IIRC, Google intends to scan and store the entirety of all books and promise to only display small parts of them. The publishers' objections are that once that data are compiled Google will forever have the publishing industry by the throat with the ability to change, without notice, the definition of small parts.
This seems kind of silly. Google doesn't establish some kind of "squatter's rights" by doing this. There is nothing to prevent publishers from suing at a later date if Google increases the size of the snippets displayed. It is the courts, not Google, who will decide what constitutes a small part.
Smells fishy to me if it is done over the objections of the owners of the material.
But in fact, nothing is being done over the objections of the owners. If any owner objects, Google removes their material from the archive. So the real concern is that it is being done over the lack of objections of the owners.
By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit.
Except that this isn't true. Google is not placing adds on Library Project pages. They do provide links to booksellers, but they don't get a fee for those links.
It seems like the only real benefit that Google is reaping from the Library Project is the publicity and public goodwill, which probably benefits Google's image as the place to go to for web research.
I can't reproduce this problem--I couldn't get it to scroll at all--but I did find that the face broke apart when I resized the window. Re-running the test with the new window size restored the face, but it was again disrupted when I resized the window again.
On the other hand, some books get on Google through the Publisher Program. These are sponsored by a publisher, and Google does make some money from them.
So their only real benefit is indirect: increased goodwill for a public-spirited project, and enhancing their corporate image as the place to go for research.
If Google's investment in the project cannot be protected, they may have little incentive to create this and other projects.
I doubt if this matters much to Google. This is closer to a philanthropic project than a money making endeavor for Google. The only thing Google really gets out of it is a boost to its public profile and its image at the portal to all things searchable. Neither would be diminished by somebody producing a competitive database. Indeed, Google is so well entrenched that people would probably refer to searching that competitive database as "googling."
I agree. Copyright law should be modified so that a copyright expires if a work goes out of print (defined as being unavailable from the copyright holder) for more than 5 years.
While there is much to criticize about Bill Gates, in selecting a target for his philanthropy, he has done a quite brilliant thing in targeting the single area where an investment in research would yield the greatest return in reduction of human misery. Parasitic diseases in the 3rd world are the source of untold suffering, yet they are not a major target of research dollars because they do not afflict wealthy companies and do not offer a great profit potential for big pharma. So Gates has identified an unmet need, and has put his money precisely where it will do the most good.
It is, of course, always tempting to seek a selfish goal for philanthropy, particularly where the donor is such a shark in the business arena. Obviously, these are not anonymous donations, and Gates reaps benefits in terms of reputation and public relations. Still, there are many areas where he could have made donations that would have had greater visibility and appeal to his primary customer base. People can have multiple motivations for their actions, but it is difficult to doubt that at least part of the motivation behind Gates's philanthropy is the desire to do something really good for people in need.
somebody posted this [mp3newswire.net] last week about making old 50s shows available for cheap. Sounds promising to me as a way of preserving the early days of TV. Heck, I'd pay a buck for old Zachary creature features.
I think that this is an ideal use of the medium. When you watch Lost or Desperate Housewives on iTunes or iPod, you are giving up the beautiful HD of the broadcast (or the torrent, if you prefer). But these old TV shows will lose little on the tiny screen. For some, it might even bring back fond memories of sitting across the room from a small-screen TV.
Why am I willing to pay more for music than I would for video?
I don't find this at all surprising. Perhaps a better way to think about it is the cost per hour, averaged over the entire period of ownership. People may watch a video a few times if they really like it, but listen to a favorite album dozens or even hundreds of times.
Biological evolution is just a special case of general evolution. If you DON'T want to accept biological evolution, you need to make a special argument about why general evolution should not be applied in this special area. I've never heard a good, or even a less than laughably poor, argument for this. This doesn't prove such arguments don't exist, or can't be made, but it certainly shows that they aren't common.
You won't find many people bothering to argue that apples are different than oranges, either.
There really is no theory of "general evolution" -- it is nothing more than a vague observation: lots of things change over time. The biological theory of evolution differs by including a mechanism that depends upon two crucial elements--hereditable variation and differential reproductive success. These are the core of the biological theory, and generally do not apply in realms other than biology.
The point is Medical & Biological research do not depend on ID or Evolution. eg.If anything, the perception that somthing intelligent designed life is more of an advantage to biological researcher, because he can say, hey there is a well thought out system here, and my job is to reverse engineer it, rather than, hey all these random beneficial mutations have produced incresed order.
As a biomedical research, I have to say that that is completely false. I use evolutionary theory all of the time to design and interpret experiments. I find it hard to imagine how one could think meaningfully about genetic data or comparative proteomics without knowledge of evolution. I would say that to a biologist, evolutionary theory is as fundamental as arithmetic is to an account. Virtually everything we do is informed by evolutionary theory.
A theory being scientific does -not- mean that it has been proven true or false. It means that it can be proven true or false
Minor correction: a scientific theory can never be proved true; it can only be proved false. That is why making falsifiable predictions is considered an absolute requirement for an idea to qualify as a scientific theory.
Actually, generalized evolutionary theory is used in arguments about the evolution of the physical universe after the first femto-second. Whenever you hear arguments about this particle would be stable in that environment, but as conditions changed it would decay into this other particle, you are dealing with an argument based on the general theory of evolution.
There is really no relationship between what you are describing and the biological theory of evolution. The general concept of "evolution," meaning natural change, is an old, general concept, and substantially predates Darwin. It was generally accepted by most biologists, simply on the basis of observations, that life had evolved even before Darwin came along, and there were other theories--e.g. Lamarkian evolution--proposed to account for it. Darwin provided a mechanism--in which natural selection plays a prominent role--to explain for the observed evolution of life, and that mechanistic theory has stood up to over a hundred years of tests.
Is the explanation of the second scientist not science simply because it fails to make predictions, but only explains data?
Such retrodiction turns out to be easy and not particularly meaningful, particularly if your theory has a large number of adjustable parameters. For example, if you give me an X-Y plot with n points derived from some measurement, I can give you a "theory"--a polynomial equation--with n+1 parameters that perfectly "predicts" (passes through) those points, but very likely, if you give me one more point, it won't fall on the curve (because few things in nature are actually well described by polynomials). I can come up with a new polynomial to fit that point, but give me one more point and I'll probably be out of luck again. This is why the true test of a theory is the ability to predict something that you don't already know. For example, Darwin didn't know about genes or mutations, but he was able to predict that something of the sort had to exist--because his theory wouldn't work without them. So for example, "That phenomenon can be described by a polynomial equation" is not a scientific theory, because I can find a polynomial equation to perfectly fit any set of data. But "That phenomenon can be described by a polynomial equation of degree three" is potentially a scientific theory, because if I collect enough data, I should be able to prove it false, if it is false.
o, your argument is a misrepresentation of what I said. I'm not claiming that ID is acceptable because macro-evolution isn't verifiable, I'm claiming that neither should be taught as fact.
In science, the only true facts are individual observations. "I dropped the book and it fell to the floor" is an observation. "Objects fall when dropped" is a theory. All scientific generalizations and explanations are theories, potentially subject to revision by new data. This is true of evolution, just as it is true of gravitation. But that does not mean that all possible explanations are equal. We do not present the theory that the earth is at the center of the solar system on the same basis as the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system. And we don't present fringe notions like ID on the same basis as a theory that is virtually universally accepted by biologists, such as natural selection.
"All organisms will have the same basic DNA building blocks" is non-falsifiable.
Of course it's falsifiable. Not every organism has had its DNA studied. So every time the DNA of an organism is sequenced, it is an opportunity to falsify the prediction.
"No member of any species will act for the benefit of another with no benefit for its own" is falsified by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
This is not a prediction of evolutionary theory. There are many circumstances in which natural selection will favor such behavior.
I'm not aware of any fossil evidence showing half-way mutated species. If someone knows of some, could they provide a link to a reputable website detailing this evidence?
I should hope not. Evolutionary theory provides no mechanism for something to be "halfway" mutated. Note that all individual differences are due to mutation, so if you find one skull that is a bit larger or smaller than another skull of the same species, that is a mutational difference.
What gene sequencing has revealed is that there is really no difference at the genomic level between micro and macroevolution. All differences between species, as well as differences between individuals, result from exactly the same kind of changes at the genetic level--which happen to be exactly the kinds of changes produced by mutation.
Your claim that it's "not worth it" runs directly counter to the example presented: these are NOT clearout sales on stuff that's going out of print, that's the MSRP on many of these DVDs. Dual Sided discs and insanely cheap packaging are our friends in this case, and if it wasn't worth it to the manufacturer, they wouldn't be doing it. For those who've never been in Walmart, he's not exaggerating, you can seriously go into a bargain bin and find an entire seasons of, for example, Abbott and Costello's TV series or the Little Rascals, for $1US.
Here's the Amazon link to Little Rascals volume 1. MSRP is $14.95. The cheapest Little Rascals disk listed on Amazon is $4.95 MSRP. There are a number of out of print Little Rascal's collections, some of which can be had at lower prices.
And that's why you're not seeing it released already. I mean the video iPod is just another storage format as far as a content exec is going to see it. You could ask the same questions about all kinds of other media. Why didn't they release all those old TV shows on VCD in 1995? Or DVD in the last few years?
Because at the prices people are willing to pay for these old shows, they won't make back the shipping, packaging, or media costs--none of which are relevant to online sales.
Have you seen the bargain DVD rack at your local Wal-Mart?
You can get entire seasons of old TV for a buck....
Which means that they are effectively going out of print, and pretty soon you won't be able to get them at all.
It simply is not worth it to the publisher to sell a DVD collection when people aren't willing to pay more than a buck or so per episode.
I've looked through the bargain bin. Mostly, they seem to have everything but what I'm looking for, and I expend several bucks worth of my time just digging through the bin (something that only sells for a buck isn't worth the employee time that it would take to alphabetize them, either).
Re:never appreciated the NES
on
20 Years of NES
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· Score: 1
First person shooters killed video games. We get one after the other with significant graphical enhancements, and nothing else going for them. Where did my adventure games go?
Can't say that I ever much got into first person shooters. Classic styles of games are still alive and well, mainly on the Nintendo handhelds--and with good graphics, to boot. And many of the classic coin arcade games are now available in console classics collections (or under PC emulation) with the original arcade graphics
I never could get into the NES, because the graphics were so damned ugly compared to the coin arcades. At least the PC's of the day from Apple, Atari, and Commodore could begin to approximate arcade graphics. I only came to appreciate consoles with the 16-bit generation.
It is clear in retrospect that Nintendo produced some remarkably creative games for that ugly little system--but I still can't stand to play it.
Do you want to pay more per month for it? That's what you're suggesting amounts to. An awful lot of characters are created on any given day, and screening every single name as they are created would require paying someone or more likely multiple people to hand-check every single name to prevent violation. Instead, they _hope_ people will avoid violating the rules, but otherwise rely on users to report violations.
It should not be hand-checked at all. It should be only a machine check. If somebody is creative enough to invent a name that somebody doesn't approve of but that isn't on the list, it is not a catastrophe--let him keep it, but edit the list so that nobody else does it.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, Google intends to scan and store the entirety of all books and promise to only display small parts of them. The publishers' objections are that once that data are compiled Google will forever have the publishing industry by the throat with the ability to change, without notice, the definition of small parts.
This seems kind of silly. Google doesn't establish some kind of "squatter's rights" by doing this. There is nothing to prevent publishers from suing at a later date if Google increases the size of the snippets displayed. It is the courts, not Google, who will decide what constitutes a small part.
Smells fishy to me if it is done over the objections of the owners of the material.
But in fact, nothing is being done over the objections of the owners. If any owner objects, Google removes their material from the archive. So the real concern is that it is being done over the lack of objections of the owners.
By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit.
Except that this isn't true. Google is not placing adds on Library Project pages. They do provide links to booksellers, but they don't get a fee for those links.
It seems like the only real benefit that Google is reaping from the Library Project is the publicity and public goodwill, which probably benefits Google's image as the place to go to for web research.
I can't reproduce this problem--I couldn't get it to scroll at all--but I did find that the face broke apart when I resized the window. Re-running the test with the new window size restored the face, but it was again disrupted when I resized the window again.
There is more than one way that books get on Google.
The books indexed by the Library Project do not have ads (there are links to online retailers, but Google doesn't make any money from them).
On the other hand, some books get on Google through the Publisher Program. These are sponsored by a publisher, and Google does make some money from them.
You don't think a company whose profits are based almost entirely on its hosting of advertisements might have a slight ulterior motive here?
Since Google doesn't put adds on Library Project pages, they don't benefit directly.
So their only real benefit is indirect: increased goodwill for a public-spirited project, and enhancing their corporate image as the place to go for research.
If Google's investment in the project cannot be protected, they may have little incentive to create this and other projects.
I doubt if this matters much to Google. This is closer to a philanthropic project than a money making endeavor for Google. The only thing Google really gets out of it is a boost to its public profile and its image at the portal to all things searchable. Neither would be diminished by somebody producing a competitive database. Indeed, Google is so well entrenched that people would probably refer to searching that competitive database as "googling."
I agree. Copyright law should be modified so that a copyright expires if a work goes out of print (defined as being unavailable from the copyright holder) for more than 5 years.
While there is much to criticize about Bill Gates, in selecting a target for his philanthropy, he has done a quite brilliant thing in targeting the single area where an investment in research would yield the greatest return in reduction of human misery. Parasitic diseases in the 3rd world are the source of untold suffering, yet they are not a major target of research dollars because they do not afflict wealthy companies and do not offer a great profit potential for big pharma. So Gates has identified an unmet need, and has put his money precisely where it will do the most good.
It is, of course, always tempting to seek a selfish goal for philanthropy, particularly where the donor is such a shark in the business arena. Obviously, these are not anonymous donations, and Gates reaps benefits in terms of reputation and public relations. Still, there are many areas where he could have made donations that would have had greater visibility and appeal to his primary customer base. People can have multiple motivations for their actions, but it is difficult to doubt that at least part of the motivation behind Gates's philanthropy is the desire to do something really good for people in need.
somebody posted this [mp3newswire.net] last week about making old 50s shows available for cheap. Sounds promising to me as a way of preserving the early days of TV. Heck, I'd pay a buck for old Zachary creature features.
I think that this is an ideal use of the medium. When you watch Lost or Desperate Housewives on iTunes or iPod, you are giving up the beautiful HD of the broadcast (or the torrent, if you prefer). But these old TV shows will lose little on the tiny screen. For some, it might even bring back fond memories of sitting across the room from a small-screen TV.
Why am I willing to pay more for music than I would for video?
I don't find this at all surprising. Perhaps a better way to think about it is the cost per hour, averaged over the entire period of ownership. People may watch a video a few times if they really like it, but listen to a favorite album dozens or even hundreds of times.
Biological evolution is just a special case of general evolution. If you DON'T want to accept biological evolution, you need to make a special argument about why general evolution should not be applied in this special area. I've never heard a good, or even a less than laughably poor, argument for this. This doesn't prove such arguments don't exist, or can't be made, but it certainly shows that they aren't common.
You won't find many people bothering to argue that apples are different than oranges, either.
There really is no theory of "general evolution" -- it is nothing more than a vague observation: lots of things change over time. The biological theory of evolution differs by including a mechanism that depends upon two crucial elements--hereditable variation and differential reproductive success. These are the core of the biological theory, and generally do not apply in realms other than biology.
The point is Medical & Biological research do not depend on ID or Evolution. eg.If anything, the perception that somthing intelligent designed life is more of an advantage to biological researcher, because he can say, hey there is a well thought out system here, and my job is to reverse engineer it, rather than, hey all these random beneficial mutations have produced incresed order.
As a biomedical research, I have to say that that is completely false. I use evolutionary theory all of the time to design and interpret experiments. I find it hard to imagine how one could think meaningfully about genetic data or comparative proteomics without knowledge of evolution. I would say that to a biologist, evolutionary theory is as fundamental as arithmetic is to an account. Virtually everything we do is informed by evolutionary theory.
A theory being scientific does -not- mean that it has been proven true or false. It means that it can be proven true or false
Minor correction: a scientific theory can never be proved true; it can only be proved false. That is why making falsifiable predictions is considered an absolute requirement for an idea to qualify as a scientific theory.
Actually, generalized evolutionary theory is used in arguments about the evolution of the physical universe after the first femto-second. Whenever you hear arguments about this particle would be stable in that environment, but as conditions changed it would decay into this other particle, you are dealing with an argument based on the general theory of evolution.
There is really no relationship between what you are describing and the biological theory of evolution. The general concept of "evolution," meaning natural change, is an old, general concept, and substantially predates Darwin. It was generally accepted by most biologists, simply on the basis of observations, that life had evolved even before Darwin came along, and there were other theories--e.g. Lamarkian evolution--proposed to account for it. Darwin provided a mechanism--in which natural selection plays a prominent role--to explain for the observed evolution of life, and that mechanistic theory has stood up to over a hundred years of tests.
Is the explanation of the second scientist not science simply because it fails to make predictions, but only explains data?
Such retrodiction turns out to be easy and not particularly meaningful, particularly if your theory has a large number of adjustable parameters. For example, if you give me an X-Y plot with n points derived from some measurement, I can give you a "theory"--a polynomial equation--with n+1 parameters that perfectly "predicts" (passes through) those points, but very likely, if you give me one more point, it won't fall on the curve (because few things in nature are actually well described by polynomials). I can come up with a new polynomial to fit that point, but give me one more point and I'll probably be out of luck again. This is why the true test of a theory is the ability to predict something that you don't already know. For example, Darwin didn't know about genes or mutations, but he was able to predict that something of the sort had to exist--because his theory wouldn't work without them. So for example, "That phenomenon can be described by a polynomial equation" is not a scientific theory, because I can find a polynomial equation to perfectly fit any set of data. But "That phenomenon can be described by a polynomial equation of degree three" is potentially a scientific theory, because if I collect enough data, I should be able to prove it false, if it is false.
o, your argument is a misrepresentation of what I said. I'm not claiming that ID is acceptable because macro-evolution isn't verifiable, I'm claiming that neither should be taught as fact.
In science, the only true facts are individual observations. "I dropped the book and it fell to the floor" is an observation. "Objects fall when dropped" is a theory. All scientific generalizations and explanations are theories, potentially subject to revision by new data. This is true of evolution, just as it is true of gravitation. But that does not mean that all possible explanations are equal. We do not present the theory that the earth is at the center of the solar system on the same basis as the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system. And we don't present fringe notions like ID on the same basis as a theory that is virtually universally accepted by biologists, such as natural selection.
Name me one non-trivial, falsifiable, unfalsified claim of evolutionary theory.
Here's a lengthy, but not exhaustive, list
"All organisms will have the same basic DNA building blocks" is non-falsifiable.
Of course it's falsifiable. Not every organism has had its DNA studied. So every time the DNA of an organism is sequenced, it is an opportunity to falsify the prediction.
"No member of any species will act for the benefit of another with no benefit for its own" is falsified by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
This is not a prediction of evolutionary theory. There are many circumstances in which natural selection will favor such behavior.
I'm not aware of any fossil evidence showing half-way mutated species. If someone knows of some, could they provide a link to a reputable website detailing this evidence?
I should hope not. Evolutionary theory provides no mechanism for something to be "halfway" mutated. Note that all individual differences are due to mutation, so if you find one skull that is a bit larger or smaller than another skull of the same species, that is a mutational difference.
What gene sequencing has revealed is that there is really no difference at the genomic level between micro and macroevolution. All differences between species, as well as differences between individuals, result from exactly the same kind of changes at the genetic level--which happen to be exactly the kinds of changes produced by mutation.
For more details, see this site
I haven't seen the box you mention, but the cheapest in-print Our Gang DVD listed on Amazon has a MSRP of $4.95.
Your claim that it's "not worth it" runs directly counter to the example presented: these are NOT clearout sales on stuff that's going out of print, that's the MSRP on many of these DVDs. Dual Sided discs and insanely cheap packaging are our friends in this case, and if it wasn't worth it to the manufacturer, they wouldn't be doing it. For those who've never been in Walmart, he's not exaggerating, you can seriously go into a bargain bin and find an entire seasons of, for example, Abbott and Costello's TV series or the Little Rascals, for $1US.
Here's the Amazon link to Little Rascals volume 1. MSRP is $14.95. The cheapest Little Rascals disk listed on Amazon is $4.95 MSRP. There are a number of out of print Little Rascal's collections, some of which can be had at lower prices.
And that's why you're not seeing it released already. I mean the video iPod is just another storage format as far as a content exec is going to see it. You could ask the same questions about all kinds of other media. Why didn't they release all those old TV shows on VCD in 1995? Or DVD in the last few years?
Because at the prices people are willing to pay for these old shows, they won't make back the shipping, packaging, or media costs--none of which are relevant to online sales.
Have you seen the bargain DVD rack at your local Wal-Mart?
You can get entire seasons of old TV for a buck....
Which means that they are effectively going out of print, and pretty soon you won't be able to get them at all.
It simply is not worth it to the publisher to sell a DVD collection when people aren't willing to pay more than a buck or so per episode.
I've looked through the bargain bin. Mostly, they seem to have everything but what I'm looking for, and I expend several bucks worth of my time just digging through the bin (something that only sells for a buck isn't worth the employee time that it would take to alphabetize them, either).
First person shooters killed video games. We get one after the other with significant graphical enhancements, and nothing else going for them. Where did my adventure games go?
Can't say that I ever much got into first person shooters. Classic styles of games are still alive and well, mainly on the Nintendo handhelds--and with good graphics, to boot. And many of the classic coin arcade games are now available in console classics collections (or under PC emulation) with the original arcade graphics
I never could get into the NES, because the graphics were so damned ugly compared to the coin arcades. At least the PC's of the day from Apple, Atari, and Commodore could begin to approximate arcade graphics. I only came to appreciate consoles with the 16-bit generation.
It is clear in retrospect that Nintendo produced some remarkably creative games for that ugly little system--but I still can't stand to play it.
Do you want to pay more per month for it? That's what you're suggesting amounts to. An awful lot of characters are created on any given day, and screening every single name as they are created would require paying someone or more likely multiple people to hand-check every single name to prevent violation. Instead, they _hope_ people will avoid violating the rules, but otherwise rely on users to report violations.
It should not be hand-checked at all. It should be only a machine check. If somebody is creative enough to invent a name that somebody doesn't approve of but that isn't on the list, it is not a catastrophe--let him keep it, but edit the list so that nobody else does it.