The rennaisance happened without copyrights. The artists got paid by princes, dukes, and popes. Personally, I'd take copyright law with all the extensions, before I would go back to being ruled by princes, dukes and popes.
You're making sense. I gathered from his own posts that the poster you were replying to had theological issues with "Darwinism", and, while I'm not going to pick your post apart for possible minor errors, on the whole it looked quite rational. (Since we're using natural language, it is always possible to nitpick - English itself isn't built to be rigorously logical). In fact, I responded to your post because it looked to be unlikely to descend to name calling and irrational "arguements" as fast as some threads.
Evolution reduced to the simplest senses, i.e. "survival of the fittest", is tautalogical (that one survived, so it must be the fittest). Properly elaborated from those bases, it becomes scientific, that is it makes testable predictions. In fact, it makes quite a few of them that have passed such tests, and so has come to be well regarded among scientists and rationalists in general.
Unfortunately, the theory has also been elaborated in other directions by many supporters. Old errors of that sort became "Social Darwinism". Looking at this thread, I noticed several posters who write as though the word Evolution included dogmatic atheism, others who think it implies something called de-evolution and that some of their fellow slashdotters are suffering from it, at least one who lumps meme-theory in with it, and so on. I'm not sure just what the original poster thought was included in the core concept.
I don't think he was necessarily picking a definition that was a deliberate straw man explanation however. He may well have been referring to some of the same definitions some "supporters of evolution" were offering.
Norway has checks and balances that you hope will accomplish justice. The US has checks and balances that we hope will accomplish justice. Guess what, a conglomerate of global corporations is using your system towards its own ends, without any true regard for justice. They've been doing that here, too.
There are a number of predictions made by Darwin in TOoS. In essence, these are what make it science at all - testable pedictions.
1. The mechanism of heredity does not allow for unlimited blending. This is largely demonstrated by the work of Mendel and successors, but better confirmed by Crick and Watson and theirs, as DNA's structure explains well why genes can best be treated as a full on/off encoding scheme.
2. Better copying fidelity (fewer mutations), actually makes natural selection work faster, even though that seems counter-intuitive to many. (Really bad copying fidelity means mutations get overwritten with new mutations before they have time to be selected for or against).
Smaller mutations are more likely to be favorable than larger ones, and again make natural selection work faster. (While Darwin briefly sketched these two principles, they have been most developed more recently, up to Gould and Dawkins.). This also is at least partially proved by the extremely accurate copying of DNA in modern organisms.
# 2 is less solidly proven than # 1. It makes a great deal of sense when applying it to the origin of species question, as Darwin did, but raises some logical inconsistencies, or makes disprovable predictions, when applied to the origin of life itself. (Maybe that's why Darwin didn't call his book "The Origin of Life"). So, depending on just what you claim is included in the theory of Natural Selection, the poster claiming that there are substantial problems just may be right, at least if substantial means bigger than can be fixed with the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis.
That "assume that colleagues are playing fairly" bit is why Alastair Crowley said that scientists were about the last people to debunk mediums and table-rappers, and the best debunker was a good stage magician.
Most people are amateurs at any given subject, but what are the odds that there are a dozen or so people that really, really understand M-theory, a much larger group that just saw the PBS special, and no others in the middle range? Papers on M-theory have been published in Science, and a number of journals with upwards of 5,000 readers each. Are we therefore to assume the vast majority either skipped those papers, or didn't understand them? Sounds like we are debating what is a sufficiently large value of "really, really".
What are the odds that Stephen Hawking really understands time? After all, he's a Physicist. In his book "A Brief History of Time" (admittedly aimed at a popular audience), he argued for changes in the way physics defines both the ordinality and cardinality of time (extending it to a negative axis, then to an imaginary one). Just what such changes to what is essentially a number-line mean, and whether they are "allowed", is something only a dozen or so abstract mathematicians can really, really say they understand. There is no good scientific proof inside of Physics that what Hawking did was acceptable, because the possible flaws are related to Cantor's transfinite math, and would require a mathematical proof instead. (And a scientific proof and a mathematical one are two different animals).
If there are only a dozen or so people who really, really understand Cantorian transfinites, and only a dozen or so who really, really underwtand how Quantum Mechanics might apply to Cosmology, what are the chances those two sets have any members in common? So what reason do we have to think Dr. Hawking's theories are any better than Joe Blogs the ditch digger's?
Einstein did excellent work on such subjects as explaining brownian motion and on the diffusion of atoms of one metal across a welded joint with another metal. His papers on both generally took a subject where there were lots of things that the existing theory couldn't explain or predict, and improved the scientific basis for the subject. It's even been said that he turned some areas of metallurgy from black arts into science. The paper on metalurgy is mathematically beautiful. It starts with the standard equations of that time, substitutes more complex terms for simple ones until the equations in the middle of the paper are huge, then switches to simplifying until at the end, he has generated a whole new set of equations, which are all either easier to use than the originals or predict more, or both.
When he published on special relativity, he had an exceptional reputation as a synthesist. The very fact that he was using the same methods he had demonstrated worked in less controversial areas impressed other physicists with the possibility that he might have made a phenominal breakthrough. Many people who knew physics still thought he might be wrong, but probably from making a subtle mistake that even the best pro might make, if that.
(Or maybe the limits of reality) - Roberston is in a position to market Linux. He has little or no control over whether customers choose to replace MS or UNIX systems with it.
Just try to define a business strategy here that would discourage a customer from migrating from UNIX to Linux - Red Hat could offer lousy support for migration, or actually tell sales people to encourage clients to stick with good old UNIX. They could publicly announce that they are there only to compete with Microsoft. Those are not what I would call good business decisions.
There's also the current climate of tight economics and heavy litigation. Why announce that your goal might be to take on MS toe-to-toe? If that was a long term goal, the company doing it would quietly work at areas such as deskop/GUI development, installer packages, and the like, and not discuss it much. Red Hat may not be David to MS's Goliath, but whoever is David is not going to make any noise until they have at least loaded up on rocks for their sling.
How did you turn those figures into that conclusion? If 44.3% reoffended within 23 years, that's 55.7% that didn't. If 9.4% fell in the 10 to 23 year range, then 90.6% of the ones who reoffended did so within the first 3 to 10 years. That's the result after a short term only treatment program. Further, the 20 year window for the study means that it was a treatment program that used only methods developed before 1970, at the very latest.
Naturally, we can guess that there are some reoffenders who don't get caught, even over a 20 year long window. That could be a little, or a lot, but the study doesn't say one way or another.
If 9.4% (which works out to 4.42 felons, neat trick) fall in the range from 10 to 23 years out, what would you estimate are the odds most of those are in the range from years 10 to 15, not 16 to 23? Probably pretty high, but the study is reported with the results for 7 years into it, and the full 20 years, but not others, so it's not all that obvious that all the data for years 16 through 23 may well represent only 1 criminal!
OK, so you're not seriously maladjusted. So 90% of your friends and acquantences aren't either. But as you put it, you scare people when you play Carmageddon. Why? Because they worry without a particular reason? Or because they have a very good reason?
That reason doesn't have to be you, mind you. It doesn't really sound like it is. It could be that everyone knows some person that is not-so-together, personally. If you are still in high school or younger, how about answers to a few questions. If I wanted to find a poorly adjusted, memtally unstable child, who might just be influenced by a game to take a nailgun to somebody's head, could I find one at your school? Could I find one in some of the particular classes you take? Could I find 2? 5? 10?
How many out of the population of your school do you think might be pushed over the edge? How many are you SURE could be?
If I met you in the cafeteria (if you still have manditory on school lunch) or in the hall between classes, and said "Would you please point at the ones you think are unstable?", would your arm get tired?
Now of those kids, how many have pretty good parents, who are trying to help the kids with their problems, and how many have screwed up parents who helped create the problems?
Some people may even see you as part of the problem. You're a false positive of sorts. A normal person who gives off signals that may make it harder to spot the really dangerous kid.
The more paranoid ones don't just want to control what games you play, they want to stop you from wearing a black trenchcoat, or dyeing your hair blue, or wearing a Marilyn Manson tee-shirt. They may go as far as school uniforms, or even try to make you act like something out of 50's TV. They're willing to go that far to control you, because there are dangerous kids in every school, in every class, maybe in every group of 10, and it's easy to try anything that might work and a lot of things that won't.
As for me, I was in the US Army, during the time things changed. In a few years, we went from having to 'toughen' up many new recruits, convince them that there were times to use violence against an enemy, to having to teach more and more of them to hold back, or at least keep it focused on armed opponents.
Belive it or not, the army tries to weed out people who could shoot unarmed little kids and rape their older sisters. The numbers of people who wanted to go kill someone, just about anyone, increased several times over, and the numbers who cared that some orders were unlawful and should not be obeyed dropped. The generation that sounds like it is just a few years ahead of yours is genuinely different, and we don't know why (I'm assuming of course that you are not that much older than your brother). We don't know if it has peaked with them or if it's going to keep on getting worse.
Re:I've been trying my best to switch people away
on
New IE Holes Discovered
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· Score: 2, Funny
I put Firebird 0.7 on the wife's PC, and convinced her to try it. She's not a techie type, but she is just about computer literate enough to know most programs can be adjusted some way or other, and to look for a preferences tab on the menus. (If the tab names don't seem self descriptive in normal english, she hollers for me, if they do she tries it on her own). After giving her about a week to get used to the interface, I suggested she try to pick a skin she liked better than the default. She set a few things, asked about some others, and then called me to see a tab that went to a developer's message (which read something like "in the finished version, this will do foo.") I explained to her that Firebird wasn't up to version 1.0 yet, just "point seven". She asked me what IE was up to ("About 6.0, honey"). Then she said, "So Microsoft multiplies all theirs by 10?"
The arguements for bundling mostly have good counter arguements. Sure, it can make sense for a theme park to charge a single admission rather than a per ride fee. They can save a lot of administrative costs. Those who remember Disney's old A through E ticket system, where the consumer often ended up with a bunch of left over A & B tickets, and tired kids who didn't want to ride the Mad Hatter's teacup ride just to use them up, will know the feeling.
But, the LP or CD format itself is bundling. Downloading just the songs you want is a move _away_ from bundling. Paying a flat fee per song looks like bundling on the level of pop music and single tracks, but is a move away from bundling at the album level.
Example: At 99 cents a track, Mike Oldfield's Tubular bells will cost you about 2 dollars for the whole album (2 tracks). Tubular Bells 2 is about 20 dollars, and Tubular Bells 3 is about 16. So, if Mr. Oldfield releases Tubular Bells 4, it will doubtless consist of exactly as many tracks as his agency figures will maximize total return.
I'm trasmodic that someone actually brought this up.
Re:Address to spelling mistakes...
on
20 Years of Virii
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· Score: 1
When I read it, I knew you weren't running a spell checker, and so you were getting most of your text right by the power of your own mind. Ergo you were probably a reasonably educated and possibly smart person, but had decided this was not a 'mission critical' task. You easily convinced me that what you had to say was worth reading further. By the time I noticed a spelling mistake, I'd also noticed several logical thoughts and a couple of examples of you being concise.
In the same way, you could have probably split an infinitive or confused words such as imply or infer without me thinking any less of you. On the other hand, there is probably someone who just noted my use of "such as" rather than "like" and thinks better of me, and someone else who noticed whatever errors I've made here and thinks worse of me. Some people's pet bug is misuse of 'its' and 'it's'. Others especially detest a run-on sentence.
Do these things really matter? Everything counts in large amounts. Make enough mistakes and they will make it too much work for even the most frendly reader to get to your points. You're two orders of magnetude below that point from my POV, but every reader sets that limit for his or her self.
Oh, and you were put "back in the barrel" rather than "on a soapbox", unless you are speaking physically and use one for a chair at your desk instead of metaphorically;-)
And the correct plural of Octopus is Octopoia (It's a greek root word, not latin, after all). But, the major thrust of this article seems significant. Someone spotted a problem 20 years ago, and some things that might have helped address it weren't done at the time. Hindsight is always 20-20, but maybe this someone is the man to ask about the next problem in the pipe-line.
Worries that Open Source is being painted as communist are generally overblown. Tell the average politican that anything not for profit is socialist, and his first thought is, "My wife is on the board of two not-for-profit hospital funds, I just took a speaking fee from a not-for-profit organization, and it sounds like this niblick thinks I'm some kind of commie.".
Most politicians have heard someone fussing about communism since they started, as for example: "If this city doesn't put up the christmas lights two weeks earlier this year then they're not supporting local retailers and so they're a buncha communists!". Politicians get used to this very early in their careers.
Say, aren't chambers-of-commerce organizations non-profit? And credit unions? And state universities? Didn't the banks claim credit unions were communistic? Did the politicians listen?
At the least, he was assuming everyone present knew what Postmodernism and Deconstruction mean in academics. I think he was assuming everyone present would understand a sort of line he was drawing about the ambiguous meanings that can result from deconstruction technique, as otherwise his point degenerates into a straw man arguement, but I'm not at all sure on that - maybe he crossed the line.
Some of those "engineering" problems are really in another domain. Even his point about hypertext making it easy to find links between things that we would normally class as not closely related, and how that may make us think there is no distinction between close and distant, sounds like an engineering problem in some ways (It's tempting to think you could solve it by counting the relative numbers of hits for a search engine, or by a catagorization scheme). Eco seems to be thinking outside of both the academic box and the engineering one by suggesting that even if we implement such an engineering solution, we won't be able to trust it without some historical perspective to tell us towards what long term goals the engineering solution should aim.
Between loss of electronic data from format problems, and loss of celluloid data from mouldy vaults, and loss of paper data from legal ambiguity about ownership, a surprisingly high amount of culture is going to vanish before it enters the public domain. Look around you. This just may be what a dark age looks like from the inside.
What an amazing coincidence. I've just been waiting for a solution to the second half of Hilbert's 16th problem to be able start construction of the first transatlantic tunnel, featureing all transparent aluminum construction to allow seeing into other cars.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but (you knew there was a but coming, didn't you?) I recall the flap a decade or so ago over the US IRS. They were flagging people who corrected minor mistakes by the IRS and paid what they thought was actually correct (where this was higher). Seems the IRS fell into the habit of calling this the "dumb but honest" flag. Remarks to that effect were even in the IRS's codebase. I don't think Open Source would work for the IRS any more than you do, but I also want to find a way for some sort of watchdog to quickly detect such things hiding in Closed Source applications, particularly ones used by the government, but possibly including private entities where they have become trusted keystones of the society. The IRS has actually become a better agency over the last ten years or so, but it took a lot of effort by congress to weed out problems that had become endemic and institutionalized.
So I guess the question is not should Google become Open Source, but should there be some auditing process for Closed Source code used by such entities, and if so, who should become the new watchman?
I'm the "granparent" poster. and I said it was making some people look like morons, far from everyone. I also said that some of the pseudo-morons obviously were NOT real morons, because of other things they wrote in each case that made intelligent points. This boils down to "Put your best arguement first, and you will be taken a lot more seriously, and more people will bother to read what you wrote next." I'm glad you think I may have had a good point amidst the bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
The rennaisance happened without copyrights. The artists got paid by princes, dukes, and popes. Personally, I'd take copyright law with all the extensions, before I would go back to being ruled by princes, dukes and popes.
You're making sense. I gathered from his own posts that the poster you were replying to had theological issues with "Darwinism", and, while I'm not going to pick your post apart for possible minor errors, on the whole it looked quite rational. (Since we're using natural language, it is always possible to nitpick - English itself isn't built to be rigorously logical). In fact, I responded to your post because it looked to be unlikely to descend to name calling and irrational "arguements" as fast as some threads.
Evolution reduced to the simplest senses, i.e. "survival of the fittest", is tautalogical (that one survived, so it must be the fittest). Properly elaborated from those bases, it becomes scientific, that is it makes testable predictions. In fact, it makes quite a few of them that have passed such tests, and so has come to be well regarded among scientists and rationalists in general.
Unfortunately, the theory has also been elaborated in other directions by many supporters. Old errors of that sort became "Social Darwinism". Looking at this thread, I noticed several posters who write as though the word Evolution included dogmatic atheism, others who think it implies something called de-evolution and that some of their fellow slashdotters are suffering from it, at least one who lumps meme-theory in with it, and so on. I'm not sure just what the original poster thought was included in the core concept.
I don't think he was necessarily picking a definition that was a deliberate straw man explanation however. He may well have been referring to some of the same definitions some "supporters of evolution" were offering.
I clicked the link. Now why would I want quality free phone calls?
Norway has checks and balances that you hope will accomplish justice. The US has checks and balances that we hope will accomplish justice. Guess what, a conglomerate of global corporations is using your system towards its own ends, without any true regard for justice. They've been doing that here, too.
There are a number of predictions made by Darwin in TOoS. In essence, these are what make it science at all - testable pedictions.
1. The mechanism of heredity does not allow for unlimited blending. This is largely demonstrated by the work of Mendel and successors, but better confirmed by Crick and Watson and theirs, as DNA's structure explains well why genes can best be treated as a full on/off encoding scheme.
2. Better copying fidelity (fewer mutations), actually makes natural selection work faster, even though that seems counter-intuitive to many. (Really bad copying fidelity means mutations get overwritten with new mutations before they have time to be selected for or against).
Smaller mutations are more likely to be favorable than larger ones, and again make natural selection work faster. (While Darwin briefly sketched these two principles, they have been most developed more recently, up to Gould and Dawkins.). This also is at least partially proved by the extremely accurate copying of DNA in modern organisms.
# 2 is less solidly proven than # 1. It makes a great deal of sense when applying it to the origin of species question, as Darwin did, but raises some logical inconsistencies, or makes disprovable predictions, when applied to the origin of life itself. (Maybe that's why Darwin didn't call his book "The Origin of Life"). So, depending on just what you claim is included in the theory of Natural Selection, the poster claiming that there are substantial problems just may be right, at least if substantial means bigger than can be fixed with the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis.
That "assume that colleagues are playing fairly" bit is why Alastair Crowley said that scientists were about the last people to debunk mediums and table-rappers, and the best debunker was a good stage magician.
Most people are amateurs at any given subject, but what are the odds that there are a dozen or so people that really, really understand M-theory, a much larger group that just saw the PBS special, and no others in the middle range? Papers on M-theory have been published in Science, and a number of journals with upwards of 5,000 readers each. Are we therefore to assume the vast majority either skipped those papers, or didn't understand them? Sounds like we are debating what is a sufficiently large value of "really, really".
What are the odds that Stephen Hawking really understands time? After all, he's a Physicist. In his book "A Brief History of Time" (admittedly aimed at a popular audience), he argued for changes in the way physics defines both the ordinality and cardinality of time (extending it to a negative axis, then to an imaginary one). Just what such changes to what is essentially a number-line mean, and whether they are "allowed", is something only a dozen or so abstract mathematicians can really, really say they understand. There is no good scientific proof inside of Physics that what Hawking did was acceptable, because the possible flaws are related to Cantor's transfinite math, and would require a mathematical proof instead. (And a scientific proof and a mathematical one are two different animals).
If there are only a dozen or so people who really, really understand Cantorian transfinites, and only a dozen or so who really, really underwtand how Quantum Mechanics might apply to Cosmology, what are the chances those two sets have any members in common? So what reason do we have to think Dr. Hawking's theories are any better than Joe Blogs the ditch digger's?
Einstein did excellent work on such subjects as explaining brownian motion and on the diffusion of atoms of one metal across a welded joint with another metal. His papers on both generally took a subject where there were lots of things that the existing theory couldn't explain or predict, and improved the scientific basis for the subject. It's even been said that he turned some areas of metallurgy from black arts into science. The paper on metalurgy is mathematically beautiful. It starts with the standard equations of that time, substitutes more complex terms for simple ones until the equations in the middle of the paper are huge, then switches to simplifying until at the end, he has generated a whole new set of equations, which are all either easier to use than the originals or predict more, or both.
When he published on special relativity, he had an exceptional reputation as a synthesist. The very fact that he was using the same methods he had demonstrated worked in less controversial areas impressed other physicists with the possibility that he might have made a phenominal breakthrough. Many people who knew physics still thought he might be wrong, but probably from making a subtle mistake that even the best pro might make, if that.
(Or maybe the limits of reality) - Roberston is in a position to market Linux. He has little or no control over whether customers choose to replace MS or UNIX systems with it.
Just try to define a business strategy here that would discourage a customer from migrating from UNIX to Linux - Red Hat could offer lousy support for migration, or actually tell sales people to encourage clients to stick with good old UNIX. They could publicly announce that they are there only to compete with Microsoft. Those are not what I would call good business decisions.
There's also the current climate of tight economics and heavy litigation. Why announce that your goal might be to take on MS toe-to-toe? If that was a long term goal, the company doing it would quietly work at areas such as deskop/GUI development, installer packages, and the like, and not discuss it much. Red Hat may not be David to MS's Goliath, but whoever is David is not going to make any noise until they have at least loaded up on rocks for their sling.
How did you turn those figures into that conclusion? If 44.3% reoffended within 23 years, that's 55.7% that didn't. If 9.4% fell in the 10 to 23 year range, then 90.6% of the ones who reoffended did so within the first 3 to 10 years. That's the result after a short term only treatment program. Further, the 20 year window for the study means that it was a treatment program that used only methods developed before 1970, at the very latest.
Naturally, we can guess that there are some reoffenders who don't get caught, even over a 20 year long window. That could be a little, or a lot, but the study doesn't say one way or another.
If 9.4% (which works out to 4.42 felons, neat trick) fall in the range from 10 to 23 years out, what would you estimate are the odds most of those are in the range from years 10 to 15, not 16 to 23? Probably pretty high, but the study is reported with the results for 7 years into it, and the full 20 years, but not others, so it's not all that obvious that all the data for years 16 through 23 may well represent only 1 criminal!
OK, so you're not seriously maladjusted. So 90% of your friends and acquantences aren't either. But as you put it, you scare people when you play Carmageddon. Why? Because they worry without a particular reason? Or because they have a very good reason?
That reason doesn't have to be you, mind you. It doesn't really sound like it is. It could be that everyone knows some person that is not-so-together, personally. If you are still in high school or younger, how about answers to a few questions. If I wanted to find a poorly adjusted, memtally unstable child, who might just be influenced by a game to take a nailgun to somebody's head, could I find one at your school? Could I find one in some of the particular classes you take? Could I find 2? 5? 10?
How many out of the population of your school do you think might be pushed over the edge? How many are you SURE could be?
If I met you in the cafeteria (if you still have manditory on school lunch) or in the hall between classes, and said "Would you please point at the ones you think are unstable?", would your arm get tired?
Now of those kids, how many have pretty good parents, who are trying to help the kids with their problems, and how many have screwed up parents who helped create the problems?
Some people may even see you as part of the problem. You're a false positive of sorts. A normal person who gives off signals that may make it harder to spot the really dangerous kid.
The more paranoid ones don't just want to control what games you play, they want to stop you from wearing a black trenchcoat, or dyeing your hair blue, or wearing a Marilyn Manson tee-shirt. They may go as far as school uniforms, or even try to make you act like something out of 50's TV. They're willing to go that far to control you, because there are dangerous kids in every school, in every class, maybe in every group of 10, and it's easy to try anything that might work and a lot of things that won't.
As for me, I was in the US Army, during the time things changed. In a few years, we went from having to 'toughen' up many new recruits, convince them that there were times to use violence against an enemy, to having to teach more and more of them to hold back, or at least keep it focused on armed opponents.
Belive it or not, the army tries to weed out people who could shoot unarmed little kids and rape their older sisters. The numbers of people who wanted to go kill someone, just about anyone, increased several times over, and the numbers who cared that some orders were unlawful and should not be obeyed dropped. The generation that sounds like it is just a few years ahead of yours is genuinely different, and we don't know why (I'm assuming of course that you are not that much older than your brother). We don't know if it has peaked with them or if it's going to keep on getting worse.
I put Firebird 0.7 on the wife's PC, and convinced her to try it. She's not a techie type, but she is just about computer literate enough to know most programs can be adjusted some way or other, and to look for a preferences tab on the menus. (If the tab names don't seem self descriptive in normal english, she hollers for me, if they do she tries it on her own). After giving her about a week to get used to the interface, I suggested she try to pick a skin she liked better than the default. She set a few things, asked about some others, and then called me to see a tab that went to a developer's message (which read something like "in the finished version, this will do foo.") I explained to her that Firebird wasn't up to version 1.0 yet, just "point seven". She asked me what IE was up to ("About 6.0, honey"). Then she said, "So Microsoft multiplies all theirs by 10?"
The arguements for bundling mostly have good counter arguements. Sure, it can make sense for a theme park to charge a single admission rather than a per ride fee. They can save a lot of administrative costs. Those who remember Disney's old A through E ticket system, where the consumer often ended up with a bunch of left over A & B tickets, and tired kids who didn't want to ride the Mad Hatter's teacup ride just to use them up, will know the feeling.
But, the LP or CD format itself is bundling. Downloading just the songs you want is a move _away_ from bundling. Paying a flat fee per song looks like bundling on the level of pop music and single tracks, but is a move away from bundling at the album level.
Example: At 99 cents a track, Mike Oldfield's Tubular bells will cost you about 2 dollars for the whole album (2 tracks). Tubular Bells 2 is about 20 dollars, and Tubular Bells 3 is about 16. So, if Mr. Oldfield releases Tubular Bells 4, it will doubtless consist of exactly as many tracks as his agency figures will maximize total return.
I'm trasmodic that someone actually brought this up.
When I read it, I knew you weren't running a spell checker, and so you were getting most of your text right by the power of your own mind. Ergo you were probably a reasonably educated and possibly smart person, but had decided this was not a 'mission critical' task. You easily convinced me that what you had to say was worth reading further. By the time I noticed a spelling mistake, I'd also noticed several logical thoughts and a couple of examples of you being concise. In the same way, you could have probably split an infinitive or confused words such as imply or infer without me thinking any less of you. On the other hand, there is probably someone who just noted my use of "such as" rather than "like" and thinks better of me, and someone else who noticed whatever errors I've made here and thinks worse of me. Some people's pet bug is misuse of 'its' and 'it's'. Others especially detest a run-on sentence. Do these things really matter? Everything counts in large amounts. Make enough mistakes and they will make it too much work for even the most frendly reader to get to your points. You're two orders of magnetude below that point from my POV, but every reader sets that limit for his or her self. Oh, and you were put "back in the barrel" rather than "on a soapbox", unless you are speaking physically and use one for a chair at your desk instead of metaphorically ;-)
And the correct plural of Octopus is Octopoia (It's a greek root word, not latin, after all). But, the major thrust of this article seems significant. Someone spotted a problem 20 years ago, and some things that might have helped address it weren't done at the time. Hindsight is always 20-20, but maybe this someone is the man to ask about the next problem in the pipe-line.
Worries that Open Source is being painted as communist are generally overblown. Tell the average politican that anything not for profit is socialist, and his first thought is, "My wife is on the board of two not-for-profit hospital funds, I just took a speaking fee from a not-for-profit organization, and it sounds like this niblick thinks I'm some kind of commie.".
Most politicians have heard someone fussing about communism since they started, as for example: "If this city doesn't put up the christmas lights two weeks earlier this year then they're not supporting local retailers and so they're a buncha communists!". Politicians get used to this very early in their careers.
Say, aren't chambers-of-commerce organizations non-profit? And credit unions? And state universities? Didn't the banks claim credit unions were communistic? Did the politicians listen?
Sounds interesting. Did he buy a single copy of a rare and important newspaper, or does he now own a whole press corporation?
(And how do the woodchucks figure into this?)
At the least, he was assuming everyone present knew what Postmodernism and Deconstruction mean in academics. I think he was assuming everyone present would understand a sort of line he was drawing about the ambiguous meanings that can result from deconstruction technique, as otherwise his point degenerates into a straw man arguement, but I'm not at all sure on that - maybe he crossed the line.
Some of those "engineering" problems are really in another domain. Even his point about hypertext making it easy to find links between things that we would normally class as not closely related, and how that may make us think there is no distinction between close and distant, sounds like an engineering problem in some ways (It's tempting to think you could solve it by counting the relative numbers of hits for a search engine, or by a catagorization scheme). Eco seems to be thinking outside of both the academic box and the engineering one by suggesting that even if we implement such an engineering solution, we won't be able to trust it without some historical perspective to tell us towards what long term goals the engineering solution should aim.
Between loss of electronic data from format problems, and loss of celluloid data from mouldy vaults, and loss of paper data from legal ambiguity about ownership, a surprisingly high amount of culture is going to vanish before it enters the public domain. Look around you. This just may be what a dark age looks like from the inside.
What an amazing coincidence. I've just been waiting for a solution to the second half of Hilbert's 16th problem to be able start construction of the first transatlantic tunnel, featureing all transparent aluminum construction to allow seeing into other cars.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but (you knew there was a but coming, didn't you?) I recall the flap a decade or so ago over the US IRS. They were flagging people who corrected minor mistakes by the IRS and paid what they thought was actually correct (where this was higher). Seems the IRS fell into the habit of calling this the "dumb but honest" flag. Remarks to that effect were even in the IRS's codebase. I don't think Open Source would work for the IRS any more than you do, but I also want to find a way for some sort of watchdog to quickly detect such things hiding in Closed Source applications, particularly ones used by the government, but possibly including private entities where they have become trusted keystones of the society. The IRS has actually become a better agency over the last ten years or so, but it took a lot of effort by congress to weed out problems that had become endemic and institutionalized.
So I guess the question is not should Google become Open Source, but should there be some auditing process for Closed Source code used by such entities, and if so, who should become the new watchman?
I'm the "granparent" poster. and I said it was making some people look like morons, far from everyone. I also said that some of the pseudo-morons obviously were NOT real morons, because of other things they wrote in each case that made intelligent points. This boils down to "Put your best arguement first, and you will be taken a lot more seriously, and more people will bother to read what you wrote next." I'm glad you think I may have had a good point amidst the bullshit.
ROTFLMAO! Hey, is there anyway to mod an AC up?