Ah, but you put forth a good counterexample as to why familiarity will not necessarily breed understanding. Despite many years of contact with foreign cultures, you still have a xenophobic, nationalist view of them, in which you see the foreign values as degenerate and unworthy, in contrast to your own culture's quality values.
Among Arabic speakers who have access to the internet in the first place, the proportion who know at least basic English is quite high. There are plenty of barriers to understanding and agreement, but I'm not sure I would rate a literal inability to communicate as the main one.
might turn out to have been smart
on
Two Scoops of Buzz
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· Score: 5, Interesting
While a lot of people are using this fiasco as evidence that Google's a bunch of techies who don't understand users, I can't really believe that it was totally unforseen and accidental. Google made a conscious decision to leverage their existing social graph of webmail users by, as automatically as possible, turning it into an actual social-network graph. If they hadn't done that, Buzz would probably not have jump-started very quickly, but now it has a huge built-in userbase. Even if a bunch of people disable it now, they're probably still way ahead in terms of total users than where they would've been if they had played nice.
So may turn out they did know what they were doing, at least from a business perspective.
In this case, though, I think they will. Twitter itself is archiving everything, and Google just paid Twitter >$10m for a real-time data feed that I'd be willing to bet they're permanently archiving (Google doesn't like deleting data). That's not quite the same as having public archives, of course, but I would put the odds of the tweets actually totally disappearing pretty low.
On Linux I think it'll be a bit longer, because 3d drivers, especially free ones that can be shipped out of the box, continue to lag behind actual hardware support.
Having walked around the Googleplex, it'd be hard to describe it as dominantly white. There are not too many African Americans, but asians are not absent by a long-shot.
I'm not usually one to demand any particular degree of "diversity" of companies, but it is rather immediately noticeable how Apple's executives all come from the same demographics: white males between 40 and 65. You'd think there'd be at least one person from some other demographic--- it's not like this is the uniformity you see if you walk into a CS or engineering department at a university (ever seen one without a single asian?).
Google themselves go out of their way to claim how diverse their workforce is, though, and their PR shots often show a carefully selected diverse set of employees. If they really wanted to argue, "we pick the most qualified regardless of who that turns out to be", they could, but they're instead trying to argue that they have an exceedingly diverse workforce, and use that for both recruiting and general PR purposes. Yet, they don't want to give actual statistics on that, which makes one suspect they're lying.
The standard gasoline blend (i.e. what you get if you buy "normal" gasoline) is 20-25% ethanol in Brazil, but there is also pure ethanol available, and >80% of new cars are able to use either the E25 or E100 fuel. Some details here.
The people who were most strongly pushing corn-based ethanol were corn farmers and farm-state politicians, for whom an increase in the price of corn was most definitely not an unintended consequence.
I don't think eWorld failed because of its now-ludicrous-sounding pricing model. At the time (early/mid-90s), it was the norm for online services to have monthly fees that gave only a few free hours per month, and then cost significant amounts per hour after that. In the early 90s, AOL gave 2 free hours for $7.95/month and $6/hour thereafter, and was wildly successful, so eWorld's $8.95/mo for 2 free hours and $5/hr day, $8/hr nights thereafter doesn't seem like it was so far out of line as to kill it.
I'm guessing Java never really made it onto the radar. This is an answer to the iPad+iPhoneOS combo: a different tablet with Android as the OS. It has has some of the same advantages, using a smartphone-style, fairly simple, app-centric OS for a tablet, rather than a normal desktop/laptop OS. Java just comes along for the ride because it's what Android happens to use for its apps. Whether Android should be using Java for its apps or not in the first place is sort of a separate discussion (although Android does already have a native development kit).
It is kind of interesting that they're managing to get media attention for it, which is one of the major goals of protests. Even when it's a repackaging of traditional protest techniques, they seem to be relatively good at PR-managing it, in comparison to more traditional protest groups. Partly, this seems to be because they're: 1) somewhat more theatrical; and 2) more single-issue, so the anti-Scientology or anti-censorship protest isn't diluted by a parade of the usual suspects with off-topic preaching of veganism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, antiglobalization, and such.
A score of a public-domain piece of music indeed isn't independently copyrightable unless it were scored in some creative fashion.
(I'm talking here about 3d models of things that are themselves in the public domain; a 3d model of a sculpture where the sculpture itself is still under copyright would not be public domain.)
If it was not copyrightable then there would be no way to recoup the cost of creating 3-D models of buildings. Think of how much it would cost to 3D model New York City.
Isn't that essentially the "sweat of the brow" argument U.S. copyright law explicitly rejected? The mere fact that it takes a lot of effort to compile some facts doesn't make them copyrightable.
In philosophy and logic, question-begging is basically a fancy term for circular argument: using the thing you want to prove, or something equivalent to it, as part of your argument for that same thing.
Oddly that "correct" usage is itself actually somewhat of a corruption. Aristotle considered circular argument different from question-beginning, and defined question-begging as asking your opponent in a debate to conceded a point that was equivalent to the point being debate. They're somewhat related concepts, though.
To give a not-yet-litigated example of what I think would be the 3d analogy: A 3d model exactly capturing the surface of the Washington Monument is not copyrightable, because it's mere facts. However, particular photographs or films of the Washington Monument are copyrightable, as they have creative presentation. However (again), someone who collected a bunch of photographs or films of it and extracted a 3d model of the Washington Monument from them, would not be violating the copyright on the photographs or films, because they were merely copying the facts (the 3d spatial position of the stones).
Particular representations of facts, like documentaries or photographs, can be copyrighted. It's the underlying facts that can't be, so you can't stop someone else from publishing the same facts in a way that doesn't use any of your creative presentation of them. In Feist, the court held that there wasn't any creative presentation at all, because listing all people in an area code in alphabetical order was just the bare facts, with no presentation that rose to the level of something copyrightable. If they had done something creative, they could copyright that part, but anyone could still extract and republish the names and phone numbers, because that bare list isn't copyrightable.
Intriguing: the site you link features a report signed by Sarah Palin, warning of the dangers of global warming and the importance of research on its effects.
It's not as if all data we have about climate came from one source. There are plenty of sources of temperature data, and various models use different combinations of sources.
The source code for quite a few models is publicly available. Here are three: one, two, three. The last one even does development in a public repository (click "browse source" in the menu bar) and features quite detailed documentation.
Just because climate science is in its infancy doesn't mean that there's anything fundamentally wrong about consolidating what information we do have about it. It's certainly possible that it could turn out to be an astrology-like tea-leaf-reading exercise, but it's also quite possible to responsibly give information about fields where there is large uncertainty. It's not as if dealing with phenomena about which we have incomplete information and large uncertainty is something new to science.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you put forth a good counterexample as to why familiarity will not necessarily breed understanding. Despite many years of contact with foreign cultures, you still have a xenophobic, nationalist view of them, in which you see the foreign values as degenerate and unworthy, in contrast to your own culture's quality values.
Among Arabic speakers who have access to the internet in the first place, the proportion who know at least basic English is quite high. There are plenty of barriers to understanding and agreement, but I'm not sure I would rate a literal inability to communicate as the main one.
While a lot of people are using this fiasco as evidence that Google's a bunch of techies who don't understand users, I can't really believe that it was totally unforseen and accidental. Google made a conscious decision to leverage their existing social graph of webmail users by, as automatically as possible, turning it into an actual social-network graph. If they hadn't done that, Buzz would probably not have jump-started very quickly, but now it has a huge built-in userbase. Even if a bunch of people disable it now, they're probably still way ahead in terms of total users than where they would've been if they had played nice.
So may turn out they did know what they were doing, at least from a business perspective.
In this case, though, I think they will. Twitter itself is archiving everything, and Google just paid Twitter >$10m for a real-time data feed that I'd be willing to bet they're permanently archiving (Google doesn't like deleting data). That's not quite the same as having public archives, of course, but I would put the odds of the tweets actually totally disappearing pretty low.
On Linux I think it'll be a bit longer, because 3d drivers, especially free ones that can be shipped out of the box, continue to lag behind actual hardware support.
That is also my reason for choosing this fine document format for my CV.
Having walked around the Googleplex, it'd be hard to describe it as dominantly white. There are not too many African Americans, but asians are not absent by a long-shot.
I'm not usually one to demand any particular degree of "diversity" of companies, but it is rather immediately noticeable how Apple's executives all come from the same demographics: white males between 40 and 65. You'd think there'd be at least one person from some other demographic--- it's not like this is the uniformity you see if you walk into a CS or engineering department at a university (ever seen one without a single asian?).
The government probably wouldn't, but it would give ammunition to nativist sentiment.
Google themselves go out of their way to claim how diverse their workforce is, though, and their PR shots often show a carefully selected diverse set of employees. If they really wanted to argue, "we pick the most qualified regardless of who that turns out to be", they could, but they're instead trying to argue that they have an exceedingly diverse workforce, and use that for both recruiting and general PR purposes. Yet, they don't want to give actual statistics on that, which makes one suspect they're lying.
The standard gasoline blend (i.e. what you get if you buy "normal" gasoline) is 20-25% ethanol in Brazil, but there is also pure ethanol available, and >80% of new cars are able to use either the E25 or E100 fuel. Some details here.
The people who were most strongly pushing corn-based ethanol were corn farmers and farm-state politicians, for whom an increase in the price of corn was most definitely not an unintended consequence.
I don't think eWorld failed because of its now-ludicrous-sounding pricing model. At the time (early/mid-90s), it was the norm for online services to have monthly fees that gave only a few free hours per month, and then cost significant amounts per hour after that. In the early 90s, AOL gave 2 free hours for $7.95/month and $6/hour thereafter, and was wildly successful, so eWorld's $8.95/mo for 2 free hours and $5/hr day, $8/hr nights thereafter doesn't seem like it was so far out of line as to kill it.
I'm guessing Java never really made it onto the radar. This is an answer to the iPad+iPhoneOS combo: a different tablet with Android as the OS. It has has some of the same advantages, using a smartphone-style, fairly simple, app-centric OS for a tablet, rather than a normal desktop/laptop OS. Java just comes along for the ride because it's what Android happens to use for its apps. Whether Android should be using Java for its apps or not in the first place is sort of a separate discussion (although Android does already have a native development kit).
Unfortunately, I think this particular rearguard action was lost a century ago.
It is kind of interesting that they're managing to get media attention for it, which is one of the major goals of protests. Even when it's a repackaging of traditional protest techniques, they seem to be relatively good at PR-managing it, in comparison to more traditional protest groups. Partly, this seems to be because they're: 1) somewhat more theatrical; and 2) more single-issue, so the anti-Scientology or anti-censorship protest isn't diluted by a parade of the usual suspects with off-topic preaching of veganism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, antiglobalization, and such.
A score of a public-domain piece of music indeed isn't independently copyrightable unless it were scored in some creative fashion.
(I'm talking here about 3d models of things that are themselves in the public domain; a 3d model of a sculpture where the sculpture itself is still under copyright would not be public domain.)
Isn't that essentially the "sweat of the brow" argument U.S. copyright law explicitly rejected? The mere fact that it takes a lot of effort to compile some facts doesn't make them copyrightable.
(And in any case, it actually isn't very expensive to crowdsource a 3d model of a whole city.)
In philosophy and logic, question-begging is basically a fancy term for circular argument: using the thing you want to prove, or something equivalent to it, as part of your argument for that same thing.
Oddly that "correct" usage is itself actually somewhat of a corruption. Aristotle considered circular argument different from question-beginning, and defined question-begging as asking your opponent in a debate to conceded a point that was equivalent to the point being debate. They're somewhat related concepts, though.
To give a not-yet-litigated example of what I think would be the 3d analogy: A 3d model exactly capturing the surface of the Washington Monument is not copyrightable, because it's mere facts. However, particular photographs or films of the Washington Monument are copyrightable, as they have creative presentation. However (again), someone who collected a bunch of photographs or films of it and extracted a 3d model of the Washington Monument from them, would not be violating the copyright on the photographs or films, because they were merely copying the facts (the 3d spatial position of the stones).
Particular representations of facts, like documentaries or photographs, can be copyrighted. It's the underlying facts that can't be, so you can't stop someone else from publishing the same facts in a way that doesn't use any of your creative presentation of them. In Feist, the court held that there wasn't any creative presentation at all, because listing all people in an area code in alphabetical order was just the bare facts, with no presentation that rose to the level of something copyrightable. If they had done something creative, they could copyright that part, but anyone could still extract and republish the names and phone numbers, because that bare list isn't copyrightable.
Intriguing: the site you link features a report signed by Sarah Palin, warning of the dangers of global warming and the importance of research on its effects.
It's not as if all data we have about climate came from one source. There are plenty of sources of temperature data, and various models use different combinations of sources.
The source code for quite a few models is publicly available. Here are three: one, two, three. The last one even does development in a public repository (click "browse source" in the menu bar) and features quite detailed documentation.
Just because climate science is in its infancy doesn't mean that there's anything fundamentally wrong about consolidating what information we do have about it. It's certainly possible that it could turn out to be an astrology-like tea-leaf-reading exercise, but it's also quite possible to responsibly give information about fields where there is large uncertainty. It's not as if dealing with phenomena about which we have incomplete information and large uncertainty is something new to science.