Honestly, from the list of top 100 authors downloaded from PG over the last 30 days (found at gutenberg.org), the top ten, excluding the nonce "Gutenberg" author, are Doyle, Twain, Shakespeare, Wells, Dickens, Verne, Poe, Burroughs, Austen and Wodehouse, and the only one of those that didn't write in English was Verne. And we have French originals from many of the Verne.
The problem with Project Gutenberg is that it has to rely upon public domain translations,
Only for those works that weren't written in English in the first place. Furthermore, a lot of the books in Penguin's collection are public domain translations, like those books translated by Dryden, and many of those can be found in Project Gutenberg.
Penquin has been publishing modern English translations for fifty years.
Luckily for you, people have written directly in English for many years and some have become almost as famous as authors that have to be translated into English. You might want to search the Gutenberg archive for such people as Shakespeare, Twain, Defoe and Dickens for an introduction to the world of great literature originally written in English.
the idea that the individual has intrinsic value, that it's not acceptable to slaughter your enemies or your peasants or even the savage tribesmen on the next continent, even if they're useless to you, is a uniquely Western idea, barely 2000 years old.
I fail to see it. The concept that the individual is merely a wretch underserving of anything more than being thrown in a pit of fire for all eternity seems pretty standard for Western concepts. The slaughtering of enemies and peasants and savage tribemens (and Jews) seems as standard for the west as for the east. (Well, okay, violent anti-semitism is pretty much a western idea.)
OTOH, many forms of Buddhism are completely pacifist and have for centuries held that it's not right to kill other people, period.
The idea that slavery is intrinsically wrong is another example of this uniqueness.
You say that on such authority, having read all of three books for outside the west. Certainly, slavery was not a world-wide phenomenon prior to the west bringing the light. It would be very surprising if a society whose holy works fairly explicitly approve of slavery* and whose form of slavery amounted to genocide in many cases and was not known for its gentleness should be the only one that believes that slavery is intrisically wrong.
* Paul sends a Christian slave back to his Christian master, and says nothing about giving the slave his freedom.
Reading fiction quickly seems to me to be a numbers game for the obsessively competitive.
Let me guess; you read book slowly because you want to taunt the rest of us with your superiority? If not, why would you assume that our reading styles have anything to do with competition?
I read fiction quickly because that's how I read books. I finished the Lord of the Rings in 12 hours. I guess I could retrain myself to read slowly, but that would be work. If I want to read something slowly, I'll read a math book or something else I have to slow down for.
And, as an English degree holder, I can tell you that all of the 8th grade grammar and spelling rules that Slashdotters assume is INTEGRAL to the study of the English language aren't even mentioned throughout the program.
But if you're going to cop an attitude, you better get it right. Someone who brags about being a math major shouldn't be making a number of basic arithmetic mistakes in their post. Anyway, it's not that hard to get it right the first time; that post struck me as one of the less grammatical of those I've seen on Slashdot.
you'd find that many of the things that are held so dearly as rules have really only been so for 150 years or so.
So? It's a lot easier to read modern standard English than 17th century English, because there's a standard spelling and punctuation scheme.
... that computers will beat a man at chess all the time they are allowed to use a database on positions.
The time to get scared is when a 'thinking' computer chess program does it all for scratch from the first move.
If we're playing a fair game, and the human doesn't get to use a database of positions--has never played a game of chess or read about chess position--then I suspect the computer will win. I fail to see why it's unfair for a computer to have databases against a human who has studied opening books and endgames for years.
Regardless of which operating system was used in this chess match, the sole determining factor is the hardware.
You should read Feng-hsiung Hsu's "Behind Deep Blue", by the author of much of the code. He goes into great detail about why the software mattered, a lot.
Remember that Deep Blue defeated Kasparov with the more aesthetic MacOS
Linux zealots will cling to this "small victory", but software is only a means to an end.
If the means was needed, I fail to see why it isn't important. Almost everything is just a means to an end; does that mean that building working airplanes is unimportant since it's just a means to an end?
If Linux was the considered the best operating system to run the chess program on, I fail to see why Linux programmers shouldn't be proud of that.
Most of his buddies never set foot on the sand. [...] All the while, he knew that his friends would go to get water and the Japanese snipers would wait until their backs are turned to shoot them. [...] He knew that the Japanese would wrap themselves with bamboo so they could stay alive for a few moments longer after getting shot.
It's war. Those are entirely reasonable and fair tactics.
I find it highly disturbing that the more liberal groups continue their attempts to strip the rights of states to have their own laws, especially in a representative government.
First place, it's not about the states having their own laws; they would challenge this at the federal level, too. That's a complete non-sequitor.
Secondly, what ever happened to the famed Conservative attitude of let the market decide? If the people of Utah want this, they can chose ISPs that will give them this without any law. This is Big Government messing with stuff they don't need to.
it seems that the ACLU is restricting the right of the people of Utah (in this case) to elect a government which is representative of their ideals and beliefs.
Huh? They aren't affecting the elections at all.
Remember, our representatives are put into their positions in order to act on our behalf.
Remember, the constitution was put into its positions to act on our behalf against the tyrrany of the government and the majority.
The idea of a censorship-free society is a pure fantasy,
Everything is pure fantasy before it comes into being.
it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Argument by consensus isn't valid.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened.
Speech that incited blacks to vote in the American South simply could not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. Speech that incited people not to join the military simply has not been permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. Speech that we have not always been at war with Eastasia simply will not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened.
Any important speech threatens the public order. If someone wants to ban it, then someone's outraged by it and can claim that it threatens the public order because it causes outrage.
Now she may or may not be eventually ruled to have committed defamatory speech against Islam, but the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions.
So what you're saying is that you can't say that certain religions are wrong? There's consensus on that, too, and strong philosophical arguments for it. How can we just ignore the dangers in our mist if we arbitrarily silence people who would, correctly or incorrectly, point them out?
Similarly in the 21st century, there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned.
Again, argument from consensus is not valid.
It is utterly undemocratic to ban political parties. It's not a democracy if the government can disenfranchise anyone who disagrees with it. I never realized that the Iranian goverment was merely following Europe's lead in removing people it didn't like from the ballet.
But thanks to the Bono Act, in the U.S. all sound recordings made before 1972 are now copyrighted until 2067. This applies even to the earliest recordings on wax cylinders and discs made in the 1890s, which Sony now claims the rights to.
That's not entirely correct. The Bono Act didn't return anything to copyright; the URAA, passed at the same time did. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38b.html gives a list of what the URAA did; in particular, it only returned certain foreign works to copyright. Also, only for "for 95 years from the year of first publication.... For example, a sound recording published in 1925 will be protected until 2020." (If I'm not mistaken, works before 1923 wouldn't be renewed because they weren't out of copyright due to the technicalities listed under clause 3 in the above document.)
Now, the confusing part is that states have been permitted to hold common-law copyrights on soundrecordings, and New York apparently does so, for a indefinite amount of time (not longer than 2067). But that's independent of Bono and URAA.
I have reviewed papers and usually it is hard to understand everything the person is putting forth.
There was a physicist a few years back who submitted an article to a journal of philosophy. After it was published, he made a big deal about it being simply meaningless. This doesn't seem to be all that different from what you're doing: I don't understand it, but it looks right.
those folks need to get their heads out of their asses. They need to stop wasting time trying to officially support the two dozen or so architectures nobody gives a damn about, stop engaging in wars about whether non-free belongs in Debian, and concentrate on releasing something that's reasonably current and also supported by security updates.
So basically forget everything that makes Debian different from everyone else. We aren't going to give up our principles because some obscene idiot curses at us.
Most usually it's already been broken, and somebody's trying to fix it.
If it never worked, then it's obviously not a big deal. If it worked, then you should fix it by reversing the breakage, and you can do so in such a way that works on all systems.
In part this is because you have discarded the fixes offered, and driven away the people with time and skill to provide them.
We've discarded buggy fixes and driven away people who aren't willing to help make a better compiler.
You're generalizing from one example, which you have a personal interest in, and you've given us no links to form our own opinion. Have you any examples of this for GCC on AIX?
Nobody, also, said compilers should be released for your target with platform bugs. Whoever's responsible for that target port should fix them before releasing, without making mainline developers back out patches.
How is one person supposed to fix bugs added all over the system? They can't be familiar with the entire system, and other people have had all release cycles to break anything that's not ix86-Linux.
You're asserting, without support, that new (platform-limited) breakage of an old test is somehow enormously worse than existing breakage of new tests. Enormously worse, here, means that you'd rather have dozens of the latter bugs than one of the former.
We're starting with a fairly complete test suite; it's hard to go far down hill if all the old tests work. It's unlikely that you're going to get a whole lot worse if you're only breaking tests in new systems.
Your odds get better with fewer total bugs
That's absurd. A million bugs in edge cases in multiple inheritance isn't worth one in basic assignment. It's not a pure count; it's how often the feature is used and how much programmers have relied on it to work well. Old test cases are likely to cover bugs that will kill all code, and new test cases are likely to cover only narrow edge cases.
the people responsible for fixing them before release are the most qualified to do it,
Why is the AIX maintainer the most capable at fixing bugs in your optimization code? How is he supposed to fix them at all, if there's a dozen different bugs that stop GCC from compiling at all on AIX?
Every new release does break features of the previous one. You're failing to prevent that. You cannot prevent that, no matter how peremptory you get, unless you just prevent all changes of any kind.
That doesn't mean it's good to randomly break code. Just because it compiles the test cases doesn't mean it compiles KDE. You don't want those features breaking.
How many people could be making really substantial contributions, but find that satisfying David Edelsohn's proprietary test apparatus is just too much bother?
Good question. So far, I haven't seen a single person who actually worked with David Edelsohn saying that it was a problem. Do you have any evidence otherwise?
It means that they get only a tiny fraction of the otherwise-available platform- independent improvements, in each release.
So, on one hand, we have a compiler that actually works and will compile KDE, and on the other, we have one with a bunch of theoretical improvements, but is full of bugs that show up on Edelsohn's test suite and in my code. I think I'll take number one, thank you.
The NetBSD have an impressive list of platforms, longer than anyone else's, in part because everyone else lists PPC, M68K, ARM, MIPS, SH, etc. only once. Sure, they list both MIPS-BE and MIPS-LE, SPARC and SPARC64, and PPC and PPC64, but that doesn't come near the splitting in the NetBSD list.
at the same time hack userland, kernel and protocols. While Debian developers mostly package upstream stuff.
And how fast does that evolve? How does the work the NetBSD people put into the (relatively static) userland and kernel compare to the work the Debian developers put into X and GCC and the kernel?
What he said was that he does not care to *maintain* those ports, and should not be expected to.
What he said in a email message to the GNU Libc list linked to on this page, is that he does not care to avoid out-and-out right bugs, like including Linux-specific headers in a generic ix86 file, that other people should be responsible for fixing his bugs.
First place, the fact that AIX does not conform to the LSB, as you were complaining about in the section of text I responded to, is not a bug.
Second place, nobody is familar with every part of GCC. You're asking the AIX maintainers to fix basically random pieces of code within a huge codebase, and it's entirely possible that they will have no way to test their patches, since someone else will have broken building on AIX in some other way in the mean time. Way too often, GCC gets to a point where broken patch builds on broken patch and nobody can do work since there's been too many broken patches added in the meantime.
In 2005, it's AIXs job to conform to the LSB (including GCC). Not the other way around.
So screw IBM. I mean, just because they go out of their way to contribute work (generic as well as system-specific) to GCC, doesn't mean that we should try and work with them at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, from the list of top 100 authors downloaded from PG over the last 30 days (found at gutenberg.org), the top ten, excluding the nonce "Gutenberg" author, are Doyle, Twain, Shakespeare, Wells, Dickens, Verne, Poe, Burroughs, Austen and Wodehouse, and the only one of those that didn't write in English was Verne. And we have French originals from many of the Verne.
The problem with Project Gutenberg is that it has to rely upon public domain translations,
Only for those works that weren't written in English in the first place. Furthermore, a lot of the books in Penguin's collection are public domain translations, like those books translated by Dryden, and many of those can be found in Project Gutenberg.
Penquin has been publishing modern English translations for fifty years.
Luckily for you, people have written directly in English for many years and some have become almost as famous as authors that have to be translated into English. You might want to search the Gutenberg archive for such people as Shakespeare, Twain, Defoe and Dickens for an introduction to the world of great literature originally written in English.
the idea that the individual has intrinsic value, that it's not acceptable to slaughter your enemies or your peasants or even the savage tribesmen on the next continent, even if they're useless to you, is a uniquely Western idea, barely 2000 years old.
I fail to see it. The concept that the individual is merely a wretch underserving of anything more than being thrown in a pit of fire for all eternity seems pretty standard for Western concepts. The slaughtering of enemies and peasants and savage tribemens (and Jews) seems as standard for the west as for the east. (Well, okay, violent anti-semitism is pretty much a western idea.)
OTOH, many forms of Buddhism are completely pacifist and have for centuries held that it's not right to kill other people, period.
The idea that slavery is intrinsically wrong is another example of this uniqueness.
You say that on such authority, having read all of three books for outside the west. Certainly, slavery was not a world-wide phenomenon prior to the west bringing the light. It would be very surprising if a society whose holy works fairly explicitly approve of slavery* and whose form of slavery amounted to genocide in many cases and was not known for its gentleness should be the only one that believes that slavery is intrisically wrong.
* Paul sends a Christian slave back to his Christian master, and says nothing about giving the slave his freedom.
Reading fiction quickly seems to me to be a numbers game for the obsessively competitive.
Let me guess; you read book slowly because you want to taunt the rest of us with your superiority? If not, why would you assume that our reading styles have anything to do with competition?
I read fiction quickly because that's how I read books. I finished the Lord of the Rings in 12 hours. I guess I could retrain myself to read slowly, but that would be work. If I want to read something slowly, I'll read a math book or something else I have to slow down for.
I'm kinda surprised that Euclid's not in there at all. Maybe a dearth of old translations?
It's a bitch to handle the illustrations and the math.
And, as an English degree holder, I can tell you that all of the 8th grade grammar and spelling rules that Slashdotters assume is INTEGRAL to the study of the English language aren't even mentioned throughout the program.
But if you're going to cop an attitude, you better get it right. Someone who brags about being a math major shouldn't be making a number of basic arithmetic mistakes in their post. Anyway, it's not that hard to get it right the first time; that post struck me as one of the less grammatical of those I've seen on Slashdot.
you'd find that many of the things that are held so dearly as rules have really only been so for 150 years or so.
So? It's a lot easier to read modern standard English than 17th century English, because there's a standard spelling and punctuation scheme.
... that computers will beat a man at chess all the time they are allowed to use a database on positions.
The time to get scared is when a 'thinking' computer chess program does it all for scratch from the first move.
If we're playing a fair game, and the human doesn't get to use a database of positions--has never played a game of chess or read about chess position--then I suspect the computer will win. I fail to see why it's unfair for a computer to have databases against a human who has studied opening books and endgames for years.
Regardless of which operating system was used in this chess match, the sole determining factor is the hardware.
You should read Feng-hsiung Hsu's "Behind Deep Blue", by the author of much of the code. He goes into great detail about why the software mattered, a lot.
Remember that Deep Blue defeated Kasparov with the more aesthetic MacOS
Deep Blue wasn't running MacOS; it was running on a RS/6000 running AIX. Read the above book, or check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue.
Linux zealots will cling to this "small victory", but software is only a means to an end.
If the means was needed, I fail to see why it isn't important. Almost everything is just a means to an end; does that mean that building working airplanes is unimportant since it's just a means to an end?
If Linux was the considered the best operating system to run the chess program on, I fail to see why Linux programmers shouldn't be proud of that.
Most of his buddies never set foot on the sand. [...] All the while, he knew that his friends would go to get water and the Japanese snipers would wait until their backs are turned to shoot them. [...] He knew that the Japanese would wrap themselves with bamboo so they could stay alive for a few moments longer after getting shot.
It's war. Those are entirely reasonable and fair tactics.
executed, usually by beheading.
So they got a quick and merciful death?
Why does the state force the telephone companies to provide 900 call blocking service when devices exist to do this?
Because the telephone company was and for a large part is a monopoly?
The majority does, indeed, rule... since that is the will of the people!
How communistic. I thought this country believed in personal freedom and personal rights. I guess those aren't on the conservative agenda, are they?
I find it highly disturbing that the more liberal groups continue their attempts to strip the rights of states to have their own laws, especially in a representative government.
First place, it's not about the states having their own laws; they would challenge this at the federal level, too. That's a complete non-sequitor.
Secondly, what ever happened to the famed Conservative attitude of let the market decide? If the people of Utah want this, they can chose ISPs that will give them this without any law. This is Big Government messing with stuff they don't need to.
it seems that the ACLU is restricting the right of the people of Utah (in this case) to elect a government which is representative of their ideals and beliefs.
Huh? They aren't affecting the elections at all.
Remember, our representatives are put into their positions in order to act on our behalf.
Remember, the constitution was put into its positions to act on our behalf against the tyrrany of the government and the majority.
Why attack the source code when you can instead attack the compiler?
Because I'm not going to download my compiler from a random site on the net, but I may download image processing code from a random site on the net.
The idea of a censorship-free society is a pure fantasy,
Everything is pure fantasy before it comes into being.
it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Argument by consensus isn't valid.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened.
Speech that incited blacks to vote in the American South simply could not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. Speech that incited people not to join the military simply has not been permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. Speech that we have not always been at war with Eastasia simply will not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened.
Any important speech threatens the public order. If someone wants to ban it, then someone's outraged by it and can claim that it threatens the public order because it causes outrage.
Now she may or may not be eventually ruled to have committed defamatory speech against Islam, but the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions.
So what you're saying is that you can't say that certain religions are wrong? There's consensus on that, too, and strong philosophical arguments for it. How can we just ignore the dangers in our mist if we arbitrarily silence people who would, correctly or incorrectly, point them out?
Similarly in the 21st century, there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned.
Again, argument from consensus is not valid.
It is utterly undemocratic to ban political parties. It's not a democracy if the government can disenfranchise anyone who disagrees with it. I never realized that the Iranian goverment was merely following Europe's lead in removing people it didn't like from the ballet.
The copyright laws need to be put back to their original terms, 14 years and if they apply, one extension of 14 years.
The original English laws, which predate the US laws, provided for an unlimited copyright.
But thanks to the Bono Act, in the U.S. all sound recordings made before 1972 are now copyrighted until 2067. This applies even to the earliest recordings on wax cylinders and discs made in the 1890s, which Sony now claims the rights to.
... For example, a sound recording published in 1925 will be protected until 2020." (If I'm not mistaken, works before 1923 wouldn't be renewed because they weren't out of copyright due to the technicalities listed under clause 3 in the above document.)
That's not entirely correct. The Bono Act didn't return anything to copyright; the URAA, passed at the same time did. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38b.html gives a list of what the URAA did; in particular, it only returned certain foreign works to copyright. Also, only for "for 95 years from the year of first publication.
Now, the confusing part is that states have been permitted to hold common-law copyrights on soundrecordings, and New York apparently does so, for a indefinite amount of time (not longer than 2067). But that's independent of Bono and URAA.
I have reviewed papers and usually it is hard to understand everything the person is putting forth.
There was a physicist a few years back who submitted an article to a journal of philosophy. After it was published, he made a big deal about it being simply meaningless. This doesn't seem to be all that different from what you're doing: I don't understand it, but it looks right.
those folks need to get their heads out of their asses. They need to stop wasting time trying to officially support the two dozen or so architectures nobody gives a damn about, stop engaging in wars about whether non-free belongs in Debian, and concentrate on releasing something that's reasonably current and also supported by security updates.
So basically forget everything that makes Debian different from everyone else. We aren't going to give up our principles because some obscene idiot curses at us.
Most usually it's already been broken, and somebody's trying to fix it.
If it never worked, then it's obviously not a big deal. If it worked, then you should fix it by reversing the breakage, and you can do so in such a way that works on all systems.
In part this is because you have discarded the fixes offered, and driven away the people with time and skill to provide them.
We've discarded buggy fixes and driven away people who aren't willing to help make a better compiler.
You're generalizing from one example, which you have a personal interest in, and you've given us no links to form our own opinion. Have you any examples of this for GCC on AIX?
Nobody, also, said compilers should be released for your target with platform bugs. Whoever's responsible for that target port should fix them before releasing, without making mainline developers back out patches.
How is one person supposed to fix bugs added all over the system? They can't be familiar with the entire system, and other people have had all release cycles to break anything that's not ix86-Linux.
You're asserting, without support, that new (platform-limited) breakage of an old test is somehow enormously worse than existing breakage of new tests. Enormously worse, here, means that you'd rather have dozens of the latter bugs than one of the former.
We're starting with a fairly complete test suite; it's hard to go far down hill if all the old tests work. It's unlikely that you're going to get a whole lot worse if you're only breaking tests in new systems.
Your odds get better with fewer total bugs
That's absurd. A million bugs in edge cases in multiple inheritance isn't worth one in basic assignment. It's not a pure count; it's how often the feature is used and how much programmers have relied on it to work well. Old test cases are likely to cover bugs that will kill all code, and new test cases are likely to cover only narrow edge cases.
the people responsible for fixing them before release are the most qualified to do it,
Why is the AIX maintainer the most capable at fixing bugs in your optimization code? How is he supposed to fix them at all, if there's a dozen different bugs that stop GCC from compiling at all on AIX?
Every new release does break features of the previous one. You're failing to prevent that. You cannot prevent that, no matter how peremptory you get, unless you just prevent all changes of any kind.
That doesn't mean it's good to randomly break code. Just because it compiles the test cases doesn't mean it compiles KDE. You don't want those features breaking.
How many people could be making really substantial contributions, but find that satisfying David Edelsohn's proprietary test apparatus is just too much bother?
Good question. So far, I haven't seen a single person who actually worked with David Edelsohn saying that it was a problem. Do you have any evidence otherwise?
It means that they get only a tiny fraction of the otherwise-available platform- independent improvements, in each release.
So, on one hand, we have a compiler that actually works and will compile KDE, and on the other, we have one with a bunch of theoretical improvements, but is full of bugs that show up on Edelsohn's test suite and in my code. I think I'll take number one, thank you.
Finally, no one is going to deprive legacy
platforms, they have to do work, pay or resign
themselves to a feature freeze.
Which is why IBM pays someone to work on AIX in GCC, and do other generic GCC work.
The NetBSD have an impressive list of platforms, longer than anyone else's, in part because everyone else lists PPC, M68K, ARM, MIPS, SH, etc. only once. Sure, they list both MIPS-BE and MIPS-LE, SPARC and SPARC64, and PPC and PPC64, but that doesn't come near the splitting in the NetBSD list.
at the same time hack userland, kernel and protocols. While Debian developers mostly package upstream stuff.
And how fast does that evolve? How does the work the NetBSD people put into the (relatively static) userland and kernel compare to the work the Debian developers put into X and GCC and the kernel?
What he said was that he does not care to *maintain* those ports, and should not be expected to.
What he said in a email message to the GNU Libc list linked to on this page, is that he does not care to avoid out-and-out right bugs, like including Linux-specific headers in a generic ix86 file, that other people should be responsible for fixing his bugs.
First place, the fact that AIX does not conform to the LSB, as you were complaining about in the section of text I responded to, is not a bug.
Second place, nobody is familar with every part of GCC. You're asking the AIX maintainers to fix basically random pieces of code within a huge codebase, and it's entirely possible that they will have no way to test their patches, since someone else will have broken building on AIX in some other way in the mean time. Way too often, GCC gets to a point where broken patch builds on broken patch and nobody can do work since there's been too many broken patches added in the meantime.
In 2005, it's AIXs job to conform to the LSB (including GCC). Not the other way around.
So screw IBM. I mean, just because they go out of their way to contribute work (generic as well as system-specific) to GCC, doesn't mean that we should try and work with them at all.