Essjay did not put his lies on Wikipedia articles though, (merely talk pages) so his lies were utterly irrelevant to Wikipedia. Everyone lies, especially on the Internet. The question is whether they are detrimental to Wikipedia.
Anyone who learns by rote instead of breaking down into simple problems is taking the soul out of whatever they are learning.
Education (especially math education, I think) should not be about learning isolated chunks of data, but about understanding concepts. All a person gains by memorizing that 15% of 61 is 9.15 is a bit of saved time. That's great if what you want to do is do well on tests or save a bit of time when calculating the tip in restaurants, but if your goal is to actually learn, it's better to just understand the general concepts and then figure out how to work your way down to the particular facts from there. It saves time and allows one to cover a broader scope of knowledge.
It's kind of borderline. The goodness of an action is exactly the goodness the happiness it inspires. To a first approximation, taking money from the vaguely middle class and giving it to the poor is a net beneficial action; the harm only comes in when you take into consideration the "externalities" of the unpleasantness of living in a society where money is taken from people willy-nilly. The externalities of taxation are somewhat different from the externalities of common theft.
Of course, the word "evil" doesn't really make sense in such a starkly utilitarian moral system, so maybe what I'm saying is irrelevant to the larger issue.
Doomed sounds cooler, though. We quote things like that not because we really care what George Santayana thought on the issue, (George Santayana is a somewhat obscure figure outside of his tendency to pump out pithy sayings) but because they sound cool and express sentiments which are generally accepted without much support beyond their assertion.
Although of course I'll still be a pedant when I find a misquote that rubs me the wrong way.
It's not a greenhouse gas if it's trapped in ice, though.
Although yes, to rule it out entirely simply because methane produces CO2 is silly. Switching to non-carbon-producing energy sources is a great idea if it can be done, but switching from oil to methane isn't terrible in the meantime.
Yes, but fortunately the humor is also weak with Tod Minuit. There's nothing funny about saying "4.6 million dollars a barrel? lol, that's a bit pricey." Misinterpreting what people say can be funny, but it is not in this case.
There's really no reason to believe that it takes 200 million years to get from ground zero to intelligence. For one, it's certainly a possibility that there have been intelligent Earthlings prior to humans. More generally, very most of evolution has been dealt with stuff that is pretty unrelated to the development of intelligence. Thus, it is reasonable to say that even if intelligence didn't evolve on Earth before humans, it could have. Thus, even if the mean time to go from ground zero to intelligence is 200 million years (which I find unlikely), the standard deviation is probably very high.
It doesn't matter what a thing is for. If you can make delicious cake with a hammer, then make delicious cake. Perhaps it's more accurate to call it an "externality-compensation fee," but that's just semantics. The only issue that matters is whether such a tax is a net benefit, or whether it ultimately causes more harm than good.
All laws oppress minorities, except when they oppress majorities. Laws against murder oppress people who like to murder, for instance. The only difference is that Jews weren't really causing that much trouble, so tossing Jews into camps and stuff is a net-harmful action, while tossing murderers into prison is a net-beneficial action.
Exactly. Anything at all can look like a bomb, so to say "oh noes, that could be a bomb!" is idiotic. Hell, suicide bombers just hide bombs under their clothes; should we ban clothes? That might not be very practical in a place like Boston that can get quite cold in the winter.
The occasionally Hello Kitty full of C4 and nails is an acceptable price to pay for living in a free and funny society.
What exactly are cops supposed to look for when looking for bombs? The nature of bombs is that they are fairly easy to hide. Put them inside a computer, a cardboard box, a large melon, hello kitty dolls, inside a car, under your clothes, whatever. To try to find bombs based on what they look like is therefore largely futile and a waste of everyone's time. But on the other side, the benefits of allowing people to put crazy shit in random places is huge. In order for society to be able to grow and flourish, people (and yes, soulless entertainment corporations) need to be free to be as weird as they want as long as they aren't being explicitly harmful. Perhaps Cartoon Network could have known better, but in that this was a campaign that went across many cities and Boston only reacted the way they did after a few weeks of the ads being out, I think it's reasonable to say that the risk of this happening was fairly low, and thus that Cartoon Network can't be held too responsible for bad luck.
Him taking the fall is understandable and probably a good PR move, but it should be pointed out that his position at the top is debatable. Cartoon Network is wholly owned by Turner Broadcasting, which in turn is wholly owned by Time Warner. He has plenty of bosses.
Almost anything is possible if you work hard no matter where you live. Even if you're starving in North Korea, you can in principle become prosperous. You might need to wage a revolution to overthrow the government, but it's possible. Class mobility is not measured by whether it is possible to move between classes, but how hard it is. From your own description, you had to work rather hard. Not anywhere near as hard as revolting in North Korea, but certainly harder than you would have had to work if financial aid had been more generous.
It might be kind of flashy, but maybe they could set something up that when tabs get sufficiently compressed, you have a zoom thing like they have on Mac OSX's dock, where the tab under the mouse expands to be wider than the other tabs so you can see what tab you're looking at even when things get really compressed.
Maybe that's the sort of thing best done as a plugin, though.
I don't think the Jargon File is the best authority on the geek versus nerd debate, because that's focused on the slang of hacker culture of the days of yore (pre-1994, let's say) and those terms are somewhat more widespread than that.
The ultimate answer, I think, is that geeks and nerds are pretty much the same thing, and although a lot of people make a distinction, what that distinction is varies from region to region. However, I have gotten the impression that the "Nerds are socially inept, geeks are merely weird" way of looking at it is fairly popular.
It's not that it takes away fair use rights, it's that it restricts fair use rights. I mean, we say that governments "take away" free speech rights when they censor you, but in that case all they're really doing is simply making it more difficult to speak. (That is, you can speak as much as you want, as long as you can figure out how to not get arrested.) Similarly, with DRM, companies are making it more difficult to exploit your fair use rights. You can still do it, but it's a pain in the ass.
Well, we want some sort of standards, because otherwise you might have kids who are complete losers graduating, and standardized tests the easiest way to implement that. As you note, it is a profoundly flawed way to standardize, but... it's easy.
No matter how strictly you interpret the constitution, the commerce clause seems to be something which flagrantly effects Google. The Internet is an institution which by design crosses state and national borders all the time, therefore much of Google's business seems to be within the realm of "Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." Perhaps you are right in the general sense that if government was smaller lobbying wouldn't be as much of an issue, but I'm not sure your point is valid in this case.
That depends on what you mean by knowingly. Human beings are creatures of limited intelligence driven quite often by less than rational emotions. A person can sign an agreement without a full appreciation of its consequences. In addition, businesses very often are capable of having a better understanding of the situation because they have more money and can spend more time closely examining the consequences. Also, the business is usually the party which writes the contract, which provides something of an advantage. Even if the two parties are considered equals in the eyes of the law, that doesn't neccesarily mean they are.
Surely you would agree that there are situations where contracts can lead to exploitation, (such as with children or fraud) and there are also situations where contracts are absolutely fair and just. I don't think that drawing the line between fair and unfair is straightfoward; and in fact it might not even be possible to draw a line, and instead it is a smooth transition from fair to unfair.
He's not actually saying that developers shouldn't be paid, but rather that they don't have to be paid, which is an important distinction. He doesn't mind if people do get paid, but he thinks if they don't get paid it's not that big a deal as long as software still gets made.
But yeah, Stallman really doesn't care that much about the interests of the professional programmer in particular. His goals are for the freedoms of computer users in general, (people in general, ultimately) and if proffessional programmers have to take a paycut or enter a new field entirely, so be it. Making proprietary software is (as he sees it) unethical, so why should they feel entitled to make money that way? Of course, if you asked him, I imagine he might say that programmers are (ultimately) better off with free software but small paychecks than they are with decently sized paychecks but unfree software because unfree software is just that bad.
Re:That sounds like communism to me
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
It's "communism" if you're forced to be efficient. (Well not really, but close enough.) If you simply choose to be efficient, that's not communism, that's simply "not being an asshole."
That said, there is value in people having their own personal computers. There are benefits gained from having the extra freedom which cancel out the benefit of saving a bit of electricity.
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Essjay did not put his lies on Wikipedia articles though, (merely talk pages) so his lies were utterly irrelevant to Wikipedia. Everyone lies, especially on the Internet. The question is whether they are detrimental to Wikipedia.
Anyone who learns by rote instead of breaking down into simple problems is taking the soul out of whatever they are learning.
Education (especially math education, I think) should not be about learning isolated chunks of data, but about understanding concepts. All a person gains by memorizing that 15% of 61 is 9.15 is a bit of saved time. That's great if what you want to do is do well on tests or save a bit of time when calculating the tip in restaurants, but if your goal is to actually learn, it's better to just understand the general concepts and then figure out how to work your way down to the particular facts from there. It saves time and allows one to cover a broader scope of knowledge.
It's kind of borderline. The goodness of an action is exactly the goodness the happiness it inspires. To a first approximation, taking money from the vaguely middle class and giving it to the poor is a net beneficial action; the harm only comes in when you take into consideration the "externalities" of the unpleasantness of living in a society where money is taken from people willy-nilly. The externalities of taxation are somewhat different from the externalities of common theft.
Of course, the word "evil" doesn't really make sense in such a starkly utilitarian moral system, so maybe what I'm saying is irrelevant to the larger issue.
For fuck's sake, the thing has a one-handed controller! How could you not?
Doomed sounds cooler, though. We quote things like that not because we really care what George Santayana thought on the issue, (George Santayana is a somewhat obscure figure outside of his tendency to pump out pithy sayings) but because they sound cool and express sentiments which are generally accepted without much support beyond their assertion.
Although of course I'll still be a pedant when I find a misquote that rubs me the wrong way.
It's not a greenhouse gas if it's trapped in ice, though.
Although yes, to rule it out entirely simply because methane produces CO2 is silly. Switching to non-carbon-producing energy sources is a great idea if it can be done, but switching from oil to methane isn't terrible in the meantime.
Yes, but fortunately the humor is also weak with Tod Minuit. There's nothing funny about saying "4.6 million dollars a barrel? lol, that's a bit pricey." Misinterpreting what people say can be funny, but it is not in this case.
There's really no reason to believe that it takes 200 million years to get from ground zero to intelligence. For one, it's certainly a possibility that there have been intelligent Earthlings prior to humans. More generally, very most of evolution has been dealt with stuff that is pretty unrelated to the development of intelligence. Thus, it is reasonable to say that even if intelligence didn't evolve on Earth before humans, it could have. Thus, even if the mean time to go from ground zero to intelligence is 200 million years (which I find unlikely), the standard deviation is probably very high.
It doesn't matter what a thing is for. If you can make delicious cake with a hammer, then make delicious cake. Perhaps it's more accurate to call it an "externality-compensation fee," but that's just semantics. The only issue that matters is whether such a tax is a net benefit, or whether it ultimately causes more harm than good.
All laws oppress minorities, except when they oppress majorities. Laws against murder oppress people who like to murder, for instance. The only difference is that Jews weren't really causing that much trouble, so tossing Jews into camps and stuff is a net-harmful action, while tossing murderers into prison is a net-beneficial action.
Exactly. Anything at all can look like a bomb, so to say "oh noes, that could be a bomb!" is idiotic. Hell, suicide bombers just hide bombs under their clothes; should we ban clothes? That might not be very practical in a place like Boston that can get quite cold in the winter.
The occasionally Hello Kitty full of C4 and nails is an acceptable price to pay for living in a free and funny society.
What exactly are cops supposed to look for when looking for bombs? The nature of bombs is that they are fairly easy to hide. Put them inside a computer, a cardboard box, a large melon, hello kitty dolls, inside a car, under your clothes, whatever. To try to find bombs based on what they look like is therefore largely futile and a waste of everyone's time. But on the other side, the benefits of allowing people to put crazy shit in random places is huge. In order for society to be able to grow and flourish, people (and yes, soulless entertainment corporations) need to be free to be as weird as they want as long as they aren't being explicitly harmful. Perhaps Cartoon Network could have known better, but in that this was a campaign that went across many cities and Boston only reacted the way they did after a few weeks of the ads being out, I think it's reasonable to say that the risk of this happening was fairly low, and thus that Cartoon Network can't be held too responsible for bad luck.
Him taking the fall is understandable and probably a good PR move, but it should be pointed out that his position at the top is debatable. Cartoon Network is wholly owned by Turner Broadcasting, which in turn is wholly owned by Time Warner. He has plenty of bosses.
Almost anything is possible if you work hard no matter where you live. Even if you're starving in North Korea, you can in principle become prosperous. You might need to wage a revolution to overthrow the government, but it's possible. Class mobility is not measured by whether it is possible to move between classes, but how hard it is. From your own description, you had to work rather hard. Not anywhere near as hard as revolting in North Korea, but certainly harder than you would have had to work if financial aid had been more generous.
There is an effort to do that, apparently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_Project
I would imagine anyone as famous as him would be able to just call up MySpace and ask them to make an exception.
It might be kind of flashy, but maybe they could set something up that when tabs get sufficiently compressed, you have a zoom thing like they have on Mac OSX's dock, where the tab under the mouse expands to be wider than the other tabs so you can see what tab you're looking at even when things get really compressed.
Maybe that's the sort of thing best done as a plugin, though.
I don't think the Jargon File is the best authority on the geek versus nerd debate, because that's focused on the slang of hacker culture of the days of yore (pre-1994, let's say) and those terms are somewhat more widespread than that.
The ultimate answer, I think, is that geeks and nerds are pretty much the same thing, and although a lot of people make a distinction, what that distinction is varies from region to region. However, I have gotten the impression that the "Nerds are socially inept, geeks are merely weird" way of looking at it is fairly popular.
It's not that it takes away fair use rights, it's that it restricts fair use rights. I mean, we say that governments "take away" free speech rights when they censor you, but in that case all they're really doing is simply making it more difficult to speak. (That is, you can speak as much as you want, as long as you can figure out how to not get arrested.) Similarly, with DRM, companies are making it more difficult to exploit your fair use rights. You can still do it, but it's a pain in the ass.
Every single Shakespeare book I read in high school had a footnote in it "Oh, this is a joke about Syphilis."
Well, we want some sort of standards, because otherwise you might have kids who are complete losers graduating, and standardized tests the easiest way to implement that. As you note, it is a profoundly flawed way to standardize, but... it's easy.
No matter how strictly you interpret the constitution, the commerce clause seems to be something which flagrantly effects Google. The Internet is an institution which by design crosses state and national borders all the time, therefore much of Google's business seems to be within the realm of "Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." Perhaps you are right in the general sense that if government was smaller lobbying wouldn't be as much of an issue, but I'm not sure your point is valid in this case.
Yes, the sticky sugary substance which has coated your keyboard is candy.
That depends on what you mean by knowingly. Human beings are creatures of limited intelligence driven quite often by less than rational emotions. A person can sign an agreement without a full appreciation of its consequences. In addition, businesses very often are capable of having a better understanding of the situation because they have more money and can spend more time closely examining the consequences. Also, the business is usually the party which writes the contract, which provides something of an advantage. Even if the two parties are considered equals in the eyes of the law, that doesn't neccesarily mean they are.
Surely you would agree that there are situations where contracts can lead to exploitation, (such as with children or fraud) and there are also situations where contracts are absolutely fair and just. I don't think that drawing the line between fair and unfair is straightfoward; and in fact it might not even be possible to draw a line, and instead it is a smooth transition from fair to unfair.
He's not actually saying that developers shouldn't be paid, but rather that they don't have to be paid, which is an important distinction. He doesn't mind if people do get paid, but he thinks if they don't get paid it's not that big a deal as long as software still gets made.
But yeah, Stallman really doesn't care that much about the interests of the professional programmer in particular. His goals are for the freedoms of computer users in general, (people in general, ultimately) and if proffessional programmers have to take a paycut or enter a new field entirely, so be it. Making proprietary software is (as he sees it) unethical, so why should they feel entitled to make money that way? Of course, if you asked him, I imagine he might say that programmers are (ultimately) better off with free software but small paychecks than they are with decently sized paychecks but unfree software because unfree software is just that bad.
It's "communism" if you're forced to be efficient. (Well not really, but close enough.) If you simply choose to be efficient, that's not communism, that's simply "not being an asshole."
That said, there is value in people having their own personal computers. There are benefits gained from having the extra freedom which cancel out the benefit of saving a bit of electricity.