But, the folks who think this way don't think the product is defective, they think it is working just fine. And as long as the terms are defined in the EULA, they might be right. That was the goal of UCITA anyway (which happily wasn't anywhere near as successful as they wanted).
no-one will want to do anything generally useful with alpha
It does raise the temptation though to go tossing random queries at the engine in the hopes that they try to register all of the results with the copyright office.
I doubt the copyright people would be amused even if they tried to register all of the legitimate queries.
It costs about $150/year to join the AAAS and with that you receive an issue of Science magazine weekly. While some of the articles are dense and very domain-specific, many of the others are not and are (I think) quite accessible to most readers - especially if you read it more or less consistently. Climate change has been covered very thoroughly in Science over the years. So, don't go with (in the most general sense) media, go to a source where the research is being covered at first or second hand and read it/evaluate it for yourself.
It is also a great way to give yourself an education in general science. Though it can be a bit intimidating at first and is certainly a bit overwhelming (the magazine arrives relentlessly - if you've read the previous issue(s) or not).
RDF is nice and there are various different syntaxes for it (including various triples formats), and promises, if it can be built, deployed and trusted(!!!) to make the web ever so much more searchable.
This will depend though on people writing good ontologies (not easy) and using them correctly (even less easy).
RDFa and microformats look, on the surface at least, to be nice ways to manage RDF type information in HTML. But I'm a bit more dubious - they don't, in many cases, have careful ontologies built around them - when they do (RDFa, mostly) they seem to be very resource intensive (a heavily RDFa annotated HTML page is likely to balloon to several times the same page without RDFa), and the uses of them I've seen have been less than convincingly correct. This doesn't mean that they're useless, just that they're not doing the job at the moment, or they're doing the job poorly.
The solution that seems to be favored by the semantic web types is to present RDF pages as an alternative to HTML pages when RDF is requested. This looks, by far, to be the best way to work this, but does require site builders (and CMSs and web frameworks), and content authors, to be able to build correct RDF pages that represent the information presented, often at the same time as they present HTML pages to human readers (and non-RDF search engines). This is going to be a major problem.
While random order would be nice, it is hardly likely. More likely will be IE first, Opera second (after all they have money to spend to put it there), then Chrome (Google has money too) and then Firefox, with other low penetration browsers following.
A bit of exploration gives one possibility. This page, on Dell DRACs , which have a web interface, shows that the web interface supports really only IE and firefox, and those only on 32 bit machines.
Not only does their site pretty much yell out "We want to make money from everyone.", they even say in their "Vision" that they want to be an all inclusive monopoly:
Every national and international photographic library, agency and other body or business relevant to our industry will be inspired to join and be a part of BAPLA.
Just what we need, yet another money-sucking trade group with an interest in perpetual copyright and the power and money to bribe lawmakers into granting them exactly that.
It would probably go more like :
Phone says : I hear that you're brushing your teeth.
Pause for connection. Crelm toothpaste with the miracle ingredient, Fraudulin! Choose Crelm toothpaste! To order Crelm toothpaste with the miracle ingredient, Fraudulin, press the "Buy" button now.
I started getting much more unfiltered spam. Lots of it looks like this (a real example) :
Subject : acceptant accelerometer
abysmal abusive accession accolade
So, no website, no valid return address. Just random words. I'm wondering if either there's a bug in the spam generator (I get others that start with a line of similarly random words, but then continue for a page or so and are followed by an ad), or if they're trying to confuse spam filters.
There's another variant that looks more like english text with a number of errors in spelling so only a few of the words are real.
This instance of firefox (sometimes I have more than one running at once) has 45 tabs open and it is that low because I just pruned them down this morning. I often end up with about 80-100 tabs open, but that is usually only for a short time while I'm problem solving or trying to figure out some specific topic at which point I usually drop back down to the 40 or so range. Often at this point I need to restart firefox (because of the memory issues).
My current minimum (tabs I always open in every browser instance and keep open) is 8, but has been as large as 12. I could cut this down to 4, but would end up reopening a few and keeping them open, so it seems pretty stable.
Short of shutting down the network a nicely distributed service could be very tough to disrupt. And while communications to the rest of the world are undoubtedly important, for the Iranians right now, internal communications are likely to be much more important.
Currently to do shared chat/video chat/audio/documents... most systems are dependent on servers of one sort or another. Making something that could work on a more peer-to-peer level would be very useful indeed as it would help alleviate (though probably not entirely eliminate) the reliance on servers that are often under someone else's control. If you doubt the usefulness of this, just look at what is happening in Iran right now.
Perhaps "we" should not intervene, if by "we" you mean the governments of the US, UK....
But if you mean we should not help the Iranians to build network and communications connectivity, which is one of the things requested, I think you're mistaken. We should help everyone we can with whatever expertise we have to establish communications amoung the people in Iran and between them and the rest of the world. One of the first things repressive governments try to do is clamp down on communications and the more we can help people communicate the harder it is for such governments to gain and maintain power. Of course, this is not the only factor, but it is a big one.
You missed the cable channels that consist of a couple of hours a day of programming and then many hours of ads and infomercials. And the "all-shopping-all-the-time" channels.
But I suspect that a-la-carte programming would leave me paying more than I'm paying now for the same few channels I watch, so I'm a bit ambivalent about pushing for it.
The wow factor of "It hit me then hit the ground" is also much better than "It hit the ground and a piece of ground hit me." Given a choice, I know which story I'd go with.
Since Ballmer has already threatened to take Microsoft out of the US if it is required to stop evading taxes, if the EU is not a possible new corporate home, where might they go?
Have you tried the "special searches". They have searches aimed at code for the major OSs - Linux, BSD, Microsoft and when I just tried it with "generic.h" in the Linux special search I got a bunch of hits on header files.
But there are also some specialized code search engines around - though I don't have pointers to them, I've used a couple and they can be quite good (and, of course, sometimes quite bad).
Suppose we were to eliminate corporate taxes (probably Ballmer's wettest of dreams). Then personal income taxes would be likely to go up - and while, given the current tax code, it wouldn't hit Ballmer as much as it would someone middle class - it would hit Ballmer as his employees, contractors, housekeepers... ask for higher salaries to help offset the increased tax burden, or it would hit him as he needs to sell products for less.
Or, perhaps we eliminate personal income taxes (another nice dream for Ballmer), but keep the corporate taxes. Now he needs to pay his employees less, but must increase the price of products more.
In either case, we end up at an equilibrium situation (or more likely a kind of semi-stable equilibrium process) in which prices/wages/taxes balance out - and this will occur anywhere he takes his toys to play - the equilibrium may occur with different relative values of taxes paid, income and outgo, but he (and his company) are still likely to end up on the top of the heap and be well off in relatively the same way.
There is one more factor, would the US continue to use Windows in sensitive operations if it were being written offshore - in [insert bugaboo threat country here]? Perhaps with (newly bought and paid for) stringent "Don't release the code" laws?
In short, I suspect he thinks it is a viable threat, but I also suspect that if he carries it out, he'll find that it didn't really pay off as much as he thought.
So if I download a couple of (open licensed) photos from flickr, I should be liable for taxes on for-pay stock photos of the same type of image?
Or if I download Dickens' "Great Expectations" I should be liable for taxes on (hmmm, what is still in copyright...) say "Infinite Jest" ?
This is not only difficult to define, it will be very difficult indeed to implement. But Washington state needs money (and a lot of money) so this seems likely to end up being Yet Another Bad Law.
Slashdot Mirror
But, the folks who think this way don't think the product is defective, they think it is working just fine. And as long as the terms are defined in the EULA, they might be right. That was the goal of UCITA anyway (which happily wasn't anywhere near as successful as they wanted).
Also the same result for "Why isn't wolfram/alpha sure what to do with my input?"
no-one will want to do anything generally useful with alpha
It does raise the temptation though to go tossing random queries at the engine in the hopes that they try to register all of the results with the copyright office. I doubt the copyright people would be amused even if they tried to register all of the legitimate queries.
It costs about $150/year to join the AAAS and with that you receive an issue of Science magazine weekly. While some of the articles are dense and very domain-specific, many of the others are not and are (I think) quite accessible to most readers - especially if you read it more or less consistently. Climate change has been covered very thoroughly in Science over the years. So, don't go with (in the most general sense) media, go to a source where the research is being covered at first or second hand and read it/evaluate it for yourself.
It is also a great way to give yourself an education in general science. Though it can be a bit intimidating at first and is certainly a bit overwhelming (the magazine arrives relentlessly - if you've read the previous issue(s) or not).
RDF is nice and there are various different syntaxes for it (including various triples formats), and promises, if it can be built, deployed and trusted(!!!) to make the web ever so much more searchable. This will depend though on people writing good ontologies (not easy) and using them correctly (even less easy).
RDFa and microformats look, on the surface at least, to be nice ways to manage RDF type information in HTML. But I'm a bit more dubious - they don't, in many cases, have careful ontologies built around them - when they do (RDFa, mostly) they seem to be very resource intensive (a heavily RDFa annotated HTML page is likely to balloon to several times the same page without RDFa), and the uses of them I've seen have been less than convincingly correct. This doesn't mean that they're useless, just that they're not doing the job at the moment, or they're doing the job poorly.
The solution that seems to be favored by the semantic web types is to present RDF pages as an alternative to HTML pages when RDF is requested. This looks, by far, to be the best way to work this, but does require site builders (and CMSs and web frameworks), and content authors, to be able to build correct RDF pages that represent the information presented, often at the same time as they present HTML pages to human readers (and non-RDF search engines). This is going to be a major problem.
While random order would be nice, it is hardly likely. More likely will be IE first, Opera second (after all they have money to spend to put it there), then Chrome (Google has money too) and then Firefox, with other low penetration browsers following.
It seems to me that this service will be a very pretty target for hats of various sorts :
A bit of exploration gives one possibility. This page, on Dell DRACs , which have a web interface, shows that the web interface supports really only IE and firefox, and those only on 32 bit machines.
Not only does their site pretty much yell out "We want to make money from everyone.", they even say in their "Vision" that they want to be an all inclusive monopoly :
Every national and international photographic library, agency and other body or business relevant to our industry will be inspired to join and be a part of BAPLA.
Just what we need, yet another money-sucking trade group with an interest in perpetual copyright and the power and money to bribe lawmakers into granting them exactly that.
Actually, I think it is more like 95% of the time So it's not so bad after all.
It would probably go more like :
Phone says : I hear that you're brushing your teeth.
Pause for connection.
Crelm toothpaste with the miracle ingredient, Fraudulin! Choose Crelm toothpaste!
To order Crelm toothpaste with the miracle ingredient, Fraudulin, press the "Buy" button now.
At every level. See the Curry Howard Lambek Correspondence (mentioned also above). The math doesn't look like arithmetic, but then most math doesn't.
I started getting much more unfiltered spam. Lots of it looks like this (a real example) : Subject : acceptant accelerometer abysmal abusive accession accolade So, no website, no valid return address. Just random words. I'm wondering if either there's a bug in the spam generator (I get others that start with a line of similarly random words, but then continue for a page or so and are followed by an ad), or if they're trying to confuse spam filters.
There's another variant that looks more like english text with a number of errors in spelling so only a few of the words are real.
This instance of firefox (sometimes I have more than one running at once) has 45 tabs open and it is that low because I just pruned them down this morning. I often end up with about 80-100 tabs open, but that is usually only for a short time while I'm problem solving or trying to figure out some specific topic at which point I usually drop back down to the 40 or so range. Often at this point I need to restart firefox (because of the memory issues).
My current minimum (tabs I always open in every browser instance and keep open) is 8, but has been as large as 12. I could cut this down to 4, but would end up reopening a few and keeping them open, so it seems pretty stable.
Short of shutting down the network a nicely distributed service could be very tough to disrupt. And while communications to the rest of the world are undoubtedly important, for the Iranians right now, internal communications are likely to be much more important.
Currently to do shared chat/video chat/audio/documents... most systems are dependent on servers of one sort or another. Making something that could work on a more peer-to-peer level would be very useful indeed as it would help alleviate (though probably not entirely eliminate) the reliance on servers that are often under someone else's control. If you doubt the usefulness of this, just look at what is happening in Iran right now.
Perhaps "we" should not intervene, if by "we" you mean the governments of the US, UK....
But if you mean we should not help the Iranians to build network and communications connectivity, which is one of the things requested, I think you're mistaken. We should help everyone we can with whatever expertise we have to establish communications amoung the people in Iran and between them and the rest of the world. One of the first things repressive governments try to do is clamp down on communications and the more we can help people communicate the harder it is for such governments to gain and maintain power. Of course, this is not the only factor, but it is a big one.
You missed the cable channels that consist of a couple of hours a day of programming and then many hours of ads and infomercials. And the "all-shopping-all-the-time" channels.
But I suspect that a-la-carte programming would leave me paying more than I'm paying now for the same few channels I watch, so I'm a bit ambivalent about pushing for it.
The wow factor of "It hit me then hit the ground" is also much better than "It hit the ground and a piece of ground hit me." Given a choice, I know which story I'd go with.
Since Ballmer has already threatened to take Microsoft out of the US if it is required to stop evading taxes, if the EU is not a possible new corporate home, where might they go?
Not that I'm against world domination by US corporations :-)
But remember, unless Microsoft keeps the ability to evade US taxes, it may not be a US corporation for long...
Have you tried the "special searches". They have searches aimed at code for the major OSs - Linux, BSD, Microsoft and when I just tried it with "generic.h" in the Linux special search I got a bunch of hits on header files.
But there are also some specialized code search engines around - though I don't have pointers to them, I've used a couple and they can be quite good (and, of course, sometimes quite bad).
Suppose we were to eliminate corporate taxes (probably Ballmer's wettest of dreams). Then personal income taxes would be likely to go up - and while, given the current tax code, it wouldn't hit Ballmer as much as it would someone middle class - it would hit Ballmer as his employees, contractors, housekeepers... ask for higher salaries to help offset the increased tax burden, or it would hit him as he needs to sell products for less.
Or, perhaps we eliminate personal income taxes (another nice dream for Ballmer), but keep the corporate taxes. Now he needs to pay his employees less, but must increase the price of products more.
In either case, we end up at an equilibrium situation (or more likely a kind of semi-stable equilibrium process) in which prices/wages/taxes balance out - and this will occur anywhere he takes his toys to play - the equilibrium may occur with different relative values of taxes paid, income and outgo, but he (and his company) are still likely to end up on the top of the heap and be well off in relatively the same way.
There is one more factor, would the US continue to use Windows in sensitive operations if it were being written offshore - in [insert bugaboo threat country here]? Perhaps with (newly bought and paid for) stringent "Don't release the code" laws?
In short, I suspect he thinks it is a viable threat, but I also suspect that if he carries it out, he'll find that it didn't really pay off as much as he thought.
So if I download a couple of (open licensed) photos from flickr, I should be liable for taxes on for-pay stock photos of the same type of image?
Or if I download Dickens' "Great Expectations" I should be liable for taxes on (hmmm, what is still in copyright ...) say "Infinite Jest" ?
This is not only difficult to define, it will be very difficult indeed to implement. But Washington state needs money (and a lot of money) so this seems likely to end up being Yet Another Bad Law.
Shhhhh! Don't give the politicians any ideas.