If I have to become a registered user to add a citation, and if I have to add citations to add things without them being automatically deleted (regardless of their merit), that destroys a lot of anonymity.
Firstly, you don't have to register to add citations. Citations are the same as the rest of the page - if you can edit anything, you can edit the lot. I don't know what you were doing wrong, but it wasn't Wikipedia's fault.
Secondly, registering doesn't destroy anonymity; it improves anonymity! You don't have to provide any personal information at all when you register -- not even an email address. And if you edit as an unregistered user, everyone can see your IP address every time you post; if you register, the IP addresses you use are hidden from everyone apart from a limited group of Wikipedia administrators, and they are only allowed to view them if they have evidence that suggests your account is being used abusively by someone who was previously banned.
And a reporter doesn't have to be a goddamn expert on aeronautics to report on a jet crash, or an expert on maritime engineering to report on a ship sinking.
Crap analogy. When a plane crashes, or a ship sinks, it's usually pretty damn obvious what's happened. It doesn't take a judge to decide whether there's really wreckage all over the runway. It doesn't take an insightful genius to predict that the plane that just crashed in New York probably won't be landing in LA tonight. On the other hand, IP lawsuits, which rely on complex theories about subtle interactions between some of the least-well-understood laws in the country, tend to be slightly harder to report on accurately.
There is, of course, the translations part.. translating Windows can't be cheap; though it surely can't be -that- expensive either.
What translation? It's not like they offer Windows in Welsh or Gaelic.* Microsoft cares so little about Britain that they can't even be bothered to take five minutes to change "color" to "colour". No, I don't think they can claim translation costs are what's pushing the price up.
* Yes, I know a Welsh interface pack does finally exist now, and a Gaelic equivalent is apparently on the way -- but these are separate add-ons, paid for out of public funds.
Cheers mate, 3 friends of mine from Sweden are no longer "swedish citizens"... they've repatriated to places where the total state theft... ahem... "taxation" is a bit less than 100%:)
How did Ikea manage to become a global brand, and its founder one of the richest men in the world, if the Swedish state is so anti-capitalist?
Look, every single person in the world believes their taxes are unreasonably high. This is rarely true. Wikipedia provides an interesting chart, which shows Sweden as having high personal taxes (but somewhat lower than France, Germany, and Belgium), and pretty reasonable corporate taxes (where the supposedly more capitalist USA has among the highest listed). God only knows if the chart is accurate or meaningful, of course, given the source.:)
Isn't part of Godwin's law that, as soon as a nazi reference is made, the discussion should stop?
No, since you ask.:)
(Godwin's Law is an observation, not a decree; it observes that there is a strong tendency in any online argument for one side to compare the other side to the Nazis, and suggests that this will become increasingly likely as a debate grows longer. That's all.)
Sadly, many people will not agree with you on this point.
The type of freedom of speech that people have fought and died for in the past is predominantly the very specific freedom to dissent -- the freedom to stand up in public and criticise the ruling party, or to argue with the beliefs of some religion, without being imprisoned for subversion or burned for heresy.
Most people, at least in the West, do believe that this form of speech should be protected absolutely. However, the simple fact of the matter is that many of them also sincerely believe, after mature consideration, that there exist other forms of speech that should be restricted. You've identified several of them yourself -- terrorist manuals, holocaust denial, and suchlike. There are some other obvious ones you haven't mentioned; so-called "hate speech", for example, which is now already illegal in many Western democracies.
Is this bad? The debate is ongoing. To you, it may be "self-evident" that anything other than total freedom of speech will inevitably become a "slippery slope" that leads to other forms of speech being restricted. But to others it is equally "self-evident" that unrestricted speech will lead to the spread of evil beliefs that will cause material harm to many people. These people don't care what Franklin said. They fully intend to vote for politicians who will give them what they want. (And don't count on the courts or your constitution to protect you... the constitution is just a bit of paper, with no inherent power; it could be amended, and if it was, even the Supreme Court would be powerless to stand up for those rights you now take for granted.)
The only way to convince these people that they are wrong is to refute their arguments and produce arguments of your own that they cannot refute. And I'll be blunt: "Franklin said so" is an appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy and no argument at all. On the other hand, an argument of the form "banning racist speech will, in and of itself, have $SPECIFIC_NEGATIVE_EFFECT on your daily life" could be powerful and compelling... if you can fill in the blank convincingly.
Yes, because obviously everyone who disagrees with you must be being paid by Microsoft to do so.
Look, let's be honest -- Vista isn't bad. It may not be as pretty as OS X, but it's got the most attractive UI Microsoft has ever produced, and on modern hardware it runs beautifully fast, is very stable, and is far more compatible with previous versions of Windows than anyone gives it credit for. (On compatibility, I just can't help remembering all the whining that went on when XP was released and didn't run all DOS programs perfectly. We've been here before, guys. We got over it.)
Note that, far from being a Microsoft shill, I'm saying this as someone who divides most of his computing time between Ubuntu and Solaris, and has a Mac Mini perched on top of his primary desktop PC. I use Vista when I want to play games or to test programs on Windows. I'm a pragmatist who values having different tools for different jobs... and I have to say, I wish there were more of us around. This constant bickering and zealotry is nothing if not tedious.
I seem to remember that in Pascal, in order to pass a string from one function to another, they had to be declared to be of the same length. That was back in Turbo Pascal for DOS days, and maybe they fixed that up by then.
Yeah, that's ancient history. Delphi had pretty nice string handling - arbitrary length, with automatic memory management (reference counting, copy-on-write). Not perfect, but convenient enough.
Haven't used it for years now, but I still remember Delphi fondly as the language that rescued me from the evil clutches of Visual Basic and led me onto the True Path of Real Programming.
this was before grammar generators made hand-built compilers obsolete
If hand-written parsers are obsolete, why did gcc get so much better a while back after its old yacc-generated C++ parser was replaced with a new one written by hand?
Humans can still do far better than machines, particularly for languages like C++ with complex, context-dependent grammars. We aren't quite obsolete yet.:)
we as a culture realized that if we made certain classes of citizens feel unwelcome in our military, we would:
a) Weaken the military. b) Look like the "unfree", "antidemocratic" culture we were nominally opposing.
Sadly, your military's leaders haven't realised this, as is evidenced by the fact that American soldiers face dismissal if it is discovered that they are homosexual.
The US forces try to justify this sickening prejudice with a range of tired old defences, despite the counter-evidence from other nations, such as Britain, that allow openly practising homosexuals to serve with no obvious ill effects.
I suppose gay US servicemen are supposed to be thankful that they merely lose their jobs, instead of actually being stoned to death like they would be in an even less tolerant society...
When printing was discovered copies of the Bible were made and those who printed, distributed stocked these copies were prosecuted (for example burned, cooked in oil etc.). The sermon's at the time were in Latin only and the ruling elite (in the church) was not interested in changing that. They did not want people translate the Bible, interpret it etc. etc.
Your enthusiasm is impressive, but you could usefully study your history in more depth.:)
When Gutenberg initiated the Western tradition of moveable-type printing, it was seized upon with delight by the Church, because at last it provided them with a cheap and reliable way of making exact copies of God's holy word. The Gutenberg Bible was produced with the full backing of the Church, and Gutenberg was given a pension by the local Archbishop and died a natural death.
You may be thinking of the unofficial biblical translation movements of people such as Wycliffe. Those, however, began considerably before the invention of printing; the Wycliffe bibles were all copied by hand. However, despite translating the Bible into English without official approval, Wycliffe was not even excommunicated, let alone "burned" or "cooked in oil"; he died of natural causes. (His bones were later exhumed and burned, but that was a political matter, and didn't involve killing anyone.)
You may also be thinking of later translations by people such as Luther, who did indeed have access to printing technology. However, this too was not particularly opposed, and Luther too died of natural causes; he was excommunicated, but not for translating the bible.
I can't speak with any authority on this particular period, but I also doubt that sermons were given in Latin. Readings from the Bible would have taken place in Latin, of course, but the whole point of the sermon was that the people could understand it - it gave the priests an opportunity to tell people what he wanted them to understand the Bible said, and they would have no easy means of checking this, so there would have been no advantage in preaching in Latin.
I know it's popular to present the so-called Middle Ages as a barbaric period where you could be tortured to death for thinking the wrong thoughts, but really, they weren't that bad at all.
No, but neither will an automatic grammar checker - their great toys to play with if you want a laugh, but I have yet to see one that was actually capable of telling the difference between good and bad grammar.
(For example, Word's grammar checker completely missed the misuse of "their" for "they're" above - as trivial and glaring an error as can imagine. Oops, it didn't notice the missing subject in the previous sentence, either!)
We'll just ignore the fact that Visual Studio does everything you said straight out of the box.
Visual Studio comes with Perl and Fortran support and vi emulation, out of the box? That's amazing! I wonder why Microsoft have never bothered to mention any of this?
The end-users don't have control over how MS wrote their DHCP routines.
If it's a change that the ISP could make, why not? If it was the other way around, people would be yelling about choice.
No they wouldn't, they'd be yelling at the Linux developers to fix their broken code and comply with the standards.
Because Linux users do have control over how their DHCP routines are written. Which is kind of the fundamental difference between open-source and proprietary software.
Telling me I can do something and then rebuking me for doing it is kind of a shitty practice, isn't it?
No, not really. It's a way to reconcile moral views and freedom: give people the right to do something you disagree with, while retaining the right to disagree with them if they take advantage of that right.
For example, I believe people should have the right to troll on Slashdot, because I believe that's the only way to ensure that people who genuinely hold controversial views feel able to argue their case. Does that mean I shouldn't have the right to mod trolls down? If so, why?
If you want me to share code with you, put it in the license.
No, that's for if you want to demand that code be shared. If you would like code to be shared, and intend to complain if it isn't when it reasonably could be, but absolutely do not want to take away the licensee's freedom to decide for themselves whether to share or not, then you should not add anything to the license. It would probably be appropriate to mention your attitude in the README, though.
(One very good reason not to put this kind of stuff in the license is that the GP apparently was specifically interested in allowing large companies to use his code. Large companies hate custom licenses. Stick with something standard if you want the commercial world to even bother looking at your code.)
Yes, but you STILL don't demonstrate where "vacation" would NOT meet those criteria. Read for yourself about the "one or more of the predetermined responses".
So having a SINGLE predetermined response WOULD meet the basics of that.
Does having a SINGLE predetermined response meet the basics of "an electronic router for forwarding the electronic message to the human operator when the classifier indicates that a response to the electronic message requires assistance from a human operator"? No, I don't think so. But that's a requirement of the patented invention - it's even mentioned right there, quite explicitly, in the section of the patent that the GP quoted. The "and" in front of it is, I believe, pretty clearly intended to convey the suggestion that it is not optional. So that's where "vacation" does NOT meet those criteria. Earth to khasim, are we communicating yet?
You're probably right that Google will win this case, but it will probably be because what Google uses is not the same as what's described in the patent, not because "vacation" is prior art.
Alliteration is cute, but cute isn't what companies like.
I dunno, it seems to work just fine for Rational Rose.
Anyway, who cares about companies? Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, not Linux for big soul-sucking corporations. They can use big soul-sucking distros like Red Hat and SuSE that have reassuring words like "Enterprise" in their name, and come with comfortably expensive support contracts. And Ubuntu will continue to thrive on the home desktop, which is the niche it happens to fill best.
True. If Linux was the dominant desktop OS and MS was trying to convert users over to Win, users who wanted to add dual-boot would experience a lot of problems and be unhappy.
No, because Linux - as a result of the hacker culture that produced it - would still assume that users might have other OSes installed (one of the BSDs, maybe, or Minix, or the user's own toy OS), so it wouldn't arbitrarily blow away the boot loader without asking first.
On the third, I attempted to test what had happened on the second, by just grabbing a random used hard drive (containing some version of Windows) and installing Ubuntu on it, accepting all default choices. Ubuntu choked. (Possible causes: multiple partitions, fragmentation, Win swap file in the middle of the area Ubuntu wanted.)
So I reformatted the drive and did a clean W2K install. Ubuntu installed over that very nicely.
Amusingly enough, I had a very similar problem when I installed a new OS on my computer recently. I had a 100-gb block of empty space that I decided to put a second OS on, just for fun, so I stuck the OS install DVD in the drive, rebooted, and clicked through endless configuration windows until I finally reached the partitioner. Here I created a new partition in the empty space and tried to continue.
Oops - the installer claimed that, for some unspecified reason, it couldn't install in that partition.
Double oops - when I rebooted to look the problem up on the web in my primary OS, it turned out that while the new OS refused to install in a lovely large empty partition, it HAD nonetheless blown away my MBR so my computer wouldn't boot at all! Good thing I had a Linux LiveCD to hand so I could fix the damage.
I eventually managed to persuade it into installing via a long and tedious process of trial and error, marking partitions active and inactive and all that jazz.
The OS in question? None other than the super-user-friendly, easiest-ever-to-install masterpiece that is Microsoft Windows Vista.
So, my impression is that Ubuntu is not really ready for the general public to install, not on a Win machine that's been in use. At the very least, not until it knows how to deal with fragmentation, Win swap files in inconvenient places, and the like. I'd even settle for a message like "Fool, this HD is hopelessly fragmented, fix that and move the swap file, before Ubuntu can help you." Bonus points for instructions on how to do those things. Double bonus points for creating a batch file that will run on reboot and do those things for you.
And I can only conclude that Windows isn't ready for the general public to install either, not on a machine that's been in use. At the very least, not until it knows how to deal with an existing OS being installed and the like. I'd even settle for a message like "Fool, I'm an arrogant OS that insists on being installed into the active partition, disable your other OS before you try to install me." Triple bonus points for not actually rendering the entire computer inoperable when the installation fails.
Linux ain't perfect, but compared to the competition, it's a hell of a lot better than Windows. It's just that most end users don't have to install Windows, so they don't know just how bad its installer is.
In fact racial profiling for terrorists would work quite well in the U.S. and E.U.
Yeah - racial profiling would have stopped Timothy McVeigh in his tracks, wouldn't it?
Oh, wait, he wasn't an Arab. (Or even foreign.) Or a Muslim. (Or even religious.)
In fact he was a white American agnostic. Didn't stop him committing one of the worst acts of terrorism in America's history, of course.
Okay, so you want to look only at cases where Muslim fundamentalists are trying to blow up planes, do you? Okay, please explain how racial profiling would have helped catch Richard Reid, who was, uh, a white British-Jamaican man, who easily made it onto a plane with a bomb and would have succeeded in downing a trans-Atlantic flight if another passenger hadn't spotted him trying to light the fuse.
But hey, let's not let the truth get in the way of indulging our xenophobia, shall we?
Because I have this terrible suspicion that the major cause of these results may have been scenes along the lines of "Hello, I'm a bored college student. Wow, you're going to pay me to play games for you? Awesome! What do you want me to say?"
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, registering doesn't destroy anonymity; it improves anonymity! You don't have to provide any personal information at all when you register -- not even an email address. And if you edit as an unregistered user, everyone can see your IP address every time you post; if you register, the IP addresses you use are hidden from everyone apart from a limited group of Wikipedia administrators, and they are only allowed to view them if they have evidence that suggests your account is being used abusively by someone who was previously banned.
* Yes, I know a Welsh interface pack does finally exist now, and a Gaelic equivalent is apparently on the way -- but these are separate add-ons, paid for out of public funds.
Look, every single person in the world believes their taxes are unreasonably high. This is rarely true. Wikipedia provides an interesting chart, which shows Sweden as having high personal taxes (but somewhat lower than France, Germany, and Belgium), and pretty reasonable corporate taxes (where the supposedly more capitalist USA has among the highest listed). God only knows if the chart is accurate or meaningful, of course, given the source.
(Godwin's Law is an observation, not a decree; it observes that there is a strong tendency in any online argument for one side to compare the other side to the Nazis, and suggests that this will become increasingly likely as a debate grows longer. That's all.)
The type of freedom of speech that people have fought and died for in the past is predominantly the very specific freedom to dissent -- the freedom to stand up in public and criticise the ruling party, or to argue with the beliefs of some religion, without being imprisoned for subversion or burned for heresy.
Most people, at least in the West, do believe that this form of speech should be protected absolutely. However, the simple fact of the matter is that many of them also sincerely believe, after mature consideration, that there exist other forms of speech that should be restricted. You've identified several of them yourself -- terrorist manuals, holocaust denial, and suchlike. There are some other obvious ones you haven't mentioned; so-called "hate speech", for example, which is now already illegal in many Western democracies.
Is this bad? The debate is ongoing. To you, it may be "self-evident" that anything other than total freedom of speech will inevitably become a "slippery slope" that leads to other forms of speech being restricted. But to others it is equally "self-evident" that unrestricted speech will lead to the spread of evil beliefs that will cause material harm to many people. These people don't care what Franklin said. They fully intend to vote for politicians who will give them what they want. (And don't count on the courts or your constitution to protect you... the constitution is just a bit of paper, with no inherent power; it could be amended, and if it was, even the Supreme Court would be powerless to stand up for those rights you now take for granted.)
The only way to convince these people that they are wrong is to refute their arguments and produce arguments of your own that they cannot refute. And I'll be blunt: "Franklin said so" is an appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy and no argument at all. On the other hand, an argument of the form "banning racist speech will, in and of itself, have $SPECIFIC_NEGATIVE_EFFECT on your daily life" could be powerful and compelling... if you can fill in the blank convincingly.
(The other 20% are either car analogies or people citing statistics they just made up.)
Look, let's be honest -- Vista isn't bad. It may not be as pretty as OS X, but it's got the most attractive UI Microsoft has ever produced, and on modern hardware it runs beautifully fast, is very stable, and is far more compatible with previous versions of Windows than anyone gives it credit for. (On compatibility, I just can't help remembering all the whining that went on when XP was released and didn't run all DOS programs perfectly. We've been here before, guys. We got over it.)
Note that, far from being a Microsoft shill, I'm saying this as someone who divides most of his computing time between Ubuntu and Solaris, and has a Mac Mini perched on top of his primary desktop PC. I use Vista when I want to play games or to test programs on Windows. I'm a pragmatist who values having different tools for different jobs... and I have to say, I wish there were more of us around. This constant bickering and zealotry is nothing if not tedious.
Haven't used it for years now, but I still remember Delphi fondly as the language that rescued me from the evil clutches of Visual Basic and led me onto the True Path of Real Programming.
Humans can still do far better than machines, particularly for languages like C++ with complex, context-dependent grammars. We aren't quite obsolete yet.
The US forces try to justify this sickening prejudice with a range of tired old defences, despite the counter-evidence from other nations, such as Britain, that allow openly practising homosexuals to serve with no obvious ill effects.
I suppose gay US servicemen are supposed to be thankful that they merely lose their jobs, instead of actually being stoned to death like they would be in an even less tolerant society...
When Gutenberg initiated the Western tradition of moveable-type printing, it was seized upon with delight by the Church, because at last it provided them with a cheap and reliable way of making exact copies of God's holy word. The Gutenberg Bible was produced with the full backing of the Church, and Gutenberg was given a pension by the local Archbishop and died a natural death.
You may be thinking of the unofficial biblical translation movements of people such as Wycliffe. Those, however, began considerably before the invention of printing; the Wycliffe bibles were all copied by hand. However, despite translating the Bible into English without official approval, Wycliffe was not even excommunicated, let alone "burned" or "cooked in oil"; he died of natural causes. (His bones were later exhumed and burned, but that was a political matter, and didn't involve killing anyone.)
You may also be thinking of later translations by people such as Luther, who did indeed have access to printing technology. However, this too was not particularly opposed, and Luther too died of natural causes; he was excommunicated, but not for translating the bible.
I can't speak with any authority on this particular period, but I also doubt that sermons were given in Latin. Readings from the Bible would have taken place in Latin, of course, but the whole point of the sermon was that the people could understand it - it gave the priests an opportunity to tell people what he wanted them to understand the Bible said, and they would have no easy means of checking this, so there would have been no advantage in preaching in Latin.
I know it's popular to present the so-called Middle Ages as a barbaric period where you could be tortured to death for thinking the wrong thoughts, but really, they weren't that bad at all.
No, but neither will an automatic grammar checker - their great toys to play with if you want a laugh, but I have yet to see one that was actually capable of telling the difference between good and bad grammar.
(For example, Word's grammar checker completely missed the misuse of "their" for "they're" above - as trivial and glaring an error as can imagine. Oops, it didn't notice the missing subject in the previous sentence, either!)
Because Linux users do have control over how their DHCP routines are written. Which is kind of the fundamental difference between open-source and proprietary software.
For example, I believe people should have the right to troll on Slashdot, because I believe that's the only way to ensure that people who genuinely hold controversial views feel able to argue their case. Does that mean I shouldn't have the right to mod trolls down? If so, why?No, that's for if you want to demand that code be shared. If you would like code to be shared, and intend to complain if it isn't when it reasonably could be, but absolutely do not want to take away the licensee's freedom to decide for themselves whether to share or not, then you should not add anything to the license. It would probably be appropriate to mention your attitude in the README, though.
(One very good reason not to put this kind of stuff in the license is that the GP apparently was specifically interested in allowing large companies to use his code. Large companies hate custom licenses. Stick with something standard if you want the commercial world to even bother looking at your code.)
You're probably right that Google will win this case, but it will probably be because what Google uses is not the same as what's described in the patent, not because "vacation" is prior art.
Anyway, who cares about companies? Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, not Linux for big soul-sucking corporations. They can use big soul-sucking distros like Red Hat and SuSE that have reassuring words like "Enterprise" in their name, and come with comfortably expensive support contracts. And Ubuntu will continue to thrive on the home desktop, which is the niche it happens to fill best.
Last time I checked, for example, Microsoft Excel still did cut-and-paste totally differently from every other Windows application.
Oops - the installer claimed that, for some unspecified reason, it couldn't install in that partition.
Double oops - when I rebooted to look the problem up on the web in my primary OS, it turned out that while the new OS refused to install in a lovely large empty partition, it HAD nonetheless blown away my MBR so my computer wouldn't boot at all! Good thing I had a Linux LiveCD to hand so I could fix the damage.
I eventually managed to persuade it into installing via a long and tedious process of trial and error, marking partitions active and inactive and all that jazz.
The OS in question? None other than the super-user-friendly, easiest-ever-to-install masterpiece that is Microsoft Windows Vista.And I can only conclude that Windows isn't ready for the general public to install either, not on a machine that's been in use. At the very least, not until it knows how to deal with an existing OS being installed and the like. I'd even settle for a message like "Fool, I'm an arrogant OS that insists on being installed into the active partition, disable your other OS before you try to install me." Triple bonus points for not actually rendering the entire computer inoperable when the installation fails.
Linux ain't perfect, but compared to the competition, it's a hell of a lot better than Windows. It's just that most end users don't have to install Windows, so they don't know just how bad its installer is.
Oh, wait, he wasn't an Arab. (Or even foreign.) Or a Muslim. (Or even religious.)
In fact he was a white American agnostic. Didn't stop him committing one of the worst acts of terrorism in America's history, of course.
Okay, so you want to look only at cases where Muslim fundamentalists are trying to blow up planes, do you? Okay, please explain how racial profiling would have helped catch Richard Reid, who was, uh, a white British-Jamaican man, who easily made it onto a plane with a bomb and would have succeeded in downing a trans-Atlantic flight if another passenger hadn't spotted him trying to light the fuse.
But hey, let's not let the truth get in the way of indulging our xenophobia, shall we?
Because I have this terrible suspicion that the major cause of these results may have been scenes along the lines of "Hello, I'm a bored college student. Wow, you're going to pay me to play games for you? Awesome! What do you want me to say?"