk of other issues: another huge natural gas producer is Russia, and they're famous for not being real friendly with us, either. I'd pray that the US would be wise enough to use its time to develop even more technologies to free us from that, too, though I'm afraid that we've a history of being short-sighted.
Two reasons:
1. Natural gas is something that the US has a fair bit of. If we swap our natural gas for Middle East oil, it shifts the balances of power in a way that's very positive for the US, even if it does nothing for greenhouse gas emissions or long-term energy stability.
2. Natural gas may be renewable. It's easier to produce biologically than gasoline is, and perhaps easier than ethanol. There's research to be done there, as well as on other natural sources like methane hydrates.
So it may or may not be a long-term solution, but managing a national economy involves short-term as well as long-term solutions.
Ms. Hatto is croaked, but her husband (who produced the recordings) is still alive and may be in deep, deep trouble.
That's a very good point. I am in fact an actor myself, and I find it kind of interesting that they would digitally add tears.
I've always found that the tears themselves were a form of "indicating": that is, using external signs to show an emotion rather than truly feeling it. Tears are a great trick if you can do them, but if they don't come, they don't come. The rest of your performance should carry it.
Mind you, I'm a stage actor. I'm used to having to do such things night after night rather than just once for a perfect take. (There are plenty of other things on a film set to make that take difficult; I'm not trying to claim that Jennifer Connelly somehow has it easy.)
So just adding water to Connelly's face doesn't seem like it would really improve her performance or its impact on the audience. But if more subtle work actually could produce better performances, then I think of it as one more tool in the actor's toolbox.