Wikipedia has 100000000 monkeys and maybe 100 smart people composing articles.
Yeah, monkeys. Like the vast majority of the contributers to Wikipedia aren't even primates. But somehow I guess you think you're one of those smart people.
It has been said that, "The victor writes the history books." A lamentable truth. Will Wikipedia accuratly report the "War on Terror", for example, or will it be sanitized to reflect the political expediencies of the times, and altered as needed to fit the shifting political waters of the future? Is it a factual document or a populist, revisionist history?
"The victor writes the history books." So this is a fault of existing encylcopedias, which is really beside the point in a comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia. More importantly though, Britannica has an editing staff primarily composed of Americans and Britans. Wikipedia, however, has many editors from Iraq and Europe and all over the world. Wikipedia will certainly report the "War on Terror" accurately in such that that involves many points of view; it certainly won't tend to report purely from the viewpoint of the government of the US.
I have advanced degrees in Biogeochemistry, so why am I casually overwritten?
That is a problem. However, an encyclopedia article doesn't just have to be correct; it must also be readable to someone with no experience in the field. Admittedly, that's not possible with some subjects, but it's more possible and more important that you may think.
Citing sources may help. Also try leaving a note on the talk page discussing the issues, instead of pseudonoymsly changing things and expecting people to recognize your authority.
If I'm writing a paper on classical music, and need to know his dates of birth and death, I stop at Brittanica. Going further is an ineffective use of time.
Do you want an answer, or do you want to be correct? Dates of birth and death are frequently debatable, just like this article shows, and even "authorative" sources often present one date like it was truth.
His point was that the millions (well eventually maybe) of junior high students going to wiki as an authoritative source for their school reports would have no way of knowing the article is wrong.
One might think of the Library of Congress as an authorative source for school reports, as to when a book was published and who wrote it. Just recently, I looked up a book and found that Josiah Woodward wrote the book; which is great, except for the fact that I had a facsimile copy of the book with a modern scholarly introduction and know that the book was anonymously written, that scholars even recently had no idea who wrote the book, and that Josiah Woodward was little more than an educated guess.
Even authorative sources can be wrong, or push one version of the idea as a truth when it's little more than a guess. That goes for the Library of Congress, the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the most biased "reference" source out there. The Karl Rove ariticle basically made him out to be a reincarnated Goebbels.
The 1913 Encyclopedia Brittanica made Harry Houdini out to be the greatest magician ever, far excelling his competitors and predecessors. That might have had something to do with the fact that the author of the article was... Harry Houdini.
The problem of course is any editor with an agenda can ruin an article.
That's not true. Most articles are on someone's watchlist, who will probably try and fix it if someone starts screwing with it. Controversial articles are on many people's watchlist; in many ways, the articles that are the most likely to have an agenda are the most likely to be neutral, pounded into that form by many editors fighting for consensus.
A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off
mentions a female user and all the rest just mention a user, as if we could assume that a user would be male, and the fact that the user was female was too important to leave to pronouns to show?
I (and some other people) were saying that decompilation is immoral if the agreement you had doesn't allow it. You (and others) are arguing that a post-purchase EULA doesn't constitute a mutual agreement. I'm not exactly how those two issues got mixed up in this thread,
The person you replied to said:
You will note that I excepted commercial licenses, since those are actual signed contracts and are legally binding.
So signed contracts were excluded from this subbranch of the thread, at least.
jmorris42 implied that there are never any ethical issues involved in decompilation
But you're overcomplicating the matter. A signed contract can add ethical issues to anything. When it is acceptable to break a promise is a philosophical question of long standing, but generally philosophers would agree that it should not be done casually. So that's not an interesting question to debate.
You can either argue it's never ethical to decompile, or that in the common case, where a program has an EULA prohibiting you from decompiling a program, that it's not ethical to decompile. Those are really the only two issues that anyone cares about debating.
But if you do buy the product, don't you think it is immoral to break the agreement you made with the seller (whether it is a signed commercial agreement or not)?
I made no agreement with the seller. If the seller wants an agreement, he can give me the forms to sign and I will put my John Hancock on the line if I am willing to make that agreement. Just because I clicked past some text to get the program to install doesn't mean I agreed to it.
You would give the sellers all the power. You can't return the programs, no matter what they say. Presenting a unilateral contract and claiming I agreed to it, after we've completed the transaction and you've taken my money is almost fraud.
In TFA it was stated that the author died in 1949, international copyright expired in 1999, but US copyright (thanks to Bono act) will expire in 2019 or never (whichever has deeper pockets).
The FA was F wrong. The Berne convention copyright expired in 1999. In Australia, it expired in 1999. In the EU, it will expire in 2019.
But the US traditionally used a publishing date plus years system, not a death plus years, and it still uses that system for older books. Prior Bono, Gone with the Wind would have expired in 1936 + 75 years = 2011, and post-Bono 1936 = 95 years = 2031.
I didn't know the Burmese PM was removed from power last week until I read it in online newspapers from Malaysia and Australia.
American media focuses on what Americans are interested in. Most Americans could care less what happens in Burmese politics. I really don't see why they would care; it has no effect on their lives. I'm sure if you dug down in the world affairs section of an American paper, it would be found there, for the Americans who care.
Skeptics of the constitution might ask if that means that if an author dies, the copyright should immediately expire? Answer: yes.
But sometimes the fact that copyright extends beyond an author's life encourages artists to create more art. Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs on his deathbed to leave his children with some money. To end the copyright immediately at death would discourage a number of deathbed or near-death works.
Its illegal to post nazi propaganda in Germany yet as an American citizen I can post it with no worries from Germany.
Germany has tried to extradite people from the US who have posted such Nazi propaganda. While the US didn't honor the extradition request, when he traveled in Germany after posting that Nazi propaganda, he was arrested and jailed for something he did on US soil.
And engineers have no concept of how much it costs to do all the tests, and that sometimes you have to cut corners to have a job. Engineers and managers are looking at different parts of the big picture, and managers probably have the same attitude about engineers, because engineers worry about different things.
Sometimes, if the choices is between doing it right and doing it cheap, doing it right means it's never going to get done. But engineers often don't see the bottome line.
until and unless the vote is limited to smart people, the stupid people will keep electing losers like Bush and Kerry who promise to steal their neighbour's money and give it to them.
I guess you think that nobody at Halliburton is very smart, because they're behind Bush all the way. Everyone who can read the ballot is smart enough to understand why having too much debt is bad, but no amount of intelligence will give the wisdom to look at the long-term instead of the short-term.
Let's be honest; most of us would-be writters and many real writters would love to be Bulwer-Lytton, one of the most prolific and well-known Victorian authors who actually made a living off his writing. It's sort of a shame he's known for that one line; of course, it beats being known for having his wife put in an insane asylum to shut her up.
Re:When did mediocrity become something to shoot f
on
Kamikaze Novel Writing
·
· Score: 1
Thats why your first quote of "if you can't do something right then don't do it at all" doesn't apply here. (I'm not even sure where it would apply)
Open heart surgery. Which is why open heart surgeons get paid the big bucks, and those who get the privilge of fixing our mistakes at leasure don't.
we have to discuss the issue in precise language if we are going to get anywhere.
I'm sure happy I'm not in your class. I would never tell a doctor about buffer overflows; it just confuses the issue. And if I were discussing at a greater detail what went wrong, I would take care to explain what a buffer overflow is. You can't use precise language to communicate to people who don't understand it.
there is much less corruption in businesses.
Corruption relative to what? Those think-tanks who keep spewing out Microsoft's FUD would be considered corrupt if they were part of government. The fact that they work efficently does the public no good at all.
It would be lovely if the real world actually worked by a few simple theories. That's probably why you believe the way you do; it makes for a simpler, more black and white world. You aren't thinking about what I'm saying; you're just spewing theory. You frame things as "rent-seeking" and "produce" and "obstructive" and use those words so you don't have to think about the issue.
You completely miss the point. If I can't trust a government official not to take a bribe, why can I trust a employee of Certifiers US, inc. not to take a bribe? If a government certifier is bribable, then any certifier is bribable, for the exact same reasons and motivations.
More seriously, I'm not sure what they might do with this, but their recent Mickey Mouse decision doesn't make it look very encouraging.
I think the Mickey Mouse decision was encouraging. In retrospect, most of the Supreme Court wasn't willing to second guess Congress there. But two members were, which means we probably have two members on our side to start with. In this case, unlike Eldred, they don't have Congress on their side, and we have solid precedent on our side. I think that may make a huge difference.
Christians who think that true morality can be externally imposed are heretics.
Yawn. That's a basic logical fallacy, to say that Christians behave this way, and any counterexamples aren't real Christians. In reality, most Christians have tried to force thier morality on everyone else, and this is a consistent pattern throughout history.
It is one thing for people who will never raise children to fool around and cut their own lives short.
Do you have any evidence that a stable gay couple has any shorter lifespan then a stable heterosexual couple? Or are you taking your internal morality and and finding a justification to make it external.
It used to be the principle on which our government implemented sanctions against adultery.
Or is it because, like all male primates, male humans don't like their harem being invaded. Because under your reasoning, you might expect male adultery to be treated the same as female adultery, instead of being basically overlooked.
The difference is however in the implementation, not in the language itself.
I don't believe that's true. Haskell, by definition, uses strong type inference, so that is part of the language itself. A Haskell program that misuses types in certain ways is not a valid Haskell program.
Languages with type inference usually publish a sheet showing how it all works with the type calculus, because type inference can run very quickly into the Halting problem. In
a = 1 b = f(x) a = "string"
, a changes types iff f(x) returns. If you would protest that that is not realistic code, then
if f(x) then
a = 1 else
a = "string" end if; [...] if f(x) then
a = 3 else
a = "queue" end if;
which changes types iff [...] changes what f(x) returns. You could add a complete type system, but it would inevitably rule out things that work correctly and don't seem "tricky" to any programmer who doesn't think using the type calculus. You will have in effect built a new subset language on top of the old that's rather different in usage from the original.
It's absurd to make logical arguments about subjective issues.
Are you saying there are no logical arguments in the field of psychology?
That's a non-sequiter. You aren't talking about psychology. A subjective issue doesn't have a logical basis to argue about; that's why it's not objective. Psychology, as a science, studies objective, testable, things.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia has 100000000 monkeys and maybe 100 smart people composing articles.
Yeah, monkeys. Like the vast majority of the contributers to Wikipedia aren't even primates. But somehow I guess you think you're one of those smart people.
It has been said that, "The victor writes the history books." A lamentable truth. Will Wikipedia accuratly report the "War on Terror", for example, or will it be sanitized to reflect the political expediencies of the times, and altered as needed to fit the shifting political waters of the future? Is it a factual document or a populist, revisionist history?
"The victor writes the history books." So this is a fault of existing encylcopedias, which is really beside the point in a comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia. More importantly though, Britannica has an editing staff primarily composed of Americans and Britans. Wikipedia, however, has many editors from Iraq and Europe and all over the world. Wikipedia will certainly report the "War on Terror" accurately in such that that involves many points of view; it certainly won't tend to report purely from the viewpoint of the government of the US.
I have advanced degrees in Biogeochemistry, so why am I casually overwritten?
That is a problem. However, an encyclopedia article doesn't just have to be correct; it must also be readable to someone with no experience in the field. Admittedly, that's not possible with some subjects, but it's more possible and more important that you may think.
Citing sources may help. Also try leaving a note on the talk page discussing the issues, instead of pseudonoymsly changing things and expecting people to recognize your authority.
If I'm writing a paper on classical music, and need to know his dates of birth and death, I stop at Brittanica. Going further is an ineffective use of time.
Do you want an answer, or do you want to be correct? Dates of birth and death are frequently debatable, just like this article shows, and even "authorative" sources often present one date like it was truth.
His point was that the millions (well eventually maybe) of junior high students going to wiki as an authoritative source for their school reports would have no way of knowing the article is wrong.
One might think of the Library of Congress as an authorative source for school reports, as to when a book was published and who wrote it. Just recently, I looked up a book and found that Josiah Woodward wrote the book; which is great, except for the fact that I had a facsimile copy of the book with a modern scholarly introduction and know that the book was anonymously written, that scholars even recently had no idea who wrote the book, and that Josiah Woodward was little more than an educated guess.
Even authorative sources can be wrong, or push one version of the idea as a truth when it's little more than a guess. That goes for the Library of Congress, the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the most biased "reference" source out there. The Karl Rove ariticle basically made him out to be a reincarnated Goebbels.
... Harry Houdini.
The 1913 Encyclopedia Brittanica made Harry Houdini out to be the greatest magician ever, far excelling his competitors and predecessors. That might have had something to do with the fact that the author of the article was
The problem of course is any editor with an agenda can ruin an article.
That's not true. Most articles are on someone's watchlist, who will probably try and fix it if someone starts screwing with it. Controversial articles are on many people's watchlist; in many ways, the articles that are the most likely to have an agenda are the most likely to be neutral, pounded into that form by many editors fighting for consensus.
Anyone else notice how
A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off
mentions a female user and all the rest just mention a user, as if we could assume that a user would be male, and the fact that the user was female was too important to leave to pronouns to show?
I (and some other people) were saying that decompilation is immoral if the agreement you had doesn't allow it. You (and others) are arguing that a post-purchase EULA doesn't constitute a mutual agreement. I'm not exactly how those two issues got mixed up in this thread,
The person you replied to said:
You will note that I excepted commercial licenses, since those are actual signed contracts and are legally binding.
So signed contracts were excluded from this subbranch of the thread, at least.
jmorris42 implied that there are never any ethical issues involved in decompilation
But you're overcomplicating the matter. A signed contract can add ethical issues to anything. When it is acceptable to break a promise is a philosophical question of long standing, but generally philosophers would agree that it should not be done casually. So that's not an interesting question to debate.
You can either argue it's never ethical to decompile, or that in the common case, where a program has an EULA prohibiting you from decompiling a program, that it's not ethical to decompile. Those are really the only two issues that anyone cares about debating.
But if you do buy the product, don't you think it is immoral to break the agreement you made with the seller (whether it is a signed commercial agreement or not)?
I made no agreement with the seller. If the seller wants an agreement, he can give me the forms to sign and I will put my John Hancock on the line if I am willing to make that agreement. Just because I clicked past some text to get the program to install doesn't mean I agreed to it.
You would give the sellers all the power. You can't return the programs, no matter what they say. Presenting a unilateral contract and claiming I agreed to it, after we've completed the transaction and you've taken my money is almost fraud.
In TFA it was stated that the author died in 1949, international copyright expired in 1999, but US copyright (thanks to Bono act) will expire in 2019 or never (whichever has deeper pockets).
The FA was F wrong. The Berne convention copyright expired in 1999. In Australia, it expired in 1999. In the EU, it will expire in 2019.
But the US traditionally used a publishing date plus years system, not a death plus years, and it still uses that system for older books. Prior Bono, Gone with the Wind would have expired in 1936 + 75 years = 2011, and post-Bono 1936 = 95 years = 2031.
I didn't know the Burmese PM was removed from power last week until I read it in online newspapers from Malaysia and Australia.
American media focuses on what Americans are interested in. Most Americans could care less what happens in Burmese politics. I really don't see why they would care; it has no effect on their lives. I'm sure if you dug down in the world affairs section of an American paper, it would be found there, for the Americans who care.
Skeptics of the constitution might ask if that means that if an author dies, the copyright should immediately expire? Answer: yes.
But sometimes the fact that copyright extends beyond an author's life encourages artists to create more art. Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs on his deathbed to leave his children with some money. To end the copyright immediately at death would discourage a number of deathbed or near-death works.
once again they got you to think everything is based in europe or north america.
Middle Earth _was_ another name for Europe back in the Middle Ages.
Its illegal to post nazi propaganda in Germany yet as an American citizen I can post it with no worries from Germany.
Germany has tried to extradite people from the US who have posted such Nazi propaganda. While the US didn't honor the extradition request, when he traveled in Germany after posting that Nazi propaganda, he was arrested and jailed for something he did on US soil.
And engineers have no concept of how much it costs to do all the tests, and that sometimes you have to cut corners to have a job. Engineers and managers are looking at different parts of the big picture, and managers probably have the same attitude about engineers, because engineers worry about different things.
Sometimes, if the choices is between doing it right and doing it cheap, doing it right means it's never going to get done. But engineers often don't see the bottome line.
until and unless the vote is limited to smart people, the stupid people will keep electing losers like Bush and Kerry who promise to steal their neighbour's money and give it to them.
I guess you think that nobody at Halliburton is very smart, because they're behind Bush all the way. Everyone who can read the ballot is smart enough to understand why having too much debt is bad, but no amount of intelligence will give the wisdom to look at the long-term instead of the short-term.
I still prefer "it was a dark and stormy night".
Let's be honest; most of us would-be writters and many real writters would love to be Bulwer-Lytton, one of the most prolific and well-known Victorian authors who actually made a living off his writing. It's sort of a shame he's known for that one line; of course, it beats being known for having his wife put in an insane asylum to shut her up.
Thats why your first quote of "if you can't do something right then don't do it at all" doesn't apply here. (I'm not even sure where it would apply)
Open heart surgery. Which is why open heart surgeons get paid the big bucks, and those who get the privilge of fixing our mistakes at leasure don't.
we have to discuss the issue in precise language if we are going to get anywhere.
I'm sure happy I'm not in your class. I would never tell a doctor about buffer overflows; it just confuses the issue. And if I were discussing at a greater detail what went wrong, I would take care to explain what a buffer overflow is. You can't use precise language to communicate to people who don't understand it.
there is much less corruption in businesses.
Corruption relative to what? Those think-tanks who keep spewing out Microsoft's FUD would be considered corrupt if they were part of government. The fact that they work efficently does the public no good at all.
It would be lovely if the real world actually worked by a few simple theories. That's probably why you believe the way you do; it makes for a simpler, more black and white world. You aren't thinking about what I'm saying; you're just spewing theory. You frame things as "rent-seeking" and "produce" and "obstructive" and use those words so you don't have to think about the issue.
You completely miss the point. If I can't trust a government official not to take a bribe, why can I trust a employee of Certifiers US, inc. not to take a bribe? If a government certifier is bribable, then any certifier is bribable, for the exact same reasons and motivations.
More seriously, I'm not sure what they might do with this, but their recent Mickey Mouse decision doesn't make it look very encouraging.
I think the Mickey Mouse decision was encouraging. In retrospect, most of the Supreme Court wasn't willing to second guess Congress there. But two members were, which means we probably have two members on our side to start with. In this case, unlike Eldred, they don't have Congress on their side, and we have solid precedent on our side. I think that may make a huge difference.
Governement officials can't make it a big deal for them, and even if they did know who they were, probably get a nice bribe not to care.
Right. Because only government officials can be bribed. The private sector is of course immune to the brandishments of money.
Christians who think that true morality can be externally imposed are heretics.
Yawn. That's a basic logical fallacy, to say that Christians behave this way, and any counterexamples aren't real Christians. In reality, most Christians have tried to force thier morality on everyone else, and this is a consistent pattern throughout history.
It is one thing for people who will never raise children to fool around and cut their own lives short.
Do you have any evidence that a stable gay couple has any shorter lifespan then a stable heterosexual couple? Or are you taking your internal morality and and finding a justification to make it external.
It used to be the principle on which our government implemented sanctions against adultery.
Or is it because, like all male primates, male humans don't like their harem being invaded. Because under your reasoning, you might expect male adultery to be treated the same as female adultery, instead of being basically overlooked.
I don't believe that's true. Haskell, by definition, uses strong type inference, so that is part of the language itself. A Haskell program that misuses types in certain ways is not a valid Haskell program.
Languages with type inference usually publish a sheet showing how it all works with the type calculus, because type inference can run very quickly into the Halting problem. In, a changes types iff f(x) returns. If you would protest that that is not realistic code, thenwhich changes types iff [...] changes what f(x) returns. You could add a complete type system, but it would inevitably rule out things that work correctly and don't seem "tricky" to any programmer who doesn't think using the type calculus. You will have in effect built a new subset language on top of the old that's rather different in usage from the original.
It's absurd to make logical arguments about subjective issues.
Are you saying there are no logical arguments in the field of psychology?
That's a non-sequiter. You aren't talking about psychology. A subjective issue doesn't have a logical basis to argue about; that's why it's not objective. Psychology, as a science, studies objective, testable, things.