And where do museums get their artefacts?... A few years ago a friend told me of how his museum -- basically a small room in a university, where the friend was the part-time curator -- bought some Egyptian papyri via eBay. Sure eBay has its problems, but other auctions aren't necessarily more trustworthy when it comes to potentially forged antiquities.
The ideal, I suppose, is to go for a private deal with a source you trust, e.g. another museum. But with high-volume stuff -- like Egyptian papyri, of which there are hundreds of thousands of items in existence -- that's not always efficient. EBay is very efficient.
Some interesting ideas there. But if you're going to change things that radically anyway, what's the virtue of keeping the MPs? (I can imagine a couple of rationales, but I doubt they're the same ones you'd pick.)
Everyone who is eligible to vote can change who represents them to any of the sitting MPs, once every 3 moths or so. This takes a vote away from their MP and gives it to the MP they want to have it. (Suggest that libraries are used for this purpose).
My gut reaction is that that sounds like a good recipe for ensuring the rapid closing of all libraries, as their funding mysteriously vanishes.
Or, find a paper that you want to rip off written in German/French/Spanish/whatever and dump it through babelfish:
"Easy"? Your procedure has three steps: Finding the paper, putting it through babelfish, and editing the result into good English. Step 2 is the only easy bit -- steps 1 and 3 combined would be considerably more work than just writing the damn paper!
It's one of those once-in-a-lifetime events. I could be worried about an elevator car falling 20 stories and killing me in the fall, or being hit by lightning. Either of those are more likely than a repeat of 9/11.
I doubted this claim, so I had to check it. I don't think you're right. In the case of lightning, it's true that lightning strikes are much, much more frequent than terrorist attacks; but since one terrorist attack can cause many fatalities, you may still be more at risk from terrorists than you are from lightning. Reportedly lightning killed about 90 people in the US per year in the period 1959-1994. It'd take 30 years of lightning to make one 9/11.
As far as I can tell about falling lifts, there seems to be very very sparse evidence of people dying in falling lifts. In fact there seem to have been only two cases, ever. The first, as it happens, is precisely the case of 9/11. The other is a case from 1945 mentioned in the same link -- the article claims that that was the only fatality caused by a falling lift, prior to 9/11. There's also one case (near the bottom of the page) where a man in a hospital gurney was trapped when a lift slipped a couple of metres while his gurney was partway out the door, but that's not quite the same thing.
Most lift fatalities appear to be a result of people falling down an empty shaft, with a minority caused by people being trapped between moving parts (including a couple of famous decapitation cases) and electrocutions. And one case of a person drowning in a lift. But reports of lift fatalities seems to range between 16 and 30 per year within the US. I'd say you're definitely more at risk from terrorists than you are from lift accidents of any kind.
we would see in the next decade some great early rock n roll get released into the public domain.:-(
Occasions like this make me glad I'm living in a country where the copyright term on audio/video recordings is 50 years, full stop. Bogart's and Elvis' best years are public domain here. (Not that I'm gloating, mind: 1959 is hardly anything for any sensible being to be pleased with. It's mainly for edumacational purposes that I'm pleased -- students are actually occasionally allowed to see the things they're studying.)
Anyway, it doesn't make any difference. Most people here assume that it's illegal even to print off a Shakespeare play -- on the grounds that, they presume, it's not allowed by copyright law.
how long till we're able to capture the heat from processors and use them to cut power requirements for computers exponentially?
Heat cannot of itself pass from a cooler body to a hotter body.
Altogether now: heat can't pass from the cooler to the hotter! You can try it if you like, but you'd far better notter. Ah yes...
Heat is work, and work's a curse; and all the heat in the universe is gonna coooooool down. 'Cos it can't increase! And there'll be no more work... and there'll be perfect peace. Yeah, that's entropy, man.
Fat drunk people are funny.
Look at classical depictions of Bacchus...never skinny.
*Ahem* I hate to be nit-picky,... well, actually that's a complete lie, I live for being picky. But Bakkhos is not noticeably fat in classical depictions (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
I'm guessing you're thinking of Silenos... except that, usually, he's also not distinctively fat (1, 2, 3), except when painted by Rubens -- a painter of the modern period. And I defy anyone to regard the Silenos in that painting as jolly -- he's revolting! We're not talking goatse revolting, not quite,... though I can imagine him pulling a goatse after a couple more goblets of wine.
Oaooow. Now my brain needs washing to get rid of that mental image.
Superb idea! I'm not sure how many OCR implementations can reliably handle 17th century Arabic script, mind you...
(If anyone knows of any, incidentally, they might also know of one that can handle classical, a.k.a. polytonic, Greek -- I'd be very interested in being pointed towards one -- pretty please!)
With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered.
Is anyone surprised at this? Seriously, does copyright ever end these days?
Pretty much the entire content of the site appears to consist of photographs (or facsimiles, if you prefer; I don't know the details of how the images were copied). Somehow I doubt the photographs were taken 8000 years ago.
If you were to transcribe the text of The Precious Book on Noteworthy Dates by Husayn bin Zayd bin 'Ali al-Jahhaf, written in the 10th century, you won't be infringing anyone's copyright. However, if you reproduce the images... beware.
As far as I recall, my courses (over ten years ago now) were pretty much all canned scripts. Except for when the idjuts started asking inane questions, and then the professor would carefully answer while the rest of the class got bored.
For disciplines in which that style of presentation is adequate, a shift towards emphasising online courses seems reasonable. What I worry about is the impact -- both direct and indirect -- on disciplines where online learning simply can't work as effectively.
Some disciplines -- the first example that comes to my mind is language learning -- lean heavily on intensive interaction between teacher and a small group of students. Quite aside from the fact that language learning needs continuous feedback, it also requires a great deal of motivation, and if it doesn't come from the student, the teacher has to (try to) provide it. Sure it's possible to learn a language in a lecture course. The self-motivation issue can, in some case at least, be defeated, but it leads to other problems. Suppose the teachers in such a discipline agree to give up their emphasis on face-to-face contact. What happens next?
First: students need much greater self-motivation to succeed in the online version of their courses than for the face-to-face version. As a result, the self-selecting group of students interested in taking up the discipline will shrink dramatically -- why spend 15 hours a week learning Arabic, when if you were taking Media Studies 101 you'd just watch the lectures, never do any research, and pass anyway?
Second: the discipline has lost students, so they get closed down by the university. (Suddenly no one's learning Arabic any more, because there isn't anywhere to learn it.)
Don't believe me? Consider: how big are social science departments these days? Hint: not very, because they've been supplanted by a combo of anthropology, political science, and media studies. Now, that may not be such a big deal, if other departments are teaching the same stuff that the moribund department used to teach. But there are other disciplines that aren't so flexible. Again, languages come to mind: bureaucrats are always trying to close departments that teach languages, because a low staff-student ratio is very desirable. My own university has closed down Russian and Portuguese -- the Russian department ran a moderately important journal, too -- and forced all remaining European languages to combine into a single department. This is all within the last decade -- during an economic boom.
When technological changes make it economically unviable to sustain an important programme, the social or historical importance of the programme is not going to save it. So, yes, I'm mildly concerned about the possibility this guy raises.
It's not actually wrong to say that the Catholic church is rich, but it's only true in the same sense that, say, Los Angeles is rich. There's a hell of a lot of wealth there, yes; but no single body has control over all of it.
The church is monolithic only in a theological sense. In an economic sense every branch of the church, every religious order, every diocese, is more or less autonomous. The Vatican has economic control only over what's inside its own borders, which is not a great deal (and usually runs at a budget deficit). If cathedrals in Cuzco and Rome are wealthy, that wealth is under the control of the separate dioceses. The pope can't tell the bishop of Cuzco what to do with the gold and silver in his cathedral (well, he can try, but the bishop of Cuzco doesn't have to listen); the pope's authority over the bishop of Cuzco is purely theological, which is to say, non-existent in real terms.
Basically, wanting "the church" to pay for stuff is like wanting the entire population of a city to pay for stuff -- and about as likely to happen. The collective wealth of the city's population may amount to billions, but the mayor's own budget is pretty tiny by comparison. The mayor can raise cash via taxation, but the Vatican can't -- or not easily; the Vatican receives about $100 million a year in donations (ear-marked by donors for the Vatican, viz. Peter's pence), and that's kind of peanuts when you have a country (and numerous embassies) to run.
Now, I won't make any apologies for the bishop of Cuzco; but aim your vitriol at the right place. "The church" as a single body simply doesn't exist in a real-world sense.
See this for the hilarious incident where Kluger contacted the anti-advertising agency in what was, shall we say, a lapse in judgment.
It was certainly a lapse in judgment, but actually I don't see a problem whatsoever with that model of advertising in principle. It's how performing artists got started in the first place. Paying an artist to promote you -- art on commission -- think of praise poems. Here's a small sample from an ancient Greek poet, Pindar, in a poem commissioned to celebrate someone's victory at the Olympian games:
... Know this, son of Archestratos:
it is because of your boxing, Hagesidamos,
that as an ornament to your golden olive garland
I shall cry aloud sweet songs,
celebrating the race of the western Lokrians.
And now, party on! I'll guarantee,
Muses, that he will return home to a people who are not hostile to visitors,
not oblivious to fine things,
but they possess the height of wisdom, and skill in the spear.
For neither the fiery fox
nor loud-roaring lions would go and change their own innate character.
Now, this was probably commissioned by the athlete's native city, rather than his family: Pindar spends more time advertising the city than the athlete. And now? Pindar's victory odes are now among the most highly regarded poetry of all time (not widely read, though, since he's pretty hard going, and he does a lot of very fancy stuff with rhythm and pacing that don't come across in translation).
As an advertising model, I really have no problem with it. There's a safety measure built in: the advertiser isn't the one deciding how to do the advertising. That's the artist's job. I reckon that -- within limits -- it's a perfectly decent and moral way for an artist to make a living.
As someone who's moderately nit-picky over my own language, I sympathise with your wanting to use a more natural word to replace a stupid made-up long word that sounds fancy but is merely lazy; but then, why not replace it with a word that's actually real? -- rather than making up yet another one? I'd suggest "discourage" or "deter".
> English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.)
It borrows to within less than 1% as many words from Latin as from the biggest influence, so where it's derived from is something of a moot point for the purpose of this argument!
Latin/Romance-derived words in your post (including the quotation, since including it actually works in favour of your claim): derived, Latin, large, amount, Latin, per cent, Latin, influence, derived, point, purpose, argument. Total count: 11.
Germanic words in your post: English, is, also, not, from, although, it, does, borrow, a, of, words, from, it, borrows, to, within, less, than, one, as, many, words, from, as, from, the, biggest, so, where, it, is, from, is, something, of, a, moot, for, the, of, this. Total count: 42.
Great. So in a Slashdot post I can type an eth (but not a thorn, bizarrely), or a y with an umlaut, but I can't type the name of this popular piece of software. Anyway, you should know from how long it took you to type that post just how painful entities are!
In addition, I have frequently had occasion to try to quote text either with more than the usual range of Western European accents (e.g. for Eastern European names) or even in another language -- because that's the type of geek I am, a language geek. Are you really going to claim that it is the more sensible choice not to support copying and pasting in such cases?
Slashdot Mirror
Harumph! Ebay? They belong in a museum!
And where do museums get their artefacts? ... A few years ago a friend told me of how his museum -- basically a small room in a university, where the friend was the part-time curator -- bought some Egyptian papyri via eBay. Sure eBay has its problems, but other auctions aren't necessarily more trustworthy when it comes to potentially forged antiquities.
The ideal, I suppose, is to go for a private deal with a source you trust, e.g. another museum. But with high-volume stuff -- like Egyptian papyri, of which there are hundreds of thousands of items in existence -- that's not always efficient. EBay is very efficient.
Some interesting ideas there. But if you're going to change things that radically anyway, what's the virtue of keeping the MPs? (I can imagine a couple of rationales, but I doubt they're the same ones you'd pick.)
Everyone who is eligible to vote can change who represents them to any of the sitting MPs, once every 3 moths or so. This takes a vote away from their MP and gives it to the MP they want to have it. (Suggest that libraries are used for this purpose).
My gut reaction is that that sounds like a good recipe for ensuring the rapid closing of all libraries, as their funding mysteriously vanishes.
There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.
How would one get anything done in such a system?
That's the point.
Weak government is good government.
(And, yes, I realise the irony of my sig in this context.)
Think it through:
1) North Korea kills several power plants with cyberweapons.
2) US kills North Korea with conventional weapons.
So you're saying that a proportionate response to a technological-economic attack is to commit genocide.
Or, find a paper that you want to rip off written in German/French/Spanish/whatever and dump it through babelfish:
"Easy"? Your procedure has three steps: Finding the paper, putting it through babelfish, and editing the result into good English. Step 2 is the only easy bit -- steps 1 and 3 combined would be considerably more work than just writing the damn paper!
It's one of those once-in-a-lifetime events. I could be worried about an elevator car falling 20 stories and killing me in the fall, or being hit by lightning. Either of those are more likely than a repeat of 9/11.
I doubted this claim, so I had to check it. I don't think you're right. In the case of lightning, it's true that lightning strikes are much, much more frequent than terrorist attacks; but since one terrorist attack can cause many fatalities, you may still be more at risk from terrorists than you are from lightning. Reportedly lightning killed about 90 people in the US per year in the period 1959-1994. It'd take 30 years of lightning to make one 9/11.
As far as I can tell about falling lifts, there seems to be very very sparse evidence of people dying in falling lifts. In fact there seem to have been only two cases, ever. The first, as it happens, is precisely the case of 9/11. The other is a case from 1945 mentioned in the same link -- the article claims that that was the only fatality caused by a falling lift, prior to 9/11. There's also one case (near the bottom of the page) where a man in a hospital gurney was trapped when a lift slipped a couple of metres while his gurney was partway out the door, but that's not quite the same thing.
Most lift fatalities appear to be a result of people falling down an empty shaft, with a minority caused by people being trapped between moving parts (including a couple of famous decapitation cases) and electrocutions. And one case of a person drowning in a lift. But reports of lift fatalities seems to range between 16 and 30 per year within the US. I'd say you're definitely more at risk from terrorists than you are from lift accidents of any kind.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
It was broke. Now they've made it worse.
we would see in the next decade some great early rock n roll get released into the public domain. :-(
Occasions like this make me glad I'm living in a country where the copyright term on audio/video recordings is 50 years, full stop. Bogart's and Elvis' best years are public domain here. (Not that I'm gloating, mind: 1959 is hardly anything for any sensible being to be pleased with. It's mainly for edumacational purposes that I'm pleased -- students are actually occasionally allowed to see the things they're studying.)
Anyway, it doesn't make any difference. Most people here assume that it's illegal even to print off a Shakespeare play -- on the grounds that, they presume, it's not allowed by copyright law.
there's been a call-for-papers for research into an OCR implementation that can handle cuneiform and other ancient writing systems.
Sounds nice. Make sure to submit a story to Slashdot if/when something good comes up ...
how long till we're able to capture the heat from processors and use them to cut power requirements for computers exponentially?
Heat cannot of itself pass from a cooler body to a hotter body.
Altogether now: heat can't pass from the cooler to the hotter! You can try it if you like, but you'd far better notter. Ah yes ...
Heat is work, and work's a curse; ... and there'll be perfect peace.
and all the heat in the universe
is gonna coooooool down. 'Cos it can't increase!
And there'll be no more work
Yeah, that's entropy, man.
-- Flanders & Swann
Fat drunk people are funny.
Look at classical depictions of Bacchus...never skinny.
*Ahem* I hate to be nit-picky, ... well, actually that's a complete lie, I live for being picky. But Bakkhos is not noticeably fat in classical depictions (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
I'm guessing you're thinking of Silenos ... except that, usually, he's also not distinctively fat (1, 2, 3), except when painted by Rubens -- a painter of the modern period. And I defy anyone to regard the Silenos in that painting as jolly -- he's revolting! We're not talking goatse revolting, not quite, ... though I can imagine him pulling a goatse after a couple more goblets of wine.
Oaooow. Now my brain needs washing to get rid of that mental image.
Sounds like a job for... OCR!!!
Superb idea! I'm not sure how many OCR implementations can reliably handle 17th century Arabic script, mind you ...
(If anyone knows of any, incidentally, they might also know of one that can handle classical, a.k.a. polytonic, Greek -- I'd be very interested in being pointed towards one -- pretty please!)
"4 pages longer than the document to which it was responding"
And?
I'm not sure either, but my best guess is that we're to take it as an indication that the RIAA is feeling defensive, i.e. nervous.
With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered.
Is anyone surprised at this? Seriously, does copyright ever end these days?
Pretty much the entire content of the site appears to consist of photographs (or facsimiles, if you prefer; I don't know the details of how the images were copied). Somehow I doubt the photographs were taken 8000 years ago.
If you were to transcribe the text of The Precious Book on Noteworthy Dates by Husayn bin Zayd bin 'Ali al-Jahhaf, written in the 10th century, you won't be infringing anyone's copyright. However, if you reproduce the images ... beware.
As far as I recall, my courses (over ten years ago now) were pretty much all canned scripts. Except for when the idjuts started asking inane questions, and then the professor would carefully answer while the rest of the class got bored.
For disciplines in which that style of presentation is adequate, a shift towards emphasising online courses seems reasonable. What I worry about is the impact -- both direct and indirect -- on disciplines where online learning simply can't work as effectively.
Some disciplines -- the first example that comes to my mind is language learning -- lean heavily on intensive interaction between teacher and a small group of students. Quite aside from the fact that language learning needs continuous feedback, it also requires a great deal of motivation, and if it doesn't come from the student, the teacher has to (try to) provide it. Sure it's possible to learn a language in a lecture course. The self-motivation issue can, in some case at least, be defeated, but it leads to other problems. Suppose the teachers in such a discipline agree to give up their emphasis on face-to-face contact. What happens next?
First: students need much greater self-motivation to succeed in the online version of their courses than for the face-to-face version. As a result, the self-selecting group of students interested in taking up the discipline will shrink dramatically -- why spend 15 hours a week learning Arabic, when if you were taking Media Studies 101 you'd just watch the lectures, never do any research, and pass anyway?
Second: the discipline has lost students, so they get closed down by the university. (Suddenly no one's learning Arabic any more, because there isn't anywhere to learn it.)
Don't believe me? Consider: how big are social science departments these days? Hint: not very, because they've been supplanted by a combo of anthropology, political science, and media studies. Now, that may not be such a big deal, if other departments are teaching the same stuff that the moribund department used to teach. But there are other disciplines that aren't so flexible. Again, languages come to mind: bureaucrats are always trying to close departments that teach languages, because a low staff-student ratio is very desirable. My own university has closed down Russian and Portuguese -- the Russian department ran a moderately important journal, too -- and forced all remaining European languages to combine into a single department. This is all within the last decade -- during an economic boom.
When technological changes make it economically unviable to sustain an important programme, the social or historical importance of the programme is not going to save it. So, yes, I'm mildly concerned about the possibility this guy raises.
It's not actually wrong to say that the Catholic church is rich, but it's only true in the same sense that, say, Los Angeles is rich. There's a hell of a lot of wealth there, yes; but no single body has control over all of it.
The church is monolithic only in a theological sense. In an economic sense every branch of the church, every religious order, every diocese, is more or less autonomous. The Vatican has economic control only over what's inside its own borders, which is not a great deal (and usually runs at a budget deficit). If cathedrals in Cuzco and Rome are wealthy, that wealth is under the control of the separate dioceses. The pope can't tell the bishop of Cuzco what to do with the gold and silver in his cathedral (well, he can try, but the bishop of Cuzco doesn't have to listen); the pope's authority over the bishop of Cuzco is purely theological, which is to say, non-existent in real terms.
Basically, wanting "the church" to pay for stuff is like wanting the entire population of a city to pay for stuff -- and about as likely to happen. The collective wealth of the city's population may amount to billions, but the mayor's own budget is pretty tiny by comparison. The mayor can raise cash via taxation, but the Vatican can't -- or not easily; the Vatican receives about $100 million a year in donations (ear-marked by donors for the Vatican, viz. Peter's pence), and that's kind of peanuts when you have a country (and numerous embassies) to run.
Now, I won't make any apologies for the bishop of Cuzco; but aim your vitriol at the right place. "The church" as a single body simply doesn't exist in a real-world sense.
See this for the hilarious incident where Kluger contacted the anti-advertising agency in what was, shall we say, a lapse in judgment.
It was certainly a lapse in judgment, but actually I don't see a problem whatsoever with that model of advertising in principle. It's how performing artists got started in the first place. Paying an artist to promote you -- art on commission -- think of praise poems. Here's a small sample from an ancient Greek poet, Pindar, in a poem commissioned to celebrate someone's victory at the Olympian games:
... Know this, son of Archestratos:
it is because of your boxing, Hagesidamos,
that as an ornament to your golden olive garland
I shall cry aloud sweet songs,
celebrating the race of the western Lokrians.
And now, party on! I'll guarantee,
Muses, that he will return home to a people who are not hostile to visitors,
not oblivious to fine things,
but they possess the height of wisdom, and skill in the spear.
For neither the fiery fox
nor loud-roaring lions would go and change their own innate character.
Now, this was probably commissioned by the athlete's native city, rather than his family: Pindar spends more time advertising the city than the athlete. And now? Pindar's victory odes are now among the most highly regarded poetry of all time (not widely read, though, since he's pretty hard going, and he does a lot of very fancy stuff with rhythm and pacing that don't come across in translation).
As an advertising model, I really have no problem with it. There's a safety measure built in: the advertiser isn't the one deciding how to do the advertising. That's the artist's job. I reckon that -- within limits -- it's a perfectly decent and moral way for an artist to make a living.
And who first realized that all caps make for efficiency? Stone masons. Ever seen a Greco-Roman building?
YESTHEYWRITELIKETHISITSVE
RYEFFICIENTANDEASYTOREADE
SPIFYOVVSEABBRVNS.SCR.PET
R.A.D.XII.KAL.MAI.MMIX
n/t
s/disincentivize/disincent/g
As someone who's moderately nit-picky over my own language, I sympathise with your wanting to use a more natural word to replace a stupid made-up long word that sounds fancy but is merely lazy; but then, why not replace it with a word that's actually real? -- rather than making up yet another one? I'd suggest "discourage" or "deter".
> English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.)
It borrows to within less than 1% as many words from Latin as from the biggest influence, so where it's derived from is something of a moot point for the purpose of this argument!
Latin/Romance-derived words in your post (including the quotation, since including it actually works in favour of your claim):
derived, Latin, large, amount, Latin, per cent, Latin, influence, derived, point, purpose, argument.
Total count: 11.
Germanic words in your post:
English, is, also, not, from, although, it, does, borrow, a, of, words, from, it, borrows, to, within, less, than, one, as, many, words, from, as, from, the, biggest, so, where, it, is, from, is, something, of, a, moot, for, the, of, this.
Total count: 42.
I hope that clarifies the slip in your reasoning.
"Frag" comes from military usage, ca. the time of the Vietnam War, not from science fiction.
Other supported named entities: ¥ ¦ © ® ± ¼ ½ ¾ × ÷ À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý ß à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ø ù ú û ü ý ÿ.
Great. So in a Slashdot post I can type an eth (but not a thorn, bizarrely), or a y with an umlaut, but I can't type the name of this popular piece of software. Anyway, you should know from how long it took you to type that post just how painful entities are!
In addition, I have frequently had occasion to try to quote text either with more than the usual range of Western European accents (e.g. for Eastern European names) or even in another language -- because that's the type of geek I am, a language geek. Are you really going to claim that it is the more sensible choice not to support copying and pasting in such cases?
Not quite, you need another "l". As it is, it is only an anagram of "April Foo".
I pity the April Foo
Personally, I pity the April Bar.
(It's in Amsterdam, off the Vijzelstraat. Feel free to pop in any night and check out the local gals.)
...if one of these hard to believe, so obviously April Fools stories actually turned out to be true.
Remember when Gmail launched?