One thing to add:
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them. This problem is bigger than that. Interest groups, especially those tied to a political or commercial entity, are even worse than those with an ideology to grind. They can pay for 24/7 surveilance of their articles. They can have an entire staff on hand just to make sure that no Wikipedia article speaks ill about them.
They will almost always be more and more dedicated than neutral, objective writers whose main passion is the promotion of truth. And they will almost always be a lot more focussed and intentional.
With a newspaper, I at least (if I care a little) know its agenda and ideology. On Wikipedia, every article can have a totally different one, even the same article can have a different one between today and tomorrow, and finding out about it can be next to impossible.
The problem with Wikipedia in this context is the confusion between information and knowledge. Wikipedia provides a lot of information. The question of knowledge, however, is more difficult.
Wikipedia claims to be "the sum of human knowledge", but it isn't. First of all, it's not a sum. The simple fact that stuff gets deleted means it is incomplete and wants to be incomplete. More importantly, Wikipedia doesn't provide knowledge, it provides information. Quality varies, truth value varies, completeness varies. The nature of Wikipedia means it always will. That doesn't mean that it can't be very good. But it does mean it is unreliable and needs to be checked. At the very least against its own edit history, better against other sources.
But the stated claim "the sum of human knowledge" doesn't tell you that. The painstaken listing of article count and the constant Wikipedia fans ranting that Wikipedia is better than Britannica, and that it's a revolution and bla bla also don't tell you to use with care.
If Wikipedia were a little more modest, a lot less arrogant and considerably more critical towards its own faults(*), it would be a lot more serious in the business sense.
(*) by that I don't mean to allow criticism, it does that. The problem is that most of the criticism falls into the "you can say what you want, but it doesn't change anything" category. There has been massive criticism of the deletionism attitude for years now, but deleted articles are still gone for good with no backup, instead of keeping at least the last version in archive, in case the consensus changes, for example. That way, criticism can be made, but it's pointless. What do you win if you get the notability nonsense abolished, for example? Millions of articles are already unrestorably gone, and the real work, that of bringing at least a part of them back, would only start after the success. That kind of not-allowing-criticism-to-have-a-meaning silences your critics not through force, but through frustration.
But philosophy isn't a science. It's jacking-off-with-words. Very few of what philosophy does has much to do with the real world. That's the difference to metaphysics (philosophies predecessor) which actually understood itself as part of science.
The problem is that philosophy writes a lot of words about other words. You can write a lot about free will and consciousness and self without ever actually defining those terms in a non-circular way. Most importantly: Without ever making your claims falsifiable.
If it can't be disproven, it's not science.
Also, if it can't be disproven, why should I care?
Um, not much of a newsflash. Hell the major monotheistic religions figured this out way back. Err, no, they didn't. If they had, then you would have been right and they would have abandoned either the concept of omniscience, or of free will. They did neither. On the contrary, they made them interdependent.
The only chance we have of any free will at all is in quantum weirdness Unlikely. Observation causes the wave function to collapse, but the observer doesn't get a choice in it. If free will requires something that is too complex to be held in a single quantum state, and very likely it is, then there simply is no way that free will could influence anything "quantum" at all.
So I pretend I have free will, and think I make moral choices based on that understanding. Pfft. What if "free will" wasn't some kind of magic "thing", but simply the term for all the complexity that goes on when you make something that feels like a choice? You don't "pretend to see the sun", even though you know that the photons that reach your eye aren't "the sun", and don't even properly represent its internal complexity. You don't "pretend to drive the car" when you fully understand that "driving the car" is a simplified term for a highly complex interaction between man, machine and environment that you don't consciously comprehend to its entire extend (because if you did, your reactions would be too slow to actually do it).
Free will is of the same kind. It's a simple term for a complex conglomerate of things and events.
You see, free will and conscious rationality are very nearly the same. Why assume that?
If I make an instinctive choice, is that not free will? Why not? Just because my consciousness wasn't involved? What if it was, it just decided that the instinctive decision was good? Does it matter if it made that decision before or after the instinctive choice was put into motion?
Also, how are you gonna make the distinction from the outside?
Free will is, first and foremost, a weakly defined word. It's not a thing.
The more I think about it, the more I tend to agree that philosophers are the porn stars of mental masturbation.
Look, there is no actual problem here, only a perceived problem due to a confusion of terms. Someone, somewhere, once came up with the term "free will", or even just "will". Through the years (and books) it got meddled up with "consciousness". Not difficult, since both terms are ill defined.
Nothing in the study indicates that you don't have free will. What it does show - and what has been the state of scientific knowledge for years - is that consciousness isn't the source of our decisions. Not really a surprise given the fact that consciousness is a complicated thing and complexity usually arises later rather than earlier. Also given the fact that consciousness is comparatively slow. Nothing in here is surprising in any way. We just have problems "digging" it, because we've been brought up with this outdated view of humans as having a "soul" or some other atomic core part where magic like free will and consciousness simply "happen" without any complexity, requirements or hard work of brain cells.
From what I've seen, there are very few of the 1 and 2 digit members left.
Got the same issue in my own game (see footer). My own user ID is 35, not 1, because very early on there were a few bugs and I re-created my account. Which means that some players have a lower ID than the creator.:-)
Where you have entire IT departments which are used to doing 90% of their work (desktop AND server) on Microsoft products, the effort and expense of suddenly discovering that Microsoft products are now verboten for new systems would be rather more than most could realistically bear. If only you'd quote that to the paid MS shills here on/. who go about saying that it isn't really a monopoly.:-)
I don't think destroyed would be very good for IT - it's competition the market needs, not replacing one heterogeny (Windows) with another (Unix, albeit in a number of guises). There's a huge difference there. Windows is one specific product family of one specific company. It's proprietary and closed, with lots and lots of hidden dirty secrets. Unix, on the other hand, is just a term for a specific group of operating systems. It's very open, standards- and interoperability-oriented. It's not tied to any specific company and if you want to try your luck with a startup and write the next big Unix, then you can.
That's exactly the difference that ensures competition can exist.
Microsoft has been punished already. Time to move on. The problem with MS - in this and other cases - is that they've been punished, and continued to act against the law. That's when you don't move on, but turn around and ask "Hello, dumbo, didn't you hear me the first time?".
The punishment is just the legal system's means of making sure the "don't do this" part sticks. It is not the price of doing it, but that's what MS is thinking, or at least they're acting as if they were thinking that way.
Back in my day, Slashdot IDs only had 5 numbers, and that was good enough for us! Young kids today. Coming in, blowing everything out of the size it's ought to be, and then go around claiming it's good enough! It was good enough long before you fit in!
In fact, that ain't funny at all, it's the whole story. It's "good enough" if it's what you're used to. For someone new, it probably isn't. For someone who's kept the ability to get a new perspective, it probably isn't.
20 years ago, I would have killed for a computer half as powerful as the ones from last year. But today, I wouldn't bother buying a last year machine. It's all perspective, and perspectives change with time.
Why can't the world be happy with a good old desktop? It was good enough for the PC generation. Exactly because of that. "Good enough" has been the attitude of the "PC generation". But "good enough" isn't good enough once you enter the real world. The one where money counts and time matters. Most people don't have time to constantly worry about the misbehaving machine, to constantly reboot or reinstall windos, or bother with crashes, bugs and problems. Nowhere is that accepted, except in computers, where people accept it because they don't know computers any different.
But the more computers you have, the less you accept it. You can reinstall one PC every few months, you can't reinstall a hundred small computers everywhere in your house. It stops being feasable, and with that it stops being acceptable.
In addition, mobile computing also means you encounter any bugs and problems very likely on the road, while you simply don't have the means for troubleshooting, reinstall, or even a call to tech support. Again, that means the machine has to be better, more useable.
Or in other words: Ubiquitous computing is the end of the microsoft dominance, because it needs to be everything that microsoft software is not and never will be: Reliable, useable, high quality usefulness.
And that's one more reason why lots of people are looking forward to it.
One thing I haven't yet seen mentioned in other comments: Brightness.
Setting the brightness to max will hurt your eyes, even though for a moment you think it improves the picture. Every piece of literature on the subject that I've read recommends setting the brightness of the screen to roughly the brightness of the room.
Makes sense once you think about it. Since you look up every now and then, or check a piece of paper, or just look over to the coffee pot - i.e. every time your eyes leave the screen, they have to adjust to the light level of the room. If that is very different from the light level of the screen, they will tire soon.
your bank account might fetch $10-$1000. With those prices, I wonder how often they pay more for the bank account than is actually in it? You assume the sole purpose is to empty the bank account. It most probably isn't. There are more interesting scams that you can play with a bank account that's not traceable to you, that are worth more than the contents of most accounts. Even if it's "just" stealing the money in the account, you assume it's all done in a hit-and-run manner. Why assume that? Would you notice if, say, $20 were taken from your account every month? If someone spends 5 minutes looking at your typical account movements, he should be able to cover them up in a way that's not immediately obvious. So unless you check every item, you're fucked. Most people don't check every item.
Germany is a common law country with a highly detailed civil code in place to cover a very narrow and exact situation that you just defined. I don't only live in Germany, my job also means I have a bit of knowledge of the court system and I make regular appearances in court as well. While Germany is a common law country, a lot of the actual meaning of the law is subject to case law. The main difference is that prior cases aren't binding, but they do serve as guidelines all the time, and decisions of the high courts (there are a few, for different areas of the law) carry almost the same weight as laws.
also charges taxes on all copying media That's correct, but besides the point. There's also the GEMA which charges for public performances of copyrighted works (e.g. playing music in your shop) and more. But that is all part of the Rechteverwertungssystem, not of the Urheberrecht.
It is an affirmative defense to actual infringement (whereas your exception is just that: it is a narrow exception to an act that is NOT considered infringement) The difference is mostly theoretical. As I said: The details vary.
like unauthorized parodies that are not looked at the same way in Europe where copyright is generally considered more of a "moral" right. That's nonsense. Parody is almost always unauthorized (that's the whole point, in many cases). I am not aware of even a single case where a parody was considered a copyright violation. Name one.
And yes, european copyright has different roots than US copyright in many cases, including the "moral" aspect. As I said: The details vary. For example, German copyright law recognizes the actual creator a lot stronger than US copyright law, including some rights that you can not sell or give away.
Fair Use is a powerful doctrine that allows this speech to be published to enhance public discourse. I guess that's why we read about so many cases from Germany, France, Spain and Italy where copyright law is invoked in order to remove some unwanted criticism, and so little about cases from the US. Oh, wait, it's the other way around.
there has been exactly 1 country that has EVER recognized fair use: The US. No country except for the US has ever recognized fair use as a legal theory. You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
Other countries don't use the same term, and the exceptions aren't all the same, but "fair use" is a very common concept.
Few countries make the use of snippets for review, criticism or quotation illegal, for example. The details vary, but the basic principles are pretty global.
Some countries go considerably further than the US. Over here in Germany, for example, I can legally copy a CD for a friend. That's called the "Privatkopie" ("private copy") and is the law's acceptance that people will do these kinds of things anyway, so within some limits (very few copies, and for personal friends only), it's allowed. (and yes, it's under attack from the copyright lobby)
Copyright laws are slightly different in every country, and with so much variety, every claim that something is a world-only is almost guaranteed to be a lie.
Warning: TFA uses aggressive advertisement including pop-in ads that block your view of the article itself until you close them away. And that's despite both AdBlocker and Fasterfox's flashblocker.
That means I only looked at one page of it, and only very briefly.
What kind of fuckup comes up with the idea of getting in the way of what your audience wants so that you can feed them something they don't?
How long does it take modern media to see through the scam? I mean, really, we laugh about people who fall for the Nigeria spam and yet our very own mainstream media falls for the same bait, reliably and consistently.
We've heard this line before. Many times. Where are the "I'll believe it when I see it" headlines?
I somehow doubt MS was holding a gun to anyone's head. Probably not. Though "...unless you don't want any business from us in the future" uttered to a company that's dependent on you pretty much has the same effect.
So, ISO got an extremely high profile black eye in the credibility department from which it may never recover. Not just ISO. All the national standard bodies that votes "yes", too.
In Germany, for example, DIN used to be very highly respected. In fact, this whole mess is the first time ever that I heard people say that DIN should fuck itself, be dissolved, is corrupt, etc.
what company wouldn't have done in their position?
But it is to ISO's massive, disgusting and probably reputation-destroying shame they they simply laid back and allowed themselves to be corrupted, defiled and sodomised by a large multinational. And they didn't even get a kiss afterwards. Yes, I also put all the blame in a rape on the victim, usually. Most of them just don't really struggle, do they?
Now seriously, ISO is fucked (even if this is an April Fools news), but MS is still the party that did it. The blame should be on them.
However, as someone who's never illegally downloaded or uploaded music or movies or software over the Internet, this case really has no bearing on me personally. Right, bro!
As someone who's never illegally flown a commercial airplane into a building on US soil, this whole "war on terrorism" thing really has no bearing on me personally.
Then again, as someone who understands that case law is being made while we watch, and some of the methods of the RIAA/MPAA are just as easily applied to other things than music or movies, and that somehow, even though the vast majority of Internet users are downloading stuff in breach of strict copyright laws, they somehow managed to pick quite out quite a few innocents, I do realize that whatever happens there does have a considerable impact for many even remotely related cases of the future.
Your wife is indeed seeing something you're not. And you've explained perfectly just what it is:
Your reproduced just the content of the conversation. But flirting isn't in the content. You can flirt with almost everything. Flirting is about the way in which the used intonation, body language, eye contact, etc. etc.
It is time for the people to revolt, and put the croporations back to where they belong by firmly asserting the power of the government over croporations, if need by, by the croporate death penalty and the confiscation of the croporation's assets. Pfft. Revolution doesn't work, read 1984 again.
All we need is to enforce the simple fact that corporations are not persons, and do not enjoy any rights granted to "the people" except those where corporations are explicitly included.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing to add: And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them. This problem is bigger than that. Interest groups, especially those tied to a political or commercial entity, are even worse than those with an ideology to grind. They can pay for 24/7 surveilance of their articles. They can have an entire staff on hand just to make sure that no Wikipedia article speaks ill about them.
They will almost always be more and more dedicated than neutral, objective writers whose main passion is the promotion of truth. And they will almost always be a lot more focussed and intentional.
With a newspaper, I at least (if I care a little) know its agenda and ideology. On Wikipedia, every article can have a totally different one, even the same article can have a different one between today and tomorrow, and finding out about it can be next to impossible.
The problem with Wikipedia in this context is the confusion between information and knowledge. Wikipedia provides a lot of information. The question of knowledge, however, is more difficult.
Wikipedia claims to be "the sum of human knowledge", but it isn't. First of all, it's not a sum. The simple fact that stuff gets deleted means it is incomplete and wants to be incomplete. More importantly, Wikipedia doesn't provide knowledge, it provides information. Quality varies, truth value varies, completeness varies. The nature of Wikipedia means it always will. That doesn't mean that it can't be very good. But it does mean it is unreliable and needs to be checked. At the very least against its own edit history, better against other sources.
But the stated claim "the sum of human knowledge" doesn't tell you that. The painstaken listing of article count and the constant Wikipedia fans ranting that Wikipedia is better than Britannica, and that it's a revolution and bla bla also don't tell you to use with care.
If Wikipedia were a little more modest, a lot less arrogant and considerably more critical towards its own faults(*), it would be a lot more serious in the business sense.
(*) by that I don't mean to allow criticism, it does that. The problem is that most of the criticism falls into the "you can say what you want, but it doesn't change anything" category. There has been massive criticism of the deletionism attitude for years now, but deleted articles are still gone for good with no backup, instead of keeping at least the last version in archive, in case the consensus changes, for example. That way, criticism can be made, but it's pointless. What do you win if you get the notability nonsense abolished, for example? Millions of articles are already unrestorably gone, and the real work, that of bringing at least a part of them back, would only start after the success. That kind of not-allowing-criticism-to-have-a-meaning silences your critics not through force, but through frustration.
But philosophy isn't a science. It's jacking-off-with-words. Very few of what philosophy does has much to do with the real world. That's the difference to metaphysics (philosophies predecessor) which actually understood itself as part of science.
The problem is that philosophy writes a lot of words about other words. You can write a lot about free will and consciousness and self without ever actually defining those terms in a non-circular way. Most importantly: Without ever making your claims falsifiable.
If it can't be disproven, it's not science.
Also, if it can't be disproven, why should I care?
Free will is of the same kind. It's a simple term for a complex conglomerate of things and events.
If I make an instinctive choice, is that not free will? Why not? Just because my consciousness wasn't involved? What if it was, it just decided that the instinctive decision was good? Does it matter if it made that decision before or after the instinctive choice was put into motion?
Also, how are you gonna make the distinction from the outside?
Free will is, first and foremost, a weakly defined word. It's not a thing.
The more I think about it, the more I tend to agree that philosophers are the porn stars of mental masturbation.
Look, there is no actual problem here, only a perceived problem due to a confusion of terms. Someone, somewhere, once came up with the term "free will", or even just "will". Through the years (and books) it got meddled up with "consciousness". Not difficult, since both terms are ill defined.
Nothing in the study indicates that you don't have free will. What it does show - and what has been the state of scientific knowledge for years - is that consciousness isn't the source of our decisions. Not really a surprise given the fact that consciousness is a complicated thing and complexity usually arises later rather than earlier. Also given the fact that consciousness is comparatively slow.
Nothing in here is surprising in any way. We just have problems "digging" it, because we've been brought up with this outdated view of humans as having a "soul" or some other atomic core part where magic like free will and consciousness simply "happen" without any complexity, requirements or hard work of brain cells.
From what I've seen, there are very few of the 1 and 2 digit members left.
:-)
Got the same issue in my own game (see footer). My own user ID is 35, not 1, because very early on there were a few bugs and I re-created my account. Which means that some players have a lower ID than the creator.
Unix, on the other hand, is just a term for a specific group of operating systems. It's very open, standards- and interoperability-oriented. It's not tied to any specific company and if you want to try your luck with a startup and write the next big Unix, then you can.
That's exactly the difference that ensures competition can exist.
The punishment is just the legal system's means of making sure the "don't do this" part sticks. It is not the price of doing it, but that's what MS is thinking, or at least they're acting as if they were thinking that way.
In fact, that ain't funny at all, it's the whole story. It's "good enough" if it's what you're used to. For someone new, it probably isn't. For someone who's kept the ability to get a new perspective, it probably isn't.
20 years ago, I would have killed for a computer half as powerful as the ones from last year. But today, I wouldn't bother buying a last year machine. It's all perspective, and perspectives change with time.
But the more computers you have, the less you accept it. You can reinstall one PC every few months, you can't reinstall a hundred small computers everywhere in your house. It stops being feasable, and with that it stops being acceptable.
In addition, mobile computing also means you encounter any bugs and problems very likely on the road, while you simply don't have the means for troubleshooting, reinstall, or even a call to tech support. Again, that means the machine has to be better, more useable.
Or in other words: Ubiquitous computing is the end of the microsoft dominance, because it needs to be everything that microsoft software is not and never will be: Reliable, useable, high quality usefulness.
And that's one more reason why lots of people are looking forward to it.
One thing I haven't yet seen mentioned in other comments: Brightness.
Setting the brightness to max will hurt your eyes, even though for a moment you think it improves the picture.
Every piece of literature on the subject that I've read recommends setting the brightness of the screen to roughly the brightness of the room.
Makes sense once you think about it. Since you look up every now and then, or check a piece of paper, or just look over to the coffee pot - i.e. every time your eyes leave the screen, they have to adjust to the light level of the room. If that is very different from the light level of the screen, they will tire soon.
And yes, european copyright has different roots than US copyright in many cases, including the "moral" aspect. As I said: The details vary. For example, German copyright law recognizes the actual creator a lot stronger than US copyright law, including some rights that you can not sell or give away. Fair Use is a powerful doctrine that allows this speech to be published to enhance public discourse. I guess that's why we read about so many cases from Germany, France, Spain and Italy where copyright law is invoked in order to remove some unwanted criticism, and so little about cases from the US. Oh, wait, it's the other way around.
Other countries don't use the same term, and the exceptions aren't all the same, but "fair use" is a very common concept.
Few countries make the use of snippets for review, criticism or quotation illegal, for example. The details vary, but the basic principles are pretty global.
Some countries go considerably further than the US. Over here in Germany, for example, I can legally copy a CD for a friend. That's called the "Privatkopie" ("private copy") and is the law's acceptance that people will do these kinds of things anyway, so within some limits (very few copies, and for personal friends only), it's allowed. (and yes, it's under attack from the copyright lobby)
Copyright laws are slightly different in every country, and with so much variety, every claim that something is a world-only is almost guaranteed to be a lie.
Warning: TFA uses aggressive advertisement including pop-in ads that block your view of the article itself until you close them away. And that's despite both AdBlocker and Fasterfox's flashblocker.
That means I only looked at one page of it, and only very briefly.
What kind of fuckup comes up with the idea of getting in the way of what your audience wants so that you can feed them something they don't?
How long does it take modern media to see through the scam? I mean, really, we laugh about people who fall for the Nigeria spam and yet our very own mainstream media falls for the same bait, reliably and consistently.
We've heard this line before. Many times. Where are the "I'll believe it when I see it" headlines?
Theoretically, yes. But the word was more included to stay as close to the original as possible.
Hm. With permission of both the owner of the plane and the building, there might be. Not sure if it would violate any aviation laws.
In Germany, for example, DIN used to be very highly respected. In fact, this whole mess is the first time ever that I heard people say that DIN should fuck itself, be dissolved, is corrupt, etc.
But it is to ISO's massive, disgusting and probably reputation-destroying shame they they simply laid back and allowed themselves to be corrupted, defiled and sodomised by a large multinational. And they didn't even get a kiss afterwards. Yes, I also put all the blame in a rape on the victim, usually. Most of them just don't really struggle, do they?
Now seriously, ISO is fucked (even if this is an April Fools news), but MS is still the party that did it. The blame should be on them.
As someone who's never illegally flown a commercial airplane into a building on US soil, this whole "war on terrorism" thing really has no bearing on me personally.
Then again, as someone who understands that case law is being made while we watch, and some of the methods of the RIAA/MPAA are just as easily applied to other things than music or movies, and that somehow, even though the vast majority of Internet users are downloading stuff in breach of strict copyright laws, they somehow managed to pick quite out quite a few innocents, I do realize that whatever happens there does have a considerable impact for many even remotely related cases of the future.
Isn't this a day early?
Your wife is indeed seeing something you're not. And you've explained perfectly just what it is:
Your reproduced just the content of the conversation. But flirting isn't in the content. You can flirt with almost everything. Flirting is about the way in which the used intonation, body language, eye contact, etc. etc.
All we need is to enforce the simple fact that corporations are not persons, and do not enjoy any rights granted to "the people" except those where corporations are explicitly included.