SimLife was terrific, and I should think would also be great for learning genetics, population biology, and evolution. I don't know why it wasn't carried forward. As far as I know the only way to run it is on an ancient Mac. I wish there was a Linux version.
I notice that that site does not list the states in which it is claimed that truth is not an absolute defense to defamation. To my knowledge, they do not exist. In any case, in the United States (all of it, this being the result of a First Amendment-based decision of the Supreme court), where the person defamed is a "public figure", the plaintiff can only win if the statement is not only false but made with "actual malice". "actual malice" is a technical term that doesn't mean what you might think: in this context it means that the statements must be made either with knowledge that they are false or with reckless disregard for their truth. School board members are certainly public figures; school teachers and administrators probably are too. So the plaintiffs can only win if the statements are false and if they can show that the blogger made them knowing them to be false or with reckless disregard for the truth.
I bet I'm not the only person here who misses Building 20. (For those who don't know, it was the last of the buildings thrown together during WWII for the Rad Lab. Even at the end, parts of it (like my grad student office) didn't have light switches. Who needs light switches if there's a break panel down the hall? But great things were done there. Among other things, it housed Linguistics and Philosophy, the Model Railway Club, the Piano Lab, ROTC, and Jerry Letvin.)
This still isn't right. ALL trademarks are with respect to a particular sector of the market initially, although it is possible for a company to register the same mark in multiple market sectors. This is true whether or not the word is a real word or something made up like "Kodak" or "Xerox". Furthermore, some marks come to apply across the board, not just to single sectors, under the "famous mark" provisions. "Beretta" is probably still available as a mark for a line of towels, but "Sears" isn't, even if Sears doesn't have its own line of towels, because "Sears" is so well known and has trademarks for such a range of products that it qualifies as a "famous mark". Marks that are made up from scratch are safer because nobody has used them before and, having no descriptive content, nobody is motivated to, but they don't have some sort of absolute privilege over regular words.
Furthermore, it is not true that a regular word may not be a mark for
something "related", that is, something of which it may be construed as descriptive. I think you've got a somewhat garbled version of the status of what are called "generic" marks, to which it is impossible to acquire exclusive rights, and "descriptive" marks, to which it is possible to acquire exclusive rights, but harder than for "arbitrary" and "suggestive" marks.
There's a good summary of this here.
Hunh? So "Apple" isn't a real word? How about "Chevron"? You certainly can trademark real words. There are several reasons that people make up trademarks like "Kwik" and "Kleen", one of which is that they seem modern or funky, which attracts some people. It is also true that if you choose something made up rather than a real word you don't have to worry about conflicts with generic use of the term, but that doesn't mean that real words in their ordinary spelling can't be trademarked.
If the design is sufficiently similar to the Nintendo Wii as to confuse consumers, Nintendo can sue for infringement on its trade dress. Trade dress is similar to trademark, but instead of the words of a brand name or slogan it refers to the non-functional characteristics of a product. In other words, existing law should take care of this problem.
Some idiots are so eager to delete articles for non-notability that they put them up for speedy deletion before the first draft is completed. A while back I wrote the first couple sentences of an article and saved it (habit of people like me who remember unreliable connections). As I continued to write, somebody came along and inserted a speedy deletion nomination notice into the article. He even had the gall to complain when I added more to the article and removed his notice (which was perfectly proper since he had no business placing it and with the additions in my view the article now did provide sufficient evidence of notability.) Now, granted, the article as it stood may not have provided sufficient evidence of notability, but you can hardly expect that in the first couple of sentences. Moreover, it was obvious from the timestamp that the article had just been started. One of the rules for proposing deletions for non-notability should be not to put one up until the article has been around for a little while. You'd think that this would be obvious, but some people on Wikipedia really are zealots.
I just had a similar problem with a book. Last year I bought a book from Amazon.com. Since it was a replacement for a copy I had lost, I didn't like inside it when it arrived, just put it on the shelf. The other day I went to consult it, only to find that although it had the cover of the book I ordered, inside was a completely different book! Amazon's response was that since I bought it last year they won't give me a full refund but that I can apply for a partial refund. On the other hand, this is really the publisher's mistake, not Amazon's, so perhaps I should raise it with them. (And yes, it's an expensive academic book, so the cost of a new copy is not trivial.)
Not only was the buyer reimbursed 140 euros for the unwanted software, he was awarded 2,300 euros in legal costs. Refusing to abide by the EULA could get expensive for vendors.
The fact that there were massive demonstrations in the wake of Kent State puts paid to your theory that the anti-war movement died out because the protesters were frightened by the deaths at Kent State.
Outside of a nationwide student strike over the Kent State Massacre itself, there were no more mass antiwar demonstrations.
Not so. How about the Mayday Protestsof 1971, which put Washington into a virtual state of siege?
Since when did the Kent State Massacre put an end to the anti-war movement? That's not how I remember it, and I've never even seen anyone claim this. The movement continued, the war became increasingly unpopular, and the US withdrew.
Incidentally, four students were killed at Kent State, not two: Alison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder. Only the first two were participants in the protest; the second two were bystanders.
Until I read through it, I thought that you were going to propose that
we just use numerical IP adresses. That's the/. solution. It has the virtue of keeping the riff-raff from clogging the pipes.
I think that you misunderstand Chomsky's critique of behaviorism. He did not claim that classical conditioning did not work on rats. Nor did he claim that classical conditioning did not work on humans for some behaviors. What he claimed is that behaviorism was not a complete psychological theory in that it could not explain human linguistic behavior. Behaviorist accounts of human language were based on a grossly oversimplified and inaccurate idea of what human linguistic behavior is like. Essentially, they thought that all you had to do was pair chunks of sound with meanings by classical conditioning. What Chomsky did was show that human language involves much more than simple wordmeaning associations, that behaviorists had not provided anything resembling an account of human language as it actually is, and that it was very unlikely that they could.
Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior was indeed the death knell of behaviorism as a theory of human cognition. It was one of the central events resulting in the development of what we now call cognitive science. Behaviorist psychology survived in some ways for several reasons. First, even if it doesn't explain human language, it does work for a lot of behavior, both of humans and of other organisms. If you were interested in rats, it was still reasonable to study operant conditioning of rats. Second, as a consequence of the first reason,
classical conditioning is an effective form of behavior modification for certain types of behavior. Clinical psychologists therefore continue to make use of it. What they try to do is not induce native language acquisition. Third, there is a certain amount of inertia in any field. It takes a while for new ideas to be accepted even if the evidence for them is strong, and even then people working in areas not directly affected often don't find it worthwhile to change what they are doing. (Note, for example, that classical mechanics is not only used in engineering but continues to be taught by physicists even though in a technical sense since the introduction of relativity we know that it isn't right. It's much simpler to use it where it works than to do everything relativistically.)
The failure of Skinner and many other psychologists of the time to recognize the complexity of human language and therefore to believe that their theories could handle it has often been repeated, in psychology and AI. Quite a few linguistically oriented AI projects announced success only for it to turn out that the claims were vastly overblown because they had an inadequate understanding of the problem, which they therefore had not solved. For an entertaining critique of such work see: Norbert Hornstein and B. Elan Dresher (1976) "On Some Supposed Contributions of Artificial Intelligence to the Scientific Study of Language," Cognition 4, pp.32l-398. For a somewhat more recent example, I remember a talk by a proponent of neural nets in the late 1980s who claimed to have a net that "learned English syntax". The reality was that, if fed rather carefully constructed data, the net learned to distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive verbs. There is a lot more than that to "learning English syntax".
We have known for years that Verisign is a badly behaved company. This is just the latest example. I just don't understand why ICANN renewed their contract. Like Diebold and SCO, this is a company that we don't need.
Conflict between Muslims and others in Nigeria and other parts of Africa is not the result of European colonialism: it is the result of Muslim colonialism. Not only did Christianity precede Islam in parts of Africa (such as Ethiopia), but where it didn't, there was often conflict between Islam and the indigenous religions. In Nigeria it is not only Christians who resist the imposition of Islam but the many people who still practice tribal religions.
Yes, it would lessen his problems: he would no longer be personally liable. That is one of the main reasons for forming a corporation. And he wouldn't necessarily have to be the one to do the work. If there is money for staff, a staff member can hire the lawyer. If there isn't, another volunteer might do it.
Sure, but in that case it seems to me that the right thing to do is not permanently shut down the site but shut it down temporarily to avoid legal action and ask the community to help reorganize. Create a corporation to run the site so that the individuals involved won't be liable, raise a little money for hosting and if necessary legal advice, and enlist some volunteers so that one person doesn't have to do all the work. It seems that this site has a lot of users and supporters so that it wouldn't be that hard to do.
The letter is from the publisher's Canadian representative and objects to the distribution of scores that are still under copyright in Canada. Furthermore, insofar as the site is available to people in the EU, the publisher can claim that it is engaged in copyright violation in the EU and take legal action in the EU resulting in a judgment that would be enforceable in Canada.
I don't understand why the site is being taken down. The publisher's demands would be satisfied by removing the scores still under copyright in the EU. As I understand it, the copyright status of these scores is noted, so presumably it wouldn't be a difficult job to identify and remove those just those scores. And since, according to the article, most of the scores on the site are out of copyright everywhere, removing those still under copyright in the EU, while regrettable, would not destroy the utility of the site. The cease-and-desist letter is annoying, but I don't see that it should require taking down the site.
It seems to me that these people are doing a terrific job of negative advertising. their activities tell me two things: (a) they don't know much about copyright law; (b) they're a bunch of jerks. If I were considering employing them, both of these features would warn me off them. I'm tempted to think that they have a mole in their office who is out to undermine them.
I always save in ODF if it is my own document. If I receive something in MS Word, immediately convert it to ODF if I may want to edit it, otherwise to PDF. The only time I save anything in MS Word format is if I have to provide it for someone else.
If the patent holder knew that the patent was invalid when it filed it, e.g. if it failed to disclose prior art, then the licensee could presumably sue for fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to look for the DOS version. The problems other than lack of niche differentiation should disappear with current hardware.
SimLife was terrific, and I should think would also be great for learning genetics, population biology, and evolution. I don't know why it wasn't carried forward. As far as I know the only way to run it is on an ancient Mac. I wish there was a Linux version.
There was also some kind of materials science lab used by the archaeologists. I forget what it was called.
I notice that that site does not list the states in which it is claimed that truth is not an absolute defense to defamation. To my knowledge, they do not exist. In any case, in the United States (all of it, this being the result of a First Amendment-based decision of the Supreme court), where the person defamed is a "public figure", the plaintiff can only win if the statement is not only false but made with "actual malice". "actual malice" is a technical term that doesn't mean what you might think: in this context it means that the statements must be made either with knowledge that they are false or with reckless disregard for their truth. School board members are certainly public figures; school teachers and administrators probably are too. So the plaintiffs can only win if the statements are false and if they can show that the blogger made them knowing them to be false or with reckless disregard for the truth.
I bet I'm not the only person here who misses Building 20. (For those who don't know, it was the last of the buildings thrown together during WWII for the Rad Lab. Even at the end, parts of it (like my grad student office) didn't have light switches. Who needs light switches if there's a break panel down the hall? But great things were done there. Among other things, it housed Linguistics and Philosophy, the Model Railway Club, the Piano Lab, ROTC, and Jerry Letvin.)
This still isn't right. ALL trademarks are with respect to a particular sector of the market initially, although it is possible for a company to register the same mark in multiple market sectors. This is true whether or not the word is a real word or something made up like "Kodak" or "Xerox". Furthermore, some marks come to apply across the board, not just to single sectors, under the "famous mark" provisions. "Beretta" is probably still available as a mark for a line of towels, but "Sears" isn't, even if Sears doesn't have its own line of towels, because "Sears" is so well known and has trademarks for such a range of products that it qualifies as a "famous mark". Marks that are made up from scratch are safer because nobody has used them before and, having no descriptive content, nobody is motivated to, but they don't have some sort of absolute privilege over regular words.
Furthermore, it is not true that a regular word may not be a mark for something "related", that is, something of which it may be construed as descriptive. I think you've got a somewhat garbled version of the status of what are called "generic" marks, to which it is impossible to acquire exclusive rights, and "descriptive" marks, to which it is possible to acquire exclusive rights, but harder than for "arbitrary" and "suggestive" marks. There's a good summary of this here.
Just as a matter of curiosity, if he's good and at odds with most of the rest of them, how did he get elected?
If the design is sufficiently similar to the Nintendo Wii as to confuse consumers, Nintendo can sue for infringement on its trade dress. Trade dress is similar to trademark, but instead of the words of a brand name or slogan it refers to the non-functional characteristics of a product. In other words, existing law should take care of this problem.
Some idiots are so eager to delete articles for non-notability that they put them up for speedy deletion before the first draft is completed. A while back I wrote the first couple sentences of an article and saved it (habit of people like me who remember unreliable connections). As I continued to write, somebody came along and inserted a speedy deletion nomination notice into the article. He even had the gall to complain when I added more to the article and removed his notice (which was perfectly proper since he had no business placing it and with the additions in my view the article now did provide sufficient evidence of notability.) Now, granted, the article as it stood may not have provided sufficient evidence of notability, but you can hardly expect that in the first couple of sentences. Moreover, it was obvious from the timestamp that the article had just been started. One of the rules for proposing deletions for non-notability should be not to put one up until the article has been around for a little while. You'd think that this would be obvious, but some people on Wikipedia really are zealots.
I just had a similar problem with a book. Last year I bought a book from Amazon.com. Since it was a replacement for a copy I had lost, I didn't like inside it when it arrived, just put it on the shelf. The other day I went to consult it, only to find that although it had the cover of the book I ordered, inside was a completely different book! Amazon's response was that since I bought it last year they won't give me a full refund but that I can apply for a partial refund. On the other hand, this is really the publisher's mistake, not Amazon's, so perhaps I should raise it with them. (And yes, it's an expensive academic book, so the cost of a new copy is not trivial.)
Not only was the buyer reimbursed 140 euros for the unwanted software, he was awarded 2,300 euros in legal costs. Refusing to abide by the EULA could get expensive for vendors.
The fact that there were massive demonstrations in the wake of Kent State puts paid to your theory that the anti-war movement died out because the protesters were frightened by the deaths at Kent State.
Not so. How about the Mayday Protestsof 1971, which put Washington into a virtual state of siege?
Since when did the Kent State Massacre put an end to the anti-war movement? That's not how I remember it, and I've never even seen anyone claim this. The movement continued, the war became increasingly unpopular, and the US withdrew.
Incidentally, four students were killed at Kent State, not two: Alison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder. Only the first two were participants in the protest; the second two were bystanders.
Until I read through it, I thought that you were going to propose that we just use numerical IP adresses. That's the /. solution. It has the virtue of keeping the riff-raff from clogging the pipes.
I think that you misunderstand Chomsky's critique of behaviorism. He did not claim that classical conditioning did not work on rats. Nor did he claim that classical conditioning did not work on humans for some behaviors. What he claimed is that behaviorism was not a complete psychological theory in that it could not explain human linguistic behavior. Behaviorist accounts of human language were based on a grossly oversimplified and inaccurate idea of what human linguistic behavior is like. Essentially, they thought that all you had to do was pair chunks of sound with meanings by classical conditioning. What Chomsky did was show that human language involves much more than simple wordmeaning associations, that behaviorists had not provided anything resembling an account of human language as it actually is, and that it was very unlikely that they could.
Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior was indeed the death knell of behaviorism as a theory of human cognition. It was one of the central events resulting in the development of what we now call cognitive science. Behaviorist psychology survived in some ways for several reasons. First, even if it doesn't explain human language, it does work for a lot of behavior, both of humans and of other organisms. If you were interested in rats, it was still reasonable to study operant conditioning of rats. Second, as a consequence of the first reason, classical conditioning is an effective form of behavior modification for certain types of behavior. Clinical psychologists therefore continue to make use of it. What they try to do is not induce native language acquisition. Third, there is a certain amount of inertia in any field. It takes a while for new ideas to be accepted even if the evidence for them is strong, and even then people working in areas not directly affected often don't find it worthwhile to change what they are doing. (Note, for example, that classical mechanics is not only used in engineering but continues to be taught by physicists even though in a technical sense since the introduction of relativity we know that it isn't right. It's much simpler to use it where it works than to do everything relativistically.)
The failure of Skinner and many other psychologists of the time to recognize the complexity of human language and therefore to believe that their theories could handle it has often been repeated, in psychology and AI. Quite a few linguistically oriented AI projects announced success only for it to turn out that the claims were vastly overblown because they had an inadequate understanding of the problem, which they therefore had not solved. For an entertaining critique of such work see: Norbert Hornstein and B. Elan Dresher (1976) "On Some Supposed Contributions of Artificial Intelligence to the Scientific Study of Language," Cognition 4, pp.32l-398. For a somewhat more recent example, I remember a talk by a proponent of neural nets in the late 1980s who claimed to have a net that "learned English syntax". The reality was that, if fed rather carefully constructed data, the net learned to distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive verbs. There is a lot more than that to "learning English syntax".
We have known for years that Verisign is a badly behaved company. This is just the latest example. I just don't understand why ICANN renewed their contract. Like Diebold and SCO, this is a company that we don't need.
Conflict between Muslims and others in Nigeria and other parts of Africa is not the result of European colonialism: it is the result of Muslim colonialism. Not only did Christianity precede Islam in parts of Africa (such as Ethiopia), but where it didn't, there was often conflict between Islam and the indigenous religions. In Nigeria it is not only Christians who resist the imposition of Islam but the many people who still practice tribal religions.
Yes, it would lessen his problems: he would no longer be personally liable. That is one of the main reasons for forming a corporation. And he wouldn't necessarily have to be the one to do the work. If there is money for staff, a staff member can hire the lawyer. If there isn't, another volunteer might do it.
Sure, but in that case it seems to me that the right thing to do is not permanently shut down the site but shut it down temporarily to avoid legal action and ask the community to help reorganize. Create a corporation to run the site so that the individuals involved won't be liable, raise a little money for hosting and if necessary legal advice, and enlist some volunteers so that one person doesn't have to do all the work. It seems that this site has a lot of users and supporters so that it wouldn't be that hard to do.
The letter is from the publisher's Canadian representative and objects to the distribution of scores that are still under copyright in Canada. Furthermore, insofar as the site is available to people in the EU, the publisher can claim that it is engaged in copyright violation in the EU and take legal action in the EU resulting in a judgment that would be enforceable in Canada.
I don't understand why the site is being taken down. The publisher's demands would be satisfied by removing the scores still under copyright in the EU. As I understand it, the copyright status of these scores is noted, so presumably it wouldn't be a difficult job to identify and remove those just those scores. And since, according to the article, most of the scores on the site are out of copyright everywhere, removing those still under copyright in the EU, while regrettable, would not destroy the utility of the site. The cease-and-desist letter is annoying, but I don't see that it should require taking down the site.
It seems to me that these people are doing a terrific job of negative advertising. their activities tell me two things: (a) they don't know much about copyright law; (b) they're a bunch of jerks. If I were considering employing them, both of these features would warn me off them. I'm tempted to think that they have a mole in their office who is out to undermine them.
I always save in ODF if it is my own document. If I receive something in MS Word, immediately convert it to ODF if I may want to edit it, otherwise to PDF. The only time I save anything in MS Word format is if I have to provide it for someone else.
If the patent holder knew that the patent was invalid when it filed it, e.g. if it failed to disclose prior art, then the licensee could presumably sue for fraud.