Technically speaking, the coworker was being a good scientist: he could have taken your word that the cryo-treatment did nothing to the cables (based entirely on your say-so with no evidence), but instead he was skeptical, and wanted to prove it for himself. Good for him.
1. The plural of anecdote isn't data. I'll believe that there are some nasty guys on sex offender lists, but I suspect there are also kids who had sex with their childhood sweetheart when they were underage, urinated in the park, etc.
2. If we want to keep track of nasty people after they've been in jail, why is this list restricted to SEX offenders? Is a murderer who's released after 20 years less of a danger to his community than a rapist?
3. No bones about it, these restrictions we place on sex offenders after they've served ARE punishment: they restrict their freedom, their ability to live where they want, work where they want, maybe even work at all. Is it fair to add to the sentence of criminals after the fact? Or would you sacrifice freedom for security at all costs?
You're right that people who already want a programming course won't be interested in this class, but everyone who uses a computer could benefit from learning a little bit about programming. At the least, it demystifies what's going on with the computer a little bit. There are also a lot of places where a little bit of programming can go a long way-- VB in Excel, Javascript for web pages, scripting in operating systems, etc. Programming may even show up in careers where it's not expected: e.g. my brother, who's a graphic designer, has done some work on Flash games, and I would never've expected him to get into programming.
And finally, everyone who programs got into it because they were introduced to it somewhere. Back in my childhood, home computers started with that "Ready." prompt, which practically dared you to learn to program. Nowadays it might not even occur to some people to try, and so a class like this could start someone on a career or a hobby they wouldn't have gotten into otherwise.
Nope, but they will be, whether you like it or not Not if you use a whitelist or keep them off of email. You can't shelter them from the existence of sex, because that has pervaded our culture, but the crap you see in spam appears nowhere else a 5-year-old is likely to see it.
There's plenty of time for them to develop an immune system; it doesn't have to start when they're five.
I wonder if a suit against a city could stipulate that the court winnings be put into a trust, to be paid back to the city in the event of the current government's being voted out of office?
It depends on who you trust, of course, but one could easily build a Firefox extension which looks up a website on a list of your choosing, and shows a green or red dot depending on which list it's on. It's an extension of the phishing-site lists. You'd need to be able to trust the lists, but we always have to trust someone to tell us what truth is, whether it be your local newspaper, Walter Cronkite, CNN, FoxNews, The Daily Show, or what have you.
Problem is that truthfulness is harder to determine than whether a site is evil (phishing, scam, etc), and so it would take more work to create such a list, maybe impossible given the size of the web.
Here's an idea (which may already exist): put a little button in your browser that says "Send to The Truth Squad", which sends the website to a forum where people vote on whether they think it's the truth; the people themselves have been vetted so that either only experts get to respond, OR people's opinions have different weights depending on their trustworthiness (evaluated how? I don't know).
So what's the solution (I ask in all humility)? It seems like "fair use" is a subjective matter, at least in certain cases, so someone has to rule on the matter. And that someone costs money. Furthermore, that someone has to rule on the finished work (because editing may change the infringement level), so publishers have to make an investment before they are certain.
IANAL, but maybe one could have statutory limits on how much the original author can recover, as a percentage of earnings, in cases other than open-and-shut plagiarism? That would allow publishers to budget for these things.
With Rowling, at least, it wasn't a "submarine" issue: as I understand it, she clearly stated her disapproval of the book before publication. A lot better than the whole Flat Stanley business where things suddenly change AFTER a time.
It seems to me that there has to be a fix for this: there has to be a way to get a legal ruling on your book BEFORE it goes into production. If there isn't, there should be. This reminds me a lot of submarine patents.
Textbooks are knowledge. Knowledge should be free.
Textbooks are not just about facts (knowledge), they are presentation as well, a structured program for learning a particular subject. Most people, when faced with a subject they aren't familiar with, would have a hard time knowing where to begin. I know that, for instance, programming language specifications are not good ways for me to learn a new language; I prefer some sort of tutorial or structured book. Tutorials are creative work and needn't be free.
Now many people use textbooks simply for reference, and in that case $150 is way too much. A good textbook, however, is like a second professor teaching you the material in a different way, and so is a good defense against the weaknesses of the professor. (Even if the textbook was written by the professor, it was written at leisure and not in the often-rushed atmosphere of a classroom, and so will cover things differently.)
Actually, a dilemma I'm currently dealing with in preparing for my own class is a counterexample to your argument, although in physics not in mathematics. Many introductory physics textbooks teach optics after electricity and magnetism, because light is an electromagnetic wave. Some textbooks, however, teach optics alongside waves, BEFORE electricity and magnetism, because the fact that light is an electromagnetic wave really doesn't make much difference to the introductory physics student. Depending on which way you do it, the introductory chapter on optics is going to be different. In my case, I'm currently using Halliday, Resnick, and Walker, which takes the former route, but I plan to go the latter route, so I am in search of supplementary material I can hand out to my class which introduces optics without any technical discussion of electromagnetism. Asking students to just ignore that stuff would work too, but not as well.
This is true in general: previous discussions often color the current subject, so reading a textbook in a different order than written can be confusing. It shouldn't be beyond the intelligent student, but some of my students have enough difficulty as it is.
Personally, I use the aggregator sites to search for the best fares, and then go to the airline's website to buy the ticket. I can't think of a time where the aggregator was offering a better price (maybe I haven't tried hard enough?), and sometimes the airline's website even has a better deal.
I did literally make a point; you just disagree with it. It is my contention that the existence and relative success of Apple through the 1990s, independent of their goals and actions, kept the idea of multiple operating systems alive in the minds of the public, thus making it easier for Linux computer users to argue that their business/university/whatever should at least allow them to use their preferred system, and maybe even support it. Without us Apple fanboys being the thorn in the side of IT staff, the equation "operating system=Windows" would have solidified even further than it already has, and open-source software wasn't in the right position in the 90's to fill the gap should Apple have fallen.
Note that all of this is independent of what Apple actually did (for good or ill); its mere survival and minimal marketshare was enough. (And by the way, this would make for a lousy marketing campaign for Apple; I think they prefer to emphasize their actual features and products rather than their mere survival).
That is, by definition, my point, which you (BTW) didn't address (which is fine, you can do whatever you want). I can't say whether that one benefit has been outweighed by the many bad things Apple has done to OSS, because that's subjective and I'm not the guru you appear to be (20 years ago I was writing in BASIC on my Vic-20...no, I lie, probably my Commodore-128 at that point).
I didn't mean to imply that Apple was doing any of this intentionally, but even if their policies are anti-Linux, their existence has been a benefit to diversity (IMO), which has been a benefit to Linux and Unix.
As for the "Mac/PC" commercials, it's made explicit that PC is running Windows, and have any of the ads really focused on hardware at all? (I don't recall any.) They wanted a short snappy title for Don Hodgman's character; "Hi, I'm a Mac; and I'm a Windows computer" doesn't really work.
You haven't addressed my point, you've just rattled off your grievances against Apple, which does nothing to refute the possibility that Apple may have at one point been beneficial to you.
Yeah, and how about my iPod shuffle? I want to run emacs on it!
I wonder about this: does open-source software have to be able to run on everything? TVs have microchips inside (I'm sure they do); should we demand the right to write open-source for them? How about automobiles? Personally, it wouldn't have crossed my mind that I could run third-party software on my iPod nano, for instance, and the fact that you can actually run any third-party software on the iPhone at all seems pretty cool to me; it seems a stretch to start demanding more. We're not talking human rights violations, here.
does that mean that Apple customers will stop buying Apple? Good! If you're a Microsoft fanboy, then I have nothing to say to you.
If you're a UNIX/Linux supporter, however, you need to realize how important Apple has been to you. By maintaining a just-large-enough marketshare during the past two decades, Apple has kept alive the idea in the general public that Windows isn't the only possible operating system, keeping the door openn for Linux. Every ad for MacOS is also an ad for "not Windows" and therefore an ad (in part) for Linux and Unix, an ad which the Linux/UNIX community can't afford to run by itself. Everytime a group of Apple fans force a company to support a second operating system in their organization, they make it easier for Linux users to force them to support three.
Apple products aren't perfect, but they are good enough to hold off the behemoth, and that's been worth something.
Both of these uses would be ensured if we had some sort of "non-exclusive patent" (like Creative Commons), or an official register of prior art.
I'm also thinking, however, that each patent counts as an asset, and maybe companies benefit from being able to claim a higher amount of assets? (IANABusinessman so I'm not sure this is true.)
I'm sorry but I'm going to have to say that I hope gas prices reach $10/gallon and higher. Maybe then something will be done.
Great; meanwhile poor families can't afford to eat (shipping costs raise grocery bills), can't afford the gas to get to work, and probably can't afford to move closer to work. Things will sort themselves out in the long term, but in the short term people suffer.
If you'll notice, we don't need $10/gallon gas; $4 gas is already having an impact. SUV sales have plummeted, houses in far-flung suburbs have dropped in value, public transportation is booming. Part of that is the current cost, but part of it is the THREAT that gas prices will increase even more.
But wishing for $10/gas before we're ready for it is (a little) like wishing we'd have a pandemic so that the government would take public health seriously, or wishing for increased casualties in Iraq so that we'd bring the troops home.
What we're missing in America are good alternatives to the cross-country flight, slow or otherwise, specifically rail. I am a great fan of Amtrak, but it needs more routes, more frequent service, and better on-time records to adequately replace the airlines. And taking the train from Dallas to Chicago (for example) means an overnight trip, which means either (a) sleeping in coach (those seats are great for sitting in but I can't sleep if I'm not lying down, even if I have two seats to myself), or (b) getting a Roomette (which cost an additional $200 or more, bringing the price far over that for an equivalent plane ticket, and availability is limit). If they could either lower the cost of the Roomette, OR come up with some other way for me to sleep lying down (Japanese-style compartments maybe? use only for sleeping, discount rate during the day), then a cross-country train trip would be a lot more interesting to me.
Also, a lot of us just don't have a lot of free time for travel: Americans have less vacation time than just about anyone. And if you told your boss that you were going to tack on a couple of extra days to your business trip to NYC because you didn't want to fly, he would look at you askance. This is going to have to be systemic change, not something individuals can do easily by themselves.
So, I would have to open 5 or so terminals, and run
screen -r -d pts-1
screen -r -d pts-2
screen -r -d pts-3
screen -r -d pts-4
screen -r -d pts-5..in each of the terminals? It's not terrible, but would be better if there was a few shortcuts.
I had the same problem with Windows (I'm a Macophone): I wanted to play MP4 files on an XP machine, Windows Media Player didn't work, and I had no idea what to do. Ended up not being able to do it (it was for a class and I had a half hour to set it up).
One problem was that, while I could Google for a player, I had no idea what sites or players were trustworthy; I didn't want to download a Trojan or a virus, something very common according to what I've heard about Windows.
I was thinking that Gmail could easily make email encryption popular: it could be as simple as a little checkbox at the top of your mail saying "Encrypt this message"....but would it be secure against the government? If I understand the system correctly, Google would have to have your private key to encrypt the email, and if the government approaches Google and asks for your private key, would Google say no? For that matter, if the other person is using Gmail, they don't even have to intercept the email on the way there, they can just read the stored copy off the server. Hmm. Gmail-based encryption would make things a little more difficult for the spies, and that would be a good thing.
However, even if it weren't totally secure, Gmail could introduce the concept of encrypted email to the masses, and once people come to expect it, they may be interested in other versions of encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically speaking, the coworker was being a good scientist: he could have taken your word that the cryo-treatment did nothing to the cables (based entirely on your say-so with no evidence), but instead he was skeptical, and wanted to prove it for himself. Good for him.
1. The plural of anecdote isn't data. I'll believe that there are some nasty guys on sex offender lists, but I suspect there are also kids who had sex with their childhood sweetheart when they were underage, urinated in the park, etc.
2. If we want to keep track of nasty people after they've been in jail, why is this list restricted to SEX offenders? Is a murderer who's released after 20 years less of a danger to his community than a rapist?
3. No bones about it, these restrictions we place on sex offenders after they've served ARE punishment: they restrict their freedom, their ability to live where they want, work where they want, maybe even work at all. Is it fair to add to the sentence of criminals after the fact? Or would you sacrifice freedom for security at all costs?
You're right that people who already want a programming course won't be interested in this class, but everyone who uses a computer could benefit from learning a little bit about programming. At the least, it demystifies what's going on with the computer a little bit. There are also a lot of places where a little bit of programming can go a long way-- VB in Excel, Javascript for web pages, scripting in operating systems, etc. Programming may even show up in careers where it's not expected: e.g. my brother, who's a graphic designer, has done some work on Flash games, and I would never've expected him to get into programming.
And finally, everyone who programs got into it because they were introduced to it somewhere. Back in my childhood, home computers started with that "Ready." prompt, which practically dared you to learn to program. Nowadays it might not even occur to some people to try, and so a class like this could start someone on a career or a hobby they wouldn't have gotten into otherwise.
Nope, but they will be, whether you like it or not
Not if you use a whitelist or keep them off of email. You can't shelter them from the existence of sex, because that has pervaded our culture, but the crap you see in spam appears nowhere else a 5-year-old is likely to see it.
There's plenty of time for them to develop an immune system; it doesn't have to start when they're five.
I wonder if a suit against a city could stipulate that the court winnings be put into a trust, to be paid back to the city in the event of the current government's being voted out of office?
It depends on who you trust, of course, but one could easily build a Firefox extension which looks up a website on a list of your choosing, and shows a green or red dot depending on which list it's on. It's an extension of the phishing-site lists. You'd need to be able to trust the lists, but we always have to trust someone to tell us what truth is, whether it be your local newspaper, Walter Cronkite, CNN, FoxNews, The Daily Show, or what have you.
Problem is that truthfulness is harder to determine than whether a site is evil (phishing, scam, etc), and so it would take more work to create such a list, maybe impossible given the size of the web.
Here's an idea (which may already exist): put a little button in your browser that says "Send to The Truth Squad", which sends the website to a forum where people vote on whether they think it's the truth; the people themselves have been vetted so that either only experts get to respond, OR people's opinions have different weights depending on their trustworthiness (evaluated how? I don't know).
So what's the solution (I ask in all humility)? It seems like "fair use" is a subjective matter, at least in certain cases, so someone has to rule on the matter. And that someone costs money. Furthermore, that someone has to rule on the finished work (because editing may change the infringement level), so publishers have to make an investment before they are certain.
IANAL, but maybe one could have statutory limits on how much the original author can recover, as a percentage of earnings, in cases other than open-and-shut plagiarism? That would allow publishers to budget for these things.
With Rowling, at least, it wasn't a "submarine" issue: as I understand it, she clearly stated her disapproval of the book before publication. A lot better than the whole Flat Stanley business where things suddenly change AFTER a time.
It seems to me that there has to be a fix for this: there has to be a way to get a legal ruling on your book BEFORE it goes into production. If there isn't, there should be. This reminds me a lot of submarine patents.
More plausible, in fact. If someone is trying to brand your entire industry as illegal, it's damn well going to hurt your business.
8) All open windows slowly slide down the screen until only their title bars are visible (although the user can keep pulling them back up as needed).
Textbooks are knowledge. Knowledge should be free.
Textbooks are not just about facts (knowledge), they are presentation as well, a structured program for learning a particular subject. Most people, when faced with a subject they aren't familiar with, would have a hard time knowing where to begin. I know that, for instance, programming language specifications are not good ways for me to learn a new language; I prefer some sort of tutorial or structured book. Tutorials are creative work and needn't be free.
Now many people use textbooks simply for reference, and in that case $150 is way too much. A good textbook, however, is like a second professor teaching you the material in a different way, and so is a good defense against the weaknesses of the professor. (Even if the textbook was written by the professor, it was written at leisure and not in the often-rushed atmosphere of a classroom, and so will cover things differently.)
Actually, a dilemma I'm currently dealing with in preparing for my own class is a counterexample to your argument, although in physics not in mathematics. Many introductory physics textbooks teach optics after electricity and magnetism, because light is an electromagnetic wave. Some textbooks, however, teach optics alongside waves, BEFORE electricity and magnetism, because the fact that light is an electromagnetic wave really doesn't make much difference to the introductory physics student. Depending on which way you do it, the introductory chapter on optics is going to be different. In my case, I'm currently using Halliday, Resnick, and Walker, which takes the former route, but I plan to go the latter route, so I am in search of supplementary material I can hand out to my class which introduces optics without any technical discussion of electromagnetism. Asking students to just ignore that stuff would work too, but not as well.
This is true in general: previous discussions often color the current subject, so reading a textbook in a different order than written can be confusing. It shouldn't be beyond the intelligent student, but some of my students have enough difficulty as it is.
Personally, I use the aggregator sites to search for the best fares, and then go to the airline's website to buy the ticket. I can't think of a time where the aggregator was offering a better price (maybe I haven't tried hard enough?), and sometimes the airline's website even has a better deal.
It wasn't a poem, he's just using a Vic-20 to surf the web.
I did literally make a point; you just disagree with it. It is my contention that the existence and relative success of Apple through the 1990s, independent of their goals and actions, kept the idea of multiple operating systems alive in the minds of the public, thus making it easier for Linux computer users to argue that their business/university/whatever should at least allow them to use their preferred system, and maybe even support it. Without us Apple fanboys being the thorn in the side of IT staff, the equation "operating system=Windows" would have solidified even further than it already has, and open-source software wasn't in the right position in the 90's to fill the gap should Apple have fallen.
Note that all of this is independent of what Apple actually did (for good or ill); its mere survival and minimal marketshare was enough. (And by the way, this would make for a lousy marketing campaign for Apple; I think they prefer to emphasize their actual features and products rather than their mere survival).
That is, by definition, my point, which you (BTW) didn't address (which is fine, you can do whatever you want). I can't say whether that one benefit has been outweighed by the many bad things Apple has done to OSS, because that's subjective and I'm not the guru you appear to be (20 years ago I was writing in BASIC on my Vic-20...no, I lie, probably my Commodore-128 at that point).
I didn't mean to imply that Apple was doing any of this intentionally, but even if their policies are anti-Linux, their existence has been a benefit to diversity (IMO), which has been a benefit to Linux and Unix.
As for the "Mac/PC" commercials, it's made explicit that PC is running Windows, and have any of the ads really focused on hardware at all? (I don't recall any.) They wanted a short snappy title for Don Hodgman's character; "Hi, I'm a Mac; and I'm a Windows computer" doesn't really work.
You haven't addressed my point, you've just rattled off your grievances against Apple, which does nothing to refute the possibility that Apple may have at one point been beneficial to you.
Just so you know.
Yeah, and how about my iPod shuffle? I want to run emacs on it!
I wonder about this: does open-source software have to be able to run on everything? TVs have microchips inside (I'm sure they do); should we demand the right to write open-source for them? How about automobiles? Personally, it wouldn't have crossed my mind that I could run third-party software on my iPod nano, for instance, and the fact that you can actually run any third-party software on the iPhone at all seems pretty cool to me; it seems a stretch to start demanding more. We're not talking human rights violations, here.
does that mean that Apple customers will stop buying Apple? Good!
If you're a Microsoft fanboy, then I have nothing to say to you.
If you're a UNIX/Linux supporter, however, you need to realize how important Apple has been to you. By maintaining a just-large-enough marketshare during the past two decades, Apple has kept alive the idea in the general public that Windows isn't the only possible operating system, keeping the door openn for Linux. Every ad for MacOS is also an ad for "not Windows" and therefore an ad (in part) for Linux and Unix, an ad which the Linux/UNIX community can't afford to run by itself. Everytime a group of Apple fans force a company to support a second operating system in their organization, they make it easier for Linux users to force them to support three.
Apple products aren't perfect, but they are good enough to hold off the behemoth, and that's been worth something.
Both of these uses would be ensured if we had some sort of "non-exclusive patent" (like Creative Commons), or an official register of prior art.
I'm also thinking, however, that each patent counts as an asset, and maybe companies benefit from being able to claim a higher amount of assets? (IANABusinessman so I'm not sure this is true.)
I'm sorry but I'm going to have to say that I hope gas prices reach $10/gallon and higher. Maybe then something will be done.
Great; meanwhile poor families can't afford to eat (shipping costs raise grocery bills), can't afford the gas to get to work, and probably can't afford to move closer to work. Things will sort themselves out in the long term, but in the short term people suffer.
If you'll notice, we don't need $10/gallon gas; $4 gas is already having an impact. SUV sales have plummeted, houses in far-flung suburbs have dropped in value, public transportation is booming. Part of that is the current cost, but part of it is the THREAT that gas prices will increase even more.
But wishing for $10/gas before we're ready for it is (a little) like wishing we'd have a pandemic so that the government would take public health seriously, or wishing for increased casualties in Iraq so that we'd bring the troops home.
What we're missing in America are good alternatives to the cross-country flight, slow or otherwise, specifically rail. I am a great fan of Amtrak, but it needs more routes, more frequent service, and better on-time records to adequately replace the airlines. And taking the train from Dallas to Chicago (for example) means an overnight trip, which means either (a) sleeping in coach (those seats are great for sitting in but I can't sleep if I'm not lying down, even if I have two seats to myself), or (b) getting a Roomette (which cost an additional $200 or more, bringing the price far over that for an equivalent plane ticket, and availability is limit). If they could either lower the cost of the Roomette, OR come up with some other way for me to sleep lying down (Japanese-style compartments maybe? use only for sleeping, discount rate during the day), then a cross-country train trip would be a lot more interesting to me.
Also, a lot of us just don't have a lot of free time for travel: Americans have less vacation time than just about anyone. And if you told your boss that you were going to tack on a couple of extra days to your business trip to NYC because you didn't want to fly, he would look at you askance. This is going to have to be systemic change, not something individuals can do easily by themselves.
That's what shell scripts are for, no? :)
I had the same problem with Windows (I'm a Macophone): I wanted to play MP4 files on an XP machine, Windows Media Player didn't work, and I had no idea what to do. Ended up not being able to do it (it was for a class and I had a half hour to set it up).
One problem was that, while I could Google for a player, I had no idea what sites or players were trustworthy; I didn't want to download a Trojan or a virus, something very common according to what I've heard about Windows.
I was thinking that Gmail could easily make email encryption popular: it could be as simple as a little checkbox at the top of your mail saying "Encrypt this message". ...but would it be secure against the government? If I understand the system correctly, Google would have to have your private key to encrypt the email, and if the government approaches Google and asks for your private key, would Google say no? For that matter, if the other person is using Gmail, they don't even have to intercept the email on the way there, they can just read the stored copy off the server. Hmm. Gmail-based encryption would make things a little more difficult for the spies, and that would be a good thing.
However, even if it weren't totally secure, Gmail could introduce the concept of encrypted email to the masses, and once people come to expect it, they may be interested in other versions of encryption.