How is this going to work? Its hard to think of situations in which the federal government would have a need for DRM. What argument are they going to use for putting DRM into GNU software? And how are they going to implement it? At worst, they could say they won't use FLOSS software for particular purposes without DRM. They can't actually control FLOSS software without major changes in copyright law that would be hard to target at FLOSS.
It seems to me that government release of software under the GPL is a big win for the FLOSS movement, and not just because its an additional adopter of the model. This provides a unifiying force between
left wing and libertarian advocates of FLOSS and those conservatives who are not in the pockets of big corporations. That kind of conservative often views the federal government as a big ripoff. Releasing government software under the GPL gives back to the people.
No, Ruby has had support from the outset for some of the Japanese encoding systems but not Unicode. Unicode is not used that much in Japan since there are encoding systems for Japanese that were already established when Unicode came along and that are arguably better, for Japanese, than Unicode.
I can't speak for other people, but I know that my decisions about what language to use haven't been based just on what I already know and what community I want to join. For instance, my first language was Fortran. After that I learned Basic and assembly language (Mix, just on paper, and the language of a Japanese laboratory minicomputer the model of which I no longer remember. The only documentation I had was in Japanese, which at the time I was just learning. And people complain about man pages!). When I first learned C, it was in a situation in which I could also have used Fortran. I learned C because it looked like it would be a better language and I was interested in trying something new.
For scripting languages, for many years I used
either a shell (sh or csh) or awk. When Perl came along, I read the book and twice made stabs at writing something non-trivial in it, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. I attribute this to my innate sense of good taste. Both the language itself (through non-orthogonality, excessive overloading, and lots of little tricks) and the Perl community (through typical practices and valuing short, cryptic code) encourage unreadable code. At the same time, I knew that AWK was not ideal for some kinds of programs (and I"ve written 500 line AWK scripts, and AWK scripts that write and then execute other AWK scripts) so when Python came along, I was interested. I still use AWK for some things since I know it well and the automatic parsing is handy, but more and more I am using Python. I find that Python encourages good programming practice and provides everything that I would get from Perl. I've also tried Tcl, to the extent of writing a moderately complex (1500 line)
program. For some things it is fine, but I don't think it scales up as well as Python.
So I think that my choices, and probably other people's, aren't just a matter of inertia and
general type of programming.
For me, by the way, in a lot of cases, Unicode
support is important. That's a nice feature of Python. Ruby looks interesting, but as far as I can tell doesn't support Unicode. Anybody know if Ruby does, or will soon, support Unicode?
I was on the Stanford faculty from 1983-1994. There was very little relationship between administrative computing and academic computing at the departmental level. (There was a centralized "academic computing" facility, run as I recall by the same people who ran the administrative stuff, that continued to be used for a while by the older-fashioned people in some non-science departments as others adopted PCs.) Administrative computing centered on an IBM dinosaur that ran a lot of locally developed software. Migration away from a system like that can be pretty rough, with data tied up in peculiar local formats, and a lot of the staff get very invested in it.
Stanford was also rather prone to central decision-making. Around 1983 they decided that every faculty member should have an IBM PC and arranged a cheap deal. (As I recall we paid a modest amount and the machines eventually became ours.) Later, they made a sweetheart deal with Apple and only wanted to support Macs. They were very slow to support Unix systems, even though when I got there in 1983 there were about 150 Vaxen, two running VMS, the rest Unix,
and soon after that Suns, Microvaxen, and HP Bobcats.
Administrative computing was a different world, one from the past. Logging in to the admin system was kind of like "Voyage to the Lost World".
I can imagine that the decision to go to outside suppliers reflects a lack of confidence in the ability of the internal administrative computing people to do the job.
Beyond the damage that this does to democracy, the other sad thing here is that by focussing so narrowly on their special interests the disabilities groups are very likely hurting themselves in the long term. Presumably most of us sympathize with people with disabilities and support measures to make life easier for them. In the future, I'm going to have to look very carefully at what these organizations want to see whether it is really a good idea. I won't be able to assume that they know what is in their own interests and that it isn't going to be harmful for everybody else. Their bad judgment in this matter has made them less trustworthy.
The GPL is not monopolistic. It doesn't prevent other people from competing. If you want to produce a competitor to gcc, for example, the fact that gcc is
GPL-ed doesn't interfere. Similarly, I don't see that the fact that the Linux kernel is distributed under the GPL interferes in any way with FreeBSD.
There are certainly arguments pro and con the GPL. If you prefer to work with software distributed under the BSD license, or to distribute your own under the BSD license, I have no problem with that. But there is nothing monopolistic about the GPL.
I think parent needs to read more carefully before complaining. Here's what I wrote, emphasis added:
As I recall,
until fairly recently in MS Windows child windows were constrained to be positioned within the parent.
In other words, I explicitly acknowledged that MS Windows no longer suffers from this constraint. I said it used to be a problem. I knew perfectly well what I was talking about, though since I don't use MS Windows a lot, I didn't keep track of when this particular limitation was removed.
I started using Unix in 1982 and have found it preferable to everything else I've encountered.
I have always had Unix available at work, and since I first installed GNU/Linux in 1995, I've had it on my personal machines as well. So basically I've only used MS Windows (and before it, MS/DOS) on personal machines before I knew about Linux, and occasionally when I have used somebody else's machine or had to write something in MS Word or something like that.
Unix gave me a powerful, flexible system. The command-line is much more powerful than a GUI,
with history, aliasing, shell scripts, file globbing, completion, shell variables, loops,
and i/o redirection. The Unix philosophy of combining lots of little programs each of which does one job well is extremely powerful. The programming environment is superior, as are many of the individual tools, such as emacs and awk.
X Windows from the outset was vastly superior to MS Windows, both because it ran over the network and in its configurability and lack of idiotic restrictions. As I recall, until fairly recently in MS Windows child windows were constrained to be positioned within the parent. Awful! All in all, I have always found Unix to be more powerful and flexible and generally easier to use.
The superiority of Unix documentation is also important. The five volume BSD manual set may not have been as easy going as "Windows for Dummies", but it provided the information I needed to do my work. The various books on Unix internals and programming, starting with the Lyons book, provided real insight that was impossible to get for MS Windows. Most of the time I also had the source, first with BSD, then with GNU/Linux, which both provided the ultimate documentation and allowed me to make modifications.
Being used to a stable and practically bug-free system, I was simply appalled when I discovered how unstable and buggy MS Windows was.
An added attraction of GNU/Linux is the associated community and the ideals of the FLOSS movement.
Naturally, there is no such attraction to Microsoft. (I should note that merely being commercial and proprietary doesn't necessarily turn me or other people off. I'm sure that Im not alone in having fond memories of DEC, a company which we felt was on the side of technical people and willing to work with us. For example, when the Microvax came out, our DEC rep gave me a copy of the architecture manual. When a senior researcher from Xerox PARC saw it on my desk, he commented that he, a senior Xerox employee, could only get access to the comparable Xerox manuals on a need-to-know basis.)
Microsoft's disgusting monopolistic behaviour has certainly added to my unwillingness to use Microsoft products, but that is a relatively recent development and just adds to my long-standing technical dislike for MS Windows.
Although the/. post says that the banknote detection software is "black-box", I see nothing to that effect in the Observer article. I wonder if in fact the software is closed source. If it isn't, then it isn't a problem for FLOSS, leaving aside details of license compatibility.
Abolishing capslock has long been near the top of my list of things to do when I become king.
In those rare situations in which I want a long string of capital letters, I just type normally and do ESC-u in emacs to change to upper case. For many years now I have remapped capslock to ctrl in X windows by putting the following in my.xmodmaprc:
remove Lock = Caps_Lock remove Control = Control_L keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L add Lock = Caps_Lock add Control = Control_L
This gives me an extra ctrl key, which is really handy.
I agree that it shouldn't be run by private industry, but giving it to governments is not only likely to produce inefficiency but perhaps more importantly, it is likely to give them the opportunity to "regulate" it, meaning censorship.
They've already shown interest in doing this.
An international non-governmental organization might
be the best thing, though exactly how to structure it isn't clear.
Large, fast flash cards like this are good for high-quality (no lossy compression) portable audio recording too. Right now the larger capacity devices are PCMCIA hard drives, but they have a larger form factor and are less convenient and probably more subject to mechanical shock too.
It's true that the ATRAC compression that minidisc recorders use is lossy, but it is much less lossy than MP3 compression, and it is a "psychoacoustic" compression technique, designed to put the distortion where you can't hear it. For certain types of phonetic or psychoacoustic research you wouldn't want to use minidisc recording, but I am not sure that it would make any difference for music. I'd be interested to know if there are any objective studies showing that most people can tell the difference between a minidisc recording and a straight 16 bit 44.1 KHz PCM recording of music.
In any case, there are now good, portable devices that record uncompressed onto flash cards, such as the Marantz PMD670. If you want to avoid compression, that's what I'd use.
the university was absolutely correct to penalize the author in question for his actions.
I don't think so, and I've been a university professor for 20 years. It's true that it isn't proper to turn in the same piece of work for two courses unless the instructors agree, but that isn't what this student did. To begin with, nothing in his post (and that's all the information we've got on this case) suggests that the internet post from which he copied had been submitted for credit. It's perfectly proper to use something you initially wrote for another purpose
if you haven't already received course credit for it. For example, as a graduate student I once gave a paper in Japanese at a workshop, then translated it into English and submitted it for a course. The instructor had no problem with that, nor has anyone else, and since this was something a bit out of the ordinary, I've told the story a number of times.
Secondly, this guy only recycled ONE PARAGRAPH.
That would be perfectly fine even if it came from something he had already used for a grade, assuming it was a normal paragraph and therefore only a fraction of the total content of the paper.
Tibet has been continuously ruled by China (via the Qing Dynasty) for several hundreds years prior.
Hogwash. This betrays a complete lack of knowledge of Chinese and Tibetan history.
Imperial China routinely claimed sovereignty over every state with which it had diplomatic relations, on the theory that the Emperor could only enter into the relationship of master to vassal, including Japan, Okinawa (an independant
country until 1609), Korea, and Vietnam. The Qing dynasty may have claimed sovereignty over Tibet,
but Tibet was de facto an independent state and did not acknowledge Chinese sovereignty. The Qing did not exercise effective control of Tibet. Nor did the Qing carry out, or for that matter, even attempt, the cultural genocide that the People's
Republic has engaged in. The Qing didn't destroy thousands of temples, kill thousands of monks and nuns, suppress the use of the Tibetan language, and settle millions of Han colonists in Tibet.
The destruction of Tibetan culture began in 1951,
not during the Qing.
In any case, as a matter of international law, the critical fact is that in 1951, at the time of the Chinese invasion, Tibet was an independant state.
It had a distinctive population occupying a well-defined territory under the effective control of its own government. The government of Tibet issued currency and passports that were internationally recognized. It entered into diplomatic relations as a sovereign nation with other countries, including Nepal,Mongolia, Great Britain, and Ladakh. In fact, The Republic of China negotiated with Tibet as a sovereign nation
at the Simla Conference in 1913-1914.
Notice that the parent contradicts himself. He claims that Tibet was under the control of the Qing, then justifies Chinese occupation of Tibet by the claim that the traditional government headed by the Dalai Lama was an oppressive theocracy. Unless he wants to adopt the implausible view that the traditional government somehow developed between 1911 (end of the Qing) and 1951, by critizing the traditional government he is admitting that the Qing did not in fact control Tibet.
In any case, if the traditional government was oppressive, and it did indeed have its faults,
that doesn't justify the introduction of an equaly if not more oppressive foreign government, nor does it justify massive Chinese colonization and cultural genocide. An internal revolution in Tibet might have been justified (though in fact the current Dalai Lama, who was 17 years old at the time of the Chinese invasion, has proved to be a reformist who would no doubt have made considerable changes), but the only legitimate role that China or other foreign countries might have played would have been to assist Tibetans in establishing a more just government.
Although we don't presently know an orthogonal basis for perception of odor, it seems that quite a range of odors could be generated with a reasonable number of components. I believe that the no-longer manufactured iScent had 200 oils.
With such a number, not only would there be a very
large number of combinations, but there would be enough single odors to give a wide choice for many purposes. What does seem doubtful is whether fine distinctions like those among wines could be synthesized by a system that wasn't specialized for wine.
The distinction that parent makes between perception of color and odor is incorrect. Physically it is true that different colors represent different wavelengths, that is, quantitative differences along a single dimension, but that is not how human beings perceive color. We have cells in the retina that respond selectively to certain wavelengths, with the effect that colors are represented as three-dimensional vectors. The real difference is thus that, as far as we know, the number of dimensions for odor is much larger than that for color.
Actually, the word window has been borrowed into Dutch as a generic computing term. A while back I did a little research into this, reported here, using Google and easily found examples of window used in this way on Dutch-language websites, including examples in which Dutch suffixes were added, which demonstrates that the word has been incorporated into Dutch. So I think that the Dutch court was wrong in ruling that window is not a generic term in Dutch.
They are
referring to the use of Windows
the trademark and the operating system, as a way of attracting credibility...
There's nothing wrong with referring to someone else's trademark. A reference in and of itself doesn't infringe, and it isn't in any way unethical. The test is whether it leads the consumer to confuse the two products. Suppose that RMS had decided to name his operating system Gnunix. It would unquestionably refer to Unix, but since it wouldn't lead consumers to confuse Gnunix with Unix, it wouldn't infringe the Unix trademark, just as Xenix, Minix, Linux, and Eunice did not. On the other hand, if I set up a company
called Microsoft Software and sell a word-processor called Microsoft Words, Microsoft would have a legitimate case because consumers probably would confuse my product with theirs.
The relevant question here is therefore whether consumers are likely to be misled by the name
Lindows into thinking that it is the same thing as Microsoft Windows. I don't think that confusion is likely, for two reasons. First, anybody who goes to the Lindows web site or reads their literature is quickly made aware that the product is not MS Windows. Second, anybody who has
heard of MS Windows knows that it is a Microsoft product and expects to see the word Microsoft and the associated logo.
As for the suggestion that Lindows refers to
MS Windows to attact credibility, I see no evidence for that and much against it. Lindows emphasizes that their product is like MS Windows
in the functionality it provides but different and better (e.g. more stable, with better security).
The nonsense coming out out of AdTI together with Andrew Tanenbaum's description of his interview make me wonder whether the speculation that Microsoft is behind this is really correct. Microsoft has tons of money and some fairly smart people, even in management. I find it hard to believe that they couldn't do a better job than this. Even if they need a putatively independent
institution as a front, they could write the material themselves. They could even have their chosen institution hire somebody halfway competant for the project. It's hard to believe that they couldn't do better than this.
I wonder if this is perhaps just somebody trying to make a name for himself and/or bring in money for himself or his institute rather than something directly arranged by Microsoft.
Granting that the answer isn't in, it seems to me that the false positives issue only concerns whether the particles contain DNA, which isn't the critical issue. If they are multiplying in culture, that means they're alive, at least as life has been defined until now. Of course there might be some other explanation for the change in optical density of the fluid. The articles don't seem to say why they can't do a more direct count of the particles.
I have to admit, my first reaction to the headline was that it was about SCO.
The very name "Patriot Act" is intended to con people into thinking that a law more suited for a fascist country is benign and all-American, necessary to protect mom, the flag, and apple pie.
They named the law carefully:
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 200
so that it would have this appealing acronym.
I say we shouldn't go along with the scam.
Don't call it the Patriot Act.
Let's call it HR 3162.
Ohio University doesn't yet have a contract with Napster; they're thinking about it. From the survey:
Ohio University is considering forming a partnership with Napster...
The purpose of their survey is to help them decide whether to enter into a contract. Hence Napster has no legal ability to enforce confidentiality. They just don't like the fact that the university's survey gives an idea of what the costs would be. It sounds like a scam to me. Do you think that the cost of water, electricity, or food services is a deep, dark secret?
Two people who aren't yet in the Hall of Fame
and aren't up for election who certainly deserve it are: John McCarthy, creator of LISP and a founder of
AI, and Richard Stallman, creator of EMACS and founder of the Free Software movement.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this going to work? Its hard to think of situations in which the federal government would have a need for DRM. What argument are they going to use for putting DRM into GNU software? And how are they going to implement it? At worst, they could say they won't use FLOSS software for particular purposes without DRM. They can't actually control FLOSS software without major changes in copyright law that would be hard to target at FLOSS.
It seems to me that government release of software under the GPL is a big win for the FLOSS movement, and not just because its an additional adopter of the model. This provides a unifiying force between left wing and libertarian advocates of FLOSS and those conservatives who are not in the pockets of big corporations. That kind of conservative often views the federal government as a big ripoff. Releasing government software under the GPL gives back to the people.
No, Ruby has had support from the outset for some of the Japanese encoding systems but not Unicode. Unicode is not used that much in Japan since there are encoding systems for Japanese that were already established when Unicode came along and that are arguably better, for Japanese, than Unicode.
I can't speak for other people, but I know that my decisions about what language to use haven't been based just on what I already know and what community I want to join. For instance, my first language was Fortran. After that I learned Basic and assembly language (Mix, just on paper, and the language of a Japanese laboratory minicomputer the model of which I no longer remember. The only documentation I had was in Japanese, which at the time I was just learning. And people complain about man pages!). When I first learned C, it was in a situation in which I could also have used Fortran. I learned C because it looked like it would be a better language and I was interested in trying something new.
For scripting languages, for many years I used either a shell (sh or csh) or awk. When Perl came along, I read the book and twice made stabs at writing something non-trivial in it, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. I attribute this to my innate sense of good taste. Both the language itself (through non-orthogonality, excessive overloading, and lots of little tricks) and the Perl community (through typical practices and valuing short, cryptic code) encourage unreadable code. At the same time, I knew that AWK was not ideal for some kinds of programs (and I"ve written 500 line AWK scripts, and AWK scripts that write and then execute other AWK scripts) so when Python came along, I was interested. I still use AWK for some things since I know it well and the automatic parsing is handy, but more and more I am using Python. I find that Python encourages good programming practice and provides everything that I would get from Perl. I've also tried Tcl, to the extent of writing a moderately complex (1500 line) program. For some things it is fine, but I don't think it scales up as well as Python.
So I think that my choices, and probably other people's, aren't just a matter of inertia and general type of programming.
For me, by the way, in a lot of cases, Unicode support is important. That's a nice feature of Python. Ruby looks interesting, but as far as I can tell doesn't support Unicode. Anybody know if Ruby does, or will soon, support Unicode?
The guy at Princeton who wrote that silly attack on open source was a computer services management guy named Howard Strauss. He is not a professor.
I was on the Stanford faculty from 1983-1994. There was very little relationship between administrative computing and academic computing at the departmental level. (There was a centralized "academic computing" facility, run as I recall by the same people who ran the administrative stuff, that continued to be used for a while by the older-fashioned people in some non-science departments as others adopted PCs.) Administrative computing centered on an IBM dinosaur that ran a lot of locally developed software. Migration away from a system like that can be pretty rough, with data tied up in peculiar local formats, and a lot of the staff get very invested in it.
Stanford was also rather prone to central decision-making. Around 1983 they decided that every faculty member should have an IBM PC and arranged a cheap deal. (As I recall we paid a modest amount and the machines eventually became ours.) Later, they made a sweetheart deal with Apple and only wanted to support Macs. They were very slow to support Unix systems, even though when I got there in 1983 there were about 150 Vaxen, two running VMS, the rest Unix, and soon after that Suns, Microvaxen, and HP Bobcats.
Administrative computing was a different world, one from the past. Logging in to the admin system was kind of like "Voyage to the Lost World". I can imagine that the decision to go to outside suppliers reflects a lack of confidence in the ability of the internal administrative computing people to do the job.
Beyond the damage that this does to democracy, the other sad thing here is that by focussing so narrowly on their special interests the disabilities groups are very likely hurting themselves in the long term. Presumably most of us sympathize with people with disabilities and support measures to make life easier for them. In the future, I'm going to have to look very carefully at what these organizations want to see whether it is really a good idea. I won't be able to assume that they know what is in their own interests and that it isn't going to be harmful for everybody else. Their bad judgment in this matter has made them less trustworthy.
The GPL is not monopolistic. It doesn't prevent other people from competing. If you want to produce a competitor to gcc, for example, the fact that gcc is GPL-ed doesn't interfere. Similarly, I don't see that the fact that the Linux kernel is distributed under the GPL interferes in any way with FreeBSD.
There are certainly arguments pro and con the GPL. If you prefer to work with software distributed under the BSD license, or to distribute your own under the BSD license, I have no problem with that. But there is nothing monopolistic about the GPL.
I think parent needs to read more carefully before complaining. Here's what I wrote, emphasis added:
In other words, I explicitly acknowledged that MS Windows no longer suffers from this constraint. I said it used to be a problem. I knew perfectly well what I was talking about, though since I don't use MS Windows a lot, I didn't keep track of when this particular limitation was removed.I started using Unix in 1982 and have found it preferable to everything else I've encountered. I have always had Unix available at work, and since I first installed GNU/Linux in 1995, I've had it on my personal machines as well. So basically I've only used MS Windows (and before it, MS/DOS) on personal machines before I knew about Linux, and occasionally when I have used somebody else's machine or had to write something in MS Word or something like that.
Unix gave me a powerful, flexible system. The command-line is much more powerful than a GUI, with history, aliasing, shell scripts, file globbing, completion, shell variables, loops, and i/o redirection. The Unix philosophy of combining lots of little programs each of which does one job well is extremely powerful. The programming environment is superior, as are many of the individual tools, such as emacs and awk. X Windows from the outset was vastly superior to MS Windows, both because it ran over the network and in its configurability and lack of idiotic restrictions. As I recall, until fairly recently in MS Windows child windows were constrained to be positioned within the parent. Awful! All in all, I have always found Unix to be more powerful and flexible and generally easier to use.
The superiority of Unix documentation is also important. The five volume BSD manual set may not have been as easy going as "Windows for Dummies", but it provided the information I needed to do my work. The various books on Unix internals and programming, starting with the Lyons book, provided real insight that was impossible to get for MS Windows. Most of the time I also had the source, first with BSD, then with GNU/Linux, which both provided the ultimate documentation and allowed me to make modifications.
Being used to a stable and practically bug-free system, I was simply appalled when I discovered how unstable and buggy MS Windows was.
An added attraction of GNU/Linux is the associated community and the ideals of the FLOSS movement. Naturally, there is no such attraction to Microsoft. (I should note that merely being commercial and proprietary doesn't necessarily turn me or other people off. I'm sure that Im not alone in having fond memories of DEC, a company which we felt was on the side of technical people and willing to work with us. For example, when the Microvax came out, our DEC rep gave me a copy of the architecture manual. When a senior researcher from Xerox PARC saw it on my desk, he commented that he, a senior Xerox employee, could only get access to the comparable Xerox manuals on a need-to-know basis.)
Microsoft's disgusting monopolistic behaviour has certainly added to my unwillingness to use Microsoft products, but that is a relatively recent development and just adds to my long-standing technical dislike for MS Windows.
Although the /. post says that the banknote detection software is "black-box", I see nothing to that effect in the Observer article. I wonder if in fact the software is closed source. If it isn't, then it isn't a problem for FLOSS, leaving aside details of license compatibility.
Abolishing capslock has long been near the top of my list of things to do when I become king. In those rare situations in which I want a long string of capital letters, I just type normally and do ESC-u in emacs to change to upper case. For many years now I have remapped capslock to ctrl in X windows by putting the following in my .xmodmaprc:
This gives me an extra ctrl key, which is really handy.I agree that it shouldn't be run by private industry, but giving it to governments is not only likely to produce inefficiency but perhaps more importantly, it is likely to give them the opportunity to "regulate" it, meaning censorship. They've already shown interest in doing this. An international non-governmental organization might be the best thing, though exactly how to structure it isn't clear.
It's true that for audio we don't need speed this high, but the large size is handy. If you're recording hours of audio it adds up.
Large, fast flash cards like this are good for high-quality (no lossy compression) portable audio recording too. Right now the larger capacity devices are PCMCIA hard drives, but they have a larger form factor and are less convenient and probably more subject to mechanical shock too.
It's true that the ATRAC compression that minidisc recorders use is lossy, but it is much less lossy than MP3 compression, and it is a "psychoacoustic" compression technique, designed to put the distortion where you can't hear it. For certain types of phonetic or psychoacoustic research you wouldn't want to use minidisc recording, but I am not sure that it would make any difference for music. I'd be interested to know if there are any objective studies showing that most people can tell the difference between a minidisc recording and a straight 16 bit 44.1 KHz PCM recording of music.
In any case, there are now good, portable devices that record uncompressed onto flash cards, such as the Marantz PMD670. If you want to avoid compression, that's what I'd use.
I don't think so, and I've been a university professor for 20 years. It's true that it isn't proper to turn in the same piece of work for two courses unless the instructors agree, but that isn't what this student did. To begin with, nothing in his post (and that's all the information we've got on this case) suggests that the internet post from which he copied had been submitted for credit. It's perfectly proper to use something you initially wrote for another purpose if you haven't already received course credit for it. For example, as a graduate student I once gave a paper in Japanese at a workshop, then translated it into English and submitted it for a course. The instructor had no problem with that, nor has anyone else, and since this was something a bit out of the ordinary, I've told the story a number of times.
Secondly, this guy only recycled ONE PARAGRAPH. That would be perfectly fine even if it came from something he had already used for a grade, assuming it was a normal paragraph and therefore only a fraction of the total content of the paper.
Hogwash. This betrays a complete lack of knowledge of Chinese and Tibetan history. Imperial China routinely claimed sovereignty over every state with which it had diplomatic relations, on the theory that the Emperor could only enter into the relationship of master to vassal, including Japan, Okinawa (an independant country until 1609), Korea, and Vietnam. The Qing dynasty may have claimed sovereignty over Tibet, but Tibet was de facto an independent state and did not acknowledge Chinese sovereignty. The Qing did not exercise effective control of Tibet. Nor did the Qing carry out, or for that matter, even attempt, the cultural genocide that the People's Republic has engaged in. The Qing didn't destroy thousands of temples, kill thousands of monks and nuns, suppress the use of the Tibetan language, and settle millions of Han colonists in Tibet. The destruction of Tibetan culture began in 1951, not during the Qing.
In any case, as a matter of international law, the critical fact is that in 1951, at the time of the Chinese invasion, Tibet was an independant state. It had a distinctive population occupying a well-defined territory under the effective control of its own government. The government of Tibet issued currency and passports that were internationally recognized. It entered into diplomatic relations as a sovereign nation with other countries, including Nepal,Mongolia, Great Britain, and Ladakh. In fact, The Republic of China negotiated with Tibet as a sovereign nation at the Simla Conference in 1913-1914.
Notice that the parent contradicts himself. He claims that Tibet was under the control of the Qing, then justifies Chinese occupation of Tibet by the claim that the traditional government headed by the Dalai Lama was an oppressive theocracy. Unless he wants to adopt the implausible view that the traditional government somehow developed between 1911 (end of the Qing) and 1951, by critizing the traditional government he is admitting that the Qing did not in fact control Tibet.
In any case, if the traditional government was oppressive, and it did indeed have its faults, that doesn't justify the introduction of an equaly if not more oppressive foreign government, nor does it justify massive Chinese colonization and cultural genocide. An internal revolution in Tibet might have been justified (though in fact the current Dalai Lama, who was 17 years old at the time of the Chinese invasion, has proved to be a reformist who would no doubt have made considerable changes), but the only legitimate role that China or other foreign countries might have played would have been to assist Tibetans in establishing a more just government.
Although we don't presently know an orthogonal basis for perception of odor, it seems that quite a range of odors could be generated with a reasonable number of components. I believe that the no-longer manufactured iScent had 200 oils. With such a number, not only would there be a very large number of combinations, but there would be enough single odors to give a wide choice for many purposes. What does seem doubtful is whether fine distinctions like those among wines could be synthesized by a system that wasn't specialized for wine.
The distinction that parent makes between perception of color and odor is incorrect. Physically it is true that different colors represent different wavelengths, that is, quantitative differences along a single dimension, but that is not how human beings perceive color. We have cells in the retina that respond selectively to certain wavelengths, with the effect that colors are represented as three-dimensional vectors. The real difference is thus that, as far as we know, the number of dimensions for odor is much larger than that for color.
Actually, the word window has been borrowed into Dutch as a generic computing term. A while back I did a little research into this, reported here, using Google and easily found examples of window used in this way on Dutch-language websites, including examples in which Dutch suffixes were added, which demonstrates that the word has been incorporated into Dutch. So I think that the Dutch court was wrong in ruling that window is not a generic term in Dutch.
There's nothing wrong with referring to someone else's trademark. A reference in and of itself doesn't infringe, and it isn't in any way unethical. The test is whether it leads the consumer to confuse the two products. Suppose that RMS had decided to name his operating system Gnunix. It would unquestionably refer to Unix, but since it wouldn't lead consumers to confuse Gnunix with Unix, it wouldn't infringe the Unix trademark, just as Xenix, Minix, Linux, and Eunice did not. On the other hand, if I set up a company called Microsoft Software and sell a word-processor called Microsoft Words, Microsoft would have a legitimate case because consumers probably would confuse my product with theirs.
The relevant question here is therefore whether consumers are likely to be misled by the name Lindows into thinking that it is the same thing as Microsoft Windows. I don't think that confusion is likely, for two reasons. First, anybody who goes to the Lindows web site or reads their literature is quickly made aware that the product is not MS Windows. Second, anybody who has heard of MS Windows knows that it is a Microsoft product and expects to see the word Microsoft and the associated logo.
As for the suggestion that Lindows refers to MS Windows to attact credibility, I see no evidence for that and much against it. Lindows emphasizes that their product is like MS Windows in the functionality it provides but different and better (e.g. more stable, with better security).
The nonsense coming out out of AdTI together with Andrew Tanenbaum's description of his interview make me wonder whether the speculation that Microsoft is behind this is really correct. Microsoft has tons of money and some fairly smart people, even in management. I find it hard to believe that they couldn't do a better job than this. Even if they need a putatively independent institution as a front, they could write the material themselves. They could even have their chosen institution hire somebody halfway competant for the project. It's hard to believe that they couldn't do better than this.
I wonder if this is perhaps just somebody trying to make a name for himself and/or bring in money for himself or his institute rather than something directly arranged by Microsoft.
Granting that the answer isn't in, it seems to me that the false positives issue only concerns whether the particles contain DNA, which isn't the critical issue. If they are multiplying in culture, that means they're alive, at least as life has been defined until now. Of course there might be some other explanation for the change in optical density of the fluid. The articles don't seem to say why they can't do a more direct count of the particles.
I have to admit, my first reaction to the headline was that it was about SCO.
The very name "Patriot Act" is intended to con people into thinking that a law more suited for a fascist country is benign and all-American, necessary to protect mom, the flag, and apple pie. They named the law carefully:
so that it would have this appealing acronym. I say we shouldn't go along with the scam. Don't call it the Patriot Act. Let's call it HR 3162.Ohio University doesn't yet have a contract with Napster; they're thinking about it. From the survey:
The purpose of their survey is to help them decide whether to enter into a contract. Hence Napster has no legal ability to enforce confidentiality. They just don't like the fact that the university's survey gives an idea of what the costs would be. It sounds like a scam to me. Do you think that the cost of water, electricity, or food services is a deep, dark secret?Two people who aren't yet in the Hall of Fame and aren't up for election who certainly deserve it are: John McCarthy, creator of LISP and a founder of AI, and Richard Stallman, creator of EMACS and founder of the Free Software movement.