For me the key phrase was the insistence that Wikipedia was from the beginning "... singlemindedly aimed at creating an encyclopedia".
That was _exactly_ what Hari Seldon's poor dupes insisted to all visitors in the first decades. But after Asimov's Foundation had existed for fifty years, its founder finally showed up in a holorecording to explain:
"...the Encyclopedia Project is a sham, and has always been!"
If the parallels hold up, the fall of civilization is coming maybe around 2025, give or take a decade, though most people won't recognize it for a while -- but Jimmy Wales' true aims won't be revealed until 2050.
And yes, due to the Wikipedia's efforts, the Interregnum will be only a thousand years instead of 30,000.
Given that we're hitting Hubbert's Peak now (again, give or take a decade), psychohistory might be preceding itself pretty nicely here...
Do not accept your grammar checkers suggestions unless you really did mean to write that.
Must be an apostrophe missing there. That was supposed to be "your gramma's checkers suggestions", right? But what does checker-playing advice have to do with the topic, anyway?
I don't believe in sigs -- I type this by hand after every post.
Well, but it says "Power Failure Crash". "Crash" is not quite the right word, but it's the leftover mess and/or unnecessary loss of data that's the bug. At least, here's what I thought of when I read this one:
When I was done with my TRS-80 Model 1, I could turn it off any time I wanted to;
When I was done with my {insert name of IBM clone here} running MS-DOS, I could turn it off any time I wanted to, unless it was accessing a disk at the time;
-- Except on one machine I seem to remember having to run a DOS program, PARK.EXE, to park the hard drive heads so they wouldn't plow into the disk surface when the power went off... but that was an aberration, I think, due to lousy hardware design.
I don't remember what the rules were for Windows 3.1, but...
When I'm done with a Windows 95+ machine, or when something goes screwy and I have to restart it, I have to close various programs and choose Start > Shut Down / Restart or the equivalent. Then, if some process refuses to shut down, I have to go track it down and kill it manually.
If I don't do the above before cycling the power, or if massive system instability results and I end up having to cycle the power anyway, I get scolded the next time I start up about how I've turned off the power improperly and Microsoft will punish me for a few minutes by looking at all the sectors on my hard drive.
Then, half the time, Microsoft will extract a random bit of useless binary garbage to write to the root of my C: drive, just in case I want to look through it with a hex editor and pick out bits and pieces of the letter to my Aunt Mildred that I was working on...
Perhaps this is somehow a feature, not a bug, but it sure doesn't seem like an improvement. Why is Windows routinely leaving the hard drive in a state that will cause this kind of silliness every time the power goes out? It's not as if the problem only happens when Windows is in the middle of a disk write when the blackout occurs -- it seems to be a "standard feature" of the OS (as the scolding error message indicates).
Of course, TFA extends this idea to applications as well as operating systems. I'm only rarely pleasantly surprised that an app has managed to remember the most of the work I've done since my last save, when I get caught by an unexpected crash or power outage.
For example, Juno's email-and-ad-display program is missing a lot of obvious features that I'd like it to have -- but its great redeeming quality is that it always seems to remember the email I was in the middle of typing, to within a few keystrokes, no matter what horrible power- or crash-related interruption has occurred.
So the idea behind the "Power Failure Crash" item in the list is that this kind of good behavior ought to be standard for all applications.
I don't believe in sigs -- I type this by hand after every post.
Well, I try to keep my logic skills reasonably well-polished -- no promises, though; I've been living in the U.S. too long:
In the grandparent post, "converse" was technically the wrong word; that would be
IF within Australian jurisdiction THEN ((hosted overseas) AND (harm done in Australia))
which is pretty nonsensical. The converse of a conditional statement isn't necessarily true, nor is the inverse (adding NOTs to everything) -- only the contrapositive is logically equivalent.
Thus, it's while it's definitely true that
p AND q => r doesn't necessarily imply that NOT p AND NOT q => NOT r
that isn't exactly relevant here. A statement doesn't imply its inverse, but that wasn't even the inverse -- that would be
NOT (p AND q) => NOT r
which is another way of saying
NOT p OR NOT q => NOT r
...I think if you added all those NOTs where you added them, you'd get
IF NOT hosted overseas AND harm NOT done in Australia THEN NOT within Australian jurisdiction.
[In this case, NOT doesn't give you a meaning that matches the original conclusion, because NOT doesn't mean "not the same as"; it means "everything else except for". So, for example, "not (within Australian jurisdiction)" definitely doesn't mean the same as "within overseas jurisdiction"... no matter what John Ashcroft thinks.]
-- But even if I got that last mess wrong somehow, it doesn't matter: the original line of argument was that the original ruling can plausibly be generalized to
IF (hosted by X) AND (harm done in Y) THEN within Y's jurisdiction
and then you do get the stipulated conclusion simply by substituting different values for X and Y ("Australia" for X and "U.S." for Y, instead of the reverse.)
> I wanted to complain to him but since I wrote > him few times regarding technical problems > with his software and got no reply, I don't > think he will care about this, unless I get > my reply published somewhere;-).
I'd give the complaint a try anyway, were I you -- I suspect that responses or not from ESR are mostly luck of the draw, due to necessary filters on large volumes of incoming email.
For what it's worth, I had some rather trivial obsessive-compulsive-grammatical comments on a few of his posted documents, some months back. Being an eternal optimist, I sent along my crackpot opinions, and got two polite and thoughtful emails in response. A couple of the problems were fixed in the posted documents within a day or two.
[Another one or two things he "reviewed" but didn't change -- those were some of the sharper "cracker" putdowns he indulges in here and there, which I thought came across too strong for any public-relations document from a "hacker historian", even a volunteer/self-appointed one (delete whichever is inapplicable)...
Now that I've read more of his writing I'm not surprised he kept 'em, since they're pretty consistent with his style elsewhere.]
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For me the key phrase was the insistence that Wikipedia was from the beginning "... singlemindedly aimed at creating an encyclopedia". That was _exactly_ what Hari Seldon's poor dupes insisted to all visitors in the first decades. But after Asimov's Foundation had existed for fifty years, its founder finally showed up in a holorecording to explain: "...the Encyclopedia Project is a sham, and has always been!" If the parallels hold up, the fall of civilization is coming maybe around 2025, give or take a decade, though most people won't recognize it for a while -- but Jimmy Wales' true aims won't be revealed until 2050. And yes, due to the Wikipedia's efforts, the Interregnum will be only a thousand years instead of 30,000. Given that we're hitting Hubbert's Peak now (again, give or take a decade), psychohistory might be preceding itself pretty nicely here...
Must be an apostrophe missing there. That was supposed to be "your gramma's checkers suggestions", right? But what does checker-playing advice have to do with the topic, anyway?
I don't believe in sigs -- I type this by hand after every post.
-- Except on one machine I seem to remember having to run a DOS program, PARK.EXE, to park the hard drive heads so they wouldn't plow into the disk surface when the power went off... but that was an aberration, I think, due to lousy hardware design.
I don't remember what the rules were for Windows 3.1, but...
If I don't do the above before cycling the power, or if massive system instability results and I end up having to cycle the power anyway, I get scolded the next time I start up about how I've turned off the power improperly and Microsoft will punish me for a few minutes by looking at all the sectors on my hard drive.
Then, half the time, Microsoft will extract a random bit of useless binary garbage to write to the root of my C: drive, just in case I want to look through it with a hex editor and pick out bits and pieces of the letter to my Aunt Mildred that I was working on...
Perhaps this is somehow a feature, not a bug, but it sure doesn't seem like an improvement. Why is Windows routinely leaving the hard drive in a state that will cause this kind of silliness every time the power goes out? It's not as if the problem only happens when Windows is in the middle of a disk write when the blackout occurs -- it seems to be a "standard feature" of the OS (as the scolding error message indicates).
Of course, TFA extends this idea to applications as well as operating systems. I'm only rarely pleasantly surprised that an app has managed to remember the most of the work I've done since my last save, when I get caught by an unexpected crash or power outage.
For example, Juno's email-and-ad-display program is missing a lot of obvious features that I'd like it to have -- but its great redeeming quality is that it always seems to remember the email I was in the middle of typing, to within a few keystrokes, no matter what horrible power- or crash-related interruption has occurred.
So the idea behind the "Power Failure Crash" item in the list is that this kind of good behavior ought to be standard for all applications.
I don't believe in sigs -- I type this by hand after every post.
1) the actual precedent does match your statement, after all, where x is "Australia"; and
2) the precedent hasn't actually been explicitly drawn yet, and may never be -- because this is law, not logic, and you never can tell...
Okay. Everybody put this topic down and -- back -- away -- slowly --
In the grandparent post, "converse" was technically the wrong word; that would be
which is pretty nonsensical. The converse of a conditional statement isn't necessarily true, nor is the inverse (adding NOTs to everything) -- only the contrapositive is logically equivalent.Thus, it's while it's definitely true that
that isn't exactly relevant here. A statement doesn't imply its inverse, but that wasn't even the inverse -- that would be which is another way of saying-- But even if I got that last mess wrong somehow, it doesn't matter: the original line of argument was that the original ruling can plausibly be generalized to
and then you do get the stipulated conclusion simply by substituting different values for X and Y ("Australia" for X and "U.S." for Y, instead of the reverse.)> I wanted to complain to him but since I wrote ;-).
> him few times regarding technical problems
> with his software and got no reply, I don't
> think he will care about this, unless I get
> my reply published somewhere
I'd give the complaint a try anyway, were I you -- I suspect that responses or not from ESR are mostly luck of the draw, due to necessary filters on large volumes of incoming email.
For what it's worth, I had some rather trivial obsessive-compulsive-grammatical comments on a few of his posted documents, some months back. Being an eternal optimist, I sent along my crackpot opinions, and got two polite and thoughtful emails in response. A couple of the problems were fixed in the posted documents within a day or two.
[Another one or two things he "reviewed" but didn't change -- those were some of the sharper "cracker" putdowns he indulges in here and there, which I thought came across too strong for any public-relations document from a "hacker historian", even a volunteer/self-appointed one (delete whichever is inapplicable)...
Now that I've read more of his writing I'm not surprised he kept 'em, since they're pretty consistent with his style elsewhere.]