Surrendering copyright is the typical state of affairs in many disciplines. A handful of publishing houses (e.g. Elsevier) own a ton of journals and they make money by selling subscriptions to academic libraries. If you can post your articles online for free, that cuts into their profit margin. For example Elsevier prohibits sending out articles on email lists or otherwise "systematically" circulating articles.
Yeah, so there are some neurons that fire in grasping tasks. The same sort of task is done whether grasping is done with hands or with pliers, so we would expect some neurons to show the same firing pattern, just by virtue of the fact that we perceive the tasks as the same in some ways and that perception must take place in the brain. How does this mean our brain is tricked?
In what way does being intuitive imply being part of the body? Repeatedly doing things makes them intuitive, but that's wholly unrelated to whether your mind perceives them as extensions of your body.
The blog you linked to is a string theorist basically bitching about people who don't like string theory. Basically, someone insulted his religion and he's getting whiney.
Here's what he says about Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble with Physics
Smolin is a mediocre, slow thinker with a bad memory, below-average imagination, bad ability to focus and investigate details, and with kindergarten ideas - it is always hard to tell whether he is just joking when he talks about his childish ideas or whether he is serious - who is unable to learn the state-of-the-art physics at the technical level and who has never written a paper that would remain both valid as well as important among physicists who know their field for more than 10 minutes.... Here's what he says about his beloved string theory:
It's very clear that if someone dislikes string theory, she or he must dislike most of modern theoretical physics, too (Lee Smolin certainly does!). It's because string theory is nothing else than the crown, unification, or culmination of modern theoretical physics and all of its crucial results, insights, methods, principles, and values.
No true academic speaks that way about any idea, whether he disagrees with it or not. That's not science, that's fanboi-ism.
It's not that much drivel, but it is subject to contexts. For example, it probably only applies to choices made among a choice set simultaneously, not to choices made sequentially. Deciding among 3 restaurants is probably easier than deciding among 40, even if there are hundreds of restaurants you're not considering. People doing parallel programming probably benefit from somebody making the initial choice for them or at least narrowing it down. Otherwise the more options you have to compare on a number of features the harder the problem becomes. In addition, there is psychological evidence that people with more choices tend to be less happy than people with fewer choices.
I'm a PhD student in psychology and I've actually often wondered this myself. I first noticed it during the last presidential elections. I haven't done any research on it, but I speculate the following is mostly right:
Many nerds have trouble with social interactions. There is some respected psychological evidence that autism (which is characterized by an impaired ability in social situations) is just an extreme form of being a nerd: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen.
If you're a smart nerd, it is easy to come to believe that you can do all sorts of fantastic things without relying on others. Nerds tend to do things like work on computers where a lot can be achieved without leaving the room. If you ask a person like this to pick a political philosophy, it's not unlikely that they'll pick the one that focuses most on leaving people alone to do what they do best.
So I would wager that if you gave all of your nerd friends a personality test, the most strongly libertarian would be the ones lowest on the extraversion and agreeableness measures.
Of course none of this has anything to do with how true libertarianism is or how smart nerds are about political matters. If anything, I imagine they grossly underestimate the importance of social interactions. In other words, I think nerds should have free reign over technology, but that perhaps the engineers shouldn't dictate policy.
Gangs don't hang out on a corner if once an hour a cops walks by a says hello
Actually, in many places they do. Beat cops and homicide cops often have somewhat amicable relationships with drug gangs so that they have informants when violent crimes happen. Narcotics cops are another issue, but they don't walk beats and it's rarely useful to arrest low-level players who are selling at street corners.
Can you explain what's been stolen here? In capitalism, the value of a good is determined by its scarcity, which is a function of its physical manifestation. So, yes stealing physical things is wrong in capitalism.
Basically you're offering your own interpretation of what counts as property -- one that many people take issue with -- and then saying that capitalism automatically makes it wrong to violate your definition. So what?
Regulations on capitalism like copyright and patents are there for utilitarian reasons -- they are believed to make competition better for everyone. Whether or not this assumption is true is up for debate. But what's not up for debate is that it's a regulation that is external to the basic definition of capitalism, just like other regulations like child labor laws, overtime, retirement plans and the like.
In pure capitalism, cloning would be perfectly legitimate.
I didn't see in the research where it showed that people who tried to memorize their phone number were "incapable" of doing so.
My bet would be that gadgets haven't changed the chemical process of memory formation. I'd wager good money that people are just choosing to remember different things...but I guess that makes less of a sensational headline.
Eix and equery and paludis all exist to fix deficiencies with portage. When you need 3rd party applications to fix your package manager, that's a good sign that portage is pretty fucked.
Hey, thanks for the reply. Let's say I need a tool called openbugs to do statistical simulations. In fact, Gentoo doesn't have this package but it's one I've searched for before. This is on a dual-core 3-some GHz machine with 4GB of RAM.
emerge -pv gnome gives 1 minute 32 seconds, but only because it can't resolve dependencies
paludis -ip gnome gives 19 seconds but can resolve the dependencies
And aptitude on a slower machine is much much faster, but I can't give direct comparisons because the interface is different.
I was a gentoo user for 3-4 years and I have to say it was by far my favorite Linux distribution. I'd switch to Ubuntu or Fedora for a couple of days and then just go back because Gentoo offered me so much more flexibility and easier access to packages. Recently, however, I'm switching all of my computers to Kubuntu because Gentoo is just not keeping up with my needs. It breaks my heart but it's true.
The thing that irks me the most is that portage is so horrendously slow. It's beyond painful to use. I switched to paludis and that solved some of the problems, but it's a messy solution for now. Besides, Gentoo no longer has all of the packages I need. I've found myself having to download software from web pages more and more, which was something I wanted to avoid with Gentoo.
Sabayon does a pretty good job of giving me a good setup out of the box, but Gentoo's package management is so messed up now that it's no longer worth that much compiling. Ubuntu used to be noticeably slower for me to use, but either Kubuntu is faster or the gap has been closed and I just prefer the ease of Kubuntu now.
The three laptops are optimized to do different things. Some are bigger and have more power some are smaller. I have several computers each doing different things. Data syncing isn't a problem because I just put everything I work on in subversion and then 'svn update' whenever I switch computers.
I don't do any gaming, but I have several computers. If I had the money, I would have several more. For example, I would have one computer for running mathematical simulations and other number crunching, another one for programming and writing things (since the math computer would run at around 100% CPU all the time), a laptop for mobility, and another laptop that runs OS X for compatability. This doesn't even mention servers etc, or the possibility of having a desktop machine at home.
You raise a good point, but it proves too much. Geeks certainly have quirky preferences, and they may take pride that they are different. But the pride comes AFTER they switch. They switch because they believe it's better and then scoff at people who have failed to make that realization. It may look like they're just trying to be different because once something becomes mainstream, that's a cue that other people may have alread improved it in some more obscure circles.
The proper way to do it is probably to use slides to ONLY display graphs. The use of bullet-points has been seriously criticized by Edward Tufte and others, and again gets into the problem of displaying text and auditory information at the same time.
I agree almost entirely. But the slashdot posters are important too because they're being educated about what needs to be changed and will change their personal behavior accordingly. I personally have spent a ton of my personal time with charities etc. but less so now than before and I always recognized that most people who want to help can't do that. The fact is that a society must be run somehow, so it has to have bankers and politicians, and techies who read slashdot. The goal of the few people who actively do things should be to educate the rest so that they bank, govern, and do their techie things in a way that betters society. In general, it's probably the case that we have more activists (think of all the college students) than can be effective without support from the more mundane institutions.
that Excel's graphing features leave something to be desired, but it's not like Excel actually has good graphing features. Excel's graphs are ugly, often misleading, and frequently default to using the wrong information to make graphs. I can't tell you how many scientific presentations I've seen where the default Excel standard error bars are clearly wrong. The graph features may be easy to use, but they're not at all good in the sense of creating honest graphs that clearly display data.
Bands have been manufactured long before the 1980s. Peter, Paul, and Mary is one well-known example. I'm sure many of the nice sounding groups from the 40s and 50s were created by producers as well.
Many of the bands we still listen to (such as the Beatles) weren't label stooges, but I'm sure they were the exception. Labels have always tried to sell bubble-gum tripe and take as few risks as possible.
I think the comparison is more apt than you believe. The Bill of Rights is meant to protect citizens and the GPL is meant to protect users. In both cases the thing they're protecting against is actions by a more powerful party (the government, or the companies with the license) from violating their rights.
And yes public domain is not free as GPL because the user has fewer rights. The developer can do a wider variety of things under public domain than under GPL, but most of those things are in conflict with the freedom of users. Similarly, the government in the Sudan can do a wider variety of things than the US government (such as take bribes for public service), but that does not make the Sudanese government style the source of more freedom.
I'm not a fan of copyright law. My claim is that freedom comes from enacting prosocial rules that ensure that rights are distributed fairly. In the absence of those rules, there is less freedom and more possibility for might-makes-right.
Yes it's true that we use free in that sense, but that's not what we mean by freedom in the political sense. In fact, I can't think of any seriously thought out political philosophy in which freedom meant anything close to anarchy. In the Western tradition, real political freedom (in the sense of rights) comes when you leave the state of nature, which of course is anarchy. This is true across the entire political spectrum.
For example, a world in which others can murder you for what you say (anarchy) is less free than a world in which you can say what you please.
I think you're confusing freedom with not having rules. Being free doesn't mean being able to do whatever you want, that's called anarchy. Freedom always has "restrictive" like the GPL for software, the Bill of Rights for political rights. It would be foolish to argue that we aren't free politically because there are restrictions on, say, whether the government can force us to quarter soldiers. So yes the GPL has restrictions, but that's WHY it's free, since all of those rules are to ensure the freedom of the sourcecode. The BSD has fewer restrictions, which makes it less free.
Slashdot Mirror
Surrendering copyright is the typical state of affairs in many disciplines. A handful of publishing houses (e.g. Elsevier) own a ton of journals and they make money by selling subscriptions to academic libraries. If you can post your articles online for free, that cuts into their profit margin. For example Elsevier prohibits sending out articles on email lists or otherwise "systematically" circulating articles.
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/rightsasanauthor
Yeah, so there are some neurons that fire in grasping tasks. The same sort of task is done whether grasping is done with hands or with pliers, so we would expect some neurons to show the same firing pattern, just by virtue of the fact that we perceive the tasks as the same in some ways and that perception must take place in the brain. How does this mean our brain is tricked?
In what way does being intuitive imply being part of the body? Repeatedly doing things makes them intuitive, but that's wholly unrelated to whether your mind perceives them as extensions of your body.
Here's what he says about Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble with Physics
Smolin is a mediocre, slow thinker with a bad memory, below-average imagination, bad ability to focus and investigate details, and with kindergarten ideas - it is always hard to tell whether he is just joking when he talks about his childish ideas or whether he is serious - who is unable to learn the state-of-the-art physics at the technical level and who has never written a paper that would remain both valid as well as important among physicists who know their field for more than 10 minutes.... Here's what he says about his beloved string theory: It's very clear that if someone dislikes string theory, she or he must dislike most of modern theoretical physics, too (Lee Smolin certainly does!). It's because string theory is nothing else than the crown, unification, or culmination of modern theoretical physics and all of its crucial results, insights, methods, principles, and values.No true academic speaks that way about any idea, whether he disagrees with it or not. That's not science, that's fanboi-ism.
It's not that much drivel, but it is subject to contexts. For example, it probably only applies to choices made among a choice set simultaneously, not to choices made sequentially. Deciding among 3 restaurants is probably easier than deciding among 40, even if there are hundreds of restaurants you're not considering. People doing parallel programming probably benefit from somebody making the initial choice for them or at least narrowing it down. Otherwise the more options you have to compare on a number of features the harder the problem becomes. In addition, there is psychological evidence that people with more choices tend to be less happy than people with fewer choices.
Many nerds have trouble with social interactions. There is some respected psychological evidence that autism (which is characterized by an impaired ability in social situations) is just an extreme form of being a nerd: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen.
If you're a smart nerd, it is easy to come to believe that you can do all sorts of fantastic things without relying on others. Nerds tend to do things like work on computers where a lot can be achieved without leaving the room. If you ask a person like this to pick a political philosophy, it's not unlikely that they'll pick the one that focuses most on leaving people alone to do what they do best.
So I would wager that if you gave all of your nerd friends a personality test, the most strongly libertarian would be the ones lowest on the extraversion and agreeableness measures.
Of course none of this has anything to do with how true libertarianism is or how smart nerds are about political matters. If anything, I imagine they grossly underestimate the importance of social interactions. In other words, I think nerds should have free reign over technology, but that perhaps the engineers shouldn't dictate policy.
Actually, in many places they do. Beat cops and homicide cops often have somewhat amicable relationships with drug gangs so that they have informants when violent crimes happen. Narcotics cops are another issue, but they don't walk beats and it's rarely useful to arrest low-level players who are selling at street corners.
Basically you're offering your own interpretation of what counts as property -- one that many people take issue with -- and then saying that capitalism automatically makes it wrong to violate your definition. So what?
Regulations on capitalism like copyright and patents are there for utilitarian reasons -- they are believed to make competition better for everyone. Whether or not this assumption is true is up for debate. But what's not up for debate is that it's a regulation that is external to the basic definition of capitalism, just like other regulations like child labor laws, overtime, retirement plans and the like.
In pure capitalism, cloning would be perfectly legitimate.
My bet would be that gadgets haven't changed the chemical process of memory formation. I'd wager good money that people are just choosing to remember different things...but I guess that makes less of a sensational headline.
Eix and equery and paludis all exist to fix deficiencies with portage. When you need 3rd party applications to fix your package manager, that's a good sign that portage is pretty fucked.
Hey, thanks for the reply. Let's say I need a tool called openbugs to do statistical simulations. In fact, Gentoo doesn't have this package but it's one I've searched for before. This is on a dual-core 3-some GHz machine with 4GB of RAM.
.086 seconds.
emerge -s openbugs gives 18 seconds
equery list -p openbugs gives 1.6 seconds
Or say I want to install slashcode
emerge -pv slashcode gives 7 minutes and 6 seconds. SEVEN MINUTES!!!!
paludis -ip slashcode gives
emerge -pv gnome gives 1 minute 32 seconds, but only because it can't resolve dependencies
paludis -ip gnome gives 19 seconds but can resolve the dependencies
And aptitude on a slower machine is much much faster, but I can't give direct comparisons because the interface is different.
Thanks, but I have both of them installed along with a couple of other repositories.
In Soviet Russia, code destroys YOU!
The thing that irks me the most is that portage is so horrendously slow. It's beyond painful to use. I switched to paludis and that solved some of the problems, but it's a messy solution for now. Besides, Gentoo no longer has all of the packages I need. I've found myself having to download software from web pages more and more, which was something I wanted to avoid with Gentoo.
Sabayon does a pretty good job of giving me a good setup out of the box, but Gentoo's package management is so messed up now that it's no longer worth that much compiling. Ubuntu used to be noticeably slower for me to use, but either Kubuntu is faster or the gap has been closed and I just prefer the ease of Kubuntu now.
I don't do any gaming, but I have several computers. If I had the money, I would have several more. For example, I would have one computer for running mathematical simulations and other number crunching, another one for programming and writing things (since the math computer would run at around 100% CPU all the time), a laptop for mobility, and another laptop that runs OS X for compatability. This doesn't even mention servers etc, or the possibility of having a desktop machine at home.
You raise a good point, but it proves too much. Geeks certainly have quirky preferences, and they may take pride that they are different. But the pride comes AFTER they switch. They switch because they believe it's better and then scoff at people who have failed to make that realization. It may look like they're just trying to be different because once something becomes mainstream, that's a cue that other people may have alread improved it in some more obscure circles.
The proper way to do it is probably to use slides to ONLY display graphs. The use of bullet-points has been seriously criticized by Edward Tufte and others, and again gets into the problem of displaying text and auditory information at the same time.
I agree almost entirely. But the slashdot posters are important too because they're being educated about what needs to be changed and will change their personal behavior accordingly. I personally have spent a ton of my personal time with charities etc. but less so now than before and I always recognized that most people who want to help can't do that. The fact is that a society must be run somehow, so it has to have bankers and politicians, and techies who read slashdot. The goal of the few people who actively do things should be to educate the rest so that they bank, govern, and do their techie things in a way that betters society. In general, it's probably the case that we have more activists (think of all the college students) than can be effective without support from the more mundane institutions.
Sorry, Internet problems. The first sentence is meant to say "It may be true that OOcalc's graphing features leave something to be desired"
that Excel's graphing features leave something to be desired, but it's not like Excel actually has good graphing features. Excel's graphs are ugly, often misleading, and frequently default to using the wrong information to make graphs. I can't tell you how many scientific presentations I've seen where the default Excel standard error bars are clearly wrong. The graph features may be easy to use, but they're not at all good in the sense of creating honest graphs that clearly display data.
Many of the bands we still listen to (such as the Beatles) weren't label stooges, but I'm sure they were the exception. Labels have always tried to sell bubble-gum tripe and take as few risks as possible.
And yes public domain is not free as GPL because the user has fewer rights. The developer can do a wider variety of things under public domain than under GPL, but most of those things are in conflict with the freedom of users. Similarly, the government in the Sudan can do a wider variety of things than the US government (such as take bribes for public service), but that does not make the Sudanese government style the source of more freedom.
I'm not a fan of copyright law. My claim is that freedom comes from enacting prosocial rules that ensure that rights are distributed fairly. In the absence of those rules, there is less freedom and more possibility for might-makes-right.
For example, a world in which others can murder you for what you say (anarchy) is less free than a world in which you can say what you please.
I think you're confusing freedom with not having rules. Being free doesn't mean being able to do whatever you want, that's called anarchy. Freedom always has "restrictive" like the GPL for software, the Bill of Rights for political rights. It would be foolish to argue that we aren't free politically because there are restrictions on, say, whether the government can force us to quarter soldiers. So yes the GPL has restrictions, but that's WHY it's free, since all of those rules are to ensure the freedom of the sourcecode. The BSD has fewer restrictions, which makes it less free.
'because it boots faster THAN'
'needs more THAN 10 gig'