woe be to the man who tries to sell a product that people don't understand.
Yeah, look what happened to Apple when they tried to radically change the interface on portable music players. Poor bastards.
I agree with TFA. A few games've tried to do MMOs in fundamentally new ways. Look at the Kingdom of Loathing: While not anywhere near a WoW rival, it became successful enough to support a handful of full-time employees and has remained steady for years. You never know where a flash of inspiration will strike, and a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about MMOs.
1. Of course it ignores virtual memory, I wasn't talking about virtual memory, I was talking about RAM.
2. To maintain a version in volatile memory would violate other rights which inhere in copyright, but not the copying part.
Sorry for the late reply; overlooked your response at first. I know you're a sharp guy, Ray, but this response tells me you've overlooked a little homework: Virtual memory is a concept you should be aware of and acknowledge whenever you talk about RAM in any context. A VM operation swaps data between RAM and disk space, treating the disk space as a sort-of extension to the RAM. Any rule that includes RAM and excludes VM is worthless, because data are exchanged between them routinely. (And because VM is a feature common to all popular operating systems today.)
The second issue is more subtle. If the rule is more lenient for RAM (volatile memory) than disk storage, there's very little preventing circumvention by using RAM as storage. I'm don't believe you can distinguish between copies intended as permanent merely because one requires a small electrical current to maintain.
And currently, you get the mechanic hired by the franchise. If, say, the franchise owner is looking for spare cash and hires a guy whose total experience is earning a C+ in high school shop, then that's your tough luck.
You can also slam the ground with your limbs, transferring the momentum to your torso and reducing the impact on it and on your head. I'm surprised they haven't experimented with that move yet.
Or you could build robots that don't have a head. Or put delicate components elsewhere. (That's not t'say this research won't be useful, for example in medical applications. I'm just sayin'.)
I personally think that copies which exist only in RAM should not be considered copies at all, but we would need the Supreme Court to reach that question to know for sure.
That's a good generalization but it'd be bad if it became a fixed rule. It'd be pretty trivial to abuse by using volatile memory as long-term mass storage. It also ignores the matter of virtual memory.
A better rule would be a guideline based on duration, percentage, and purpose. Again, the principle is sound, but an actual ruling to that effect would need some qualification.
I was liking your tutorial, well right up until the point when you insulted me.
Well, I suppose I wasn't aware that "young and inexperienced" is an insult. I'm reasonably sure that we all've been there.
I guess I should have cited another common error I hear. Referring to the computer et al. as the CPU. Did they teach that as well?
Sadly, yes, and I take part of the blame for that one. When I was younger I taught computer literacy to corporate folks; the Ziff-Davis courseware we used made that mistake. Although I knew what an actual CPU was, I went along with it.
The most common thing I hear is people confusing memory and the hard drive. I suppose to them it makes sense. The hard drive is the thing that keeps (remembers) their files.
Students, for years, were taught that HDDs are a type of ROM. We both know they're a different type of NVM. However, the "M" in each of these abbreviations stands for "memory". There's a reason for that: HDD storage is, in fact, memory.
Calling storage "storage" exclusively is a good idea but it's a relatively new phenomenon. At one point, RAM and storage were both called (primary and secondary) storage! Later, they were both called memory. All of these changes were over the course of a few decades.
In another generation or so, we'll prolly have it more-or-less settled; for now, criticizing confusion between the terms just demonstrates that you're young and inexperienced.
I like how Fox claims that this bunker was constructed at the end of 2002 and was used for Cheney to hide in after the WTC attacks. Either Dick was very, very patient, or one of their assumptions is off.
Y'know, the word "nazi" was originally* an abbreviation for Nationalsozialist, which means "National Socialist" (from the political party name). It was coined as an insult to the political party and was used in southern Germany to refer to a clumsy fool. It came into English by exiles and refugees from Germany. The actual National Socialist party avoided the word.
It's interesting that, in modern usage, it's managed to take on the meaning of a person who insists upon strict, pedantic application of rules. This is the first time I've heard of an "etymology nazi", tho', since etymology is neither a political stance, a set of rules, or anything at all to do with a klutz. It makes me wonder if "nazi" is gradually taking on a fluid meaning with a negative connotation in the way "gay" has done over the last decade. Soon, we might hear kids saying "This movie is so gay. The director is a drama nazi."
(I am outside.)
*This ignores usage from c. 1903 which was similar to the later usage, but probably did not contribute to it being coined again.
Even in the most generous estimate, tho', we're nowhere near the GP's claim of hundreds of millions.
Although a few minutes' thought makes me reconsider, since there's no problem with a single trademark including multiple words. There are quite a few permutations available.
Yes, and read down a little further: "the trademark Android Data hadn't been used for over three years, that the company has been dissolved for over four years"
Now read the whole sentence:
Google countered in August, claiming that the trademark Android Data hadn't been used for over three years, that the company has been dissolved for over four years, and that there couldn't be any confusion between the two names.
Yeesh. You think, maybe, that Google might potentially have a small bias when making that statement?
The OED lists 171,471 words in the English language...
That number, I assume, is from AskOxford. It is incorrect. That's how many entries are in volume 1, excluding archaic words and combination word-forms. The full count is more than six hundred thousand, plus their own estimate of another half-million uncatalogued technical words.
The Global Language Monitor has been in the news recently claiming 999,456 words in the English language, although it isn't clear how picky they are.
Encyclopedia Americana (1999 ed.) claims 750,000 words.
"About a million" is a good number to work with. None of these numbers include alternate spellings, which (here I'm guessing) probably number in the thousands, but they do include words that are not so useful as trademarks, like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Even in the most generous estimate, tho', we're nowhere near the GP's claim of hundreds of millions.
Also, just listing the "winners" doesn't do justice to the article.
On the Internet, we have what are called "hyperlinks". They're typically colored differently from other text and underlined; when your mouse cursor passes over them, it will generally change. If, while your cursor is over the hyperlink, you press the left mouse button (called "clicking"), your browser will load a different page, to which the hyperlink points.
A good example of this can be found in your parent's post, near the top. That poster included a colon after the first line of his or her post; this is a grammatical convention which denotes that the statement is more fully described by that which follows the colon. Try clicking on that hyperlink now, then use your browser's "back" button to return to this page. Wow! You found the complete text of the article on one page!
I'm'a go out on a limb and suggest that the complete article does, in fact, do justice to the article. I don't think abstracting the list detracts from it, either.
And today we've both learned lessons on the magic of the Internet and the magic of reading and the magic of me being a condescending bastard.
Meanwhile, the REAL purpose of copyright is fantastically well-served by this agreement.
I'd agree with you if it weren't for the exclusivity. In principle, we'd be much better off with this handled legislatively than judicially. By statute, Congress could set requirements and practices for publication of orphaned works. This would open up the field for competition, encouraging future development of the technologies involved, and helping avoid abusive practices.
If this settlement catalyzes such legislation, then I'm all for it. As it stands, it's better'n what we had before, but it's very much a stopgap we can't tolerate as a long-term policy.
Of course, there could be some reason why this couldn't be done, but I wouldn't assume that, I'd want to know for sure...
There is a reason. It's called the second law of thermodynamics. Whenever the words "perpetual motion" pop into your head, remember to presume the second law, then (if you must) try to break it. The burden of proof is on the perpetual motion, always.
More specifically, the reaction this thing is based on has been known for quite some time. It's nifty, but if there were some kind of wackyness in the energies of the reaction we'd've heard about it by now.
[Head explodes] WTF??? Why should my interpretation of what the novel said be *less* reliable than my interpretation of what some critic said about that novel???
Because Wikipedia is not a debating club. If everyone's interpretation were equally valid, then folks would be free to delete or contradict one another without conscience. By demanding external citations, Wikipedia allows its information to be debated in the wild while it attempts, with varying degrees of success, to present a neutral viewpoint.
Now you may have better insight than the critic in question, sure. But by allowing you to simply post your views, Wikipedia would have to post everyone's. Remember that even if you are a published critic, you aren't s'posed to cite yourself.
I'll grant that there's some validity to the notion, but not to the degree often practiced by the academic types. Barring a few special cases, I strongly suspect that artists mostly mean what they mean, barring perhaps some subtlety in subtexts, pattern of imagery, or whatever.
Most good works are either comprehensible or they're garbage, with the exceptions closely matching the special cases above; folks like John Barth, Don McLean, T.S. Eliot, or Lewis Carroll. In these cases, the barrier to understanding is largely a lack of them telling.
Which raises another reason to seek other citations. Artists often do interviews, keep journals, websites, blogs, and just yak yak yak all the damn time. Those can give insight into what he or she was thinking. Sometimes, they change their minds, or say different things. You won't find any of that stuff in the original work, so Wikipedia naturally wants external citations.
If you are lucky, your brain is as "all male" or "all female" as your average guy or gal and the doctor guessed right when he did the "corrective surgery."
I don't want t'get into the thick of this discussion; I don't have much useful t'say that hasn't been said. But here on the fringes, I'll pick on a minor issue.
While this sort of corrective surgery isn't ridiculously unusual, it is very rare for a child to have two viable sets of genetalia. When a doctor "chooses" a child's gender, he or she is making a decision based on the practical aspects of the anatomy, not a free choice.
When a child is born with the complete set, it falls to the parents to decide what to do, at least in the US. Usually, the female organs are kept in that case, since the surgery is much less invasive. While the choice is more open, again practical aspects steer the decision.
In any case, I'm not aware of any correlation between this sort of surgery and later transgendering, although it seems to be an assumption among activists that there is one.
I'm not sure it really matters whether there is one or not. At-birth assignment surgery is almost always steered by necessity, and there's no way to guess correctly when it isn't: Even if there is a causal relationship, the practice wouldn't change.
about this. My first reaction was that it was wrong not to appoint a technologist as CTO. Then I read O'Reilly's article, which argues cogently that the appointment makes a lot of sense.
This guy is a sensible choice, but perhaps not the best one. On one hand, he clearly is a technophile; he's had some nifty ideas and isn't afraid to hear new ones.
On the other hand, he seems to very much be a politician first and a technologist second. The video embedded in O'Reilly's commentary is telling: in the first four minutes, he uses the word "humbled", passively, five times. He can't resist buzzwords: "begin a conversation for dialogue" indeed. And if I hear him say "long-term strategic roadmap" one more time I'm'a puke.
So... I dunno. He looks good on paper, but he makes me want to scrub my brain after listening to him. He probably is a good choice for getting Obama's nationalized healthcare records system up and running. In other technology issues, I'm'a go out on a limb and predict that he'll turn out to be a fast-talking mouthpiece with very little real impact.
He's a Mac, no doubt. He's been involved in use of the iPod and iPhone in education, he's fascinated by social networking systems, and he likes to gloat about how Virginia had the first settlement of what would become the USA.
Well, in Virginia he pushed (and succeeded) to get an open-source textbook approved for schools, the first in the US.
I'm unaware of any particular stance he's taken on open source operating systems. He seems to be a bit of an Apple fanboy, tho', judging by the attention he's given the iPod and iPhone.
Nobody was shot for treason when they endorsed a program that raped the US Constitution.
So... you're suggesting that we rape the Constitution to protect the Constitution, eh?
I agree with you generally - I dunno who said "If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention", but it's as true as true. But shouting "TREASON!" when arguing Constitutional issues makes you look silly, since it demonstrates a basic lack of knowledge about the Constitution. (Hint: Article III)
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woe be to the man who tries to sell a product that people don't understand.
Yeah, look what happened to Apple when they tried to radically change the interface on portable music players. Poor bastards.
I agree with TFA. A few games've tried to do MMOs in fundamentally new ways. Look at the Kingdom of Loathing: While not anywhere near a WoW rival, it became successful enough to support a handful of full-time employees and has remained steady for years. You never know where a flash of inspiration will strike, and a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about MMOs.
1. Of course it ignores virtual memory, I wasn't talking about virtual memory, I was talking about RAM. 2. To maintain a version in volatile memory would violate other rights which inhere in copyright, but not the copying part.
Sorry for the late reply; overlooked your response at first. I know you're a sharp guy, Ray, but this response tells me you've overlooked a little homework: Virtual memory is a concept you should be aware of and acknowledge whenever you talk about RAM in any context. A VM operation swaps data between RAM and disk space, treating the disk space as a sort-of extension to the RAM. Any rule that includes RAM and excludes VM is worthless, because data are exchanged between them routinely. (And because VM is a feature common to all popular operating systems today.)
The second issue is more subtle. If the rule is more lenient for RAM (volatile memory) than disk storage, there's very little preventing circumvention by using RAM as storage. I'm don't believe you can distinguish between copies intended as permanent merely because one requires a small electrical current to maintain.
I want the mechanic who knows what to do.
And currently, you get the mechanic hired by the franchise. If, say, the franchise owner is looking for spare cash and hires a guy whose total experience is earning a C+ in high school shop, then that's your tough luck.
You can also slam the ground with your limbs, transferring the momentum to your torso and reducing the impact on it and on your head. I'm surprised they haven't experimented with that move yet.
Or you could build robots that don't have a head. Or put delicate components elsewhere. (That's not t'say this research won't be useful, for example in medical applications. I'm just sayin'.)
I personally think that copies which exist only in RAM should not be considered copies at all, but we would need the Supreme Court to reach that question to know for sure.
That's a good generalization but it'd be bad if it became a fixed rule. It'd be pretty trivial to abuse by using volatile memory as long-term mass storage. It also ignores the matter of virtual memory.
A better rule would be a guideline based on duration, percentage, and purpose. Again, the principle is sound, but an actual ruling to that effect would need some qualification.
I was liking your tutorial, well right up until the point when you insulted me.
Well, I suppose I wasn't aware that "young and inexperienced" is an insult. I'm reasonably sure that we all've been there.
I guess I should have cited another common error I hear. Referring to the computer et al. as the CPU. Did they teach that as well?
Sadly, yes, and I take part of the blame for that one. When I was younger I taught computer literacy to corporate folks; the Ziff-Davis courseware we used made that mistake. Although I knew what an actual CPU was, I went along with it.
The most common thing I hear is people confusing memory and the hard drive. I suppose to them it makes sense. The hard drive is the thing that keeps (remembers) their files.
Students, for years, were taught that HDDs are a type of ROM. We both know they're a different type of NVM. However, the "M" in each of these abbreviations stands for "memory". There's a reason for that: HDD storage is, in fact, memory.
Calling storage "storage" exclusively is a good idea but it's a relatively new phenomenon. At one point, RAM and storage were both called (primary and secondary) storage! Later, they were both called memory. All of these changes were over the course of a few decades.
In another generation or so, we'll prolly have it more-or-less settled; for now, criticizing confusion between the terms just demonstrates that you're young and inexperienced.
I like how Fox claims that this bunker was constructed at the end of 2002 and was used for Cheney to hide in after the WTC attacks. Either Dick was very, very patient, or one of their assumptions is off.
Gnort would save us!
That sounds like a Major Disaster to me.
Not time for etymology nazis.
Y'know, the word "nazi" was originally* an abbreviation for Nationalsozialist, which means "National Socialist" (from the political party name). It was coined as an insult to the political party and was used in southern Germany to refer to a clumsy fool. It came into English by exiles and refugees from Germany. The actual National Socialist party avoided the word.
It's interesting that, in modern usage, it's managed to take on the meaning of a person who insists upon strict, pedantic application of rules. This is the first time I've heard of an "etymology nazi", tho', since etymology is neither a political stance, a set of rules, or anything at all to do with a klutz. It makes me wonder if "nazi" is gradually taking on a fluid meaning with a negative connotation in the way "gay" has done over the last decade. Soon, we might hear kids saying "This movie is so gay. The director is a drama nazi."
(I am outside.)
*This ignores usage from c. 1903 which was similar to the later usage, but probably did not contribute to it being coined again.
Even in the most generous estimate, tho', we're nowhere near the GP's claim of hundreds of millions.
Although a few minutes' thought makes me reconsider, since there's no problem with a single trademark including multiple words. There are quite a few permutations available.
Yes, and read down a little further: "the trademark Android Data hadn't been used for over three years, that the company has been dissolved for over four years"
Now read the whole sentence:
Yeesh. You think, maybe, that Google might potentially have a small bias when making that statement?
Just a few points:
The OED lists 171,471 words in the English language...
That number, I assume, is from AskOxford. It is incorrect. That's how many entries are in volume 1, excluding archaic words and combination word-forms. The full count is more than six hundred thousand, plus their own estimate of another half-million uncatalogued technical words.
The Global Language Monitor has been in the news recently claiming 999,456 words in the English language, although it isn't clear how picky they are.
Encyclopedia Americana (1999 ed.) claims 750,000 words.
"About a million" is a good number to work with. None of these numbers include alternate spellings, which (here I'm guessing) probably number in the thousands, but they do include words that are not so useful as trademarks, like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Even in the most generous estimate, tho', we're nowhere near the GP's claim of hundreds of millions.
Also, just listing the "winners" doesn't do justice to the article.
On the Internet, we have what are called "hyperlinks". They're typically colored differently from other text and underlined; when your mouse cursor passes over them, it will generally change. If, while your cursor is over the hyperlink, you press the left mouse button (called "clicking"), your browser will load a different page, to which the hyperlink points.
A good example of this can be found in your parent's post, near the top. That poster included a colon after the first line of his or her post; this is a grammatical convention which denotes that the statement is more fully described by that which follows the colon. Try clicking on that hyperlink now, then use your browser's "back" button to return to this page. Wow! You found the complete text of the article on one page!
I'm'a go out on a limb and suggest that the complete article does, in fact, do justice to the article. I don't think abstracting the list detracts from it, either.
And today we've both learned lessons on the magic of the Internet and the magic of reading and the magic of me being a condescending bastard.
Meanwhile, the REAL purpose of copyright is fantastically well-served by this agreement.
I'd agree with you if it weren't for the exclusivity. In principle, we'd be much better off with this handled legislatively than judicially. By statute, Congress could set requirements and practices for publication of orphaned works. This would open up the field for competition, encouraging future development of the technologies involved, and helping avoid abusive practices.
If this settlement catalyzes such legislation, then I'm all for it. As it stands, it's better'n what we had before, but it's very much a stopgap we can't tolerate as a long-term policy.
Of course, there could be some reason why this couldn't be done, but I wouldn't assume that, I'd want to know for sure...
There is a reason. It's called the second law of thermodynamics. Whenever the words "perpetual motion" pop into your head, remember to presume the second law, then (if you must) try to break it. The burden of proof is on the perpetual motion, always.
More specifically, the reaction this thing is based on has been known for quite some time. It's nifty, but if there were some kind of wackyness in the energies of the reaction we'd've heard about it by now.
[Head explodes] WTF??? Why should my interpretation of what the novel said be *less* reliable than my interpretation of what some critic said about that novel???
Because Wikipedia is not a debating club. If everyone's interpretation were equally valid, then folks would be free to delete or contradict one another without conscience. By demanding external citations, Wikipedia allows its information to be debated in the wild while it attempts, with varying degrees of success, to present a neutral viewpoint.
Now you may have better insight than the critic in question, sure. But by allowing you to simply post your views, Wikipedia would have to post everyone's. Remember that even if you are a published critic, you aren't s'posed to cite yourself.
As to the grandparent, deconstructionists are responsible for that. They hold to the idea that the author's opinion of his or her works isn't particularly important - other views are equally valid. The intentional fallacy is the name given to the silly notion that the artist has any damned idea what he or she is doing.
I'll grant that there's some validity to the notion, but not to the degree often practiced by the academic types. Barring a few special cases, I strongly suspect that artists mostly mean what they mean, barring perhaps some subtlety in subtexts, pattern of imagery, or whatever.
Most good works are either comprehensible or they're garbage, with the exceptions closely matching the special cases above; folks like John Barth, Don McLean, T.S. Eliot, or Lewis Carroll. In these cases, the barrier to understanding is largely a lack of them telling.
Which raises another reason to seek other citations. Artists often do interviews, keep journals, websites, blogs, and just yak yak yak all the damn time. Those can give insight into what he or she was thinking. Sometimes, they change their minds, or say different things. You won't find any of that stuff in the original work, so Wikipedia naturally wants external citations.
We should check out Vega.
No. What happens on Vega, stays on Vega.
If you are lucky, your brain is as "all male" or "all female" as your average guy or gal and the doctor guessed right when he did the "corrective surgery."
I don't want t'get into the thick of this discussion; I don't have much useful t'say that hasn't been said. But here on the fringes, I'll pick on a minor issue.
While this sort of corrective surgery isn't ridiculously unusual, it is very rare for a child to have two viable sets of genetalia. When a doctor "chooses" a child's gender, he or she is making a decision based on the practical aspects of the anatomy, not a free choice.
When a child is born with the complete set, it falls to the parents to decide what to do, at least in the US. Usually, the female organs are kept in that case, since the surgery is much less invasive. While the choice is more open, again practical aspects steer the decision.
In any case, I'm not aware of any correlation between this sort of surgery and later transgendering, although it seems to be an assumption among activists that there is one.
I'm not sure it really matters whether there is one or not. At-birth assignment surgery is almost always steered by necessity, and there's no way to guess correctly when it isn't: Even if there is a causal relationship, the practice wouldn't change.
The residents of St. Augustine might beg to differ, as might the cliff dwellers of the Southwest, for that matter.
Yeah. You might say those were the Xerox PARC of America. ;)
about this. My first reaction was that it was wrong not to appoint a technologist as CTO. Then I read O'Reilly's article, which argues cogently that the appointment makes a lot of sense.
This guy is a sensible choice, but perhaps not the best one. On one hand, he clearly is a technophile; he's had some nifty ideas and isn't afraid to hear new ones.
On the other hand, he seems to very much be a politician first and a technologist second. The video embedded in O'Reilly's commentary is telling: in the first four minutes, he uses the word "humbled", passively, five times. He can't resist buzzwords: "begin a conversation for dialogue" indeed. And if I hear him say "long-term strategic roadmap" one more time I'm'a puke.
So... I dunno. He looks good on paper, but he makes me want to scrub my brain after listening to him. He probably is a good choice for getting Obama's nationalized healthcare records system up and running. In other technology issues, I'm'a go out on a limb and predict that he'll turn out to be a fast-talking mouthpiece with very little real impact.
Let's not screw around here: Is he Mac or PC?
He's a Mac, no doubt. He's been involved in use of the iPod and iPhone in education, he's fascinated by social networking systems, and he likes to gloat about how Virginia had the first settlement of what would become the USA.
What is his stance on the open source revolution?
Well, in Virginia he pushed (and succeeded) to get an open-source textbook approved for schools, the first in the US.
I'm unaware of any particular stance he's taken on open source operating systems. He seems to be a bit of an Apple fanboy, tho', judging by the attention he's given the iPod and iPhone.
Nobody was shot for treason when they endorsed a program that raped the US Constitution.
So... you're suggesting that we rape the Constitution to protect the Constitution, eh?
I agree with you generally - I dunno who said "If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention", but it's as true as true. But shouting "TREASON!" when arguing Constitutional issues makes you look silly, since it demonstrates a basic lack of knowledge about the Constitution. (Hint: Article III)
I don't know where you're getting that. Could you cite a source please?
Here you go: Executive Order 13491, signed January 22, 2009.