"Paragraphs, not characters" is not a good yardstick for the significance of changes. An example: without the option of choosing the "save" function instead of just relying on auto-save, how would I keep the change if I just pulled up a document and noticed that I had omitted, say, the word "not" from "Thou shalt not commit adultery"?
Sorry if I overreacted; this is a hot-button issue with me, and I have a tendency to be oversensitive about it and start to rant and foam at the mouth.
I too sympathize -- heck, even agree -- with the people who think porn shouldn't be federally subsidized. I don't think libraries should be tax-supported at all, or at least supported only at the local level. Why should somebody in Boston or Memphis be forced to pay for a library book in Peoria? Or vice versa?
But I just feel that, if people are going to be forced to pay taxes to support libraries, then at the very least, it's only fair that libraries should be absolute bastions of freedom for every kind of speech.
That said, I do agree with you that there is a fundamental difference between saying "public Internet access should be filtered" (if that were even possible) and saying "home Internet access should be filtered", and that filtering what someone views in his or her own home is vastly more objectionable.
Speaking as a libertarian, I absolutely agree that tax dollars should not be used for things to which the taxpayer objects. Unfortunately, if we have tax-supported libraries at all, there is no way to avoid that. I learned this in my first professional library job, when we had a patron who didn't want her child exposed to books with talking animals "because we don't believe in lying to our children". That taught me that there is no predicting what people will find objectionable.
Other people in every public library where I've worked have objected to any of the following: series romances, Christian fiction, occult books (including Harry Potter and C.S. Lewis both), bodybuilding magazines, sex education books, books on dating that didn't include discussion of sex, the Hardy Boys, DVDs, books on evolution, excessively large collections of reference series, quilt displays, rap CDs, classical CDs, conservative newspapers, liberal magazines, databases that indexed publications for the gay community, databases that didn't, color copiers, Internet terminals, computers that lacked the Internet, and even certain dictionaries and phone books. If we removed everything to which a taxpayer felt entitled to object, there would be no library at all.
That mother's objection may look ridiculous to us, but it did not to her. Your objection to hardcore porn does not look ridiculous to me, but it does to others. Whose standards do we use when we're deciding who has the right to object to the way their tax dollars are spent? Mine? Yours? Hers?
My ideal solution would be to return to subscription and charity libraries in the long term. Yes, both of these models have problems, but at the very least no taxpayer would be required to pay for the things to which he or she objected. But in the interim, as long as libraries remain tax-funded, I am a fierce advocate for every possible freedom of speech and freedom of information in them. If you object to your tax dollars being spent on porn, then I suggest you band together with the no-talking-animals faction and work to remove tax funding for libraries altogether.
I use some things to create momentary onscreen storage -- sort of a clipboard proxy, if you will. For instance, if I want to copy & paste from one app to another, but decide that it's easier to fix the formatting in a plain text editor first. So I copy from app A, paste into the editor, fix it up, copy from the editor, paste into app B. Then I close the editor without saving. There is no reason to keep that plain text file -- none whatsoever. A setup that automatically saves every doc would, on my computer, result in an irritating trashpile of transitory text docs.
Moreover, I have occasionally at work opened a text editor or word processor and started a nasty flaming reply to something or other. As I work on it, I calm down and put the doc into more diplomatic language, or realize that the best response in the case is no response. I wouldn't want some snoop (my boss, for instance) trolling my hard drive or my network folders finding the first seventeen profanity-riddled versions of the elegantly tactful e-mail I sent last week protesting a change in policy.
I would hate to see the loss of the Save option (not the button per se -- being a dinosaur who hates mouses, I tend to use keyboard shortcuts or file menu functions whenever possible). I would especially hate to see it replaced with a version tree or a default autosave that would require me actively to track down and expunge everything I didn't want to leave a record of.
I'll second this one. I'm forever opening things up and making tweaky changes. Nope, don't like that. Hmm. How about this? Nope, don't like that. This? Hmm... maybe... but nah.
Often as not, I decide to stick with the original (at least for now). This is so much easier when the software doesn't "helpfully" autosave and force me to wade through levels of undo: Lessee... how many things did I change now? --oh dadblast it, the app only allows X levels of undo, and here I must have made x+1 changes. When "Save" is completely optional, I can just close it without saving and know that my original exists unmodified.
This is my biggest gripe about PalmOS and PocketPC -- the assumption that there is no such thing as a change you don't want to keep.
Libraries worldwide have been contending (with varying degrees of failure) with this sort of proposal for years now. In the U.S., many states now require library Internet computers to be filtered; the federal government has also made it a requirement for most of the federal funding available to libraries.
Because of these restrictions, the library where I work is filtered. We staff have to immediately disable the filter for any adult patron who requests unfiltered access (and we're supposed to, but often, er, forget to) restore the filter as soon as that particular patron's session is over.
You wouldn't believe the idiotic stuff that gets blocked -- innocuous, harmless, completely innocent stuff, right alongside the more questionable. One fellow from out of town couldn't log into his own business's web page with the filter on -- presumably because his first name, which appeared in the URL, began with a "D" and rhymed with "ick".
Meanwhile, the patrons blithely find all the porn and violence and four-letter-word-headphone-breaking rap music they like. They learn very quickly which sites the filter isn't catching, and openly share them with one another.
The staff terminals have the filtering turned off full-time (technically illegally, if I understand correctly). Although library policy says we are only to turn off the filter "as needed", it's dadblasted impossible to do our jobs with it on, so it stays off.
So now these Australian senators want to impose this state of affairs on an entire country... yeesh.
First off, it was Entropius, not I, who mentioned his classical choir CDs.
Second, even if your out-of-your-ass figure of 3 dozen is correct, that is not "nobody" as the AC (you?) claimed.
Third, Entropius mentioned that someone does download his music, and that he doesn't object. Presumably he was offering this as an example of the reasonable approach he wishes the RIAA would take. (Entropius, please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Fourth, my mentioning my circle of friends was another way of proving that the claim of "nobody gives a fuck" was incorrect. I give a fuck. So do most people of my acquaintance. This disproves the claim.
Fifth, my mention of CDs (as opposed to downloading) was specifically in response to the AC's (your?) claim that "nobody would buy [Entropius' choir's] CD anyway." The AC brought CDs into the discussion, not I.
Sixth, A difference in quantity is not a difference in kind, nor is it a difference in principle. Sure, more people will download 50 cent. This is utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand, which (as I understand the thrust of Entropius' argument -- again, Entropius, please correct me if I'm wrong) is this: "What is the reasonable response to someone downloading music to which I control the rights?"
Finally, don't bother replying as AC. I will not read any further responses from any ACs on this. Show the balls to put even a virtual name to your thoughts!
Perhaps "brainwash" may sound bit harsh word for this, but that's exactly how you'd brainwash someone. Repeating words that does not make sense, reducing subjective thoughts and contradictory/unpredictable behavior, supressing comprehension and inducing confusion and doubts in order to turn that person into more submissive/subceptable mental state which can be easily manipulated and controlled.
Yes, actually. I have fairly often decided that the price of a CD was not worth it when I found out that the CD did not include lyrics. The music publishers who put out CDs without lyrics generally lose my business for those CDs.
My God, your knowledge of music and who's interested in it is pretty damn pathetic.
Classical choral music makes up about 2/3 of my collection of several thousand CDs/tapes/records (yeah, I'm a dinosaur, but still). I have a pretty large circle of friends and family for whom it makes up a smaller, but still significant, percentage. We're all always on the look for well-done recordings of choral music, especially if the choir or the compositions on the recording are new or unusual in some way.
You need to widen your circle of acquaintances if you really think that it's "simply not true" that "people give a fuck about" types of music you don't listen to just because they're not played on your favorite ClearChannel station.
Oh no, I think you're mistaken. I distinctly remember that documentary. Weren't the dinosaurs all bioengineered to be herbivores? And of course, nothing could go wrong with a plan that foolproof...
Being a horrible pack rat, I am unable to lay hands on the specific results to verify these figures. Some I don't still have any documentation for, or my parents have it along with my old school papers, etc. Furthermore, I grow old (I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled), so my memory of the exact figures and which ones match which exact test is beginning to grow hazy (aside from the SAT, which was burned into my skull by far too many conversations comparing SAT scores in college). But here's what I seem to recall:
Leiter International Performance Scale (taken ca. 1978? 1979?): ~125
SAT (1979): 1330 (66 verbal, 67 math -- atypically [for me] lower verbal score) -- which apparently (see a different response to my original comment) translates to ~137/~140
WAIS (?1984?): ~140 (? 137 ?) (full-scale), ~165 Verbal IQ (the discrepancy really struck me, so this figure has stuck in my head)
Stanford-Binet (? 1976 ?): ~143 (but the "Visual/Spatial" subset was something like 110, IIRC -- again, the discrepancy stuck with me)
Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (? 1986? 1987?): ~124
There were others taken when I was a child in the late 1960's/early 1970's. I don't recall now which tests. I do recall that the scores were generally high 130's, and at least one that was in that range but included a verbal score in the 160's.
For whatever it's worth (and I don't think it's worth much myself), occasional online IQ tests at various sites over the past 10 years or so pretty consistently assess me at about 140-145, unless they include a lot of spatial/visual questions, and then I get more like 125-130.
One of my jobs is providing online chat reference service -- a reference librarian online. I have apparently failed the Turing test, because more than once I have had a patron type in -- after I have successfully answered their question -- "Are you a real person, or a computer?"
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to the subset of certain standardized tests that measures Verbal IQ. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, for instance: A person taking the test receives a full-scale IQ score, a verbal IQ score, a performance IQ score, as well as scaled scores on each of the subtests.
According to a bulletin issued by the Ohio State University Extension Data Center (which if anything has an interest in overstating how rural Ohio counties are), there are five urban counties surrounding Cleveland (Cuyahoga, Lake, Medina, Summit, and Stark) and only one rural (Geauga).
To quote from the bulletin:
As of 1990, the majority of Ohio's 88 counties were rural, (i.e. 50% or more of the population were living in places of less than 2,500 people or are living in open country, Figure 29). An urban county is defined as people residing in places of 2,500 or more or those living in densely settled urbanized areas adjacent to central cities of metropolitan areas (Rural and Urban Population for Ohio Counties, 1990, Don Thomas). The state of Ohio as of 1990 had 25.9% of its population living in a rural area and 74.1% living in an urban area.
Subjective impressions derived from your view from an interstate highway leading into a completely different city than the one mentioned in the study do not qualify as data.
What you're objecting to is a question of style, not grammar. "I support no p2p" is stylistically a tad archaic or overly formal in style, but perfectly normal grammar.
You are proposing an alternative (and equally valid) zeugma: "I DO support open source, but [I do] not [support] p2p." This is decidedly more contemporary and more colloquial, but it is not any more (or less) grammatically correct.
Nifty! Thanks. I had only a vague memory of "it's slightly higher than 1/10 of SAT" to go on. Evidently the "slightly higher" was slightly higher than I remembered. Now if only I can be bothered to remember these figures for future reference...
Speaking as a gay man, I don't consider your question trollish. I'll try to address it in earnest.
Even granting the assumption (yet to be proved) that homosexuality is genetic -- yes, it "limits reproductive success". But it doesn't prevent reproduction. I know of many gay men who married & reproduced first, and then came out of the closet (or didn't, and fool around on their wives with other men).
This is just one way in which the "gay gene" (if it even exists) can be propagated. The stereotype of gay-man-as-woman's-best-friend has a certain truth to it; perhaps this evolved as a means of enhancing the reproductive success of the sisters of those born homosexual, thereby affording another way of propagating the "gay gene".
However, I fail to see what your question really is asking. Are you assuming that homosexual behavior somehow correlates with the lack of intelligence that the gene in the study may cause? It almost sounds as though you're claiming that homosexual behavior is a manifestation of stupidity. How do you reconcile this with the studies that show a higher average IQ in the gay community than in the general population?
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at it, let's never EVER let a user delete ANYTHING.
:-)
Who do you think you are -- Gmail?
"Paragraphs, not characters" is not a good yardstick for the significance of changes. An example: without the option of choosing the "save" function instead of just relying on auto-save, how would I keep the change if I just pulled up a document and noticed that I had omitted, say, the word "not" from "Thou shalt not commit adultery"?
I agree with you. It ain't broke.
Sorry if I overreacted; this is a hot-button issue with me, and I have a tendency to be oversensitive about it and start to rant and foam at the mouth.
I too sympathize -- heck, even agree -- with the people who think porn shouldn't be federally subsidized. I don't think libraries should be tax-supported at all, or at least supported only at the local level. Why should somebody in Boston or Memphis be forced to pay for a library book in Peoria? Or vice versa?
But I just feel that, if people are going to be forced to pay taxes to support libraries, then at the very least, it's only fair that libraries should be absolute bastions of freedom for every kind of speech.
That said, I do agree with you that there is a fundamental difference between saying "public Internet access should be filtered" (if that were even possible) and saying "home Internet access should be filtered", and that filtering what someone views in his or her own home is vastly more objectionable.
Speaking as a libertarian, I absolutely agree that tax dollars should not be used for things to which the taxpayer objects. Unfortunately, if we have tax-supported libraries at all, there is no way to avoid that. I learned this in my first professional library job, when we had a patron who didn't want her child exposed to books with talking animals "because we don't believe in lying to our children". That taught me that there is no predicting what people will find objectionable.
Other people in every public library where I've worked have objected to any of the following: series romances, Christian fiction, occult books (including Harry Potter and C.S. Lewis both), bodybuilding magazines, sex education books, books on dating that didn't include discussion of sex, the Hardy Boys, DVDs, books on evolution, excessively large collections of reference series, quilt displays, rap CDs, classical CDs, conservative newspapers, liberal magazines, databases that indexed publications for the gay community, databases that didn't, color copiers, Internet terminals, computers that lacked the Internet, and even certain dictionaries and phone books. If we removed everything to which a taxpayer felt entitled to object, there would be no library at all.
That mother's objection may look ridiculous to us, but it did not to her. Your objection to hardcore porn does not look ridiculous to me, but it does to others. Whose standards do we use when we're deciding who has the right to object to the way their tax dollars are spent? Mine? Yours? Hers?
My ideal solution would be to return to subscription and charity libraries in the long term. Yes, both of these models have problems, but at the very least no taxpayer would be required to pay for the things to which he or she objected. But in the interim, as long as libraries remain tax-funded, I am a fierce advocate for every possible freedom of speech and freedom of information in them. If you object to your tax dollars being spent on porn, then I suggest you band together with the no-talking-animals faction and work to remove tax funding for libraries altogether.
I use some things to create momentary onscreen storage -- sort of a clipboard proxy, if you will. For instance, if I want to copy & paste from one app to another, but decide that it's easier to fix the formatting in a plain text editor first. So I copy from app A, paste into the editor, fix it up, copy from the editor, paste into app B. Then I close the editor without saving. There is no reason to keep that plain text file -- none whatsoever. A setup that automatically saves every doc would, on my computer, result in an irritating trashpile of transitory text docs.
Moreover, I have occasionally at work opened a text editor or word processor and started a nasty flaming reply to something or other. As I work on it, I calm down and put the doc into more diplomatic language, or realize that the best response in the case is no response. I wouldn't want some snoop (my boss, for instance) trolling my hard drive or my network folders finding the first seventeen profanity-riddled versions of the elegantly tactful e-mail I sent last week protesting a change in policy.
I would hate to see the loss of the Save option (not the button per se -- being a dinosaur who hates mouses, I tend to use keyboard shortcuts or file menu functions whenever possible). I would especially hate to see it replaced with a version tree or a default autosave that would require me actively to track down and expunge everything I didn't want to leave a record of.
I'll second this one. I'm forever opening things up and making tweaky changes. Nope, don't like that. Hmm. How about this? Nope, don't like that. This? Hmm... maybe ... but nah.
... how many things did I change now? --oh dadblast it, the app only allows X levels of undo, and here I must have made x+1 changes. When "Save" is completely optional, I can just close it without saving and know that my original exists unmodified.
Often as not, I decide to stick with the original (at least for now). This is so much easier when the software doesn't "helpfully" autosave and force me to wade through levels of undo: Lessee
This is my biggest gripe about PalmOS and PocketPC -- the assumption that there is no such thing as a change you don't want to keep.
Or, for an example closer to home, you're wasting your time posting on slashdot without hope of recompence.
...
What?!? You mean we don't get paid for this? Dang
Libraries worldwide have been contending (with varying degrees of failure) with this sort of proposal for years now. In the U.S., many states now require library Internet computers to be filtered; the federal government has also made it a requirement for most of the federal funding available to libraries.
... yeesh.
Because of these restrictions, the library where I work is filtered. We staff have to immediately disable the filter for any adult patron who requests unfiltered access (and we're supposed to, but often, er, forget to) restore the filter as soon as that particular patron's session is over.
You wouldn't believe the idiotic stuff that gets blocked -- innocuous, harmless, completely innocent stuff, right alongside the more questionable. One fellow from out of town couldn't log into his own business's web page with the filter on -- presumably because his first name, which appeared in the URL, began with a "D" and rhymed with "ick".
Meanwhile, the patrons blithely find all the porn and violence and four-letter-word-headphone-breaking rap music they like. They learn very quickly which sites the filter isn't catching, and openly share them with one another.
The staff terminals have the filtering turned off full-time (technically illegally, if I understand correctly). Although library policy says we are only to turn off the filter "as needed", it's dadblasted impossible to do our jobs with it on, so it stays off.
So now these Australian senators want to impose this state of affairs on an entire country
Perhaps "brainwash" may sound bit harsh word for this, but that's exactly how you'd brainwash someone. Repeating words that does not make sense, reducing subjective thoughts and contradictory/unpredictable behavior, supressing comprehension and inducing confusion and doubts in order to turn that person into more submissive/subceptable mental state which can be easily manipulated and controlled.
/. convo to me...
Sounds like a typical
Yes, actually. I have fairly often decided that the price of a CD was not worth it when I found out that the CD did not include lyrics. The music publishers who put out CDs without lyrics generally lose my business for those CDs.
They would have checked the lyrics, but they didn't want to run afoul of the RIAA.
My God, your knowledge of music and who's interested in it is pretty damn pathetic.
Classical choral music makes up about 2/3 of my collection of several thousand CDs/tapes/records (yeah, I'm a dinosaur, but still). I have a pretty large circle of friends and family for whom it makes up a smaller, but still significant, percentage. We're all always on the look for well-done recordings of choral music, especially if the choir or the compositions on the recording are new or unusual in some way.
You need to widen your circle of acquaintances if you really think that it's "simply not true" that "people give a fuck about" types of music you don't listen to just because they're not played on your favorite ClearChannel station.
Oh no, I think you're mistaken. I distinctly remember that documentary. Weren't the dinosaurs all bioengineered to be herbivores? And of course, nothing could go wrong with a plan that foolproof ...
Am I missing something, or are you all insane?
The two are hardly mutually exclusive, nor exhaustive, possibilities.
Do you have a "bookmark" for the paragraph formatting dialog in Word?
...
One could only wish
It does seem like the computer world loves to make the same mistakes over and over and over and over again.
... ?
For "the computer world" read "the entire human race."
What's that about not learning history?
I can't remember. Could someone repeat it for us
There were others taken when I was a child in the late 1960's/early 1970's. I don't recall now which tests. I do recall that the scores were generally high 130's, and at least one that was in that range but included a verbal score in the 160's.
For whatever it's worth (and I don't think it's worth much myself), occasional online IQ tests at various sites over the past 10 years or so pretty consistently assess me at about 140-145, unless they include a lot of spatial/visual questions, and then I get more like 125-130.
One of my jobs is providing online chat reference service -- a reference librarian online. I have apparently failed the Turing test, because more than once I have had a patron type in -- after I have successfully answered their question -- "Are you a real person, or a computer?"
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to the subset of certain standardized tests that measures Verbal IQ. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, for instance: A person taking the test receives a full-scale IQ score, a verbal IQ score, a performance IQ score, as well as scaled scores on each of the subtests.
According to a bulletin issued by the Ohio State University Extension Data Center (which if anything has an interest in overstating how rural Ohio counties are), there are five urban counties surrounding Cleveland (Cuyahoga, Lake, Medina, Summit, and Stark) and only one rural (Geauga).
To quote from the bulletin:
As of 1990, the majority of Ohio's 88 counties were rural, (i.e. 50% or more of the population were living in places of less than 2,500 people or are living in open country, Figure 29). An urban county is defined as people residing in places of 2,500 or more or those living in densely settled urbanized areas adjacent to central cities of metropolitan areas (Rural and Urban Population for Ohio Counties, 1990, Don Thomas). The state of Ohio as of 1990 had 25.9% of its population living in a rural area and 74.1% living in an urban area.
Subjective impressions derived from your view from an interstate highway leading into a completely different city than the one mentioned in the study do not qualify as data.
Er ... no.
What you're objecting to is a question of style, not grammar. "I support no p2p" is stylistically a tad archaic or overly formal in style, but perfectly normal grammar.
You are proposing an alternative (and equally valid) zeugma: "I DO support open source, but [I do] not [support] p2p." This is decidedly more contemporary and more colloquial, but it is not any more (or less) grammatically correct.
Nifty! Thanks. I had only a vague memory of "it's slightly higher than 1/10 of SAT" to go on. Evidently the "slightly higher" was slightly higher than I remembered. Now if only I can be bothered to remember these figures for future reference ...
Speaking as a gay man, I don't consider your question trollish. I'll try to address it in earnest.
Even granting the assumption (yet to be proved) that homosexuality is genetic -- yes, it "limits reproductive success". But it doesn't prevent reproduction. I know of many gay men who married & reproduced first, and then came out of the closet (or didn't, and fool around on their wives with other men).
This is just one way in which the "gay gene" (if it even exists) can be propagated. The stereotype of gay-man-as-woman's-best-friend has a certain truth to it; perhaps this evolved as a means of enhancing the reproductive success of the sisters of those born homosexual, thereby affording another way of propagating the "gay gene".
However, I fail to see what your question really is asking. Are you assuming that homosexual behavior somehow correlates with the lack of intelligence that the gene in the study may cause? It almost sounds as though you're claiming that homosexual behavior is a manifestation of stupidity. How do you reconcile this with the studies that show a higher average IQ in the gay community than in the general population?
Or am I completely off the mark?
One always capitalizes the name of one's Deity.