Getting back to the thread, three of the biggest copyright offenses occurred under the Democrats: the DMCA, the Copyright Term Extension Act, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (part of which lifted caps on media ownership).
The Republicans have had control of the house since 1994. I believe the DMCA and Copyright Term Extension Act were passed in 1998, and of course the last act you mentioned was presumably passed in 1996. However, Clinton could have vetoed these which would have required Democratic support to override, so the Dems are not exempt from their connection to these acts.
Fair enough. But the problem in the human-centric tasks such as writing a letter (besides being harder to time with a person in the loop) is code bloat, IMHO. One cannot blame modern languages or cpus on code bloat. Surely if you took the "same code" that was behind MS Word 1.0, compiled it on a modern compiler, and ran it on a modern computer it would run noticeably faster, even if it were running on a modern OS. (Granted, the modern OS might negatively impact the speed of MS Word 1.0.)
An excellent book, that addresses similar problems in a much more general manner is Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner. To (over) summarize, things "bite back" because humans have certain thresholds (such as safety thresholds) and will usually push new technology to ride those thresholds, explaing various things such as why air bags don't save as many lives as they could (if it weren't for human nature), etc. That doesn't mean air bags are bad, just that our nature mitigates some of their usefulness. Of course, I'm quickly digressing.
Yeah, I'm not buying it either. Certainly we all know where he's coming from - the boot up time on an old Apple II was faster than the boot up time on a modern Mac or PC. However, I cannot imagine how a useful program can be faster on an Apple II than any modern language on any modern hardware. I suspect he's taken the boot-up analogy and way over extended it.
I remember having an old program that calculated bifurcation trees that used to take 24 hours to complete on my old Compucolor II (which as you all know, was made by that wildly successful company Intecolor). When we got an Apple II, I ported it over to Apple Basic (from Compucolor Basic, the graphic commands of which are horrifyingly delicious) and got about a 20-fold increase in speed. Now I only had to wait a couple hours. If I run that same program today on a modern computer (using a modern language and a modern compiler) it finishes too quickly to time without using a timing macro. (I haven't run it in 5 years or so, and even then it was too fast to accurately time - less than a couple seconds, as I recall.) Granted, I might be misremembering some details, and I might have improved the efficiency of the program myself. However, it was a fairly simple program, so I'm not sure how I could have written it that inefficiently.
The simplest unsolvable swap is to swap the stickers from both sides of an edge piece. Then, simply twist it a few dozen times to mask it.
However, if the solver is as gifted as he thinks it is, he'll probably get it to a similar configuration fairly quickly at which point he should be able to confidently proclaim that it cannot be solved. (Those who are experts in the cube, which I definitely am not, should also be familiar with its parity states.)
I have confirmed that True Majority Voting (TMV) is synonymous with Condorcet. As far as I can tell (from Google) no other country uses Condorcet. However, for (us) Americans this could be seen as a positive, and not a negative. We do pride ourselves on our independent ways, after all.
Here's how I would explain Condorcet:
First, I would rename it to something friendlier, like "true majority". (I think the term "true majority" is already in use as a synonym to Condorcet, but there might be subtle differences.)
The winner in a true majority election is the candidate who beats every other candidate when compared to them individually. This prevents "spoilers" from affecting the election, since they have no effect on pair-wise comparisons.
That's all that is needed to explain it. If they want more, give them examples:
If 20% of the population prefer Nader to Kerry and Kerry to Bush, 35% of the population prefer Kerry to Nader and Nader to Bush, and 45% of the population prefer Bush to Kerry and Kerry to Nader, then 80% prefer Kerry to Nader and 55% prefer Kerry to Bush, so Kerry wins by every pair-wise comparison and hence would win the election.
Of course, if the 45% switch their order to Bush, Nader, Kerry, then Nader wins the election - and in that case he should!
There reason I used pet was because it was given to me as an example of how different their behaviour is. It is not like dealing with a small child or a pet who are stupid but capable of dealing with other emotions, a baby or a cat can easily read your mood. Autistic childeren are not stupid, some are even very intelligent but they have no capability to read your emotions.
This is definitely the opinion of many psychologists, but I know of no one who has actively worked with autistic children (other than perhaps yourself) who actually think autistic children have no capability to read one's emotions. Many of them have diminished capabilities in this regard, and sure, some pets might seem to be better at it than some autistic children - until you get to know the child and understand that he can determine your emotions, but might not react to them in an appropriate manner!
So don't talk babytalk I was told but keep it emotionally simple. Don't expect them to read between the lines. Tell them clearly what you want or not want. Wether this is still accurate today I don't know but it was how I was instructed. I wasn't supposed to work with them directly, just work around them.
For many autistic children, clarity is very important. However, this could as easily stem from reduced mental abilities as from reduced empathic abilities. (Although some autistic children are definitely smarter than average, the typical autistic child is not.)
Anyway the robot I seen wasn't about teaching. It was to get them out of their isolation, give them something to interact with that doesn't have all these complex social things that playing with humans has (and without the strain and cost on human care takers) to these childeren. It seemed to work very well as a kid who had been sitting in a huddle was actively playing and having fun.
That can be fine as well, I was just sharing my vision for how robots can be used to help autistic children.
I hope you don't mean it that way but I seen an awful lot of programs aimed at helping people who are different have no other goal then to make them like the rest.
Perhaps you're overstating your point, but I have seen no programs that have no other goal than to make them like the rest. The goal I see is to (1) most importantly, help them achieve peaceful adult lives, (2) help them understand their environment, (3) help their environment understand them, and (4) where possible allow them to live an independent lifestyle (on the assumption, which is possibly incorrect, that this augments #1 above). Among the autistic children I know many of them will achieve all 4 of these goals and most of them will achieve the first goal.
I do agree, however, that we must be careful to make the distinction between helping them to achieve their dreams and helping them to achieve our dreams for them. I've read a work by a mildly autistic adult (i.e., one with Asperger's syndrome) who stated that she was quite content with who she was and would not want to be "normal". By the way, I've been using the label "autistic" to indicate any disorder in the autistic spectrum, and not just limited to the more narrow actual meaning of the word. (I.e., technically, those with Asperger's syndrome are not autistic, they are merely in the autistic spectrum.)
Your concept has validity, but some of your comments are inaccurate. Most autistic children have social skills well above that of a pet, especially if they are in an Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) program that addresses these skills. In fact, of the more than 20 autistic children I know (all of whom are in an ABA program), ALL of them have social skills above that of a pet. (I'm going to stop using that comparison now, because it's beginning to bother me.)
I think where this idea has the most merit, however, is in an ABA program itself. Instructors using ABA do their best to use consistent prompts (or sometimes consistently inconsistent, if they're trying to teach generalization skills) and show no affect when the child acts up. These techniques would be much easier to handle with a robot. However, this robot would need significant AI (to understand if the child has provided a correct response, or if the child is engaging in a behavior that should be extinguished, etc.), but AI that might soon be within our current reach.
I'm fairly certain that he's not. There's no state that I'm aware of that limits the amount of time you have to vote. I suspect he was just using literary license.
Despite decades of study and improved learning techniques, human nature hasn't changed all that much.
Actually, over the decades, I think we have changed. When my grandparents were still alive, they would fall for things (e.g., mail scams, although luckily they had people around them who would explain that these were scams) that I know my parents were cynical enough not to fall for (and, yes, they had good educations). And I see my parents fall for (rather inocuous) internet scams (such as those letters you forward to all), where my first instinct is to go to Snopes and verify the veracity of such stories - knowing, of course, that just because it's not on Snopes doesn't make it true, either. I've done my best to educate my parents in this regard, and I think it's paid off some, but my point is this:
Over the generations, as new advertising techniques are developed, the generations that grow up with them are more immune to them than the generations that did not. This probably also correlates with us being more cynical/less trusting.
In some ways, (i.e., I'm being noncomittal) it could be considered worse to frivously claim voter intimidation (assuming that frivously = falsely). Perhaps it's just our culture, but this seems like the idea that it's worse when your friends betray you than when your enemies attack you. Falsely claiming voter intimidation cheapens actual instances of disenfranchising voters, and therefore aids those who would do so. To have it as a matter of policy (i.e., premeditated and deliberate) would be even worse.
However, the DNC play book does not call for this tactic - at least not openly. It calls for a preemptive strike which could easily be interpreted in numerous ways - e.g., explaining to your constituents that even if x, y, or z happen you still need to vote.
Many people probably have more RAM than they need. However, certain operating systems tend to expand their needs to meet or exceed typical RAM configurations. Additionally, many of us in research really benefit from increased RAM, although you do need a 64-bit architecture before you can access more than 4 Gibibytes of it. For example, if you're doing large simulations, you benefit greatly from being able to keep everything in memory and not having to read/write to the hard drive.
Absolutely. Most people I know agree that Drake's equation should be modded (-1, Overrated). Don't get me wrong, I find it an enjoyable diversion. But it's only benefit is to explicitly label many of the parameters involved. Of course, soon we'll be better and better at calculating those parameters, but until we get to that last one, we're no closer to knowing the number than we started.
I believe these planets (or many of them, at least) were discovered by the dimming of their parent stars. Some of this dimming will be due to the atmosphere of the planet, and the absorption lines that show up during this dimming will reveal magnitudes of information about the composition of that atmosphere.
patents are screwy because certain large companies profit from that screwyness
Hanlon's Razor:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Or, as in the case of the patent office, a lack of resources. (I am in no way claiming that the patent processors themselves are stupid, just the process. After all, a very prominent physicist was working in the Swiss patent office as a technical assistant while working on a somewhat significant theory of his.)
The first computer "bug" was found by Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper while she was on Navy active duty in 1945.
Although this is accepted wisdom in various quarters, the use of the word "bug" as a defect predates Lt. Hopper by quite some time. Specifically, as the above link points out, the term was used to indicate a glitch as far back as the 19th century, and Shakespeare himself used the the term to indicate a disruptive person in Henry VI, part III.
All you had to do was buy a home and you were barraged.
Or, live in an apartment whose apartment number is part of the street address (because the "street" is inside the apartment complex). When I lived in a Post(R) apartment (which has this addressing scheme), I got a phone call from a company claiming that my mortgage had been sold to them, and that I should start sending my mortgage payments to addressed to them. It gave me a good laugh, but I shudder to think how many people have fallen for this scam. (I wasn't home at the time, so the message was left on my machine. I'm not sure what I would have said had I been given a chance to actually talk to the person - of course, it's probably one of those systems that hangs up if they get an actual human.)
Semantic warfare -- struggles over the meanings of words as proxies for political or market positions -- is just like other kinds of warfare; you want to fight it on the other guy's turf, not yours. Every minute we spend arguing with Microsoft flacks about what free means is a win for them and a lose for us.
From parent:
But there is a logical flaw in ESR's argument here. It's wrong to conclude that using the term "free software" is a bad idea just because MS tries to muddy the waters.
I don't believe that ESR is arguing that using the term "free software" is a bad idea, merely that we should be focusing on arguing how the term "shared source" is a misnomer, at least in the M$ case. I think their logic behind this is exquisite - the best defense is a good offense. Their arguments are so obviously flawed that we shouldn't focus on them, but rather focus on how bad their side of the story is. This automaticaaly makes the "free software" side of the story look that much better without re-iterating the M$ arguments at all.
Actually, they do occur in nature. Specifically, they occur when a sufficiently energetic cosmic ray strikes our atmosphere.
This is the same reason that many physicists laugh off the idea that they're going to create a mini-black hole that would sink to the earth's core and destroy us all. The universe is constantly running even higher-energy experiments in our atmosphere all the time - we just haven't placed our detectors in the right place! (To be fair to our hard-working particle physicists, you would need a VERY large detector hovering high in the air if you wanted to catch these things in nature.)
Judging by the many caustic replies from AC, sarcasm is a poorly understood literary device. I assumed (my fault) that no one would take my previous comment at face value.
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The Republicans have had control of the house since 1994. I believe the DMCA and Copyright Term Extension Act were passed in 1998, and of course the last act you mentioned was presumably passed in 1996. However, Clinton could have vetoed these which would have required Democratic support to override, so the Dems are not exempt from their connection to these acts.
For those who didn't know.
Fair enough. But the problem in the human-centric tasks such as writing a letter (besides being harder to time with a person in the loop) is code bloat, IMHO. One cannot blame modern languages or cpus on code bloat. Surely if you took the "same code" that was behind MS Word 1.0, compiled it on a modern compiler, and ran it on a modern computer it would run noticeably faster, even if it were running on a modern OS. (Granted, the modern OS might negatively impact the speed of MS Word 1.0.)
An excellent book, that addresses similar problems in a much more general manner is Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner. To (over) summarize, things "bite back" because humans have certain thresholds (such as safety thresholds) and will usually push new technology to ride those thresholds, explaing various things such as why air bags don't save as many lives as they could (if it weren't for human nature), etc. That doesn't mean air bags are bad, just that our nature mitigates some of their usefulness. Of course, I'm quickly digressing.
Yeah, I'm not buying it either. Certainly we all know where he's coming from - the boot up time on an old Apple II was faster than the boot up time on a modern Mac or PC. However, I cannot imagine how a useful program can be faster on an Apple II than any modern language on any modern hardware. I suspect he's taken the boot-up analogy and way over extended it.
I remember having an old program that calculated bifurcation trees that used to take 24 hours to complete on my old Compucolor II (which as you all know, was made by that wildly successful company Intecolor). When we got an Apple II, I ported it over to Apple Basic (from Compucolor Basic, the graphic commands of which are horrifyingly delicious) and got about a 20-fold increase in speed. Now I only had to wait a couple hours. If I run that same program today on a modern computer (using a modern language and a modern compiler) it finishes too quickly to time without using a timing macro. (I haven't run it in 5 years or so, and even then it was too fast to accurately time - less than a couple seconds, as I recall.) Granted, I might be misremembering some details, and I might have improved the efficiency of the program myself. However, it was a fairly simple program, so I'm not sure how I could have written it that inefficiently.
The simplest unsolvable swap is to swap the stickers from both sides of an edge piece. Then, simply twist it a few dozen times to mask it.
However, if the solver is as gifted as he thinks it is, he'll probably get it to a similar configuration fairly quickly at which point he should be able to confidently proclaim that it cannot be solved. (Those who are experts in the cube, which I definitely am not, should also be familiar with its parity states.)
I have confirmed that True Majority Voting (TMV) is synonymous with Condorcet. As far as I can tell (from Google) no other country uses Condorcet. However, for (us) Americans this could be seen as a positive, and not a negative. We do pride ourselves on our independent ways, after all.
Here's how I would explain Condorcet: First, I would rename it to something friendlier, like "true majority". (I think the term "true majority" is already in use as a synonym to Condorcet, but there might be subtle differences.) The winner in a true majority election is the candidate who beats every other candidate when compared to them individually. This prevents "spoilers" from affecting the election, since they have no effect on pair-wise comparisons. That's all that is needed to explain it. If they want more, give them examples: If 20% of the population prefer Nader to Kerry and Kerry to Bush, 35% of the population prefer Kerry to Nader and Nader to Bush, and 45% of the population prefer Bush to Kerry and Kerry to Nader, then 80% prefer Kerry to Nader and 55% prefer Kerry to Bush, so Kerry wins by every pair-wise comparison and hence would win the election. Of course, if the 45% switch their order to Bush, Nader, Kerry, then Nader wins the election - and in that case he should!
This is definitely the opinion of many psychologists, but I know of no one who has actively worked with autistic children (other than perhaps yourself) who actually think autistic children have no capability to read one's emotions. Many of them have diminished capabilities in this regard, and sure, some pets might seem to be better at it than some autistic children - until you get to know the child and understand that he can determine your emotions, but might not react to them in an appropriate manner!
For many autistic children, clarity is very important. However, this could as easily stem from reduced mental abilities as from reduced empathic abilities. (Although some autistic children are definitely smarter than average, the typical autistic child is not.)
That can be fine as well, I was just sharing my vision for how robots can be used to help autistic children.
Perhaps you're overstating your point, but I have seen no programs that have no other goal than to make them like the rest. The goal I see is to (1) most importantly, help them achieve peaceful adult lives, (2) help them understand their environment, (3) help their environment understand them, and (4) where possible allow them to live an independent lifestyle (on the assumption, which is possibly incorrect, that this augments #1 above). Among the autistic children I know many of them will achieve all 4 of these goals and most of them will achieve the first goal.
I do agree, however, that we must be careful to make the distinction between helping them to achieve their dreams and helping them to achieve our dreams for them. I've read a work by a mildly autistic adult (i.e., one with Asperger's syndrome) who stated that she was quite content with who she was and would not want to be "normal". By the way, I've been using the label "autistic" to indicate any disorder in the autistic spectrum, and not just limited to the more narrow actual meaning of the word. (I.e., technically, those with Asperger's syndrome are not autistic, they are merely in the autistic spectrum.)
Your concept has validity, but some of your comments are inaccurate. Most autistic children have social skills well above that of a pet, especially if they are in an Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) program that addresses these skills. In fact, of the more than 20 autistic children I know (all of whom are in an ABA program), ALL of them have social skills above that of a pet. (I'm going to stop using that comparison now, because it's beginning to bother me.)
I think where this idea has the most merit, however, is in an ABA program itself. Instructors using ABA do their best to use consistent prompts (or sometimes consistently inconsistent, if they're trying to teach generalization skills) and show no affect when the child acts up. These techniques would be much easier to handle with a robot. However, this robot would need significant AI (to understand if the child has provided a correct response, or if the child is engaging in a behavior that should be extinguished, etc.), but AI that might soon be within our current reach.
I'm fairly certain that he's not. There's no state that I'm aware of that limits the amount of time you have to vote. I suspect he was just using literary license.
Actually, over the decades, I think we have changed. When my grandparents were still alive, they would fall for things (e.g., mail scams, although luckily they had people around them who would explain that these were scams) that I know my parents were cynical enough not to fall for (and, yes, they had good educations). And I see my parents fall for (rather inocuous) internet scams (such as those letters you forward to all), where my first instinct is to go to Snopes and verify the veracity of such stories - knowing, of course, that just because it's not on Snopes doesn't make it true, either. I've done my best to educate my parents in this regard, and I think it's paid off some, but my point is this:
Over the generations, as new advertising techniques are developed, the generations that grow up with them are more immune to them than the generations that did not. This probably also correlates with us being more cynical/less trusting.
I think her lack of knowledge would be more forgivable if she weren't on the House Science Committee's space subcommittee!
I agree with your (implied) suggestion that such ignorance is non-partisan, although I wish it were the exception instead of the rule!
In some ways, (i.e., I'm being noncomittal) it could be considered worse to frivously claim voter intimidation (assuming that frivously = falsely). Perhaps it's just our culture, but this seems like the idea that it's worse when your friends betray you than when your enemies attack you. Falsely claiming voter intimidation cheapens actual instances of disenfranchising voters, and therefore aids those who would do so. To have it as a matter of policy (i.e., premeditated and deliberate) would be even worse. However, the DNC play book does not call for this tactic - at least not openly. It calls for a preemptive strike which could easily be interpreted in numerous ways - e.g., explaining to your constituents that even if x, y, or z happen you still need to vote.
Many people probably have more RAM than they need. However, certain operating systems tend to expand their needs to meet or exceed typical RAM configurations. Additionally, many of us in research really benefit from increased RAM, although you do need a 64-bit architecture before you can access more than 4 Gibibytes of it. For example, if you're doing large simulations, you benefit greatly from being able to keep everything in memory and not having to read/write to the hard drive.
Cobb is the Green Party candidate, not Ralph Nader. Nader is running as an independent.
Absolutely. Most people I know agree that Drake's equation should be modded (-1, Overrated). Don't get me wrong, I find it an enjoyable diversion. But it's only benefit is to explicitly label many of the parameters involved. Of course, soon we'll be better and better at calculating those parameters, but until we get to that last one, we're no closer to knowing the number than we started.
I believe these planets (or many of them, at least) were discovered by the dimming of their parent stars. Some of this dimming will be due to the atmosphere of the planet, and the absorption lines that show up during this dimming will reveal magnitudes of information about the composition of that atmosphere.
I think the equation you're thinking of is the Drake equation.
patents are screwy because certain large companies profit from that screwyness
Hanlon's Razor:"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Or, as in the case of the patent office, a lack of resources. (I am in no way claiming that the patent processors themselves are stupid, just the process. After all, a very prominent physicist was working in the Swiss patent office as a technical assistant while working on a somewhat significant theory of his.)
The first computer "bug" was found by Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper while she was on Navy active duty in 1945.
Although this is accepted wisdom in various quarters, the use of the word "bug" as a defect predates Lt. Hopper by quite some time. Specifically, as the above link points out, the term was used to indicate a glitch as far back as the 19th century, and Shakespeare himself used the the term to indicate a disruptive person in Henry VI, part III.
All you had to do was buy a home and you were barraged.
Or, live in an apartment whose apartment number is part of the street address (because the "street" is inside the apartment complex). When I lived in a Post(R) apartment (which has this addressing scheme), I got a phone call from a company claiming that my mortgage had been sold to them, and that I should start sending my mortgage payments to addressed to them. It gave me a good laugh, but I shudder to think how many people have fallen for this scam. (I wasn't home at the time, so the message was left on my machine. I'm not sure what I would have said had I been given a chance to actually talk to the person - of course, it's probably one of those systems that hangs up if they get an actual human.)No, I did not. I should have read more carefully. I stand corrected.
Semantic warfare -- struggles over the meanings of words as proxies for political or market positions -- is just like other kinds of warfare; you want to fight it on the other guy's turf, not yours. Every minute we spend arguing with Microsoft flacks about what free means is a win for them and a lose for us.
From parent:But there is a logical flaw in ESR's argument here. It's wrong to conclude that using the term "free software" is a bad idea just because MS tries to muddy the waters.
I don't believe that ESR is arguing that using the term "free software" is a bad idea, merely that we should be focusing on arguing how the term "shared source" is a misnomer, at least in the M$ case. I think their logic behind this is exquisite - the best defense is a good offense. Their arguments are so obviously flawed that we shouldn't focus on them, but rather focus on how bad their side of the story is. This automaticaaly makes the "free software" side of the story look that much better without re-iterating the M$ arguments at all.
Actually, they do occur in nature. Specifically, they occur when a sufficiently energetic cosmic ray strikes our atmosphere.
This is the same reason that many physicists laugh off the idea that they're going to create a mini-black hole that would sink to the earth's core and destroy us all. The universe is constantly running even higher-energy experiments in our atmosphere all the time - we just haven't placed our detectors in the right place! (To be fair to our hard-working particle physicists, you would need a VERY large detector hovering high in the air if you wanted to catch these things in nature.)
Judging by the many caustic replies from AC, sarcasm is a poorly understood literary device. I assumed (my fault) that no one would take my previous comment at face value.