Jon "maddog" Hall posted an explanation of the history of the Linux trademark (and Linux International's defense of the trademark) together with a statement supporting Linux Australia's and Jeremy Malcolm's actions in this to the Linux Australia list:
Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark for the world, which
due to the costs of registering and obtaining International Trade Marks is
VERY expensive. Linux International has spent over 300,000 USD to do this
over the years. LI is a non-profit and does not have very much revenue, so
some of this money has come from my own personal checkbook. While I can not
say how much money I have spent on defending the mark per se, I can tell you
that I have spent about 250,000 USD of my own money in keeping LI alive. I am
not looking for medals or a chest to pin them on. I am only stating this to
show people that this is not a "scam", nor is anyone making any money off this
other than the international legal and trademark community, and I am sure that
they are necessary and justifiable fees. Certainly Jeremy Malcolm has seemed
to be above board and conscientious in all of our dealings with him, as has
Jonathan Oxer and the rest of the fine people at LAI.
After a while the board of Linux International recognized the advantage of
forming a separate non-profit, the Linux Mark Institute (LMI). We need LMI to
be self-funding, and following trademark laws in the 200 countries of the world
is very expensive.
Linux Australia is the group organising the big linux.conf.au conference each year. (Both Linus and/. editors have attended in the past...)
They are currently in the process of setting themselves up as the group to talk to if you want to talk to FOSS volunteers in Australia. This is pretty much a self-appointed role for them, but they have put a lot of effort into communicating with the LUGs all over the country and they have deeper pockets and a higher profile than the LUGs due to organising the region's major FOSS conference, so the LUGs are, as far as I know, consenting. Most Linux Australia people are pretty active in their own LUG: the Sydney and Perth groups have a great deal of overlap with Linux Australia. LA is also open membership and most conference attendees do end up joining (it's free with the conference admission) so a reasonable chunk of FOSS developers in Australia have voting rights. Rusty Russell and Andrew Tridgell have both been involved to varying degrees.
So they are a legitimate user group, or meta-user group, as much as any other LUG in Australia. It's in their role as the umbrella of Linux in Australia that they seem to have asked Malcolm to act to shore up Linus's claim to "Linux" in Australia, currently in doubt because so many businesses already use the word.
The president of Linux Australia (which is, btw, kind of an umbrella group for Australian LUGs and which manages the linux.conf.au conference), said this in his blog:
There'll be a bit of an update about this soon by someone more knowledgeable than myself, but in the meantime the important thing to know is that the email is part of the process that LMI (Linux Mark Institute) has been undertaking to secure the trademark to the word "Linux". LMI is acting on behalf of Linus Torvalds to establish and protect the Linux trademark in various jurisdictions around the world, and has enlisted the assistance of local organisations within those jurisdictions to act as local representatives. Linux Australia has been cooperating with LMI to assist with securing the trademark in Australia.
Jeremy Malcolm has also published a FAQ, including the following:
What was the purpose of your letter?
There are many businesses in Australia that are using the word "Linux" as part of their operations. IP Australia, our trade mark registrar, knows this, and considers it an obstacle for the success of Linus Torvalds' application to register "Linux" as a trade mark here. We need to show IP Australia that although a lot of people may be using "Linux" in a trade mark context, they are doing so under licence of Linus (or strictly, under sub-licence from LMI).
Why was I sent the letter?
The letter was sent to anyone whom it appeared might have been using the word "Linux", or some derivative of that word, in a trade mark context.
But I'm not using it in a trade mark context!
That's good to know. Thanks, and sorry for any inconvenience.
But you're asking me for money!
No I'm not. You might be required to licence the mark in the future if you are using the Linux mark in a trade mark context for your business, but I have no instructions, and don't anticipate receiving any, to pursue you to take out such a licence.
'upgrade' means "update any packages that don't require new dependencies" and 'dist-upgrade' means "update packages and pull in new dependencies if need be". With a long release cycle, each stable release is going to have a lot of the second kind of packages.
North Koreans who escape to the South actually have special adjustment schools they can go to. It's not just about tech, but also teaches the Northerners, who've experienced famine, about things like dieting.
DHCP configures EVERYTHING (like mail server, news server, etc)
If your DNS is configured with names and search paths so that "mail" and "smtp" both are mail relays for your network and "news" is your newsserver, the effect can be the same -- default configurations work.
What's easier, convincing people to use an extended DHCP or convincing every admin to do the above? I honestly don't know.
Did anyone else not like the original because of the empty space and the talking?
It seems the empty space, the path-finding and the Fed-Ex quests (go to Beregost and bring me back my bottle of wine) are the two biggest complaints about the original, judging from alt.games.baldurs-gate and the Gameplay FAQ.
Needless to say, they've promised to fix them all - pathfinding will include bumping others out of the way instead of walking half-way around the world (like Icewind Dale apparently, but I've never played it), walking speed will be up 50%, empty spaces won't be there and quests will be more interesting.
I liked some of the voices - Minsc in particular had good lines ('RASKKKKKKKKKKKKK'). At the moment though, I have Safana in my evil party and her American accent is annoying me. That and being greeting by 'Yes darling' when I click on her as a female PC (her personality description makes it seem she'd aim that stuff at males).
YYou should not fear your government. You should fear the corporations, whose power is far greater than your government, and who lack the restraint both of morals and of public opinion.
This post is one I've wanted to make on/. for a while and will probably make again...
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding between US and non-US/.-ers, and this post is mainly to US readers so that you understand some of the puzzled and angry responses you get to posts expressing dislike of government and the restrictions it places on freedom.
As an Australian, speaking of my impression about 'ordinary' Australians (responses, additions and criticism welcome), it is not our government we fear. We fear corporations, and we fear the free market.
At the moment our economy is in a boom cycle (probably at the tail end, judging from our falling dollar), but never have people been less happy with the economy.
Discussion of the free market by non-economists revolves around the negative impact of globalisation on job security and by extension, on happiness and social cohesion. (Remember as a small economy we have less to gain than the US).
In this, we see our government as our protector. When large companies go bankrupt owing their workers large sums, the government steps in and guarantees them money (or they do when the prime Minister's brother was on the board...:) ). When Telstra - the major telecommunications company - announces 10000 jobs to be cut, the government promises that the impact will be minimal and rural workers won't be hit.
Our present government, which is conservative, has had to appear to back off some economic policies in order to exploit this view of market-and-corporations-as-ultimate-enemy.
This is a point of view many posts seem dismissive of, seeming to think it is trivial and silly, thus denying themselves a chance of engaging with and convincing their opponent. Perhaps it is trivial and silly. Perhaps it is not.
Don't dismiss it. Refute it if you think it is wrong. There are a lot of people who hold it in varying degrees and you are not going to be able to argue some of your points of view without accepting that. Just step back a couple of paces in your arguments and argue from there.
I'm not arguing that this is the way it should be, or that this is how people think about everything. (ie I don't see a word processor == map bijection).
This is simply my experience. People think every file can be read by everything. Anecdote: One of my friends (very smart, eloquent etc etc) needs to send a letter to my uni's CS and Maths departments. She knows they use Unix, and sends an MS Word attachment...
I'm not entirely sure what you thought was wrong with my post aside from the fact that people know how to use maps, even though maps sometimes use different symbols for the same thing. Congratulations. That is true.
Since I don't really understand what point you were intending to make, I can only assume some positions for you:
I am dumb and made a stupid post. Reply: You don't want one, you already think I am an idiot.
People (and possibly me) are dumb: they can use maps, so why the hell can't they change file formats? Reply: Map readers are aware of the differences between the maps and thus can use the fairly obvious similarities between them (or the key) to 'decode' them. End-users don't see the details of file formats, they see similar output for all of them, and thus assume they are the same, and probably aren't much more complicated that text. To fall into your wierd map analogy completely, seeing two maps, identical except for some differently formated town names, wouldn't you assume they were maps of the same area?
But this is fairly silly. Pragmatically, it's this simple: people (and the students of this teacher in particular) don't get something. You either help them with it or choose the route of least resistance. In this case, a cost-benefit analysis might suggest least-resistance.
--
Instructions for a really good refutation of this post: Take all words, replace one in particular with the word 'pencil'.
Anyway, whatever. You've prolly heard these arguments a thousand times over from more intelligent people:).
Well maybe. They're perfectly reasonable arguments and they've been used by a lot of intelligent people:) But that's OK. Everyone has to apply Occam's razor at some point. You seem apply it more at the practical level, so that you can express what you experience in 'everyday' ways, and some people apply it at the theorectical level (ie simplest explanation == most 'right' somehow).
There's nothing wrong with holding views that other people have expressed before. I hold that there really is an external world which bears some relationship (somehow) to the way in which we expereince it, but I bet a lot of more intelligent people have said that before too:)
And what, exactly, is wrong with plain ASCII (or Unicode) text documents? School reports don't need fancy formatting, embedded documents, double-strikethrough-underline-bold-vertical-shado wed-blinking-red text, or text. What's wrong with text?
Nothing's wrong with text except that people don't know it exists. People who don't turn bold, italic, justify on, are very likely un-clueful (I don't like 'clueless' cos I know many clever people who just aren't interested enough to 'get' computers at anything more than a superficial level).
A lot of people, even people who use computers on a semi-regular basis, don't get the idea of non-compatible file formats, or non-compatible anything. They think of computers as a tool, which should be designed to do what they want, easily, and obviously, one thing they want is to transfer files. So they should be able to click save and everything should be sweet.
Even if they do understand how to ask MS Word or whatever to save in ASCII, they don't understand why that has to happen, and thus the whole thing will be a big turn-off.
The outside world looks at them as real (objective) scientists, but when an alternate theorem appears, they are the ones that will fight it the most. Not because the theorem might be wrong, but because they loose all their status in the scientific world.
I'm sure this is the case for many scientists, as it is for many people. But I don't think this is necessarily the case.
Thomas Kuhn famously postulated that science proceeds by paradigm shifts in which, roughly, a bright young spark comes up with some revolutionary new theory that completely rewrites the old theory, and has to fight against the grand old duchesses/dukes of science until spectacularly vindicated.
Then that theory develops holes and is patched until the next brilliant postgrad, who is then opposed as vehemently by the developers/advocates of the old theory.
I can't give you many arguments against the theory as a whole (aside from my first year philsophy lecturer's statement "Kuhn wasn't trained in philosophy" which clearly says it all and probably argues for a paradigmatic view of philsophy) but point out that many scientists vehemently deny this.
There was one anecdote (please someone tell me the author) which pointed out that although, socially, scientists have as rigid a pecking order as anyone else, when holding a seminar, or discussing a theory, the freshest newcomer has as much a right to an answer (no matter if the question displays ignorance of undergrad material) than the speakers own collegues.
Certainly, I personally deplore the attitude of many people who have taught me science towards the history of their discipline ("What an ignorant lot of twits, we understand it all now"), and sincerely hope that isn't the case everywhere.
An appreciation of the difficult of postulating a scientific theory would help solve the problem you raise, where a 'wrong' answer causes loss of status. That shouldn't be the case.
The purpose of science is not to look for some ultimate truth, it is rather to try and model the processes of the universe. Evolution is a theory which has given remarkably accurate predictions
'The purpose of science' is still open to debate. The one you are advocating is, or is related to, empiricist theories of science, which in turn are closely related to anti-realist theories - ie that there is nothing at all 'in' science aside from predictive powers.
I am not sure that you are arguing that the sole purpose of these models is for predictive purposes alone, and I don't necessarily advocate the realist view of science - I'm just pointing out it exists.
Some problems that have been noted with the empirical (ie purely predictive) view of science are that it is difficult to determine the line where the constituents of the model (say 'atoms' for example) and observed scientific phenomena begin (ie 'bacteria', which cannot be seen with naked eye might be postulated as merely an explanatory device for the occurance of disease, or a phenomena in their own right).
I suspect that you postulate 'organisms' and 'species' as real things that evolutionary theories predict the behaviour of. Some theorists haven't - they have regarded the immediate sensory perceptions of our mind as reality, and 'organisms', 'society', 'sub-atomic particles', 'people' etc as tools to predict immediate sensory phenomena (and then there's the problem of defining what a single, irreducible sensory phenomenon is for the purpose of predicting them).
Basically, I'm just noting that although many 'working scientists' (who have apparently been placed under the microscope by philosophers) hold an empiricist view of science, there are some who hold the view that science is a quest for ultimate truth about reality, and that current scientific theories are closer to describing that reality than, say, religious beliefs, and that refinement of scientific theories as time passes approximate reality more closely than before. To these people, the development of evolutionary theory in line with their idea of the scientific method, and its contribution to an overall picture of reality might be make the case for holding it as powerful as its predictive powers would.
I'd say that the Japanese are creating Japanese words based on English.
This is probably simplified - IANALinguist but only taking a couple of years of it at uni, but this would have to be true.
English is a very free language in terms of syllable structure - consider strong which begins with three consonants in a single syllable. Japanese (and many other languages) are much more constrained - the normal syllabic form is consonant+vowel, with some few exceptions - e.g. a syllable may end in a consonant as long as it is a voiceless stop (p, t, k) and the next syllable begins in that consonant.
Many langauages which adopt English words change them to fit their own structure - consider English chef, borrowed (stolen:-) ) from French comparatively recently, and compare it with the very Anglicized chief, which was the same word, borrowed longer ago.
Langauages' power to absorb is underrated. Given a couple of generations, native speakers think they're using a good solid native word.
But free speech is the right to say what you want; not the right to be heard anyway.
Having a society with free speech where there is no chance of unorthodox views being heard is pointless though. The whole point is having a chance to persuade people of your opinions.
However, you have the right not to listen. But you should be able to know where to go if you want to listen.
I didn't know where to go to read posts at -2 (although I think some of the parent comments indicate how to do this), although I did know that that's some people's default rating. I read at +1 default, and I don't want to read at -2. But it's hard to find out that you can.
Besides, from the sound of it, the site itself doesn't offer this as an option, you have to set threshold=-2 in the URL. So is this censorship, or is the option to tweak the URL enough for people who want to read at -2, read at -2?
There's no point being able to say anything you want if you can only say it really quietly 600 kilometres below ground... I don't know whether an analogy with/. can be drawn or not:)
I wouldn't say that telling offensive jokes is a "right."
The point of a right is that you can (as opposed to should) exercise it regardless of whether you are acting morally or not, offensively or not, dangerously or not.
If you have a right to free speech, you can choose not to exercise your right as a moral action, or out of politeness. But you still would have been able to speak freely if that speech was offensive or impolite.
If you believe in and are prepared to defend a right to free speech, then you can only attempt to persuade others to use that right selectively by using other arguments, such as respect for persons, or politeness for that matter (I don't think they're always the same thing). But they can ignore you and exercise their right regardless.
Regardless of whether you are arguing that there should not be (absolute) freedom of expression because it can be used for offensive purposes, or attempting to persuade people not to use their right to free speech for offensive purposes, you are still touching on the issue of freedom of speech. In the first case, you might have more power to stop such offensiveness, but perhaps some offensiveness is needed, and besides you then might have power to stop other stuff too. In the second case, you can only attempt to persuade, and some offensiveness will hurt people.
I don't know what the answer is. It depends on what you think of the value of controversial specch, and what you think of the validity of slippery slope arguments, and how steep you think the slope is.
Sauron actually made it and let a 'large part' of his power pass into it. He learnt the skill from Celebrimbor, a High-Elvish descendant of Feanor (see The Silmarillion) who made the Three Rings. They appear to have collaborated on the Seven and the Nine.
You'd think a descendant of Feanor (and Celebrimbor is only four or five generations down) would have been wary of Morgoth's lieutenant.
Yeah, the problem would have surfaced again in a few millenia when the ring figured out how to get itself caught in someone's net or something.
Well it could have worked... but the elves and Gandalf as immortals, would have a longer view. Some skimming of some of the dates once suggested to me that Galadriel is over 10 000 years old at the time of LoTR even though dates don't work properly before the Rising of the Sun.
Besides, Sauron would probably win if the Ring was lost - note how hopeless the last defence is. Whereas the destruction of the Ring is the destruction of all his power.
But Legolas' father was Silvan elf, and a ruler of Silvan elves. The ancestors of these elves (or perhaps they themselves - Elves did not age - although Legolas indicates somewhere he is only five huindred I think) had started the journey to the West that the Valar invited them to undertake.
The Silvan elves became enamoured of their surroundings towards the end of the journey and refused the final crossing of the sea.
Thus they never saw the Two Trees in the West in their full glory and were never the pupils of the Valar - the gods.
Thus, although powerful and enlightened by human standards, they were not High Elves like Elrond (on the Elf side), whose Elvish ancestors had come back from the West to retake the Silmarils.
He expected the Ring to be taken up by some sort of Hero, and openly used against him.
Yes, and this is actively used as a strategy by Aragorn - that is why he uses the Palantir before venturing on the Paths of the Dead - he challanges Sauron, so as to hope that Sauron is fooled into believing that Isildur's heir weilds the Ring.
This draws more of Sauron's forces out of Mordor, thus making it easier for Frodo.
Aragorn does admit later however, that he didn't expect the response to be as swift as it is - he barely comes in time.
the 15 year old Y.T. would not only be hard to cast, but would have to have sex with a giant mutated Aluet twice her age
I have a suspicion that that would be lost somewhere. My bet is they would write in a Y.T./Hiro affair - I mean, Juanita (the character I most identified with btw) has a very minor part, and Y.T./Raven just doesn't fit what they'd imagine the audience would want to see in terms of fireworks.
Depends which country you're talking about. The calendar was the creation of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, dropping ten days in October. Catholic countries followed immediately, and Protestant countries by 1700. In Europe, it was only England who had a leap year in 1700. Use of the Gregorian calendar in England (and the colonies) was finally specified by an Act of Parliament in 1751. By then, because of the extra leap year, the correction required 11 days. I believe Russia may not have changed until this century.
Slashdot Mirror
Google's only put up the January 2001 index because it happens to be the oldest one they have.
web.archive.org does have a result for Slashdot as it was in late 1998 though, so you don't have to stick to Slashdot in 2001!
Jon "maddog" Hall posted an explanation of the history of the Linux trademark (and Linux International's defense of the trademark) together with a statement supporting Linux Australia's and Jeremy Malcolm's actions in this to the Linux Australia list:
Linux Australia is the group organising the big linux.conf.au conference each year. (Both Linus and /. editors have attended in the past...)
They are currently in the process of setting themselves up as the group to talk to if you want to talk to FOSS volunteers in Australia. This is pretty much a self-appointed role for them, but they have put a lot of effort into communicating with the LUGs all over the country and they have deeper pockets and a higher profile than the LUGs due to organising the region's major FOSS conference, so the LUGs are, as far as I know, consenting. Most Linux Australia people are pretty active in their own LUG: the Sydney and Perth groups have a great deal of overlap with Linux Australia. LA is also open membership and most conference attendees do end up joining (it's free with the conference admission) so a reasonable chunk of FOSS developers in Australia have voting rights. Rusty Russell and Andrew Tridgell have both been involved to varying degrees.
So they are a legitimate user group, or meta-user group, as much as any other LUG in Australia. It's in their role as the umbrella of Linux in Australia that they seem to have asked Malcolm to act to shore up Linus's claim to "Linux" in Australia, currently in doubt because so many businesses already use the word.
Jeremy Malcolm has also published a FAQ, including the following:
'upgrade' means "update any packages that don't require new dependencies" and 'dist-upgrade' means "update packages and pull in new dependencies if need be". With a long release cycle, each stable release is going to have a lot of the second kind of packages.
North Koreans who escape to the South actually have special adjustment schools they can go to. It's not just about tech, but also teaches the Northerners, who've experienced famine, about things like dieting.
If your DNS is configured with names and search paths so that "mail" and "smtp" both are mail relays for your network and "news" is your newsserver, the effect can be the same -- default configurations work.
What's easier, convincing people to use an extended DHCP or convincing every admin to do the above? I honestly don't know.
It's also a one-click install option when you install Galeon on Debian. I suspect it's a pretty universal Galeon thing.
Play a human character and dual-class as soon as the game begins - you'll be level 1 with a lot of hit points.
This might make the beginning almost impossible of course...
It seems the empty space, the path-finding and the Fed-Ex quests (go to Beregost and bring me back my bottle of wine) are the two biggest complaints about the original, judging from alt.games.baldurs-gate and the Gameplay FAQ.
Needless to say, they've promised to fix them all - pathfinding will include bumping others out of the way instead of walking half-way around the world (like Icewind Dale apparently, but I've never played it), walking speed will be up 50%, empty spaces won't be there and quests will be more interesting.
I liked some of the voices - Minsc in particular had good lines ('RASKKKKKKKKKKKKK'). At the moment though, I have Safana in my evil party and her American accent is annoying me. That and being greeting by 'Yes darling' when I click on her as a female PC (her personality description makes it seem she'd aim that stuff at males).
YYou should not fear your government. You should fear the corporations, whose power is far greater than your government, and who lack the restraint both of morals and of public opinion.
This post is one I've wanted to make on /. for a while and will probably make again...
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding between US and non-US /.-ers, and this post is mainly to US readers so that you understand some of the puzzled and angry responses you get to posts expressing dislike of government and the restrictions it places on freedom.
As an Australian, speaking of my impression about 'ordinary' Australians (responses, additions and criticism welcome), it is not our government we fear. We fear corporations, and we fear the free market.
At the moment our economy is in a boom cycle (probably at the tail end, judging from our falling dollar), but never have people been less happy with the economy.
Discussion of the free market by non-economists revolves around the negative impact of globalisation on job security and by extension, on happiness and social cohesion. (Remember as a small economy we have less to gain than the US).
In this, we see our government as our protector. When large companies go bankrupt owing their workers large sums, the government steps in and guarantees them money (or they do when the prime Minister's brother was on the board... :) ). When Telstra - the major telecommunications company - announces 10000 jobs to be cut, the government promises that the impact will be minimal and rural workers won't be hit.
Our present government, which is conservative, has had to appear to back off some economic policies in order to exploit this view of market-and-corporations-as-ultimate-enemy.
This is a point of view many posts seem dismissive of, seeming to think it is trivial and silly, thus denying themselves a chance of engaging with and convincing their opponent. Perhaps it is trivial and silly. Perhaps it is not.
Don't dismiss it. Refute it if you think it is wrong. There are a lot of people who hold it in varying degrees and you are not going to be able to argue some of your points of view without accepting that. Just step back a couple of paces in your arguments and argue from there.
*sigh*
I'm not arguing that this is the way it should be, or that this is how people think about everything. (ie I don't see a word processor == map bijection).
This is simply my experience. People think every file can be read by everything. Anecdote: One of my friends (very smart, eloquent etc etc) needs to send a letter to my uni's CS and Maths departments. She knows they use Unix, and sends an MS Word attachment...
I'm not entirely sure what you thought was wrong with my post aside from the fact that people know how to use maps, even though maps sometimes use different symbols for the same thing. Congratulations. That is true.
Since I don't really understand what point you were intending to make, I can only assume some positions for you:
But this is fairly silly. Pragmatically, it's this simple: people (and the students of this teacher in particular) don't get something. You either help them with it or choose the route of least resistance. In this case, a cost-benefit analysis might suggest least-resistance.
--
Instructions for a really good refutation of this post: Take all words, replace one in particular with the word 'pencil'.
Well maybe. They're perfectly reasonable arguments and they've been used by a lot of intelligent people :) But that's OK. Everyone has to apply Occam's razor at some point. You seem apply it more at the practical level, so that you can express what you experience in 'everyday' ways, and some people apply it at the theorectical level (ie simplest explanation == most 'right' somehow).
There's nothing wrong with holding views that other people have expressed before. I hold that there really is an external world which bears some relationship (somehow) to the way in which we expereince it, but I bet a lot of more intelligent people have said that before too :)
Your post was a lot of fun to read, thanks.
That's OK. :)
And what, exactly, is wrong with plain ASCII (or Unicode) text documents? School reports don't need fancy formatting, embedded documents, double-strikethrough-underline-bold-vertical-shado wed-blinking-red text, or text. What's wrong with text?
Nothing's wrong with text except that people don't know it exists. People who don't turn bold, italic, justify on, are very likely un-clueful (I don't like 'clueless' cos I know many clever people who just aren't interested enough to 'get' computers at anything more than a superficial level).
A lot of people, even people who use computers on a semi-regular basis, don't get the idea of non-compatible file formats, or non-compatible anything. They think of computers as a tool, which should be designed to do what they want, easily, and obviously, one thing they want is to transfer files. So they should be able to click save and everything should be sweet.
Even if they do understand how to ask MS Word or whatever to save in ASCII, they don't understand why that has to happen, and thus the whole thing will be a big turn-off.
The outside world looks at them as real (objective) scientists, but when an alternate theorem appears, they are the ones that will fight it the most. Not because the theorem might be wrong, but because they loose all their status in the scientific world.
I'm sure this is the case for many scientists, as it is for many people. But I don't think this is necessarily the case.
Thomas Kuhn famously postulated that science proceeds by paradigm shifts in which, roughly, a bright young spark comes up with some revolutionary new theory that completely rewrites the old theory, and has to fight against the grand old duchesses/dukes of science until spectacularly vindicated.
Then that theory develops holes and is patched until the next brilliant postgrad, who is then opposed as vehemently by the developers/advocates of the old theory.
I can't give you many arguments against the theory as a whole (aside from my first year philsophy lecturer's statement "Kuhn wasn't trained in philosophy" which clearly says it all and probably argues for a paradigmatic view of philsophy) but point out that many scientists vehemently deny this.
There was one anecdote (please someone tell me the author) which pointed out that although, socially, scientists have as rigid a pecking order as anyone else, when holding a seminar, or discussing a theory, the freshest newcomer has as much a right to an answer (no matter if the question displays ignorance of undergrad material) than the speakers own collegues.
Certainly, I personally deplore the attitude of many people who have taught me science towards the history of their discipline ("What an ignorant lot of twits, we understand it all now"), and sincerely hope that isn't the case everywhere.
An appreciation of the difficult of postulating a scientific theory would help solve the problem you raise, where a 'wrong' answer causes loss of status. That shouldn't be the case.
The purpose of science is not to look for some ultimate truth, it is rather to try and model the processes of the universe. Evolution is a theory which has given remarkably accurate predictions
'The purpose of science' is still open to debate. The one you are advocating is, or is related to, empiricist theories of science, which in turn are closely related to anti-realist theories - ie that there is nothing at all 'in' science aside from predictive powers.
I am not sure that you are arguing that the sole purpose of these models is for predictive purposes alone, and I don't necessarily advocate the realist view of science - I'm just pointing out it exists.
Some problems that have been noted with the empirical (ie purely predictive) view of science are that it is difficult to determine the line where the constituents of the model (say 'atoms' for example) and observed scientific phenomena begin (ie 'bacteria', which cannot be seen with naked eye might be postulated as merely an explanatory device for the occurance of disease, or a phenomena in their own right).
I suspect that you postulate 'organisms' and 'species' as real things that evolutionary theories predict the behaviour of. Some theorists haven't - they have regarded the immediate sensory perceptions of our mind as reality, and 'organisms', 'society', 'sub-atomic particles', 'people' etc as tools to predict immediate sensory phenomena (and then there's the problem of defining what a single, irreducible sensory phenomenon is for the purpose of predicting them).
Basically, I'm just noting that although many 'working scientists' (who have apparently been placed under the microscope by philosophers) hold an empiricist view of science, there are some who hold the view that science is a quest for ultimate truth about reality, and that current scientific theories are closer to describing that reality than, say, religious beliefs, and that refinement of scientific theories as time passes approximate reality more closely than before. To these people, the development of evolutionary theory in line with their idea of the scientific method, and its contribution to an overall picture of reality might be make the case for holding it as powerful as its predictive powers would.
I'd say that the Japanese are creating Japanese words based on English.
This is probably simplified - IANALinguist but only taking a couple of years of it at uni, but this would have to be true.
English is a very free language in terms of syllable structure - consider strong which begins with three consonants in a single syllable. Japanese (and many other languages) are much more constrained - the normal syllabic form is consonant+vowel, with some few exceptions - e.g. a syllable may end in a consonant as long as it is a voiceless stop (p, t, k) and the next syllable begins in that consonant.
Many langauages which adopt English words change them to fit their own structure - consider English chef, borrowed (stolen :-) ) from French comparatively recently, and compare it with the very Anglicized chief, which was the same word, borrowed longer ago.
Langauages' power to absorb is underrated. Given a couple of generations, native speakers think they're using a good solid native word.
But free speech is the right to say what you want; not the right to be heard anyway.
Having a society with free speech where there is no chance of unorthodox views being heard is pointless though. The whole point is having a chance to persuade people of your opinions.
However, you have the right not to listen. But you should be able to know where to go if you want to listen.
I didn't know where to go to read posts at -2 (although I think some of the parent comments indicate how to do this), although I did know that that's some people's default rating. I read at +1 default, and I don't want to read at -2. But it's hard to find out that you can.
Besides, from the sound of it, the site itself doesn't offer this as an option, you have to set threshold=-2 in the URL. So is this censorship, or is the option to tweak the URL enough for people who want to read at -2, read at -2?
There's no point being able to say anything you want if you can only say it really quietly 600 kilometres below ground... I don't know whether an analogy with /. can be drawn or not :)
I wouldn't say that telling offensive jokes is a "right."
The point of a right is that you can (as opposed to should) exercise it regardless of whether you are acting morally or not, offensively or not, dangerously or not.
If you have a right to free speech, you can choose not to exercise your right as a moral action, or out of politeness. But you still would have been able to speak freely if that speech was offensive or impolite.
If you believe in and are prepared to defend a right to free speech, then you can only attempt to persuade others to use that right selectively by using other arguments, such as respect for persons, or politeness for that matter (I don't think they're always the same thing). But they can ignore you and exercise their right regardless.
Regardless of whether you are arguing that there should not be (absolute) freedom of expression because it can be used for offensive purposes, or attempting to persuade people not to use their right to free speech for offensive purposes, you are still touching on the issue of freedom of speech. In the first case, you might have more power to stop such offensiveness, but perhaps some offensiveness is needed, and besides you then might have power to stop other stuff too. In the second case, you can only attempt to persuade, and some offensiveness will hurt people.
I don't know what the answer is. It depends on what you think of the value of controversial specch, and what you think of the validity of slippery slope arguments, and how steep you think the slope is.
How'd it get it's power?
Sauron actually made it and let a 'large part' of his power pass into it. He learnt the skill from Celebrimbor, a High-Elvish descendant of Feanor (see The Silmarillion) who made the Three Rings. They appear to have collaborated on the Seven and the Nine.
You'd think a descendant of Feanor (and Celebrimbor is only four or five generations down) would have been wary of Morgoth's lieutenant.
Yeah, the problem would have surfaced again in a few millenia when the ring figured out how to get itself caught in someone's net or something.
Well it could have worked... but the elves and Gandalf as immortals, would have a longer view. Some skimming of some of the dates once suggested to me that Galadriel is over 10 000 years old at the time of LoTR even though dates don't work properly before the Rising of the Sun.
Besides, Sauron would probably win if the Ring was lost - note how hopeless the last defence is. Whereas the destruction of the Ring is the destruction of all his power.
But Legolas' father was Silvan elf, and a ruler of Silvan elves. The ancestors of these elves (or perhaps they themselves - Elves did not age - although Legolas indicates somewhere he is only five huindred I think) had started the journey to the West that the Valar invited them to undertake.
The Silvan elves became enamoured of their surroundings towards the end of the journey and refused the final crossing of the sea.
Thus they never saw the Two Trees in the West in their full glory and were never the pupils of the Valar - the gods.
Thus, although powerful and enlightened by human standards, they were not High Elves like Elrond (on the Elf side), whose Elvish ancestors had come back from the West to retake the Silmarils.
He expected the Ring to be taken up by some sort of Hero, and openly used against him.
Yes, and this is actively used as a strategy by Aragorn - that is why he uses the Palantir before venturing on the Paths of the Dead - he challanges Sauron, so as to hope that Sauron is fooled into believing that Isildur's heir weilds the Ring.
This draws more of Sauron's forces out of Mordor, thus making it easier for Frodo.
Aragorn does admit later however, that he didn't expect the response to be as swift as it is - he barely comes in time.
I have a suspicion that that would be lost somewhere. My bet is they would write in a Y.T./Hiro affair - I mean, Juanita (the character I most identified with btw) has a very minor part, and Y.T./Raven just doesn't fit what they'd imagine the audience would want to see in terms of fireworks.
Ugh.
Depends which country you're talking about. The calendar was the creation of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, dropping ten days in October. Catholic countries followed immediately, and Protestant countries by 1700. In Europe, it was only England who had a leap year in 1700. Use of the Gregorian calendar in England (and the colonies) was finally specified by an Act of Parliament in 1751. By then, because of the extra leap year, the correction required 11 days. I believe Russia may not have changed until this century.
My info is from here and here.