There are lots of sources that people cite as authoritative. That people do so doesn't automatically make them correct to do so. People also cite the bible.
Ah, and the belief in the theory of objective reality is not?
If you believe I exist and am not a figment of your imagination, then there exists an objective reality. There is no inbetween state dividing solipsism and objective reality. As soon as you admit that your perception about the world is not guaranteed to be correct, then that means there MUST exist an objective reality. If yesterday you believed the moon was made of cheese and today you believe it is made of rocks, then in a 100% subjective reality, that would mean that yesterday the moon really was made of cheese and it suddenly changed to rock when your opinion of it changed it into rock - at no time before or after your change of mind were you ever incorrect.
Saying there is no objective reality is synonymous with solipsism, in which case why are you bothering to post to a forum read only by what you believe to be figments of your imagination?
You have just made the claim that at least some Wikipedia editors, including yourself, are people who had the desire to vandalize the site in the past and now are contributors. Why you think saying this would make me trust it more is a mystery to me.
but knowledge, such as source code, was not meant to be locked up for an indefinite amount of time, as copyrights are post-mouse-legislation.
I agree that neither patent nor copyright law is no longer a good match for software. But the cause of that isn't the longer durations. The cause is the effective removal of the Fair Use doctrine. If Fair Use was still in place and unhindered by DMCA, then you wouldn't need to wait for the copyright to expire before being able to make similar software that does similar stuff.
None of those things listed in the objection FAQ covered my point - that reality is not subject to a vote. That a Wikipedia entry has one expert looking at it doesn't change the fact that other people edit it too.
The diffeence is that there isn't as strong a seperation between the knowlege and the application of it in software as there is in 'hard' engineering. Patents are not supposed to be about knowlege (for example, which chemical compounds can adhere to each other), but about applying it (for example, the use of this particular compound on a bit of plastic to make this particular type of masking tape). With software patents, that wall of separation is thin or perhaps even non-existant. I can't write source code without that source code also being a description of how the thing works. Therefore it is nigh impossible to patent just the code without also patenting the knowlege - and knowlege was never supposed to be patentable.
Wikipedia is based on the premise that truth is democratic. Maybe the argument could be made for that with some subjective matters, but much of Wikipedia's topics are objective. I'd trust a single physicist's explanation of Einstiens' theory of relativity over ten thousand randomly chosen people.
It's a useful tool for surveying what the general public (or at least the general public of people who use Wikipedia) think. It shouldn't be taken as anything more authoritative than that, though.
That was never a usenet rule. The rule was that every argument will eventually devolve into an argument about mentioning Hitler or Nazis. It said nothing about who has won or lost at that point.
The problem is that that leads to the concept that objective reality doesn't exist - facts are a democratic subjective thing - if more people believe it then it's more true.
And of course, that's bullcrap.
And that's what's wrong with using Wikipedia as anything more than a feeler for what other people think. It's useful as a survey of public opinion, but not as a storehouse of facts.
Then the solution is to fix copyright expiration and put it back the way it was before being Disnified. The solution is NOT to use the wrong type of law just because the one that should be used has been broken.
False. It's a sign the slashdot population is getting stupid. The reason moderators can't figure out who's kidding is that there is a large enough population of slashdotters now who would say something extremely dumb and actually mean it. Just because it looks entirely silly and nonsensical doesn't mean it's a joke.
While I'd like this news to be true, I have to be very suspicious because any time someone claims to have successfully tallied all the bugs in a program, that person is lying.
I agree, and that's what the message is. That there *IS* a difference between perceived and actual history, and it's a very important one, but you cannot tell what it is, is a very scary concept.
I first didn't notice the comma in the title. I thought "War of the world's chocolate factory trailer", and thought, "My, what a bizzarre concept for a movie."
I wonder about wind power - it seems to me that if it was feasable to maximize the use of it by putting up windmills everywhere, that it would have the detrimental effect of locally dampening the wind in different areas and thereby altering global weather patterns quite a bit. Yeah, I know that it would take a heck of a lot of windmills to do that, but it would take a heck of a lot of windmills for the idea to really be viable as a full power plant replacement rather than the tiny experimental supplement it is today. So an interesting question would be - if you calculate the global total kenetic energy of the movement of the atmosphere (wind), and then compare that to the amount of energy consumed by electricity globally, what kind of a ratio do you get? It should be possible to calculate a lower bound for how much global wind velocities would have to be reduced if all power came from windmills, even assuming 100% efficient engery conversion.
Once enough people try doing this, it wouldn't work anymore. The only reason it might work today is if spammers are assuming an address that is dead for a few days is dead forever and not worth keeping on the mailing list. Once they know that's not true anymore, they'll stop purging dead addresss from their lists that quickly.
If I only got about 5 e-mails a day so I could easily remember all of them, then sure. But once I have more than that, I want the few lines of reminder context.
I do consider it rude, however, when over 50% of the lines in the body of the message are the quoted lines. That isn't needed.
False. I read it. I understood it. But I don't agree with that line. If you think it's true, then you don't understand Orwell's message. If it was actually true that the difference between history and percieved history didn't matter, then the entirety of Orwell's complaint wouldn't matter, because there'd be nothing wrong with lying about history, because then lying about history would actually be impossible.
The point was that someone said it was pointless to have video feed to the controller of an RFC plane since you want to always look at the plane. Since the context was the RC airplane hobby, then what happens over miles of transmission is utterly irrelevant. What matters is what happens in the flight range area. Within that context, you could have obstructions of line of sight, like towers, a tree, something like that, but you're not going to worry about trying to transmit a few miles through hillsides. So I was assuming by "line of sight" you meant through the sorts of obsticles that could actually be relevant in that context - and those aren't the kind that will provide a line of sight transmission problem akin to that of trying to transmit through a large hill.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of sources that people cite as authoritative. That people do so doesn't automatically make them correct to do so. People also cite the bible.
The tradition was not the rule. The rule was just that "this is going to happen" The tradition was due to a misinterpretation of that rule.
Ah, and the belief in the theory of objective reality is not?
If you believe I exist and am not a figment of your imagination, then there exists an objective reality. There is no inbetween state dividing solipsism and objective reality. As soon as you admit that your perception about the world is not guaranteed to be correct, then that means there MUST exist an objective reality. If yesterday you believed the moon was made of cheese and today you believe it is made of rocks, then in a 100% subjective reality, that would mean that yesterday the moon really was made of cheese and it suddenly changed to rock when your opinion of it changed it into rock - at no time before or after your change of mind were you ever incorrect.
Saying there is no objective reality is synonymous with solipsism, in which case why are you bothering to post to a forum read only by what you believe to be figments of your imagination?
You have just made the claim that at least some Wikipedia editors, including yourself, are people who had the desire to vandalize the site in the past and now are contributors. Why you think saying this would make me trust it more is a mystery to me.
but knowledge, such as source code, was not meant to be locked up for an indefinite amount of time, as copyrights are post-mouse-legislation.
I agree that neither patent nor copyright law is no longer a good match for software. But the cause of that isn't the longer durations. The cause is the effective removal of the Fair Use doctrine. If Fair Use was still in place and unhindered by DMCA, then you wouldn't need to wait for the copyright to expire before being able to make similar software that does similar stuff.
None of those things listed in the objection FAQ covered my point - that reality is not subject to a vote. That a Wikipedia entry has one expert looking at it doesn't change the fact that other people edit it too.
The diffeence is that there isn't as strong a seperation between the knowlege and the application of it in software as there is in 'hard' engineering. Patents are not supposed to be about knowlege (for example, which chemical compounds can adhere to each other), but about applying it (for example, the use of this particular compound on a bit of plastic to make this particular type of masking tape). With software patents, that wall of separation is thin or perhaps even non-existant. I can't write source code without that source code also being a description of how the thing works. Therefore it is nigh impossible to patent just the code without also patenting the knowlege - and knowlege was never supposed to be patentable.
Wikipedia is based on the premise that truth is democratic. Maybe the argument could be made for that with some subjective matters, but much of Wikipedia's topics are objective. I'd trust a single physicist's explanation of Einstiens' theory of relativity over ten thousand randomly chosen people.
It's a useful tool for surveying what the general public (or at least the general public of people who use Wikipedia) think. It shouldn't be taken as anything more authoritative than that, though.
That was never a usenet rule. The rule was that every argument will eventually devolve into an argument about mentioning Hitler or Nazis. It said nothing about who has won or lost at that point.
The problems with Christianity and D&D are essentially the same: too many people RTFM, but don't comprehend it.
Actually, the problem with both of them is the ones who *do* read it, and try to treat every rule literally even though they contradict.
The problem is that that leads to the concept that objective reality doesn't exist - facts are a democratic subjective thing - if more people believe it then it's more true.
And of course, that's bullcrap.
And that's what's wrong with using Wikipedia as anything more than a feeler for what other people think. It's useful as a survey of public opinion, but not as a storehouse of facts.
Then the solution is to fix copyright expiration and put it back the way it was before being Disnified. The solution is NOT to use the wrong type of law just because the one that should be used has been broken.
False. It's a sign the slashdot population is getting stupid. The reason moderators can't figure out who's kidding is that there is a large enough population of slashdotters now who would say something extremely dumb and actually mean it. Just because it looks entirely silly and nonsensical doesn't mean it's a joke.
While I'd like this news to be true, I have to be very suspicious because any time someone claims to have successfully tallied all the bugs in a program, that person is lying.
No. The one messing with semantics is the anonymous coward trying to falsely equate "uses foo on bar" with "uses foo *as* bar".
you had a preconception of the game
False.
your agenda (to post here slamming the game)
False.
I don't tolerate lying.
I agree, and that's what the message is. That there *IS* a difference between perceived and actual history, and it's a very important one, but you cannot tell what it is, is a very scary concept.
I first didn't notice the comma in the title.
I thought "War of the world's chocolate factory trailer", and thought, "My, what a bizzarre concept for a movie."
I wonder about wind power - it seems to me that if it was feasable to maximize the use of it by putting up windmills everywhere, that it would have the detrimental effect of locally dampening the wind in different areas and thereby altering global weather patterns quite a bit. Yeah, I know that it would take a heck of a lot of windmills to do that, but it would take a heck of a lot of windmills for the idea to really be viable as a full power plant replacement rather than the tiny experimental supplement it is today. So an interesting question would be - if you calculate the global total kenetic energy of the movement of the atmosphere (wind), and then compare that to the amount of energy consumed by electricity globally, what kind of a ratio do you get? It should be possible to calculate a lower bound for how much global wind velocities would have to be reduced if all power came from windmills, even assuming 100% efficient engery conversion.
Once enough people try doing this, it wouldn't work anymore. The only reason it might work today is if spammers are assuming an address that is dead for a few days is dead forever and not worth keeping on the mailing list. Once they know that's not true anymore, they'll stop purging dead addresss from their lists that quickly.
If I only got about 5 e-mails a day so I could easily remember all of them, then sure. But once I have more than that, I want the few lines of reminder context.
I do consider it rude, however, when over 50% of the lines in the body of the message are the quoted lines. That isn't needed.
HD-DVD (or Blueray) need to come and soon. DRM isn't the only reason for this
DRM isn't ANY reason for this. Nobody needs DRM.
False.
I read it. I understood it. But I don't agree with that line. If you think it's true, then you don't understand Orwell's message. If it was actually true that the difference between history and percieved history didn't matter, then the entirety of Orwell's complaint wouldn't matter, because there'd be nothing wrong with lying about history, because then lying about history would actually be impossible.
The point was that someone said it was pointless to have video feed to the controller of an RFC plane since you want to always look at the plane. Since the context was the RC airplane hobby, then what happens over miles of transmission is utterly irrelevant. What matters is what happens in the flight range area. Within that context, you could have obstructions of line of sight, like towers, a tree, something like that, but you're not going to worry about trying to transmit a few miles through hillsides. So I was assuming by "line of sight" you meant through the sorts of obsticles that could actually be relevant in that context - and those aren't the kind that will provide a line of sight transmission problem akin to that of trying to transmit through a large hill.
Ah, in that case, then I agree. Not only are they making illegal copies, but they also are making profit off them.