As you noted in the write-up yourself, this agreement merely forces you to grant Google a non-exclusive license to use your post (in exchange for them allowing you to posting it via their service free of charge). This explicitly means that Google does not claim to own your UseNet posts; you still retain ownership and full rights to do whatever you want with it. They can just also use it without your permission (but as they don't own it, they can't do things like force you to pay them to use your own post, or sell your post to someone else, and so on).
SWF (the flash format) is an open standard. The reason there is no good Free Software implementation of an authorship tool is that nobody has written one. There's some Perl scripts floating around that can generate Flash animations, and some attempts at apps to author real ones, but Macromedia's tools are still the best, by far. That's not a fault of closed standards, but merely Macromedia outdoing the open-source competition.
This is less a defense of the author's work than an attack on Cliff's review, interspersed with an uncomfortable number of personal attacks directed towards Cliff.
I wouldn't be averse to him responding to Cliff's criticisms with a defense of his book and an explanation of why those criticisms are inapplicable or misguided, but I am averse to him simply attacking the review and the reviewer.
Umm, diesel pumps are everywhere, since trucks in North America typically use diesel. Most service stations (at least everywhere in the United States I've been) have at least one diesel pump. It's generally the stations without diesel pumps that are the rarity, not the other way around.
Now that said, the reason many Americans don't like diesel cars is that diesel is thicker and less volatile, and thus diesel engines don't start as easily, particularly in cold climates. And with the advent of gas/electric hybrid cars that get 70+ mpg with standard unleaded gasoline, it seems unlikely that diesel cars will make inroads in the near future.
I think you answer your own question there michael. If Microsoft switches from AOL to MSN as the default internet provider in Windows, then AOL retaliates by switching from IE to Mozilla. But if AOL switches from IE to Mozilla first, then Microsoft retaliates by switching from AOL to MSN as the default internet software that comes with Windows. The inter-relationship is too important for either of those scenarios to happen.
Ah, the incessant cry of psychologists: correlation does not imply causation.
one researcher argues that computer use can reduce creativity and create anti-social kids (never met any of these, no sir) while another researcher contends that kids who use computers and the internet grow up reading, inquiring, and generally brighter.
Oh really? I'd say it's just as likely, perhaps more likely, that it's the less-creative, anti-social, but better-reading, more-inquiring, and generally brighter kids who tend to use computers a lot, rather than it being the computers that produce those characteristics. "People who use computers" is a group whose demographics differ significantly from the average population, so any differences could very well be due to the self-selecting nature of the group, rather than computer themselves.
Re:Why isn't the GPL more specific?
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GPL FAQ
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· Score: 2
I think the problem is that there are limits on what contracts are legal. It's perfectly valid to make claims on "derived works" or works that are "part of the same program," but it's unclear whether it'd be valid to make claims on "dynamically linked modules" if a court later determines that dynamically linked modules are in fact completely separate programs. I'm not an expert in contract law, but generally you can't write anything you want into your contract (as with the question in the FAQ about non-free input/output - even if you want to say your program's GPL covers output, you cannot legally do that).
Re:Best reply to Mundie yet.
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GPL FAQ
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· Score: 4
Ah ok, that makes sense. As an embeddable technology it is interesting. The Slashdot headline ("Wireless Controllers for Consoles") was a bit misleading, since wireless controllers for consoles aren't particularly interesting or new.
Well, the $6.25 is just for the chip; obviously any final product would cost more. If I recall correctly, there was a $30-$40 wireless controller for the SNES nearly a decade ago. That's not too much different, all things considered.
Sure, it was a total disaster of an election. I fully support making sure it doesn't happen again by installing modern voting machines and implementing more uniform standards.
The point is that the election did happen, and neither Gore nor Bush won it, yet one of them had to become the President (since the other candidates weren't even in the running at this point, having won exactly zero electoral votes). In the end it turned out Bush became president, which gets all the Gore supporters angry, but if Gore had become president, all the Bush supporters would've been angry. It might be "illegitimate" but it's as legitimate as is possible under the circumstances - it was impossible for either candidate to be a legitimate president, and yet we needed one of them to become president anyway. So Bush it was.
Yes, perhaps "margin of error" was a poor choice of words, as that seems to be a statistics term that only applies when you're doing things like sampling a population. What I meant was more akin to the "uncertainties" in experimental science. Just as you measure something to 80.25 +/- 0.01 microamperes, the election as currently designed can only really measure vote totals to +/- 100 at best.
Well yes, elections in theory do not have margins of error. But elections in practice do. Florida used a great deal of old vote-counting machines which are less than perfect. They might provide a highly-accurate count, but they don't provide a perfectly accurate count. With hand-counting you have the same problems. You say to apply one definition across the board, but such subtleties and slight differences between ballots come into play that the only way to do this would be to have one person actually hand-count every vote in the state, and this is obviously not feasible. Failing that, we're left with a machine count with its attendant margin of error, or a hand-count by many different people, and the error there cause by different interpretations or evaluations of standards by different counters (even if there were a clearly written standard).
In the future hopefully computerized vote machines will be used, which will count the vote as the voter votes, and allow them to see what was counted, and tally things electronically. Then, there should be no question about how many votes were cast for each candidate.
Sure, Gore received more votes in the US overall, but that's irrelevant as elections in the US are done on a state-by-state basis. All the states except Florida were pretty well-decided, and in Florida the vote totals were too close to accurately pick a winner. In the end Bush was pretty much arbitrarily picked, but if Gore had won, he'd have been arbitrarily picked as well.
As for his policies, it depends on what policy you're talking about. Of course I partially agree with them - any reasonable person would agree with some things and disagree with other things. It'd be the height of partisan stupidity to say "I agree with everything X does" or "I disagree with everything X does."
While I partially agree with you, I don't think there's any way either side could have legitimately won. The vote totals in Florida were so close as to be within any reasonable margin of error, so giving the victory to one side or the other is arbitrary. But since one side or the other did have to be given the victory, I don't particularly object to the way things turned out; if Gore had "won" the election there, it would've been just as fraudulent (take a look at a lot of the suppressed evidence of generously counting Gore ballots when any reasonable observer would see that the ballot was completely blank).
Taco, your extreme bias and general incomprehension of political issues is getting a bit annoying. It's ok to be completely ignorant about politics, but not when you constantly talk about them on a large site that purports to disseminate "news."
Oh, and while I'm not a big fan of Mr. Bush's and usually vote Democrat, I'm glad he won this election - I shudder to think of what it'd be like if Joseph "ban movies and music" Liebermann and Tipper "parental advisory label" Gore had any power.
Obviously not. AOL is not claiming that they own the word "AIM," only that they own the use of the acronym AIM as an acronym for "AOL Instant Messenger." As the NRA would presumably not be using it in that context, they would be uninfringing. However, as AIMster is clearly using it as an acronym for AOL's trademarked system, it is indeed infringing.
True, they cannot trademark "AIM" in any context, but they do have rights over the use of AIM as an acronym for AOL "Instant Messenger." Since AIMster was clearly using it as such an acronym, their use is infringing.
Well, Galeon is certainly better than the full Mozilla; it's Mozilla's scripted UI layer that slows a lot of things down. And yeah the tab-mode is cool; Opera's MDI works very similarly. I don't like having 8 or so root-level browser windows open all the time. =]
Hmm, what sort of processor do you have? Mozilla 0.9 is faster than 0.8.1, I'll grant you that, but it's still by no means fast. I have a Pentium266 with 160MB of RAM, and it's incredibly slow, especially compared to Opera and Internet Explorer. Mozilla takes nearly 30 full seconds to start up! Opening a new browser window in Opera is instantaneous (thanks to the MDI), and takes less than 1/4 of a second in IE, but takes around a second in Mozilla to fullly open, size itself, and render the toolbar. That's just too slow.
Except for the lines of code graph, I don't see how they justify fitting exponential curves to any of the other graphs. Since the resulting "exponential" curves that were fit are nearly straight lines there's really no basis for doing anything other than a linear fit.
They note that this was all run on the same hardware, but all that means is that the results are valid *for* that hardware. Some of the drastic changes in some areas might be due to, for example, the replacement of a generic driver with a specific driver optimized for one of the pieces of hardware they used. Obviously this change wouldn't carry over to all other systems.
All in all not bad though. It would've been nice to see some more rigorous data analysis though (the data analysis expected in a typical college freshman chemlab class is more extensive than this).
Slashdot Mirror
As you noted in the write-up yourself, this agreement merely forces you to grant Google a non-exclusive license to use your post (in exchange for them allowing you to posting it via their service free of charge). This explicitly means that Google does not claim to own your UseNet posts; you still retain ownership and full rights to do whatever you want with it. They can just also use it without your permission (but as they don't own it, they can't do things like force you to pay them to use your own post, or sell your post to someone else, and so on).
SWF (the flash format) is an open standard. The reason there is no good Free Software implementation of an authorship tool is that nobody has written one. There's some Perl scripts floating around that can generate Flash animations, and some attempts at apps to author real ones, but Macromedia's tools are still the best, by far. That's not a fault of closed standards, but merely Macromedia outdoing the open-source competition.
This is less a defense of the author's work than an attack on Cliff's review, interspersed with an uncomfortable number of personal attacks directed towards Cliff.
I wouldn't be averse to him responding to Cliff's criticisms with a defense of his book and an explanation of why those criticisms are inapplicable or misguided, but I am averse to him simply attacking the review and the reviewer.
In addition, E^2 = p^2*c^2 + m^2*c^4
Umm, diesel pumps are everywhere, since trucks in North America typically use diesel. Most service stations (at least everywhere in the United States I've been) have at least one diesel pump. It's generally the stations without diesel pumps that are the rarity, not the other way around.
Now that said, the reason many Americans don't like diesel cars is that diesel is thicker and less volatile, and thus diesel engines don't start as easily, particularly in cold climates. And with the advent of gas/electric hybrid cars that get 70+ mpg with standard unleaded gasoline, it seems unlikely that diesel cars will make inroads in the near future.
What about MSN? Mozilla?
I think you answer your own question there michael. If Microsoft switches from AOL to MSN as the default internet provider in Windows, then AOL retaliates by switching from IE to Mozilla. But if AOL switches from IE to Mozilla first, then Microsoft retaliates by switching from AOL to MSN as the default internet software that comes with Windows. The inter-relationship is too important for either of those scenarios to happen.
Ah, the incessant cry of psychologists: correlation does not imply causation.
one researcher argues that computer use can reduce creativity and create anti-social kids (never met any of these, no sir) while another researcher contends that kids who use computers and the internet grow up reading, inquiring, and generally brighter.
Oh really? I'd say it's just as likely, perhaps more likely, that it's the less-creative, anti-social, but better-reading, more-inquiring, and generally brighter kids who tend to use computers a lot, rather than it being the computers that produce those characteristics. "People who use computers" is a group whose demographics differ significantly from the average population, so any differences could very well be due to the self-selecting nature of the group, rather than computer themselves.
I think the problem is that there are limits on what contracts are legal. It's perfectly valid to make claims on "derived works" or works that are "part of the same program," but it's unclear whether it'd be valid to make claims on "dynamically linked modules" if a court later determines that dynamically linked modules are in fact completely separate programs. I'm not an expert in contract law, but generally you can't write anything you want into your contract (as with the question in the FAQ about non-free input/output - even if you want to say your program's GPL covers output, you cannot legally do that).
We should put this on T-shirts
I take it you wear rather large T-shirts?
I've had no success getting their software to work in Opera v5.11 for Windows. Anybody else gotten it to work?
Ah ok, that makes sense. As an embeddable technology it is interesting. The Slashdot headline ("Wireless Controllers for Consoles") was a bit misleading, since wireless controllers for consoles aren't particularly interesting or new.
Well, the $6.25 is just for the chip; obviously any final product would cost more. If I recall correctly, there was a $30-$40 wireless controller for the SNES nearly a decade ago. That's not too much different, all things considered.
Sure, it was a total disaster of an election. I fully support making sure it doesn't happen again by installing modern voting machines and implementing more uniform standards.
The point is that the election did happen, and neither Gore nor Bush won it, yet one of them had to become the President (since the other candidates weren't even in the running at this point, having won exactly zero electoral votes). In the end it turned out Bush became president, which gets all the Gore supporters angry, but if Gore had become president, all the Bush supporters would've been angry. It might be "illegitimate" but it's as legitimate as is possible under the circumstances - it was impossible for either candidate to be a legitimate president, and yet we needed one of them to become president anyway. So Bush it was.
Yes, perhaps "margin of error" was a poor choice of words, as that seems to be a statistics term that only applies when you're doing things like sampling a population. What I meant was more akin to the "uncertainties" in experimental science. Just as you measure something to 80.25 +/- 0.01 microamperes, the election as currently designed can only really measure vote totals to +/- 100 at best.
Well yes, elections in theory do not have margins of error. But elections in practice do. Florida used a great deal of old vote-counting machines which are less than perfect. They might provide a highly-accurate count, but they don't provide a perfectly accurate count. With hand-counting you have the same problems. You say to apply one definition across the board, but such subtleties and slight differences between ballots come into play that the only way to do this would be to have one person actually hand-count every vote in the state, and this is obviously not feasible. Failing that, we're left with a machine count with its attendant margin of error, or a hand-count by many different people, and the error there cause by different interpretations or evaluations of standards by different counters (even if there were a clearly written standard).
In the future hopefully computerized vote machines will be used, which will count the vote as the voter votes, and allow them to see what was counted, and tally things electronically. Then, there should be no question about how many votes were cast for each candidate.
Sure, Gore received more votes in the US overall, but that's irrelevant as elections in the US are done on a state-by-state basis. All the states except Florida were pretty well-decided, and in Florida the vote totals were too close to accurately pick a winner. In the end Bush was pretty much arbitrarily picked, but if Gore had won, he'd have been arbitrarily picked as well.
As for his policies, it depends on what policy you're talking about. Of course I partially agree with them - any reasonable person would agree with some things and disagree with other things. It'd be the height of partisan stupidity to say "I agree with everything X does" or "I disagree with everything X does."
And Gore didn't either. Unless you could a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court as an election of sorts.
What did you want to happen - give Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan the presidency?
While I partially agree with you, I don't think there's any way either side could have legitimately won. The vote totals in Florida were so close as to be within any reasonable margin of error, so giving the victory to one side or the other is arbitrary. But since one side or the other did have to be given the victory, I don't particularly object to the way things turned out; if Gore had "won" the election there, it would've been just as fraudulent (take a look at a lot of the suppressed evidence of generously counting Gore ballots when any reasonable observer would see that the ballot was completely blank).
Taco, your extreme bias and general incomprehension of political issues is getting a bit annoying. It's ok to be completely ignorant about politics, but not when you constantly talk about them on a large site that purports to disseminate "news."
Oh, and while I'm not a big fan of Mr. Bush's and usually vote Democrat, I'm glad he won this election - I shudder to think of what it'd be like if Joseph "ban movies and music" Liebermann and Tipper "parental advisory label" Gore had any power.
Obviously not. AOL is not claiming that they own the word "AIM," only that they own the use of the acronym AIM as an acronym for "AOL Instant Messenger." As the NRA would presumably not be using it in that context, they would be uninfringing. However, as AIMster is clearly using it as an acronym for AOL's trademarked system, it is indeed infringing.
True, they cannot trademark "AIM" in any context, but they do have rights over the use of AIM as an acronym for AOL "Instant Messenger." Since AIMster was clearly using it as such an acronym, their use is infringing.
Your Nazi-like attempt to censor discussion will not be tolerated.
Well, Galeon is certainly better than the full Mozilla; it's Mozilla's scripted UI layer that slows a lot of things down. And yeah the tab-mode is cool; Opera's MDI works very similarly. I don't like having 8 or so root-level browser windows open all the time. =]
Hmm, what sort of processor do you have? Mozilla 0.9 is faster than 0.8.1, I'll grant you that, but it's still by no means fast. I have a Pentium266 with 160MB of RAM, and it's incredibly slow, especially compared to Opera and Internet Explorer. Mozilla takes nearly 30 full seconds to start up! Opening a new browser window in Opera is instantaneous (thanks to the MDI), and takes less than 1/4 of a second in IE, but takes around a second in Mozilla to fullly open, size itself, and render the toolbar. That's just too slow.
Except for the lines of code graph, I don't see how they justify fitting exponential curves to any of the other graphs. Since the resulting "exponential" curves that were fit are nearly straight lines there's really no basis for doing anything other than a linear fit.
They note that this was all run on the same hardware, but all that means is that the results are valid *for* that hardware. Some of the drastic changes in some areas might be due to, for example, the replacement of a generic driver with a specific driver optimized for one of the pieces of hardware they used. Obviously this change wouldn't carry over to all other systems.
All in all not bad though. It would've been nice to see some more rigorous data analysis though (the data analysis expected in a typical college freshman chemlab class is more extensive than this).