Is there any relationship between Nupedia and GNUPedia? Are these simply two independent implementations of an idea whose time has come? If they are independent, will they merge or continue separately serving different goals?
Re:"Simple" problems for machine translation
on
Wearable Translators
·
· Score: 2
Yes, as that article points out, there is a great deal of context required to do translation. Translation of larger bodies of text is easier than translation of similar volumes of isolated sentences or phrases. For the anglophone monoglots in the audience, consider the word "Copy" in isolation. It could be a noun, meaning a reproduction, or a verb, meaning to reproduce. What I have done in this simple example is to perform a translation, not from one language to another, but from one word to a synonym in English. Not only are there multiple possible translations, but the meaning itself is ambiguous.
Yes, as we speak or write at greater length, some of the ambiguity disappears. But think about the fact that no one speaks in complete grammatically correct sentences all the time. We make mistakes, we lose our train of thought, we get interrupted.
It seems an obvious point, but I will make it anyway, machine translation is unlikely to exceed the best quality of human translation under ideal conditions. Some things are impervious to translation. There is a wonderful article about that problem in this month's issue of Liberty magazine. It starts off discussing the French translation of one of the Harry Potter books, but touches on several other translations. It's worth reading.
Freedom is sacrificed a little at a time
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
Spam is annoying. I expect to delete as much of it these days as I receive in real mail. At last count, I have been spammed in 7 or 8 languages, some of which I can't puzzle out even a single word of. It uses bandwidth, wastes disk space and takes up my time.
But I will not concede to any government the right to determine what can and cannot be considered unwanted e-mail. When the intent is clearly something that would be criminal when done by other means, such as death threats, fraudulent stock scams, etc., certainly those should be illegal. Consider how far anti-spam legislation may go. Do you want to jail time for a message like this:
To: Not Yet Clueful Newbie <new-b@domain>
From: Open Source Hacker <hacker@lug>
Subject: Come to our meeting next Thursday
Hey, I'm the Linux zealot you met at the
bookstore Saturday. Since you were local I
just fingered the local ISPs for someone with
your name. Are you interested in coming to
our Linux Users' Group meeting next Thursday?
I shouldn't have to consult a lawyer to determine the legality of every action I take.
I remember thinking several years ago when Mir suffered every disaster that didn't involve weather or earthquakes, that it was amazing how well it survived all of the problems. I hope that the lessons learned from it are put to good use on the ISS.
Certainly, (La)TeX is better, easier, more widely known among mathematicians and scientists... now. But when you can be sure that every desktop with a browser on it can render MathML, but less than 1% of them will have TeX, which will be taught? Which will be supported and used. Some of us will continue to use TeX until the alternatives are clearly superior. Unfortunately, many people will sacrifice some of the things that TeX does so well that aren't obvious for ubiquity. I can count on TeX to fill my paragraphs beautifully. Browsers don't always get it right.
It is wonderfully humane to have good intentions. But when it is clear that the solution presented won't bring the desired results, all the good intentions in the world are still wrong. I actually sat in a horribly crowded emergency room several months ago with someone very dear to me. I'm glad her condition didn't take a turn for the worse. There is a chronic shortage of nursing staff in our area, as in many places.
When a third party pays for something, it artificially lowers the price for the person making the purchasing decision. When something costs less to the buyer, more will be demanded, regardless of the true cost. The problem is that the cost has not gone down. Hospitals still have to pay the overhead for medical staff, equipment, electricity and heat, cleaning and numerous other things.
I don't want to see people die because they can't afford medical care. That is heartless. But it is even more heartless to overburden the medical facilities with non-critical patients, and there were quite a few that night. If a patient who needs emergency care, and is both able and willing to pay for it, but can't get it because the emergency rooms are overburdened with non-paying, non-critical patients, I call the people who created the problem heartless.
I certainly don't want to pay for a portion of what the other users at my ISP are looking at. If I'm reading web sites for various Linux distros, gnu.org, slashdot, and sourceforge and none of them are charging anything, why should I pay for someone's reading habits at various predigested news sites.
Separating the payment from the use, especially spreading it around, encourages overuse. It is a large part of the problem with the cost of medical care in the US. If you don't have to bear the costs, why not have the best and use as much of it as you want.
xv has been doing thumbnails of all the pictures in a directory for several years. Depending on what exactly eBay thinks they've patented, there may be a number of example of prior art.
Absolutely! Give away some of the cards that you want drivers for to the people who have shown te ability to do the job. I can't think of a better way for both parties to get something they want. If you have one or two key people who are really helping, consider hiring them. Keep the contract open source friendly. They agree to work for you writing drivers for your hardware, but the drivers themselves remain open source. Such things have happened before. The amount of the incentive depends on the amount of work and its value.
My reason for suggesting a published standard was not a slur on TeX. As I said, I love it. The advantage of standards is that, in theory at least, they are not under the control of a single person, company, or reference implementation.
I agree with you about TeX's stability. After using several different incompatible tools through the 80's for my resume, I finally put it in TeX and stayed with TeX for a decade. I'm considering HTML or XML now, but I haven't made the switch.
Anything with source that is plain text (HTML, SGML, XML, RTF) and that is based on a published standard should be the requirement. That guarantees too things. The first is that there will be tools in the future that can read it even if the format itself is abandoned at some point by all of its users. The second is that it is documented in a publically accessible way for the whole world to see.
TeX doesn't meet that second requirement as much as I love it.
The NSA has a mandate to protect the information security of our government. I believe they would interpret that to include protection of the information security of the industrial base that supports our country. I would love to see a group within the NSA charged with working with the open source community to enhance the security of open source software. I would never trust software solely because it comes with a security seal of approval only from an agency which also has other priorities which may be at odds with my privacy. However, I would consider their assurance to be a valuable addition.
I applaud the effort that these people within the NSA who brought this project to light went to. The fact that they have released this work at all is surprising. But they have demonstrated their good faith by honoring the GPL. Bravo.
However, documents such as unpublished software are excluded as a proof that an idea is not novel, because the software itself is not a public document.
There have been discussions here on Slashdot before about the obvious idea that open source clearly qualifies as publication of the ideas embodied in it. It is possible that open source software will save the entire software industry from becoming mired in disaster of its own making through its own patents. While I respect intellectual property law protections for those ideas that clearly meet all three criteria, I think we have all seen examples of many that don't. As an example, would Emacs' info mode qualify as prior art in defense against BT's hyperlink patent? I honestly don't know enough of the details of that patent to say, nor am I a patent attorney.
It is clear however that patents are being granted that are falling short of the obviousness test. Unfortunately, when viewed as individual cases, it is difficult to determine where to draw the line. However, if more source code were published, there would be no question that many patent applications failed the novelty test. The bottom line is that if an open source project uses ideas from a patent in code that was released before the patent application, then either it doesn't infringe because the patent wasn't novel, or it doesn't infringe because it doesn't fall within the scope of the patent.
I remember the day of the infamous 'Green Card' usenet spam. The net rose up and smote Canter & Siegel. I personally faxed them black pages to burn up their fax machinefuser. This type of group action is gone. Spam is with us forever more.
I don't think it is gone, but it is less intense against any particular target because there are now so many. I remember reading the aftermath of that incident. I remember the reactions of many of Usenet's resident personalities to Siegel's interview, in which she presented herself as a pioneer. Was that only 6 1/2 years ago?
We still shun the spammers and the flamers. Spam was a new manifestation of antisocial behavior in a medium that was already experienced in dealing with it. Usenet had grown used to the annual influx of newbies with each fall semester. It had weathered flame wars, some infamous enough that they were referred to long after. And many of us have migrated to the Web or keep a foot in each.
Here on Slashdot, don't we moderate down offtopic posts and flamebait? And I'd like to think that I'm not the only person who uses moderator points to search out low-scoring, but worthy comments and moderate them up.
Community consists of two things: people and the effort they put into communicating. A lack of either will kill it. The presence of interesting people and an effort to maintain a high level of communication will probably sustain it. Make the net what you want it to be. If ever there was a place to be shaped by the will of its inhabitants, this is it.
Virtual communities have served as an introduction to people I later want to meet in person. Based on our growing interactions online, we choose to meet when the opportunity presents itself. I have had the chance to meet a number of people in meatspace after we met online. And I maintain a mental list of others I would like to meet.
It was predictable that at least one of the students would take up the challenge. In fact, a good teacher who knows his students moderately well ought to be able to guess which ones might. But more importantly, what does this retribution teach all of the students there? He accepted a challenge that was openly given. When he succeeded, he annouced his success. And he was punished. Will the next student to do this quietly prowl around the system and say nothing? And is there anyone in most schools with the knowledge to discover that the system has been compromised?
The virtual community is the long-sought but almost-never-found New Jerusalem that's touched the hearts and minds of some of the nicest, most ethical people who've ever gone online.
This sentence truly resonated with me. It reminded me of some dialog from a book I read last summer, Alongside Night by Neil Schulman. The protagonist, a teenage boy, asks an acquaintance of his father's why he never stole some of the gold that his father had entrusted to him. In this fictional future, personal ownership of gold was still illegal in the US. Had he stolen it, the victim could never have reported it to the police. This man's answer was simple, but it spoke volumes. He said, "Because it wasn't mine."
We have elaborate social mechanisms built up to supplement our natural methods of establishing trust. We have police and courts and jails to punish people who violate our trust in ways that we call "illegal". We have institutions such as banks, insurance companies, etc. that serve the function of being established members of society with reputations to protect which will accept part or all of the risk that comes with transacting business between strangers. We have various consumer organizations that watch for failures on the part of these companies to uphold their reputations and publish that information.
Yet, at our core we establish relationships. We judge the people around us on their integrity, discretion, knowledge, skill, level of shared interests and many other factors. We each maintain our models of who they are. While there have been a number of cases in various courts, for the most part, what keeps people from violating our trust online is that many people want to maintain an identity online. Their words and the relationships that they form are that identity. In essence, we are playing a huge, multi-player game of the prisoner's dilemma, with no final turn.
I post my thoughts here. I moderate and meta-moderate as well, and although CmdrTaco, et al, might wish I wouldn't I submit stories. What I do here takes place in public. You can search for my past comments. They aren't all gems. But they represent who I am. And they help shape this place. They make it a place where I can get to know a few people. I still have to fall back on the ancient, instinctive methods of building relationships over time.
In a way, Marshall McLuhan was dead wrong. The medium is not the message. Communication between people has always been why we talk and write. We are trying to reach each other. We act honorably and honestly for many reasons, but most of them boil down to the simple fact that that is the way to treat people whom you would have as friends. And we want friends.
I have to agree; the quote hits one of the biggest problems dead on. It is often cited as the reason for the demise of Usenet. And yet, when I stop by several newsgroups today, I find that they are very much the same as they were in the early 90's even though the volume has increased. In fact, I see many of the same personalities there. I still go there to find some of my friends.
Usenet survived being the original target of spam. I suspect in a way it was ready to deal with it because it had had flamers for years. But it is worth looking at why Usenet persists to discover how virtual communities survive. It is a place, no less real for having no physical location, in which people can meet others of like interests. So long as there is a community that values and protects an online space as a community, it can survive. I doubt that that is fully sufficient for it's survival, but it is clearly necessary.
Sometimes a nick becomes the name that you are known by everywhere. It identifies you online and in meatspace. Mine is like that. It was given to me by a friend in 1984 as a joke and it has stuck ever since. I first started using it online in the late 80's.
I remember early experiences with various online communities where what appeared to be real names weren't. One of the most common jokes was for guys to assume women's names to play with people's heads. Through those experiences I learned what a name truly is. It is continuity. It is identity. It is reputation.
Consistent use of any memorable, unique name is a way to establish who you are for all to see. John Doe, logging in for the first time next week is as much of a stranger to me as someone with a nick. Either of them can then build the identity that I will come to know.
For all of the psychological power that the idea carries, the thought that we can connect a name to a person hides some assumptions that just aren't true. Names aren't unique. People lie. And people change. My best friends from high school weren't the people I remembered when I went back for my 10th reunion.
NPR's Morning Edition ran a story this morning entitled Author Unknown about tracking the identity of anonymous authors. It underscored the fact that your words identify you. Each of us has a style, a voice. If you can hear the voices, even friends without real names can still be friends.
In college I had a classmate who could write Fortran code in any language. And it was good Fortran. He generally posted his solution to every project two days before it was due. No one ever copied his solutions. They were clear, understandable, and completely identifiable as his, every time.
On a daily basis, I use C+-+-, sh, Perl, Emacs Lisp, and often awk, SQL, and various other languages. I have written some excellent code in each of these. I have written some stuff that should never have seen the light of day. Good code is good because it is understandable. It is good because it works. It is good because it solves the problem you set out to solve. It is not good because of the specific language you wrote it in.
Choosing the wrong language for a problem is a mistake. I wouldn't write a tool to quickly match a few regexps and modify files accordingly in anything that didn't provide good native support for it. I would do it in Perl, Python, Emacs Lisp, sed, or awk. I wouldn't touch such a problem with C or Java. The wrong tool for the job.
Choosing the one true teaching language is akin to giving the students a toolbox with nothing but a hammer in it. Every problem will start to look like a nail. You can fake it when the problem is inserting a screw, but I'd hate to plane a cabinet door with a hammer.
None of you youngsters even know what it was like to wait for a radio to warm up. (Which reminds me, why weren't vacuum tubes on that list?)
Ah. That brings back memories of my first stereo. I wonder how it would have altered our current expectations of technology, if instead of transistors we had developed a way to make ever smaller vacuum tubes, but they still took time to warm up.
I use Emacs for nearly everything I can. At home, I compile the latest myself, sometimes patched with something I'm working on at that moment. Of course, at home I have a real OS, Linux. At work, I use it under Windows. The system didn't come with a compiler and I don't want to sort out building it with Cygwin, not because I don't like Cygwin, but because I'm not working on porting it. The pre-compiled binaries allow me to use it in multiple places and only build on the machine where I'm actually working on something.
Please tell me that I am not the only person here under the age of 40 who owns and knows how to use a slide rule. Just don't ask me which box in the basement it is still packed in.
I don't know how many times I've seen redirection that pauses a few seconds and sends me to a Page-Of-No-Return. No amount of clicking on the back button will take me to where I cam from. It brings me back, complete with pop-ups along the way. And these "mistakes" seem to be most common on pages that come with spam, so I can only assume that they are intentional. Yes, I know how to get out, but does my mother?
This has upped the ante considerably in the war on unwanted "content".
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any relationship between Nupedia and GNUPedia? Are these simply two independent implementations of an idea whose time has come? If they are independent, will they merge or continue separately serving different goals?
Yes, as that article points out, there is a great deal of context required to do translation. Translation of larger bodies of text is easier than translation of similar volumes of isolated sentences or phrases. For the anglophone monoglots in the audience, consider the word "Copy" in isolation. It could be a noun, meaning a reproduction, or a verb, meaning to reproduce. What I have done in this simple example is to perform a translation, not from one language to another, but from one word to a synonym in English. Not only are there multiple possible translations, but the meaning itself is ambiguous.
Yes, as we speak or write at greater length, some of the ambiguity disappears. But think about the fact that no one speaks in complete grammatically correct sentences all the time. We make mistakes, we lose our train of thought, we get interrupted.
It seems an obvious point, but I will make it anyway, machine translation is unlikely to exceed the best quality of human translation under ideal conditions. Some things are impervious to translation. There is a wonderful article about that problem in this month's issue of Liberty magazine. It starts off discussing the French translation of one of the Harry Potter books, but touches on several other translations. It's worth reading.
Spam is annoying. I expect to delete as much of it these days as I receive in real mail. At last count, I have been spammed in 7 or 8 languages, some of which I can't puzzle out even a single word of. It uses bandwidth, wastes disk space and takes up my time.
But I will not concede to any government the right to determine what can and cannot be considered unwanted e-mail. When the intent is clearly something that would be criminal when done by other means, such as death threats, fraudulent stock scams, etc., certainly those should be illegal. Consider how far anti-spam legislation may go. Do you want to jail time for a message like this:
To: Not Yet Clueful Newbie <new-b@domain>
From: Open Source Hacker <hacker@lug>
Subject: Come to our meeting next Thursday
Hey, I'm the Linux zealot you met at the
bookstore Saturday. Since you were local I
just fingered the local ISPs for someone with
your name. Are you interested in coming to
our Linux Users' Group meeting next Thursday?
I shouldn't have to consult a lawyer to determine the legality of every action I take.
I remember thinking several years ago when Mir suffered every disaster that didn't involve weather or earthquakes, that it was amazing how well it survived all of the problems. I hope that the lessons learned from it are put to good use on the ISS.
Certainly, (La)TeX is better, easier, more widely known among mathematicians and scientists ... now. But when you can be sure that every desktop with a browser on it can render MathML, but less than 1% of them will have TeX, which will be taught? Which will be supported and used. Some of us will continue to use TeX until the alternatives are clearly superior. Unfortunately, many people will sacrifice some of the things that TeX does so well that aren't obvious for ubiquity. I can count on TeX to fill my paragraphs beautifully. Browsers don't always get it right.
It is wonderfully humane to have good intentions. But when it is clear that the solution presented won't bring the desired results, all the good intentions in the world are still wrong. I actually sat in a horribly crowded emergency room several months ago with someone very dear to me. I'm glad her condition didn't take a turn for the worse. There is a chronic shortage of nursing staff in our area, as in many places.
When a third party pays for something, it artificially lowers the price for the person making the purchasing decision. When something costs less to the buyer, more will be demanded, regardless of the true cost. The problem is that the cost has not gone down. Hospitals still have to pay the overhead for medical staff, equipment, electricity and heat, cleaning and numerous other things.
I don't want to see people die because they can't afford medical care. That is heartless. But it is even more heartless to overburden the medical facilities with non-critical patients, and there were quite a few that night. If a patient who needs emergency care, and is both able and willing to pay for it, but can't get it because the emergency rooms are overburdened with non-paying, non-critical patients, I call the people who created the problem heartless.
I certainly don't want to pay for a portion of what the other users at my ISP are looking at. If I'm reading web sites for various Linux distros, gnu.org, slashdot, and sourceforge and none of them are charging anything, why should I pay for someone's reading habits at various predigested news sites.
Separating the payment from the use, especially spreading it around, encourages overuse. It is a large part of the problem with the cost of medical care in the US. If you don't have to bear the costs, why not have the best and use as much of it as you want.
David Friedman talks about Information as a Public Good in his book Price Theory. Follow the link and search for "Information as a Public Good".
xv has been doing thumbnails of all the pictures in a directory for several years. Depending on what exactly eBay thinks they've patented, there may be a number of example of prior art.
Absolutely! Give away some of the cards that you want drivers for to the people who have shown te ability to do the job. I can't think of a better way for both parties to get something they want. If you have one or two key people who are really helping, consider hiring them. Keep the contract open source friendly. They agree to work for you writing drivers for your hardware, but the drivers themselves remain open source. Such things have happened before. The amount of the incentive depends on the amount of work and its value.
My reason for suggesting a published standard was not a slur on TeX. As I said, I love it. The advantage of standards is that, in theory at least, they are not under the control of a single person, company, or reference implementation.
I agree with you about TeX's stability. After using several different incompatible tools through the 80's for my resume, I finally put it in TeX and stayed with TeX for a decade. I'm considering HTML or XML now, but I haven't made the switch.
Anything with source that is plain text (HTML, SGML, XML, RTF) and that is based on a published standard should be the requirement. That guarantees too things. The first is that there will be tools in the future that can read it even if the format itself is abandoned at some point by all of its users. The second is that it is documented in a publically accessible way for the whole world to see.
TeX doesn't meet that second requirement as much as I love it.
The NSA has a mandate to protect the information security of our government. I believe they would interpret that to include protection of the information security of the industrial base that supports our country. I would love to see a group within the NSA charged with working with the open source community to enhance the security of open source software. I would never trust software solely because it comes with a security seal of approval only from an agency which also has other priorities which may be at odds with my privacy. However, I would consider their assurance to be a valuable addition.
I applaud the effort that these people within the NSA who brought this project to light went to. The fact that they have released this work at all is surprising. But they have demonstrated their good faith by honoring the GPL. Bravo.
There have been discussions here on Slashdot before about the obvious idea that open source clearly qualifies as publication of the ideas embodied in it. It is possible that open source software will save the entire software industry from becoming mired in disaster of its own making through its own patents. While I respect intellectual property law protections for those ideas that clearly meet all three criteria, I think we have all seen examples of many that don't. As an example, would Emacs' info mode qualify as prior art in defense against BT's hyperlink patent? I honestly don't know enough of the details of that patent to say, nor am I a patent attorney.
It is clear however that patents are being granted that are falling short of the obviousness test. Unfortunately, when viewed as individual cases, it is difficult to determine where to draw the line. However, if more source code were published, there would be no question that many patent applications failed the novelty test. The bottom line is that if an open source project uses ideas from a patent in code that was released before the patent application, then either it doesn't infringe because the patent wasn't novel, or it doesn't infringe because it doesn't fall within the scope of the patent.
I don't think it is gone, but it is less intense against any particular target because there are now so many. I remember reading the aftermath of that incident. I remember the reactions of many of Usenet's resident personalities to Siegel's interview, in which she presented herself as a pioneer. Was that only 6 1/2 years ago?
We still shun the spammers and the flamers. Spam was a new manifestation of antisocial behavior in a medium that was already experienced in dealing with it. Usenet had grown used to the annual influx of newbies with each fall semester. It had weathered flame wars, some infamous enough that they were referred to long after. And many of us have migrated to the Web or keep a foot in each.
Here on Slashdot, don't we moderate down offtopic posts and flamebait? And I'd like to think that I'm not the only person who uses moderator points to search out low-scoring, but worthy comments and moderate them up.
Community consists of two things: people and the effort they put into communicating. A lack of either will kill it. The presence of interesting people and an effort to maintain a high level of communication will probably sustain it. Make the net what you want it to be. If ever there was a place to be shaped by the will of its inhabitants, this is it.
Virtual communities have served as an introduction to people I later want to meet in person. Based on our growing interactions online, we choose to meet when the opportunity presents itself. I have had the chance to meet a number of people in meatspace after we met online. And I maintain a mental list of others I would like to meet.
It was predictable that at least one of the students would take up the challenge. In fact, a good teacher who knows his students moderately well ought to be able to guess which ones might. But more importantly, what does this retribution teach all of the students there? He accepted a challenge that was openly given. When he succeeded, he annouced his success. And he was punished. Will the next student to do this quietly prowl around the system and say nothing? And is there anyone in most schools with the knowledge to discover that the system has been compromised?
This sentence truly resonated with me. It reminded me of some dialog from a book I read last summer, Alongside Night by Neil Schulman. The protagonist, a teenage boy, asks an acquaintance of his father's why he never stole some of the gold that his father had entrusted to him. In this fictional future, personal ownership of gold was still illegal in the US. Had he stolen it, the victim could never have reported it to the police. This man's answer was simple, but it spoke volumes. He said, "Because it wasn't mine."
We have elaborate social mechanisms built up to supplement our natural methods of establishing trust. We have police and courts and jails to punish people who violate our trust in ways that we call "illegal". We have institutions such as banks, insurance companies, etc. that serve the function of being established members of society with reputations to protect which will accept part or all of the risk that comes with transacting business between strangers. We have various consumer organizations that watch for failures on the part of these companies to uphold their reputations and publish that information.
Yet, at our core we establish relationships. We judge the people around us on their integrity, discretion, knowledge, skill, level of shared interests and many other factors. We each maintain our models of who they are. While there have been a number of cases in various courts, for the most part, what keeps people from violating our trust online is that many people want to maintain an identity online. Their words and the relationships that they form are that identity. In essence, we are playing a huge, multi-player game of the prisoner's dilemma, with no final turn.
I post my thoughts here. I moderate and meta-moderate as well, and although CmdrTaco, et al, might wish I wouldn't I submit stories. What I do here takes place in public. You can search for my past comments. They aren't all gems. But they represent who I am. And they help shape this place. They make it a place where I can get to know a few people. I still have to fall back on the ancient, instinctive methods of building relationships over time.
In a way, Marshall McLuhan was dead wrong. The medium is not the message. Communication between people has always been why we talk and write. We are trying to reach each other. We act honorably and honestly for many reasons, but most of them boil down to the simple fact that that is the way to treat people whom you would have as friends. And we want friends.
I have to agree; the quote hits one of the biggest problems dead on. It is often cited as the reason for the demise of Usenet. And yet, when I stop by several newsgroups today, I find that they are very much the same as they were in the early 90's even though the volume has increased. In fact, I see many of the same personalities there. I still go there to find some of my friends.
Usenet survived being the original target of spam. I suspect in a way it was ready to deal with it because it had had flamers for years. But it is worth looking at why Usenet persists to discover how virtual communities survive. It is a place, no less real for having no physical location, in which people can meet others of like interests. So long as there is a community that values and protects an online space as a community, it can survive. I doubt that that is fully sufficient for it's survival, but it is clearly necessary.
Sometimes a nick becomes the name that you are known by everywhere. It identifies you online and in meatspace. Mine is like that. It was given to me by a friend in 1984 as a joke and it has stuck ever since. I first started using it online in the late 80's.
I remember early experiences with various online communities where what appeared to be real names weren't. One of the most common jokes was for guys to assume women's names to play with people's heads. Through those experiences I learned what a name truly is. It is continuity. It is identity. It is reputation.
Consistent use of any memorable, unique name is a way to establish who you are for all to see. John Doe, logging in for the first time next week is as much of a stranger to me as someone with a nick. Either of them can then build the identity that I will come to know.
For all of the psychological power that the idea carries, the thought that we can connect a name to a person hides some assumptions that just aren't true. Names aren't unique. People lie. And people change. My best friends from high school weren't the people I remembered when I went back for my 10th reunion.
NPR's Morning Edition ran a story this morning entitled Author Unknown about tracking the identity of anonymous authors. It underscored the fact that your words identify you. Each of us has a style, a voice. If you can hear the voices, even friends without real names can still be friends.
In college I had a classmate who could write Fortran code in any language. And it was good Fortran. He generally posted his solution to every project two days before it was due. No one ever copied his solutions. They were clear, understandable, and completely identifiable as his, every time.
On a daily basis, I use C+-+-, sh, Perl, Emacs Lisp, and often awk, SQL, and various other languages. I have written some excellent code in each of these. I have written some stuff that should never have seen the light of day. Good code is good because it is understandable. It is good because it works. It is good because it solves the problem you set out to solve. It is not good because of the specific language you wrote it in.
Choosing the wrong language for a problem is a mistake. I wouldn't write a tool to quickly match a few regexps and modify files accordingly in anything that didn't provide good native support for it. I would do it in Perl, Python, Emacs Lisp, sed, or awk. I wouldn't touch such a problem with C or Java. The wrong tool for the job.
Choosing the one true teaching language is akin to giving the students a toolbox with nothing but a hammer in it. Every problem will start to look like a nail. You can fake it when the problem is inserting a screw, but I'd hate to plane a cabinet door with a hammer.
Ah. That brings back memories of my first stereo. I wonder how it would have altered our current expectations of technology, if instead of transistors we had developed a way to make ever smaller vacuum tubes, but they still took time to warm up.
I use Emacs for nearly everything I can. At home, I compile the latest myself, sometimes patched with something I'm working on at that moment. Of course, at home I have a real OS, Linux. At work, I use it under Windows. The system didn't come with a compiler and I don't want to sort out building it with Cygwin, not because I don't like Cygwin, but because I'm not working on porting it. The pre-compiled binaries allow me to use it in multiple places and only build on the machine where I'm actually working on something.
Please tell me that I am not the only person here under the age of 40 who owns and knows how to use a slide rule. Just don't ask me which box in the basement it is still packed in.
I don't know how many times I've seen redirection that pauses a few seconds and sends me to a Page-Of-No-Return. No amount of clicking on the back button will take me to where I cam from. It brings me back, complete with pop-ups along the way. And these "mistakes" seem to be most common on pages that come with spam, so I can only assume that they are intentional. Yes, I know how to get out, but does my mother?
This has upped the ante considerably in the war on unwanted "content".
They didn't delete all references to Project Gutenberg. Hence they are bound by the other alternative.