However, the BSD's also cripple themselves by maintaining an "avoid the GPL" mindset and would rather maintain their own userland.
I actually do not think this is the case. FreeBSD ships with gcc and supports dozens of GPL userland applications through packages, ports and a Linux compatability module. gcc is the default compiler under many BSD systems. Linux also includes a fair number of BSD-licensed userland utilities with most distributions.
So I'm not seeing an "avoid the GPL" mindset (and I've spent the last half hour actively looking for evidence of it.) There are advantages to having all of the core system under the same license, a sentiment also expressed by RMS in regards to non-GPL parts of the Linux kernel.
For example, the lack of a public performance clause means in the GPL means that while one can copy a GPL audio recording, one does not have permission to play the recording in a nightclub or over the radio.
I think that most of the people have not read the licenses. Here what the attribution license gives you:
3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:
a: to reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collective Works, and to reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collective Works; b: to create and reproduce Derivative Works; c: to distribute copies or phonorecords of, display publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by means of a digital audio transmission the Work including as incorporated in Collective Works; d: to distribute copies or phonorecords of, display publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by means of a digital audio transmission Derivative Works;
The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats. All rights not expressly granted by Licensor are hereby reserved.
Basically, the GPL and BSD license only deal with a and b within a specific media. These licenses do not cover phonorecords, public performance, public display or digital audio transmission.
Is it just me, or was the world complicated enough without having another 8 different licenses to consider when you're publishing your work? I know the idea is that you forget that GPL, BSD and whatnot ever existed and rely exclusively on Creative Commons judgement about what should be in the license but it would have been nice to have been given a 'best fit' from the existing licenses in the wild.
Perhaps it is just you. The big strength (and limitation) of the GPL and BSD license is that they exclusively define rights in terms of software: source code and object code. This works great for software but applies less well to other creative works. For example, the GPL does not handle the problem of a mixed media artist who wishes to use a photograph in a collage. Or the playright who wants to create a drama based around a painting. Or the musician who wants to sample the work of an Middle Eastern music ensemble.
Currently there are no standards for other creative works other beyond public domain and 'all rights reserved'. So actually, I disagree that the idea is to 'forget that GPL, BSD and whatnot ever really existed'. The GPL is great, if you are producing software. BSD is great, if you are producing software. If you are producing textbooks, educational multimedia, film, music, drama, poetry, or just about anything that is not software.
I didn't think that Creative Commons had much of a software focus. The GPL and the LGPL work great for software, but work less well for other creative works. What qualifies as source code for photographs of forest mushrooms, or a recording of an jazz jam session? What about art exhibitions or knit sweater instructions?
Software producers should probably use one of the many open-source software licenses which are customized to the nature of software as a creative work. However, there is a lack of viable liberal licenses for reseach, literary, visual and musical works.
SciFi replacing FOX for taking alien believers?
on
Taken?
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· Score: 2
I've been avoiding the series primarily because SciFi seems to be hell bent on reviving the US UFOlogy entertainment industry. This has been suffering recently since the X-Files colapsed under the weight of its own overdone mythos. There has always been a strong link between fiction about UFOs and the so called "true stories". Many early encounters cribbed details from recent science fiction movies before convirging on the current pattern of abduction stories. At any rate it is interesting to see the sudden invesment by SciFi in the abduction mythos at a time in which even many key players in American UFOlogy are backing away from the huge number of abduction claims made in the 90s.
Dvorak may help some cases but it depends on exactly which bad typing habit causes the problem. Dvorak has not helped me much because I learned to type back on typewriters that required a much firmer touch. As a result I tend to be a "pounder" unless I think very hard about typing.
Basically my experience with RSI is that there is no "one size fits all" solution.
According to Time Peter Jackson fought with the studio to pick up the second film exactly where the first left off, as if you just stepped out for a popcorn refil without any voice over or flashbacks.
But it seems to me that some people missed the conflict and resolution of Fellowship even when the director ADDED AN ADDITIONAL SCENE OF DIALOG BETWEEN ARAGORN AND FRODO TO MAKE THE CONFLICT EXPLICIT! The conflict is that the ring corrupts everything that comes near it making the Fellowship its self a threat to the quest. The resolution is that Ringbearer tries to go alone.
Can somebody convince me otherwise? I feel kind of bad about being so indifferent about the Bono act. Can somebody give me an example of a situation in which a work's not being copyrighted-- that is, being in the public domain-- led to some kind of wonderful thing happening?
For a classic example, how about the works of William Shakespeare. The existence of Shakespeare in the public domain means that anybody can make a movie based on William Shakespeare from Walt Disney (The Lion King), to Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, Akira Kurasawa, Bugs Bunny, Leonard Bernstein and "Strange Brew". If you need a copy of a particular play you can get it on the Internet for free, or you can choose from a large number of competing printed versions ranging from just one step above newsprint, to acid-free leather bound collectors editions. If you and a bunch of friends want to practice your Elizabethan fencing while reciting the opening gang fight from Romeo and Juliet in the City Park, ("Do you bite your thumb at me?"/"No sir, but I do bite my thumb!") The worst that can happen is that you get hauled off for waving a bunch of sharp pointy bits of steel around.
In contrast, if you even come close to making a work that might, possibly be seen as mocking the Mouse, Disney can slap you with a cease-and-desist order. While anybody anywhere can perform Shakespeare anytime, Disney has been known for taking day care centers to court for showing Disney videos on a VCR.
I actually feel that a fair compromise would be to return to the old registration system in which copyright extensions required registering the work. This would make it easy to find out what works have been abandoned and can be salvaged by nonprofits, such as the large volume of silent film and newsreel footage that is languishing for want of conservation because of a lack of clear copyright ownership. And would give the owners of valuable legacy property their valued extensions.
Perhaps some real world experience is needed in this discussion. About a year ago, an extended career of bad typing habits (probably due to early childhood training on manual typewriters) ended up in a very nasty case of Repetitive Motion Disorder (RSI). Basically the recommendation was to stop typing at all for an extended period of time, followed by extensive retraining. At that time I started working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
In my experience, the software does a pretty good job of recognizing dictation. It does a better job if I remember not look at the screen while I am talking, a habit that is very difficult for me. Continuous speech recognition does better if you give it very long phrases as opposed to very short phrases. Yes, the text does require correction, but text requires correction no matter what input method you happen to use. Basically, dictation software means the difference between doing 500 painful words a day, and 2000 easy words a day. I don't need to continuously train the software, only when I come across a new word not in the dictionary. The main problem is that the primary text errors are not spelling typos that are easy to spot, but homonym errors that are more difficult to spot.
The hardest part is that it forces me to change the way that I write. Formerly I was a very "Beethovenian" writer. This term was inspired by the composer's tendency to use literal cut-and-paste to edit his documents pasting on as many as a dozen layers of new manuscript on top of a phrase until it was perfect. When typing, I tend to delete text several times as it is written. Speech recognition works best if you can dictate an entire paragraph and then edit afterwards. In most cases editing is fairly simple because most mistakes come up in the most probable match list. Speech recognition is probably not as good as typing, but for me is certainly better than the alternative of pursuing a career based around "would you like fries with that?" After all, Henry James suffered the same problem later in life and dictated most of his later manuscripts.
My primary irritation is that the speech models work very well for writing expository text, but they don't work very well for writing programming code. It would also be nice if Dragon NaturallySpeaking came with a better text editor, one that can handle multiple files opened at once.
One doesn't become a grandmaster overnight. Generally, if you are not on your way by your teens, you will never make it. It involves studying chess every day for years and years. There is a reason there are less than 500 in the world. As a result of their studies, however, I think many miss out on the basic socialization acquired by most people. They would probably make the average Slashdot reader look like a well-adjusted socialite.
I'm not convinced. I collect books by Grandmasters and read chess news. For every Bobby Fischer and Paul Morphy (widely considered to be the previous American genius going back to the 1800) there seem to be a lot of chess players who are nice functional human beings. Fischer seems to be unique in both his paranoia and his complete inability to relate to other people which makes him notorious in the chess community (reporters were forced in his rematch to call him "World Champion").
This is the only real hold-back application for me. With RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), speech recognition means the difference between writing 500 painful words a day, and 2,000 easy words a day. With ViaVoice apparently no longer in development for linux I don't anticipate switching soon.
For me, an important bit of evidence that it really happened comes from the Soviet Union. At the time the Soviet Union was successfully taking the first measurements of the atmosphere of venus using radio astronomy. In addition a handful of amateur radio operators were already experimenting with EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) transmission. This left a fairly large body of people capable of confirming a carrier signal through the transfer orbit to the moon and back.
I don't think that you understand how this form of filtering works.
1: You decide what content is spam and what content is not spam because you train the filter. One of the things that I disliked about SpamAssassin was its tendency to mark conference announcements as spam. I don't have this problem with my pseudo-baysian filter because it recognizes that mail about education tends to be good while mail about mortgages, pot and penis enlargement tends to be bad.
2: Perhaps more importantly the filter not only checks for trusted content, but trusted souces and routes. If honestcorp.com never sends you spam, then honestcorp.com becomes a trusted route for email.
Galileo was launched in 1989 and completed its primary mission in 1997. The costs of doing additional investigation are minimal compared to the cost of building an entirely different probe. Basically, any images we get from Gallileo are comparatively dirt cheap, so we might as well keep it running.
Yeah, but it doesn't mean the freedom to take away the freedom of others.
This is one of the big flaws in terms of "software freedom" as advocated by GPL pundits. There is this nebulous claim out there that not publishing the source code involves taking away freedom.
To use an example, lets look at Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is avaliable as part of the Gutenberg archive. Random House publishes a new annotated version. Have I been stripped of any freedoms because the annotations and commentary are not public domain. No. I have exactly the same liberties to read and publish my own versions of Leaves of Grass as before.
If I make a new creative work on my own and copy protect it, am I infringing on anyone's freedom. No. They have the same freedoms they had before I published my work. If they don't like that I didn't include source materials, they can purchase a different work.
Advocates of the GPL argue that propretary protections of software should not exist because software is a non-rivalous resouce. There is an infinite potential to make copies.
Then when the subject is public domain and BSD they argue that software is a rivalous resource that needs protection through copyleft. If it is non-rivalous, then there is nothing I can do that will infringe on your freedom. You have a free version. You can copy, modify and distribute at will.
This is a common misconception about free software. The freedom in free software does not belong to the people that use the software, but rather to the software itself. Free software is free from ever being a victim of an 'embrace and extend' maneuver, where the software is modified for strategic reasons, rather than to actually improve it.
If software has freedom, then does it have rights? And if so, what about my car, my rat cage, and my sewing machine?
Public domain is NOT the same as Free software. It's nowhere NEAR Free software. With public domain, anyone can take my code and change the license and sell it to me with a restrictive license.
There is a funny definition of "freedom" there. "Free" as long as one abides by the restrictions placed on derivative works by the author. The bigest problem with freedom is that freedom includes the liberty to say or do things that are not right or not in the best interest of the comunity as a whole. Free speech includes the freedom to create hate speech. Free association includes the freedom to join the KKK. You can't simultaneously say "this is free" and "you must give what you make from this back to the community." GPL advocates would be much more honest of they were to argue for the GPL as a form of software conservatory rather than mangling the concept of freedom.
Of course the GPL is a very good thing. However, that does not make public domain a very bad thing. Placing many of the standard technologies into the public domain would help to prevent many of the copyright and patent snafus that have developed over the last few years. HTML and http thrived because their placement in the public domain permitted everyone to write code for them. Government-produced documents must be in the public domain in order to support democracy.
It's bad business to ignore the long-term affects of your short- term "compromises"
True. On the other hand there are compromises either way you go. For cases where open-source software is nonexistent or not sufficient to the task, do you sacrifice critical functionality for freedom? For me personally, it appears that support for ViaVoice (still a non-free product) on Linux has disappeared. Neither Sphinx or Open Mind are close to offering dictation. Freedom is good but the ability to draft 2,000 words per day without pain as opposed to 200 words per day puts food on the table.
You can't build a computer that is capable of running a perfect simulation of the universe, because doing so would require as many or more "bits" or information as are availble for use in the universe.
It is even worse than that. You can't build a computer that simulates the general case of three gravitational bodies interacting in space because it requires calculating the state of the system for an infinite number of infinitely small slices of time. Fortunately, the unstable solutions tend to weed themselves out through collision and evaporation leading to relatively stable solutions such as the solar system. But modeling the solar system is impossible. The best we can do is create some extremely good approximations that work well for the major bodies and less well for the minor bodies.
Well, as another point of view there is a growing body of theory which argues that the body-mind duality that is central to Kurtzweil's claims is hopelessly naive and fails to capture how the mind really works. Basically, the mind can not be separiated from body (and from a radical situatied cognition point of view the mind can not be separated from contexet either), packaged, and transfered to a different system.
Basically the mind as computer metaphor is very misleading because the computer is based on a concept of separation of hardware from software, with the software interchangable at a higher level of abstraction. Probably a better metaphor would be to consider the mind as an FM radio, an information processing circuit flexible within specific parameters but still bound by the underlying hardware. The physical morphology of hands, eyes and legs are as important to cognition as the informational inputs they produce. Replicating the mind requires replicating the body, in which case why bother?
At any rate, one does not need to be religious to be skeptical of dowloadable minds. Brian Aldis published a scathing criticism of the movie AI and his own novella Supertoys Last All Summer Long aruging that human cognition evolved more than a million years in concert with a body. Stephen Hawking points out an informational problem in that the brain operates on scales which make it impossible make a complete snapshot of the mind without destroying it. In addition there is a computational problem that paralells strong cryptography, the computation required exceeds certian known boudaries of the universe even if one proposes a perfect computer.
So I believe skepticism is justifiable to the point where the burden is on those who claim that complex and chaotic sysems are knowable.
Librarians may be depicted in a less than flattering way in the media, but how many people actually visit libraries outside of schooling these days? I myself visit Borders book store, browse, listen to music, have a coffee and chat with my friends most saturdays, but in a library I wouldn't be able to find the latest titles or enjoy myself. Compared to retail a library is a staid boring authoritarian place, which is why the staff of these valuable institutions are depicted in this way.
Just about every library over the last 5 years has more social meeting space than the bookstores. In most public libraries, the casual space is the norm with a silent reading room for those who want quiet (which is useful for days when I can't deal with the chatter.) At my local library there is always at least one workgroup and gaming group.
The biggest problem with bookstores is you can't take books home, and you can't photocopy pages. As a result, the library is the place I go to browse periodicals that I don't want to spend money on but occasionally have useful bits I want to take home.
A third reason why I like libraries is that search engines like google are becoming less and less valuable resources the more junk gets piled into it. The ratio of non-english texts to english texts is becoming a bit high, and 95% of the results are incomplete, poorly researched, out of date, decontextualized, badly written, comlete BS or any mixture of the above. One advantage to print publishing over web publishing is that someone other that the auhor has the opportinity point out the worst flaws. Too much information is as bad a problem as too little information.
This is where I find the added value of libraries and librarians, if I'm researching in a topic that is new to me, I'll ask a librarian to find the best ways to search.
Well, if you want to take it that direction, nothing comes without price.
But we are not talking price here. We are talking about the freedom to do what you wish with what is given to you. This is a major difference in philosophy between the two licenses. The GPL says "I know what is best for you, therefore I set the terms of modification and redistribution." The BSD License says "I don't know what is best for you, therefore you set your own terms."
Still, your argument here doesn't make sense to me. No one is obligated, under the GPL, to pursue those that use their code inappropriately. Copyright is broken all the time. So even if FreeBSD were chosen instead of Linux, people would still break the terms of the license.
Actually, one has to bend over backwards to break the terms of the BSD license. The entire point of the license is to give the software away with no strings attached while providing minimal protection from liability. About the only thing better is to publish anonymously into the public domain. (There is a mechanism for doing so, it is just rarely used.)
Granted people break copyright laws all the time. But this is irrelevant because the point of the license is to define what the author considers to be appropriate use. In some cases, appropriate use may very well include some of the things that make GPL advocates cringe (like treating distribution of source code as optional, incorporation into proprietary products and linking to not-free libraries.) In some cases, the GPL is necessary to keep the work inside the free commons. On the other hand, in other cases it is best to simply say "here it is, I trust your moral judgement."
Look at it in the right perspective. As opposed to not having the option for distributing the source code with proprietary software? Seems that the gpl doesn't put an undue burden. And perhaps a student that receives the source code might decide to take a look at it. The teacher that doesn't want to take "the burden" of that isn't providing every opportunity for learning.
Isn't there a false delima in this? I do not believe that the only choices are to release under the GPL or to not release at all. But the problem with providing every opportunity for learning is that there are limitless opportunities and limited resources. Is learning maximized by including source code or packing as many programs as possible onto the CD. To put things in the right perspective here, probably less that %1 of the people who use free software ever look at the source code. Defining the obligations for redistribution for the elite few rather that for the many is sometimes an unfair burden.
Anyone whose code is popular enough that people would be looking for it 2 1/2 years later isn't going to object to trying to make it available on request by trying to maintain a website.
But there is the problem. The GPL makes no allowances for popularity. If you publish your program, you are committed to the three year period.
There's more to the GPL than the spirit of enforcing it. You know the old saying, locks are to keep honest people out. GPL something and the average person will be likely to GPL it as well.
You know, my grandmother had an interesting knack for giving away presents. "This is yours," she would say "but if you ever sell it I will haunt you." The gift in that case was not free in terms of libre.
The GPL has some strings attached to it. Some people don't like giving to the community with those strings attached. In some cases the benefits of releasing something under a more liberal license outweighs the risks of malicious appropriation.
Coming from academia, one of the big problems with the GPL is that not only can you not redistribute the work under less liberal license, but you can't redistribute the work under a more liberal license either. For example, section 3 of the license seems to be overly restrictive in terms of redistribution of object code in a way that is irrelevant to most users. When applied to individual users, this seems a bit problematic. Basically I can see cases where I don't care if a teacher includes the source code when distributing 30 copies to her students. Rather than placing the burden on the teacher to distribute the source code, if access to source code is important, it should be technically embedded in the object code by the creator.
Section 2 requires that people who distribute source code maintain access to the source code for three years. This seems to be a problematic demand especially for student projects and web sites that may disappear over the course of the year.
A third problem is that while most people agree that giving back to the community is important, the GPL puts the creator in the position the being the enforcer of other people's morality. There are couple of reasons why a person might be reluctant to do so. First of all, many people are not in the position to enforce the terms of the GPL. If one is not able or unwilling to enforce the GPL, then there is no reason to apply the GPL. The second reason is that the GPL does place restrictions on the modification and distribution of programs. Some people believe that the benefits of placing no restrictions on modification and redistribution outweighs the risk of appropriation.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the BSD's also cripple themselves by maintaining an "avoid the GPL" mindset and would rather maintain their own userland.
I actually do not think this is the case. FreeBSD ships with gcc and supports dozens of GPL userland applications through packages, ports and a Linux compatability module. gcc is the default compiler under many BSD systems. Linux also includes a fair number of BSD-licensed userland utilities with most distributions.
So I'm not seeing an "avoid the GPL" mindset (and I've spent the last half hour actively looking for evidence of it.) There are advantages to having all of the core system under the same license, a sentiment also expressed by RMS in regards to non-GPL parts of the Linux kernel.
For example, the lack of a public performance clause means in the GPL means that while one can copy a GPL audio recording, one does not have permission to play the recording in a nightclub or over the radio.
Basically, the GPL and BSD license only deal with a and b within a specific media. These licenses do not cover phonorecords, public performance, public display or digital audio transmission.
Is it just me, or was the world complicated enough without having another 8 different licenses to consider when you're publishing your work? I know the idea is that you forget that GPL, BSD and whatnot ever existed and rely exclusively on Creative Commons judgement about what should be in the license but it would have been nice to have been given a 'best fit' from the existing licenses in the wild.
Perhaps it is just you. The big strength (and limitation) of the GPL and BSD license is that they exclusively define rights in terms of software: source code and object code. This works great for software but applies less well to other creative works. For example, the GPL does not handle the problem of a mixed media artist who wishes to use a photograph in a collage. Or the playright who wants to create a drama based around a painting. Or the musician who wants to sample the work of an Middle Eastern music ensemble.
Currently there are no standards for other creative works other beyond public domain and 'all rights reserved'. So actually, I disagree that the idea is to 'forget that GPL, BSD and whatnot ever really existed'. The GPL is great, if you are producing software. BSD is great, if you are producing software. If you are producing textbooks, educational multimedia, film, music, drama, poetry, or just about anything that is not software.
I didn't think that Creative Commons had much of a software focus. The GPL and the LGPL work great for software, but work less well for other creative works. What qualifies as source code for photographs of forest mushrooms, or a recording of an jazz jam session? What about art exhibitions or knit sweater instructions?
Software producers should probably use one of the many open-source software licenses which are customized to the nature of software as a creative work. However, there is a lack of viable liberal licenses for reseach, literary, visual and musical works.
I've been avoiding the series primarily because SciFi seems to be hell bent on reviving the US UFOlogy entertainment industry. This has been suffering recently since the X-Files colapsed under the weight of its own overdone mythos. There has always been a strong link between fiction about UFOs and the so called "true stories". Many early encounters cribbed details from recent science fiction movies before convirging on the current pattern of abduction stories. At any rate it is interesting to see the sudden invesment by SciFi in the abduction mythos at a time in which even many key players in American UFOlogy are backing away from the huge number of abduction claims made in the 90s.
Dvorak may help some cases but it depends on exactly which bad typing habit causes the problem. Dvorak has not helped me much because I learned to type back on typewriters that required a much firmer touch. As a result I tend to be a "pounder" unless I think very hard about typing.
Basically my experience with RSI is that there is no "one size fits all" solution.
According to Time Peter Jackson fought with the studio to pick up the second film exactly where the first left off, as if you just stepped out for a popcorn refil without any voice over or flashbacks.
But it seems to me that some people missed the conflict and resolution of Fellowship even when the director ADDED AN ADDITIONAL SCENE OF DIALOG BETWEEN ARAGORN AND FRODO TO MAKE THE CONFLICT EXPLICIT! The conflict is that the ring corrupts everything that comes near it making the Fellowship its self a threat to the quest. The resolution is that Ringbearer tries to go alone.
Can somebody convince me otherwise? I feel kind of bad about being so indifferent about the Bono act. Can somebody give me an example of a situation in which a work's not being copyrighted-- that is, being in the public domain-- led to some kind of wonderful thing happening?
For a classic example, how about the works of William Shakespeare. The existence of Shakespeare in the public domain means that anybody can make a movie based on William Shakespeare from Walt Disney (The Lion King), to Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, Akira Kurasawa, Bugs Bunny, Leonard Bernstein and "Strange Brew". If you need a copy of a particular play you can get it on the Internet for free, or you can choose from a large number of competing printed versions ranging from just one step above newsprint, to acid-free leather bound collectors editions. If you and a bunch of friends want to practice your Elizabethan fencing while reciting the opening gang fight from Romeo and Juliet in the City Park, ("Do you bite your thumb at me?"/"No sir, but I do bite my thumb!") The worst that can happen is that you get hauled off for waving a bunch of sharp pointy bits of steel around.
In contrast, if you even come close to making a work that might, possibly be seen as mocking the Mouse, Disney can slap you with a cease-and-desist order. While anybody anywhere can perform Shakespeare anytime, Disney has been known for taking day care centers to court for showing Disney videos on a VCR.
I actually feel that a fair compromise would be to return to the old registration system in which copyright extensions required registering the work. This would make it easy to find out what works have been abandoned and can be salvaged by nonprofits, such as the large volume of silent film and newsreel footage that is languishing for want of conservation because of a lack of clear copyright ownership. And would give the owners of valuable legacy property their valued extensions.
Perhaps some real world experience is needed in this discussion. About a year ago, an extended career of bad typing habits (probably due to early childhood training on manual typewriters) ended up in a very nasty case of Repetitive Motion Disorder (RSI). Basically the recommendation was to stop typing at all for an extended period of time, followed by extensive retraining. At that time I started working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
In my experience, the software does a pretty good job of recognizing dictation. It does a better job if I remember not look at the screen while I am talking, a habit that is very difficult for me. Continuous speech recognition does better if you give it very long phrases as opposed to very short phrases. Yes, the text does require correction, but text requires correction no matter what input method you happen to use. Basically, dictation software means the difference between doing 500 painful words a day, and 2000 easy words a day. I don't need to continuously train the software, only when I come across a new word not in the dictionary. The main problem is that the primary text errors are not spelling typos that are easy to spot, but homonym errors that are more difficult to spot.
The hardest part is that it forces me to change the way that I write. Formerly I was a very "Beethovenian" writer. This term was inspired by the composer's tendency to use literal cut-and-paste to edit his documents pasting on as many as a dozen layers of new manuscript on top of a phrase until it was perfect. When typing, I tend to delete text several times as it is written. Speech recognition works best if you can dictate an entire paragraph and then edit afterwards. In most cases editing is fairly simple because most mistakes come up in the most probable match list. Speech recognition is probably not as good as typing, but for me is certainly better than the alternative of pursuing a career based around "would you like fries with that?" After all, Henry James suffered the same problem later in life and dictated most of his later manuscripts.
My primary irritation is that the speech models work very well for writing expository text, but they don't work very well for writing programming code. It would also be nice if Dragon NaturallySpeaking came with a better text editor, one that can handle multiple files opened at once.
One doesn't become a grandmaster overnight. Generally, if you are not on your way by your teens, you will never make it. It involves studying chess every day for years and years. There is a reason there are less than 500 in the world. As a result of their studies, however, I think many miss out on the basic socialization acquired by most people. They would probably make the average Slashdot reader look like a well-adjusted socialite.
I'm not convinced. I collect books by Grandmasters and read chess news. For every Bobby Fischer and Paul Morphy (widely considered to be the previous American genius going back to the 1800) there seem to be a lot of chess players who are nice functional human beings. Fischer seems to be unique in both his paranoia and his complete inability to relate to other people which makes him notorious in the chess community (reporters were forced in his rematch to call him "World Champion").
This is the only real hold-back application for me. With RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), speech recognition means the difference between writing 500 painful words a day, and 2,000 easy words a day. With ViaVoice apparently no longer in development for linux I don't anticipate switching soon.
For me, an important bit of evidence that it really happened comes from the Soviet Union. At the time the Soviet Union was successfully taking the first measurements of the atmosphere of venus using radio astronomy. In addition a handful of amateur radio operators were already experimenting with EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) transmission. This left a fairly large body of people capable of confirming a carrier signal through the transfer orbit to the moon and back.
I don't think that you understand how this form of filtering works.
1: You decide what content is spam and what content is not spam because you train the filter. One of the things that I disliked about SpamAssassin was its tendency to mark conference announcements as spam. I don't have this problem with my pseudo-baysian filter because it recognizes that mail about education tends to be good while mail about mortgages, pot and penis enlargement tends to be bad.
2: Perhaps more importantly the filter not only checks for trusted content, but trusted souces and routes. If honestcorp.com never sends you spam, then honestcorp.com becomes a trusted route for email.
Galileo was launched in 1989 and completed its primary mission in 1997. The costs of doing additional investigation are minimal compared to the cost of building an entirely different probe. Basically, any images we get from Gallileo are comparatively dirt cheap, so we might as well keep it running.
Yeah, but it doesn't mean the freedom to take away the freedom of others.
This is one of the big flaws in terms of "software freedom" as advocated by GPL pundits. There is this nebulous claim out there that not publishing the source code involves taking away freedom.
To use an example, lets look at Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is avaliable as part of the Gutenberg archive. Random House publishes a new annotated version. Have I been stripped of any freedoms because the annotations and commentary are not public domain. No. I have exactly the same liberties to read and publish my own versions of Leaves of Grass as before.
If I make a new creative work on my own and copy protect it, am I infringing on anyone's freedom. No. They have the same freedoms they had before I published my work. If they don't like that I didn't include source materials, they can purchase a different work.
Advocates of the GPL argue that propretary protections of software should not exist because software is a non-rivalous resouce. There is an infinite potential to make copies.
Then when the subject is public domain and BSD they argue that software is a rivalous resource that needs protection through copyleft. If it is non-rivalous, then there is nothing I can do that will infringe on your freedom. You have a free version. You can copy, modify and distribute at will.
This is a common misconception about free software. The freedom in free software does not belong to the people that use the software, but rather to the software itself. Free software is free from ever being a victim of an 'embrace and extend' maneuver, where the software is modified for strategic reasons, rather than to actually improve it.
If software has freedom, then does it have rights? And if so, what about my car, my rat cage, and my sewing machine?
Public domain is NOT the same as Free software. It's nowhere NEAR Free software. With public domain, anyone can take my code and change the license and sell it to me with a restrictive license.
There is a funny definition of "freedom" there. "Free" as long as one abides by the restrictions placed on derivative works by the author. The bigest problem with freedom is that freedom includes the liberty to say or do things that are not right or not in the best interest of the comunity as a whole. Free speech includes the freedom to create hate speech. Free association includes the freedom to join the KKK. You can't simultaneously say "this is free" and "you must give what you make from this back to the community." GPL advocates would be much more honest of they were to argue for the GPL as a form of software conservatory rather than mangling the concept of freedom.
Of course the GPL is a very good thing. However, that does not make public domain a very bad thing. Placing many of the standard technologies into the public domain would help to prevent many of the copyright and patent snafus that have developed over the last few years. HTML and http thrived because their placement in the public domain permitted everyone to write code for them. Government-produced documents must be in the public domain in order to support democracy.
It's bad business to ignore the long-term affects of your short- term "compromises"
True. On the other hand there are compromises either way you go. For cases where open-source software is nonexistent or not sufficient to the task, do you sacrifice critical functionality for freedom? For me personally, it appears that support for ViaVoice (still a non-free product) on Linux has disappeared. Neither Sphinx or Open Mind are close to offering dictation. Freedom is good but the ability to draft 2,000 words per day without pain as opposed to 200 words per day puts food on the table.
You can't build a computer that is capable of running a perfect simulation of the universe, because doing so would require as many or more "bits" or information as are availble for use in the universe.
It is even worse than that. You can't build a computer that simulates the general case of three gravitational bodies interacting in space because it requires calculating the state of the system for an infinite number of infinitely small slices of time. Fortunately, the unstable solutions tend to weed themselves out through collision and evaporation leading to relatively stable solutions such as the solar system. But modeling the solar system is impossible. The best we can do is create some extremely good approximations that work well for the major bodies and less well for the minor bodies.
Well, as another point of view there is a growing body of theory which argues that the body-mind duality that is central to Kurtzweil's claims is hopelessly naive and fails to capture how the mind really works. Basically, the mind can not be separiated from body (and from a radical situatied cognition point of view the mind can not be separated from contexet either), packaged, and transfered to a different system.
Basically the mind as computer metaphor is very misleading because the computer is based on a concept of separation of hardware from software, with the software interchangable at a higher level of abstraction. Probably a better metaphor would be to consider the mind as an FM radio, an information processing circuit flexible within specific parameters but still bound by the underlying hardware. The physical morphology of hands, eyes and legs are as important to cognition as the informational inputs they produce. Replicating the mind requires replicating the body, in which case why bother?
At any rate, one does not need to be religious to be skeptical of dowloadable minds. Brian Aldis published a scathing criticism of the movie AI and his own novella Supertoys Last All Summer Long aruging that human cognition evolved more than a million years in concert with a body. Stephen Hawking points out an informational problem in that the brain operates on scales which make it impossible make a complete snapshot of the mind without destroying it. In addition there is a computational problem that paralells strong cryptography, the computation required exceeds certian known boudaries of the universe even if one proposes a perfect computer.
So I believe skepticism is justifiable to the point where the burden is on those who claim that complex and chaotic sysems are knowable.
Librarians may be depicted in a less than flattering way in the media, but how many people actually visit libraries outside of schooling these days? I myself visit Borders book store, browse, listen to music, have a coffee and chat with my friends most saturdays, but in a library I wouldn't be able to find the latest titles or enjoy myself. Compared to retail a library is a staid boring authoritarian place, which is why the staff of these valuable institutions are depicted in this way.
Just about every library over the last 5 years has more social meeting space than the bookstores. In most public libraries, the casual space is the norm with a silent reading room for those who want quiet (which is useful for days when I can't deal with the chatter.) At my local library there is always at least one workgroup and gaming group.
The biggest problem with bookstores is you can't take books home, and you can't photocopy pages. As a result, the library is the place I go to browse periodicals that I don't want to spend money on but occasionally have useful bits I want to take home.
A third reason why I like libraries is that search engines like google are becoming less and less valuable resources the more junk gets piled into it. The ratio of non-english texts to english texts is becoming a bit high, and 95% of the results are incomplete, poorly researched, out of date, decontextualized, badly written, comlete BS or any mixture of the above. One advantage to print publishing over web publishing is that someone other that the auhor has the opportinity point out the worst flaws. Too much information is as bad a problem as too little information.
This is where I find the added value of libraries and librarians, if I'm researching in a topic that is new to me, I'll ask a librarian to find the best ways to search.
Well, if you want to take it that direction, nothing comes without price.
But we are not talking price here. We are talking about the freedom to do what you wish with what is given to you. This is a major difference in philosophy between the two licenses. The GPL says "I know what is best for you, therefore I set the terms of modification and redistribution." The BSD License says "I don't know what is best for you, therefore you set your own terms."
Still, your argument here doesn't make sense to me. No one is obligated, under the GPL, to pursue those that use their code inappropriately. Copyright is broken all the time. So even if FreeBSD were chosen instead of Linux, people would still break the terms of the license.
Actually, one has to bend over backwards to break the terms of the BSD license. The entire point of the license is to give the software away with no strings attached while providing minimal protection from liability. About the only thing better is to publish anonymously into the public domain. (There is a mechanism for doing so, it is just rarely used.)
Granted people break copyright laws all the time. But this is irrelevant because the point of the license is to define what the author considers to be appropriate use. In some cases, appropriate use may very well include some of the things that make GPL advocates cringe (like treating distribution of source code as optional, incorporation into proprietary products and linking to not-free libraries.) In some cases, the GPL is necessary to keep the work inside the free commons. On the other hand, in other cases it is best to simply say "here it is, I trust your moral judgement."
Look at it in the right perspective. As opposed to not having the option for distributing the source code with proprietary software? Seems that the gpl doesn't put an undue burden. And perhaps a student that receives the source code might decide to take a look at it. The teacher that doesn't want to take "the burden" of that isn't providing every opportunity for learning.
Isn't there a false delima in this? I do not believe that the only choices are to release under the GPL or to not release at all. But the problem with providing every opportunity for learning is that there are limitless opportunities and limited resources. Is learning maximized by including source code or packing as many programs as possible onto the CD. To put things in the right perspective here, probably less that %1 of the people who use free software ever look at the source code. Defining the obligations for redistribution for the elite few rather that for the many is sometimes an unfair burden.
Anyone whose code is popular enough that people would be looking for it 2 1/2 years later isn't going to object to trying to make it available on request by trying to maintain a website.
But there is the problem. The GPL makes no allowances for popularity. If you publish your program, you are committed to the three year period.
There's more to the GPL than the spirit of enforcing it. You know the old saying, locks are to keep honest people out. GPL something and the average person will be likely to GPL it as well.
You know, my grandmother had an interesting knack for giving away presents. "This is yours," she would say "but if you ever sell it I will haunt you." The gift in that case was not free in terms of libre.
The GPL has some strings attached to it. Some people don't like giving to the community with those strings attached. In some cases the benefits of releasing something under a more liberal license outweighs the risks of malicious appropriation.
Coming from academia, one of the big problems with the GPL is that not only can you not redistribute the work under less liberal license, but you can't redistribute the work under a more liberal license either. For example, section 3 of the license seems to be overly restrictive in terms of redistribution of object code in a way that is irrelevant to most users. When applied to individual users, this seems a bit problematic. Basically I can see cases where I don't care if a teacher includes the source code when distributing 30 copies to her students. Rather than placing the burden on the teacher to distribute the source code, if access to source code is important, it should be technically embedded in the object code by the creator.
Section 2 requires that people who distribute source code maintain access to the source code for three years. This seems to be a problematic demand especially for student projects and web sites that may disappear over the course of the year.
A third problem is that while most people agree that giving back to the community is important, the GPL puts the creator in the position the being the enforcer of other people's morality. There are couple of reasons why a person might be reluctant to do so. First of all, many people are not in the position to enforce the terms of the GPL. If one is not able or unwilling to enforce the GPL, then there is no reason to apply the GPL. The second reason is that the GPL does place restrictions on the modification and distribution of programs. Some people believe that the benefits of placing no restrictions on modification and redistribution outweighs the risk of appropriation.