It's much narrower, and the total number of congress members involved is 2. That's 2, as in 2 out of 635.
There are 435 members of Congress and 100 members of the Senate (excluding the Vice-President and the non-voting Senate delegates from e.g. Puerto Rico).
Anyway, banning the GPL doesn't make sense here; if there are no holes in a program, having all the source code in the world won't compromise its security. But REQUIRING the GPL doesn't make sense, either.
Too many problems with requiring either GPL or BSD licenses. Would screw over too many existing programs, like the SBIR program. And what if the best way to solve a problem is with licensed but not open code? Encourage, sure. Require, no.
That's fine, but still shouldn't be using 0x85 in the XML to represent "..." in the document.
No, but a lot of the time, you're encoding text that was created by a user who doesn't know what the heck they're doing, and can't handle anything more sophisticated than MS Word.
He's got a point, though I don't know if he's right with everything he's saying. You don't use MS Word to edit XML, but you often use XML to encode text that started out (on someone else's desktop, perhaps) as Word text.
This is just a way to spark a holy war "my newline character is better than yours" debate. The proposal makes perfect sense - it brings XML into line with Unicode and ISO-10646.
Uh, dude, Unicode characters are not necessarily 2-byte. UTF-8 characters are 1 byte if ASCII (real ASCII, the "pedantic" 128-character set), 2 byte or more (up to 6 or 8 bytes, iirc) if not. UTF-16 characters are either 2 bytes or 4 bytes. UTF-32 characters are all 4 bytes. Read the spec.
The equation editor in WordPerfect 9+ is great. Granted, I've never use TeX or its relatives, but WP's EE got me through two years of physics, calculus, and stats. It's a thing of beauty.
The EE that Word comes with should not even be considered an aborted attempt at an EE. It's nothing more than pond scum.
Funny that you would say that, given that they are both knock-offs of MathType (the Word word definitely is; the WP9 one - not the older WP equation editor, which used a very robust language rather than drop downs, and was imho far superior, but the one with the drop-down boxes - certainly has the same look and feel).
Anyway, TeX and the WP Equation Editor are for two different audiences. TeX is for formal typesetting, WPEE for casual writing and drafts.
I haven't tried to pirate Office, so I don't know how easy it is. I'd be suprised if their copy-protection measures really work, though - do they?
According to reports at e.g. the Register, no, not completely, but as I said, it's no longer trivial. I haven't tried to pirate Office either, but since MS is making quite a big deal out of this, I imagine the idea is to discourage the kind of casual piracy that is being discussed. Complete protection from piracy is likely impossible.
In fact, the black hole is known to radiate Hwaking radiation, which means that the hypothetical perfect singularity black hole model, which can only absorb matter, does not exist. If the said conditions are not perfectly valid for a black hole, then why would it be a perfect singularity, even if this Hawking radiation exists only on a quantum probabilistic level?
Not known, theorized. Anyway, see this and this excellent site for more on black holes.
Sure I have, but pirating Office isn't the triviality it used to be - and yet the price is the highest ever. In other words, I doubt that the price is really justified by the levels of piracy (my above comment is sarcastic).
Now, because of higher prices caused by piracy, there is a market backlash against it.
So that must mean that now that Office has excellent anti-piracy support, and through software auditing have stopped much of the piracy at the corporate level, so now the price will come down to something more reasonable and rational, more in line with their costs, right?
Last version of WordPerfect I used was 9; I dropped WP after 9 because it was a terrible disappoint after WordPerfect 8, the best word processing program I've ever used. Here are the problems with WP 9 (WP 10 may have overcome some of these):
Abysmal Unicode support, deprecated in favor of WP's own 1-byte special character sets.
Buggy support of previous file types (e.g., if you embedded an.eps file in WP8, you couldn't print that file later in WP9 to a PostScript printer - you'd get a PostScript error; note that you could print the file in WP8, so even if the originating bug was in WP8, WP9 could have used a quirks mode to resolve the problem).
Buggy print drivers; PerfectPrint or whatever it was called would crash constantly.
DAD (the mess of icons in the system tray) on by default; MS learned this lesson with their shortcut bar and left it off by default in versions after 97
The SGML/XML editing system was a great idea, but at least as of WP9, you had to compile your DTDs before you could even start using it.
I prefer OpenOffice for one reason and one reason only: the Unicode support. I would LOVE a version of WordPerfect that had real Unicode support, used a DTD-based file format, and still had the reveal codes feature (but with XML/SGML element tags rather than WP's proprietary codes). These last two are features I'd encourage the OpenOffice folks to look into; and to look at the WP9 look-and-feel, which I found superior to Office's at that time. I still find OpenOffice's look and feel too much like StarOffice 5's - just not comfortable.
AppleWorks (previously called ClarisWorks) pales in comparison to Microsoft Office XP. There's no equivalent for the versatility of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint®. Toolbars and menus customize themselves to the way I work. I wouldn't know how to function without the Track Changes and Comments features of Word. I adore the Office Clipboard, which copies multiple elements from one file and pastes them into another.
So a laptop with 512 MB of ram, Office XP, Windows XP pro, and all the other features this thing is talking about was $450.00 cheaper than an iBook? Sorry, but that is very unlikely. If you're comparing a Windows computer to a Mac, and you're saying that Office XP is better than AppleWorks, you'd better be including the $500 for Office XP in that comparison, or you're going to get burned by legal.
The Boston area is a hotbed for open source development, with the W3C, OSDN, O'Reilly, and a lot of other names you'd recognize. Maybe you could find as many in NYC, but I doubt the density is as high. Wonder what that will do for MacWorld attendence?
Boston is only 190 miles from NY, on the Northeast Corridor, and easy to reach from Baltimore, DC, and Philly by plane (most flights are non-stop). Moving to Boston might cut down on the day trippers from Philly to NY, and the hour-trippers from NY, but that's about it.
how little -- none at all -- they paid to the claim he makes in the brief (and mentioned briefly during the questioning) that the birth of a new technology regime (the Internet) should have a profound impact on how we craft copyright law.
For Ginsburg, at least, this should all be old hat; her daughter who wrote one of the classic treatments of it in a Representations article about 10 years ago: J. C. Ginsburg, "Copyright Without Walls ? Speculations on Literary
Property in the Library of the future", Representations,42.
On the assumptions that one's own daughter's works should be canon, I imagine she's familiar with it.
In the fragments of Euripides' Phaethon, Helios is addressed by Klymene as Apollo (more precisely, as the one whose name means destruction, a common pun on Apollo and apollumi). I can provide the exact reference if necessary; there are texts in e.g. Diggle's OCT of selected fragments, and in Cropp's Fragmentary Plays I. This is the earliest case in which the two gods, who are usually distinct, are conflated. There is a huge amount of literature on the subject. So, no, I'm not wrong, but I can see why you would think that.
As for the rest of your posting, I know very well that Khronos (also transliterated as Chronos) is Greek for time. I've had eight years of ancient Greek.
As I suggested above, see Timothy Gantz's books on Early Greek Mythology.
Kronos = Saturnus.
Chronus = Khronos, which isn't necessarily the same thing as Kronos. See Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Gods. Another example: Helios sometimes is and sometimes is not the same god as (Greek) Apollo; but Sol is less often the same god as (Roman) Apollo.
Anyway, Minerva seems best to me (though there's already a Pallas named after her, one of the four giant asteroids).
Pluto is the threshold case. At the moment, it seems to be the conventional wisdom that anything found that's larger than Pluto will have to be considered for planet status, and anything smaller for planetoid/asteroid/comet status. Quaoar would thus not be a planet. But who knows? The important thing is that a solar system can have these kinds of objects:
Stars (Sun)
Brown dwarfs (none known in our system)
Gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
Terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars)
Asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, etc.)
Kuiper-like objects (Pluto, Quoaoar, maybe Chiron)
Comets (maybe Chiron, Halley, etc.)
Terrestrial moons (the Moon, Io, Europa, Titan, Iapetus)
Kuiper-like-object-like moons (Charon, maybe Triton)
Asteroid-like moons (Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea)
Dust lanes and planetary rings
Protostars, protoplanets, protoplanetary disks
etc.
As you can see, the star/planet/asteroid/comet/moon classification isn't quite detailed enough for what we now know.
Interestingly there are a few problems with the name Persephone. All of the major planets are named for Roman gods; Persephone is the Greek name for the goddess in Latin called Proserpina.
Second, there is the suggestion that Clarke (or maybe Asimov) made before Charon was discovered: he suggested that Pluto's moon, if one were ever discovered, be named Persephone, and that the name Charon be given to any trans-Plutonian planet, with I think Cerberus being reserved for any moons of that planet. That way someone from outside the system would have to pass Charon and Cerberus (or maybe it was Styx) to get to Pluto and Persephone.
See the Space Telescope Institute's Press Release for more information about Quaoar; on the name, this link
may be of use; it looks like Quaoar is a name from mythology, albeit indigenous American mythology, which makes it consistent with the names of the minor planets and moons (which do not need to be named after Roman gods; the moons of Uranus are even named after characters from Shakespeare : e.g., Oberon and Titania from Much Ado About Nothing, and Ariel and Miranda from The Tempest).
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It's much narrower, and the total number of congress members involved is 2. That's 2, as in 2 out of 635.
There are 435 members of Congress and 100 members of the Senate (excluding the Vice-President and the non-voting Senate delegates from e.g. Puerto Rico).
Anyway, banning the GPL doesn't make sense here; if there are no holes in a program, having all the source code in the world won't compromise its security. But REQUIRING the GPL doesn't make sense, either.
Too many problems with requiring either GPL or BSD licenses. Would screw over too many existing programs, like the SBIR program. And what if the best way to solve a problem is with licensed but not open code? Encourage, sure. Require, no.
That's fine, but still shouldn't be using 0x85 in the XML to represent "..." in the document.
No, but a lot of the time, you're encoding text that was created by a user who doesn't know what the heck they're doing, and can't handle anything more sophisticated than MS Word.
He's got a point, though I don't know if he's right with everything he's saying. You don't use MS Word to edit XML, but you often use XML to encode text that started out (on someone else's desktop, perhaps) as Word text.
This is just a way to spark a holy war "my newline character is better than yours" debate. The proposal makes perfect sense - it brings XML into line with Unicode and ISO-10646.
Read the XSLT spec. That gives you some idea of the wonder that is XML.
Uh, dude, Unicode characters are not necessarily 2-byte. UTF-8 characters are 1 byte if ASCII (real ASCII, the "pedantic" 128-character set), 2 byte or more (up to 6 or 8 bytes, iirc) if not. UTF-16 characters are either 2 bytes or 4 bytes. UTF-32 characters are all 4 bytes. Read the spec.
The equation editor in WordPerfect 9+ is great. Granted, I've never use TeX or its relatives, but WP's EE got me through two years of physics, calculus, and stats. It's a thing of beauty. The EE that Word comes with should not even be considered an aborted attempt at an EE. It's nothing more than pond scum.
Funny that you would say that, given that they are both knock-offs of MathType (the Word word definitely is; the WP9 one - not the older WP equation editor, which used a very robust language rather than drop downs, and was imho far superior, but the one with the drop-down boxes - certainly has the same look and feel).
Anyway, TeX and the WP Equation Editor are for two different audiences. TeX is for formal typesetting, WPEE for casual writing and drafts.
I haven't tried to pirate Office, so I don't know how easy it is. I'd be suprised if their copy-protection measures really work, though - do they?
According to reports at e.g. the Register, no, not completely, but as I said, it's no longer trivial. I haven't tried to pirate Office either, but since MS is making quite a big deal out of this, I imagine the idea is to discourage the kind of casual piracy that is being discussed. Complete protection from piracy is likely impossible.
In fact, the black hole is known to radiate Hwaking radiation, which means that the hypothetical perfect singularity black hole model, which can only absorb matter, does not exist. If the said conditions are not perfectly valid for a black hole, then why would it be a perfect singularity, even if this Hawking radiation exists only on a quantum probabilistic level?
Not known, theorized. Anyway, see this and this excellent site for more on black holes.
Sure I have, but pirating Office isn't the triviality it used to be - and yet the price is the highest ever. In other words, I doubt that the price is really justified by the levels of piracy (my above comment is sarcastic).
Most of these people, politics aside and given a choice, would take Word any day over WordPerfect and would take Excel any day over 1-2-3.
How do you know? If Corel hadn't fouled up WP9, I'd still be using it, and so would my company of 150 people.
Now, because of higher prices caused by piracy, there is a market backlash against it.
So that must mean that now that Office has excellent anti-piracy support, and through software auditing have stopped much of the piracy at the corporate level, so now the price will come down to something more reasonable and rational, more in line with their costs, right?
Yeah, right.
Last version of WordPerfect I used was 9; I dropped WP after 9 because it was a terrible disappoint after WordPerfect 8, the best word processing program I've ever used. Here are the problems with WP 9 (WP 10 may have overcome some of these):
I prefer OpenOffice for one reason and one reason only: the Unicode support. I would LOVE a version of WordPerfect that had real Unicode support, used a DTD-based file format, and still had the reveal codes feature (but with XML/SGML element tags rather than WP's proprietary codes). These last two are features I'd encourage the OpenOffice folks to look into; and to look at the WP9 look-and-feel, which I found superior to Office's at that time. I still find OpenOffice's look and feel too much like StarOffice 5's - just not comfortable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Apple contributing a lot of changes to FreeBSD's codebase?
AppleWorks (previously called ClarisWorks) pales in comparison to Microsoft Office XP. There's no equivalent for the versatility of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint®. Toolbars and menus customize themselves to the way I work. I wouldn't know how to function without the Track Changes and Comments features of Word. I adore the Office Clipboard, which copies multiple elements from one file and pastes them into another.
So a laptop with 512 MB of ram, Office XP, Windows XP pro, and all the other features this thing is talking about was $450.00 cheaper than an iBook? Sorry, but that is very unlikely. If you're comparing a Windows computer to a Mac, and you're saying that Office XP is better than AppleWorks, you'd better be including the $500 for Office XP in that comparison, or you're going to get burned by legal.
Ah, yes, the digital version of the Hogan's Heroes approach.
The Boston area is a hotbed for open source development, with the W3C, OSDN, O'Reilly, and a lot of other names you'd recognize. Maybe you could find as many in NYC, but I doubt the density is as high. Wonder what that will do for MacWorld attendence?
Boston is only 190 miles from NY, on the Northeast Corridor, and easy to reach from Baltimore, DC, and Philly by plane (most flights are non-stop). Moving to Boston might cut down on the day trippers from Philly to NY, and the hour-trippers from NY, but that's about it.
how little -- none at all -- they paid to the claim he makes in the brief (and mentioned briefly during the questioning) that the birth of a new technology regime (the Internet) should have a profound impact on how we craft copyright law.
For Ginsburg, at least, this should all be old hat; her daughter who wrote one of the classic treatments of it in a Representations article about 10 years ago: J. C. Ginsburg, "Copyright Without Walls ? Speculations on Literary Property in the Library of the future", Representations,42. On the assumptions that one's own daughter's works should be canon, I imagine she's familiar with it.
See Jane C. Ginsburg's CV and this Ruth Bader Ginsburg Biography.
Sol is the Latin word for "Sun". The Greek term, by the way, would be ho Helios, "the Sun." Likewise Luna and he Selene for the Moon.
I think you are wrong. Helios was never Apollo.
In the fragments of Euripides' Phaethon, Helios is addressed by Klymene as Apollo (more precisely, as the one whose name means destruction, a common pun on Apollo and apollumi). I can provide the exact reference if necessary; there are texts in e.g. Diggle's OCT of selected fragments, and in Cropp's Fragmentary Plays I. This is the earliest case in which the two gods, who are usually distinct, are conflated. There is a huge amount of literature on the subject. So, no, I'm not wrong, but I can see why you would think that.
As for the rest of your posting, I know very well that Khronos (also transliterated as Chronos) is Greek for time. I've had eight years of ancient Greek.
As I suggested above, see Timothy Gantz's books on Early Greek Mythology.
Bacchus, not Baccus.
Kronos = Saturnus.
Chronus = Khronos, which isn't necessarily the same thing as Kronos. See Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Gods. Another example: Helios sometimes is and sometimes is not the same god as (Greek) Apollo; but Sol is less often the same god as (Roman) Apollo.
Anyway, Minerva seems best to me (though there's already a Pallas named after her, one of the four giant asteroids).
Pluto is the threshold case. At the moment, it seems to be the conventional wisdom that anything found that's larger than Pluto will have to be considered for planet status, and anything smaller for planetoid/asteroid/comet status. Quaoar would thus not be a planet. But who knows? The important thing is that a solar system can have these kinds of objects:
Stars (Sun)
Brown dwarfs (none known in our system)
Gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
Terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars)
Asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, etc.)
Kuiper-like objects (Pluto, Quoaoar, maybe Chiron)
Comets (maybe Chiron, Halley, etc.)
Terrestrial moons (the Moon, Io, Europa, Titan, Iapetus)
Kuiper-like-object-like moons (Charon, maybe Triton)
Asteroid-like moons (Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea)
Dust lanes and planetary rings
Protostars, protoplanets, protoplanetary disks
etc.
As you can see, the star/planet/asteroid/comet/moon classification isn't quite detailed enough for what we now know.
Interestingly there are a few problems with the name Persephone. All of the major planets are named for Roman gods; Persephone is the Greek name for the goddess in Latin called Proserpina.
Second, there is the suggestion that Clarke (or maybe Asimov) made before Charon was discovered: he suggested that Pluto's moon, if one were ever discovered, be named Persephone, and that the name Charon be given to any trans-Plutonian planet, with I think Cerberus being reserved for any moons of that planet. That way someone from outside the system would have to pass Charon and Cerberus (or maybe it was Styx) to get to Pluto and Persephone.
See the Space Telescope Institute's Press Release for more information about Quaoar; on the name, this link may be of use; it looks like Quaoar is a name from mythology, albeit indigenous American mythology, which makes it consistent with the names of the minor planets and moons (which do not need to be named after Roman gods; the moons of Uranus are even named after characters from Shakespeare : e.g., Oberon and Titania from Much Ado About Nothing, and Ariel and Miranda from The Tempest).