Leaving aside the obvious, that we're talking about a fictional space opera, not some serious SciFi here, what's wrong with this approach?
We give rights to people and to animals because they are feeling, living beings. A robot or computer does not feel anything unless you've programmed him to simulate such a thing. The difference between your iPhone and the androids of SciFi is much smaller than the difference between a microbe and a human being, and we kill millions of those every time we use desinfectant spray. Don't recall anyone getting murder charges for that.
Despite all the make-belief, androids aren't human and don't suffer. There's no point in giving them rights. As a matter of fact, programming them so that they can suffer (instead of simulating an avoidance algorithm) would be the cruel part, not what comes after.
With or without "piracy", that is a real question, because the vast majority of authors don't.
I'm not sure about the exact numbers as it's been a while since I read the articles on this, but roughly 90% of authors don't have an income worth mentioning from their books or articles. Of the remaining 10%, less than 1% makes their living entirely on their writing. The vast majority of authors have a "real" job in addition to writing.
I don't think that the robot would change words for ones of similar meaning like a badly done thesaurus on steroids.
That is exactly what it does. The article with the examples is in german, which is my native language. There are examples where it changes linebreaks to spaces and such, but most of the examples actually do change words.
You don't need to actually change words, and they probably won't for all the reasons you cited.
RTFA. Changing words and phrases is exactly what this is about.
Whitespace is trivial to "fix". There's only one correct way to do it (one space), so a script to correct all of it (removing the watermark) would be an hour of work, tops.
Changing meaningful whitespace, i.e. linebreaks into spaces or vice-versa runs into the same problem I outlined. As an author, I actually make a choice there and there's a reason for where I start a new line or paragraph.
So that's why I come across obvious errors in books where I thought that if it stands out like a sore thumb at a non-native speaker, why the fuck did the proof-readers miss it?
It depends. If it's done well, it can be fairly resistant to any noise introduced into the system.
As an author myself, I see a very different issue with this. I don't want some robot changing my text. Some of those words it might decide to change because they are similar I may have pained over and decided for a reason to use this one and not the other one. Granted, few authors pick every single word intentionally, but the software won't know which ones are carefully selected.
Often times, there is subtle meaning. For example, I might decide to always use the same phrase in certain contexts, giving a very subtle hint to the reader which things are alike and which ones are different. One he might not even notice consciously.
It also will cause all sorts of trouble to quoting. How will teachers handle this if a student quotes a text but the quote differs slightly from the version the teacher has read? One of the most important things we teach students is that quotes need to be exactly as they appear, with any omissions or changes clearly marked.
That also extends to quotes within the text. If character A reports what character B said, I doubt the system will have enough text understanding to change both texts the same way, so the reader will be left wondering if it is intentional that there's a slight difference and what the author wants to hint at, when there's no such thing implied.
It is absolutely, perfectly ok to censor anything I run on my servers in any way I want. If you don't like it, run your own server, where you can say whatever you want.
Really, I thought this was so blatantly obvious that it doesn't require explanation or justification. I'm shocked that people even discuss the point.
Or maybe some people enjoy living as a whole human being instead of slicing their life into pieces? He makes it quite clear that his role as a software maintainer and his personal and political opinions are linked and he wouldn't have become the former if it hadn't been for the later.
The problem is that most corporations don't think long term anymore. To them "long term" means more than one business year.
New technology is very, very often founded by taxpayers in its initial stages. Then corporations pick it up and make it big and take the credit, but the fact is that they could start with a mature product instead of doing all the basic research themselves.
There are exceptions, but if you really go through the history of even recent inventions, you will be surprised at how often taxpayer money is involved in the early stages.
For my country, most of the current telecommunications stuff, TV and radio, a lof of transportation, thousands of small inventions in material sciences and engineering, alternative energy, almost everything in the aerospace industry, the early Internet and an endless list of other things would not have come to pass without the government funding at least parts of the early development, and often considerably more than that.
Basically, any technology that takes several years to mature and deploy as well as any that requires a considerably deployed base before economy of scale makes it profitable.
The city should be in the business of finding the best value, not the dirt cheapest solution.
What I'm saying is: Maybe they would love to do just that, but everyone complains when they need a bigger budget because they are not going with the dirt cheap solutions anymore.
I'm not sure what any of this really has to do with shoddy sidewalks installed by the city...
The big picture is that there is this liberal assumption floating around that anything the government does is bad and expensive, and everyone private enterprise does is cheap and good. And I'm saying that's bullshit.
Sidewalks! It's literally not rocket science.
No. But it's still a job that can be done well, or badly.
I'm just trying to make you think one step further, beyond "the city fucked this up" towards "why did they fuck this up?".
I don't like representative democracy, either. However, the people decided that this is how they want it, so they are also responsible for what happened afterwards. I can't give you a gun and tell you to shoot something, and then complain about the details of where you shot it and how.
So even if it were decided by the voters, people aren't allowed to complain about it?
Complain, yes. But there are valid and invalid complaints. You can still dislike it, but you should acknowledge that it is like that for a reason. That you might disagree with, but the majority doesn't.
Ok, that's a bit beating around the bush. What's getting on my nerves is people complaining about government actions as if the government where an alien parasite that infects the planet and not something that we do to ourselves.
I'm about as liberal as they come, but in this case it's pretty easy to see why people become disillusioned with government spending.
Have you ever thought about the other explanation: They they do it cheaply and badly because everyone tries to save a few pennies on this job? I'm pretty sure had you hired a contractor, it would've been more than $800, but it would've been done properly.
Everyone always expects the government to work great, but with an absolute minimum of budget. Well, newsflash, private corporations don't manage to do that, either. Many of them just have the advantage of getting infrastructure, etc. for free from the government.
Example: The rail company in Germany was made a private company about 10 years ago. The first few years, everything looks great, just like the consultants had promised. Then things started to go downhill, and still do. Because the first thing they started to save money on was such irritable costs as maintainance. With minimal maintainance, the tracks and stations work just fine... for a few years...
Government is sometimes wasteful, but often they are just more expensive because they don't cut corners as much as private companies do and because they take risks and explore frontiers that corporations rather not. NASA is crazy expensive, but they got a man to the moon in 8 years. And even with all the groundwork long done, private companies are still working out the details of reaching earth orbit after 11 years.
Here's the longhand explanation: The voters have decided that they want to do it this way. If you don't see it that way, then you're in the minority. Tough luck.
There are many valid reasons why you want to store gender. One of the most obvious is that language is sex-aware and many languages even more so than english. There are many cases where you need the gender just to talk to or about someone, and the gender-neutral workarounds are at best awkward and at worst outright insulting. Again, don't just judge from english, which happens to be fairly flexible in that regard.
You need to dig a lot deeper if you want to do journalism.
First, scantily clad women do not appeal to men alone. Studies have shown that these women on the cover of magazines increase sales even among female buyers.
And, as I promised, here's a short rant for the next idiot going on about sexims:
Yes, sexism is real. Now stop pretending that the women are the victims. There are a lot of areas where men are the victims. Talk to a man who has been abused by his wife and ask him how much help he has received from the outside world. The part that didn't laugh at him, or disbelief him.
Check with the "gender studies" of your local university and if it's not a thinly veiled feminist assault group, you are very, very lucky (and a rare exception).
Make a graph about how man people work for men's rights compared to women's rights.
Talk to a language feminazi. Oh my god, these are evil and misguided people. Want an example, here's just one: The "His" in "History" has absolutely nothing to do with gender. Check your etymological dictionary.
Are booth babes sexist? Maybe. But what they mainly are is capitalistic: They bring in at least their wages in profits. If scantily clad men would do the same, you bet you'd see them around.
In order to hate something, you need to care about.
You care enough to reply. Twice.
If you cannot handle someone holding a different opinion to yours, then don't post on here in the first place.
You are being emotional. Everyone can disagree with me as much as they want. I will, however, point out that if you invest the time to write a reply, you can't in the same sentence claim that you don't care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't read a topic that doesn't mean anything to you, nor would you reply.
The difference is that the "central lot" in case of the UN doesn't hold any power.
Name the UN representative of your country. You can't? I wonder why that is. Probably because he's not important. He's just a diplomat following orders, that's all.
You would still have to bribe and cajole all the national governments. The advantage would be that you'd have to do it to all of them (or at least a majority), and not just one.
Actually, if you're an American (I realize many people here are not) then whenever one of the bad guys is the US government, you do need to support the citizen (whether he's bad or good). Whenever your own government is bad, then it is necessary that they lose, no matter who the opponent and no matter how hard you have to hold your nose.
So, you are in support of the Unabomber, the 9/11 terrorists, every rapist and murderer out there as well as every single criminal ever?
Please explain your funny little theory to the parents of a little girl that was raped and killed at the trial of the guy who did it. That you support him because the government is evil.
if that's what it takes to force the government to obey they law.
You are making the false assumption that that's what it takes. But if you look at history, then the opposite is true: Every single example you've listed has made the US government more powerful and more out of control, not less.
The real tragedy of the commons is, that they don't have a defender. Corporations have been stealing from the public domain in massive quantities and for a long time.
What people mostly don't understand is that the world is not a Hollywood movie. Just because one side is the bad guys doesn't mean the other side is the good guy.
In this case, it's a power-greedy, corrupt government vs. a greedy, criminal egomaniac.
Let them tear each other apart and enjoy the show, because if you make the mistake of rooting with any of them, you're supporting the bad guys.
Kimble's business has always been himself. If the fact that he changed his last name to "Dotcom" didn't tell you as much, I'm not sure if a huge sign with neon letters will.
Downloaded and installed yesterday and played around with it a little. Quite nifty.
What bugs me is that on OS X, a lot of the keys it uses are assigned elsewhere and thus don't work. I'll have to figure out how to redefine the keyboard shortcuts, and the preferences dialog doesn't work. It's a beta, ok. I'm not complaining, just saying what I noticed.
The other thing is that right now I don't know what to use it for. But that might just be because I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user and if I use Numbers, the (missing in TreeSheets) calculation functions are exactly what I'm using it for.
Slashdot Mirror
And what exactly do you think a human being is? It's a robot with a computer brain that has been programmed to simulate 'feeling' things.
Uh, no it isn't. That's a mechanistic view that has been out of fashion for at least 10 years. I strongly recommend reading some more recent research.
Leaving aside the obvious, that we're talking about a fictional space opera, not some serious SciFi here, what's wrong with this approach?
We give rights to people and to animals because they are feeling, living beings. A robot or computer does not feel anything unless you've programmed him to simulate such a thing. The difference between your iPhone and the androids of SciFi is much smaller than the difference between a microbe and a human being, and we kill millions of those every time we use desinfectant spray. Don't recall anyone getting murder charges for that.
Despite all the make-belief, androids aren't human and don't suffer. There's no point in giving them rights. As a matter of fact, programming them so that they can suffer (instead of simulating an avoidance algorithm) would be the cruel part, not what comes after.
Where do authors make money
With or without "piracy", that is a real question, because the vast majority of authors don't.
I'm not sure about the exact numbers as it's been a while since I read the articles on this, but roughly 90% of authors don't have an income worth mentioning from their books or articles. Of the remaining 10%, less than 1% makes their living entirely on their writing. The vast majority of authors have a "real" job in addition to writing.
I don't think that the robot would change words for ones of similar meaning like a badly done thesaurus on steroids.
That is exactly what it does. The article with the examples is in german, which is my native language. There are examples where it changes linebreaks to spaces and such, but most of the examples actually do change words.
You don't need to actually change words, and they probably won't for all the reasons you cited.
RTFA. Changing words and phrases is exactly what this is about.
Whitespace is trivial to "fix". There's only one correct way to do it (one space), so a script to correct all of it (removing the watermark) would be an hour of work, tops.
Changing meaningful whitespace, i.e. linebreaks into spaces or vice-versa runs into the same problem I outlined. As an author, I actually make a choice there and there's a reason for where I start a new line or paragraph.
So that's why I come across obvious errors in books where I thought that if it stands out like a sore thumb at a non-native speaker, why the fuck did the proof-readers miss it?
It depends. If it's done well, it can be fairly resistant to any noise introduced into the system.
As an author myself, I see a very different issue with this. I don't want some robot changing my text. Some of those words it might decide to change because they are similar I may have pained over and decided for a reason to use this one and not the other one. Granted, few authors pick every single word intentionally, but the software won't know which ones are carefully selected.
Often times, there is subtle meaning. For example, I might decide to always use the same phrase in certain contexts, giving a very subtle hint to the reader which things are alike and which ones are different. One he might not even notice consciously.
It also will cause all sorts of trouble to quoting. How will teachers handle this if a student quotes a text but the quote differs slightly from the version the teacher has read? One of the most important things we teach students is that quotes need to be exactly as they appear, with any omissions or changes clearly marked.
That also extends to quotes within the text. If character A reports what character B said, I doubt the system will have enough text understanding to change both texts the same way, so the reader will be left wondering if it is intentional that there's a slight difference and what the author wants to hint at, when there's no such thing implied.
My house, my rules. Same for my blog or my forum.
It is absolutely, perfectly ok to censor anything I run on my servers in any way I want. If you don't like it, run your own server, where you can say whatever you want.
Really, I thought this was so blatantly obvious that it doesn't require explanation or justification. I'm shocked that people even discuss the point.
Or maybe some people enjoy living as a whole human being instead of slicing their life into pieces? He makes it quite clear that his role as a software maintainer and his personal and political opinions are linked and he wouldn't have become the former if it hadn't been for the later.
The problem is that most corporations don't think long term anymore. To them "long term" means more than one business year.
New technology is very, very often founded by taxpayers in its initial stages. Then corporations pick it up and make it big and take the credit, but the fact is that they could start with a mature product instead of doing all the basic research themselves.
There are exceptions, but if you really go through the history of even recent inventions, you will be surprised at how often taxpayer money is involved in the early stages.
For my country, most of the current telecommunications stuff, TV and radio, a lof of transportation, thousands of small inventions in material sciences and engineering, alternative energy, almost everything in the aerospace industry, the early Internet and an endless list of other things would not have come to pass without the government funding at least parts of the early development, and often considerably more than that.
Basically, any technology that takes several years to mature and deploy as well as any that requires a considerably deployed base before economy of scale makes it profitable.
The government version cost extra because it was being run by the mayor's nephew and staffed by union thugs.
And that's a set of baseless assumptions right there.
I prefer a fact-based approach to bullshit propaganda. So unless you've got any evidence of your claim, I'll call you a liar.
The city should be in the business of finding the best value, not the dirt cheapest solution.
What I'm saying is: Maybe they would love to do just that, but everyone complains when they need a bigger budget because they are not going with the dirt cheap solutions anymore.
I'm not sure what any of this really has to do with shoddy sidewalks installed by the city...
The big picture is that there is this liberal assumption floating around that anything the government does is bad and expensive, and everyone private enterprise does is cheap and good. And I'm saying that's bullshit.
Sidewalks! It's literally not rocket science.
No. But it's still a job that can be done well, or badly.
I'm just trying to make you think one step further, beyond "the city fucked this up" towards "why did they fuck this up?".
I don't like representative democracy, either. However, the people decided that this is how they want it, so they are also responsible for what happened afterwards. I can't give you a gun and tell you to shoot something, and then complain about the details of where you shot it and how.
So even if it were decided by the voters, people aren't allowed to complain about it?
Complain, yes. But there are valid and invalid complaints. You can still dislike it, but you should acknowledge that it is like that for a reason. That you might disagree with, but the majority doesn't.
Ok, that's a bit beating around the bush. What's getting on my nerves is people complaining about government actions as if the government where an alien parasite that infects the planet and not something that we do to ourselves.
OTOH a market approach to dinos doesn't make much sense because they ain't making any more of them.
*grin* that was a really good one.
But, of course, I'm quite sure that you can get authentic dino skeletons from China in whatever type and quantity you desire...
I'm about as liberal as they come, but in this case it's pretty easy to see why people become disillusioned with government spending.
Have you ever thought about the other explanation: They they do it cheaply and badly because everyone tries to save a few pennies on this job? I'm pretty sure had you hired a contractor, it would've been more than $800, but it would've been done properly.
Everyone always expects the government to work great, but with an absolute minimum of budget. Well, newsflash, private corporations don't manage to do that, either. Many of them just have the advantage of getting infrastructure, etc. for free from the government.
Example: The rail company in Germany was made a private company about 10 years ago. The first few years, everything looks great, just like the consultants had promised. Then things started to go downhill, and still do. Because the first thing they started to save money on was such irritable costs as maintainance. With minimal maintainance, the tracks and stations work just fine... for a few years...
Government is sometimes wasteful, but often they are just more expensive because they don't cut corners as much as private companies do and because they take risks and explore frontiers that corporations rather not.
NASA is crazy expensive, but they got a man to the moon in 8 years. And even with all the groundwork long done, private companies are still working out the details of reaching earth orbit after 11 years.
Well, that is democracy for it.
Here's the longhand explanation: The voters have decided that they want to do it this way. If you don't see it that way, then you're in the minority. Tough luck.
Yes and no.
There are many valid reasons why you want to store gender. One of the most obvious is that language is sex-aware and many languages even more so than english. There are many cases where you need the gender just to talk to or about someone, and the gender-neutral workarounds are at best awkward and at worst outright insulting. Again, don't just judge from english, which happens to be fairly flexible in that regard.
You need to dig a lot deeper if you want to do journalism.
First, scantily clad women do not appeal to men alone. Studies have shown that these women on the cover of magazines increase sales even among female buyers.
And, as I promised, here's a short rant for the next idiot going on about sexims:
Yes, sexism is real. Now stop pretending that the women are the victims. There are a lot of areas where men are the victims. Talk to a man who has been abused by his wife and ask him how much help he has received from the outside world. The part that didn't laugh at him, or disbelief him.
Check with the "gender studies" of your local university and if it's not a thinly veiled feminist assault group, you are very, very lucky (and a rare exception).
Make a graph about how man people work for men's rights compared to women's rights.
Talk to a language feminazi. Oh my god, these are evil and misguided people. Want an example, here's just one: The "His" in "History" has absolutely nothing to do with gender. Check your etymological dictionary.
Are booth babes sexist? Maybe. But what they mainly are is capitalistic: They bring in at least their wages in profits. If scantily clad men would do the same, you bet you'd see them around.
In order to hate something, you need to care about.
You care enough to reply. Twice.
If you cannot handle someone holding a different opinion to yours, then don't post on here in the first place.
You are being emotional. Everyone can disagree with me as much as they want. I will, however, point out that if you invest the time to write a reply, you can't in the same sentence claim that you don't care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't read a topic that doesn't mean anything to you, nor would you reply.
*lol*, no. The post I replied to specifically mentioned the 9/11 attackers as people to side with if it meant less government.
The difference is that the "central lot" in case of the UN doesn't hold any power.
Name the UN representative of your country. You can't? I wonder why that is. Probably because he's not important. He's just a diplomat following orders, that's all.
You would still have to bribe and cajole all the national governments. The advantage would be that you'd have to do it to all of them (or at least a majority), and not just one.
It would be more distributed.
Actually, if you're an American (I realize many people here are not) then whenever one of the bad guys is the US government, you do need to support the citizen (whether he's bad or good). Whenever your own government is bad, then it is necessary that they lose, no matter who the opponent and no matter how hard you have to hold your nose.
So, you are in support of the Unabomber, the 9/11 terrorists, every rapist and murderer out there as well as every single criminal ever?
Please explain your funny little theory to the parents of a little girl that was raped and killed at the trial of the guy who did it. That you support him because the government is evil.
if that's what it takes to force the government to obey they law.
You are making the false assumption that that's what it takes. But if you look at history, then the opposite is true: Every single example you've listed has made the US government more powerful and more out of control, not less.
The real tragedy of the commons is, that they don't have a defender. Corporations have been stealing from the public domain in massive quantities and for a long time.
What people mostly don't understand is that the world is not a Hollywood movie. Just because one side is the bad guys doesn't mean the other side is the good guy.
In this case, it's a power-greedy, corrupt government vs. a greedy, criminal egomaniac.
Let them tear each other apart and enjoy the show, because if you make the mistake of rooting with any of them, you're supporting the bad guys.
Kimble's business has always been himself. If the fact that he changed his last name to "Dotcom" didn't tell you as much, I'm not sure if a huge sign with neon letters will.
It's a pretty interesting new take at things.
Downloaded and installed yesterday and played around with it a little. Quite nifty.
What bugs me is that on OS X, a lot of the keys it uses are assigned elsewhere and thus don't work. I'll have to figure out how to redefine the keyboard shortcuts, and the preferences dialog doesn't work. It's a beta, ok. I'm not complaining, just saying what I noticed.
The other thing is that right now I don't know what to use it for. But that might just be because I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user and if I use Numbers, the (missing in TreeSheets) calculation functions are exactly what I'm using it for.