Alexander Hamilton wasn't the only one to oppose Rights being included in the Constitution though.
Yes, but he was the one who was being cited. If someone had cited the vey similar objections raised by Madison before he turned around and actually wrote the Bill of Rights, my response would have been different.
A good point is that he opposed slavery.
Like most humans (including the rest of the Founders), there was plenty each of good and bad one could find with him, sure.
The law already protects databases of public facts.
What law, specifically?
Why would a spontaneously generated list not be copyrightable?
Because copyright is tied to the original work of authorship, and while a database of public facts that someone compiles may require original work, a list generated by a computer program in response to a user query has no original work specific to the output involved except the users in coming up with the query, so there is no basis for anyone, except maybe the user submitting the query, to claim copyright on the result. The program itself, of course, is subject to copyright by whoever created it, but creating a tool does not give you copyright to what other people create using the tool, even if you have a copyright to the tool itself.
All calculations generate the sources under the "Source information" link on each page.
They don't identify the sources of particular facts used (for instance, if you ask for the population of a country, you'll get a Wolfram|Alpha "Primary Source" -- and a whole list of other sources that are generically root sources of population data.)
Meanwhile, if I ask Google for the population of a country, I get a numeric answer with a specific website that is the source of the information. (I point to that specific example because its one thing that has been repeatedly held up, I assume by people who have never actually used Google, as something that W|A is good at that Google can't do.)
When you ask W|A a fact question (as opposed to an abstract mathematical/logic question), you get some response, with no idea of how the response was derived or what actual source data was, in fact, used to derive it. That might be occasionally entertaining, but its pretty much useless for any serious purpose.
Google doesn't host any of the actual information, you don't need to cite them as a source.
Google does, in fact, host all of the information used in their searches (it doesn't go out a spider the web in response to your request, it spiders it earlier, creates a database, supplements that database with information about your and other users past searches and behavior, and uses that database when you enter a search query.)
In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.
If it didn't exist before I asked for it, and my asking for it was the only human action that caused it to come into existence, if there is an "author" for copyright purposes, it's me. The only way Wolfram could, therefore, claim copyright on it is if it was a work for hire, but since I'm not a Wolfram employee acting within the scope of my employment, and since there is no agreement signed by both parties designating it a work for hire, that doesn't work either.
Consequently, I'd say their own terms of service defeat their claim to copyright.
The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution.
How is a document generated by a computer program in response to an external users query an original work of authorship created by Wolfram? Sure, the computer program itself is, but that's a different issue. If its not, it isn't subject to copyright by Wolfram, and nothing in W|A's terms of service can make it so.
According to Microsoft, this solves a 'problem inherent in open architecture systems,' i.e., 'they are generally licensed with complete use rights and/or functionality that may be beyond the need or desire of the system purchaser.' An additional problem with open architecture systems, Microsoft explains, is that 'virtually anyone can write an application that can be executed on the system.'
So, according to Microsoft, problems with open architecture systems is that: (1) The people who license (whether by purchase or otherwise) those systems can use them fully, and (2) People can easily develop application software for them.
Why would anyone want to buy (or, for that matter, develop software for) an operating system from anyone who considers those things problems?
There may be prior art for this in the mainframe or embedded-systems world.
There's certainly vast precedent for it in application software even in the conventional desktop market, so I'm not sure what they are doing with operating systems that is new enough to even arguably not fail for reasons of obviousness.
Why spend thousands of dollars smooshing a high resolution display to your face when you can blow up a flatscreen to epic proportions and get all the resolution you need?
Giant flatscreens aren't very portable, which makes them less practical for on-the-go applications (including, but not limited to, augmented reality) compared to HMDs -- presuming, of course, you can get a good HMD. Which is one reason why people want HMDs.
The high end stuff allows researchers to build entire rooms where gyroscopes and camera tracking provide location information while the subject is surrounded by projected images or large flat panels.
Which is great, if you want to hang out in that room. Not so great if you don't.
In short, don't hold your breath. The VR of the 90's is dead. Long live augmented realtiy.
Uh, yeah. But all the things you are talking about -- dedicated rooms with big flatscreens and position tracking -- are the tools of (advanced versions of) 1990s-style VR. HMDs that go with you in your day-to-day life, connect to wearable computers which themselves connect to ubiquitous wireless data networks, and present information on demand (or, better, autonomously) relevant to your immediate needs are the tools augmented reality.
Right, but for most people (and, despite claims to the contrary, academics are "most people"), that separation isn't necessary nor beneficial.
Actually, in my office experience, for most people it would be beneficial in the long run. Many, many problems with documents that must be maintained, updated, and reissued stem from the fact that people use Word either without using logical styles or with inconsistent use of them, which may make something that looks okay the first time, but makes long term maintenance a nightmare.
Most people probably don't know they'd benefit from it, but that's not the same thing as most people not actually being able to benefit.
Some Founding Fathers like Alexander Hamilton opposed Rights being included in the Constitution. So the Constitution was approved without them but with the understanding that a Bill of Rights would be added as an amendment. They believed that the protection of rights, Capital and small "r", was not needed. Hamilton argued "Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations."
Given how much of an authoritarian, centralizer, and advocate of the idea of broad implied government powers Hamilton turned out to be once the Constitution was in force (and, in fact, had already shown himself to be as a member of the Congress under the Articles of Confederation), one might reasonably take his rhetoric about why the Constitution shouldn't explicitly protect individual rights with a grain of salt.
One should not forget that the Founders were also politicians.
Compared to the recent leadership of the country the Founders were gods.
Familiarity breeds contempt, and a couple centuries of deliberately focussing on the good (and minimizing the bad) in the founders -- as part of building the mythology of America -- exaggerates the degree to which the Founders seem superior.
It seems intuitive: Increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles - or anything else that runs on gas - should lower the demand for oil.
Really? Not only is it not intuitive, I can't think of any credible argument that would convince anyone that understands basic supply and demand curves (or even what the words "supply" and "demand" mean in economics) that would suggest that increasing fuel efficiency, all other things being equal, would decrease demand. The only thing that would decrease demand would be a change which decreased the marginal utility of consumption of a unit of oil or which increased the marginal utility of subsitutes for oil, and since increasing efficiency increasess the the marginal utility of oil, it should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that increasing efficiency wil, all other things being equal, will increase demand.
What the author here probably wanted to say is that it seems intuitive that increasing efficiency will, all other things being equal, decrease the quantity demanded at the market-clearing price, or, put more simply, total consumption. And, indeed, that is a common and not unreasonable intuition, but one that is sometimes inaccurate.
Of course, as the comments on TFA note, the idea that it is specifically wrong in the case of increased fuel economy is less clear than the author of the editorial tries to make it seem, since average automobile fuel economy actual decreased over the period the author notes that fuel consumption has increased as "evidence" that increasing fuel econonmy increases total fuel consumption.
If you have a problem with Word they don't call in and say "My Microsoft is broken".
I've heard people in my office complain about "Microsoft isn't working right" or "I can't get Microsoft to work" when they have a problem that they believe stems from any component of Office, particularly Word, and even though they have access to various Oracle Forms apps (as well as SQL*Plus, but the people who don't understand it thankfully don't tend to touch that) as well, consistently refer to Oracle Discoverer simply as "Oracle", and when they run into any of the limitations they face in Discoverer (some due to Discoverer itself, some due to the way the End-User Layer happens to be configured, some due to the settings on their machine), they say "Oracle won't let you do X" or "Oracle doesn't do Y right".
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's called a "case."
No, the "case" is just a component of the thing being talked about; particularly, its the component that holds all the functional components together. It is as wrong to use "case" as it is to use "hard drive".
The old term I remember being used was "system unit"--I still like it, but it doesn't seem to be in general use.
"Computer"--as some in the thread have suggested--is not bad, but its frequently used in conversation for the collection of the "system unit" and the main interactive I/O peripherals (keyboard, monitor, and since GUIs became the norm, mouse), and its useful to be able to be able to unambiguously indicate that one is specifically referring to the "system unit" rather than the whole system.
If you want to use a computer, you can learn the names of the 3 parts you actually touch: monitor, mouse, keyboard.
I touch the thing we used to call "the system unit" about as much as the monitor, more if you count touching internal drives for removable optical media. Unfortunately, even among technicians, there is no real consistent name the "the system unit"; its frequently called the CPU (distinguished from the chip only by context) even by techs, in my experience, and hard drive is fairly common among less-technical users. (Why not just call it "the computer"? Because "the computer" is usually used to refer to the collection of the "system unit" and the main I/O components -- keyboard, mouse, and monitor -- which its important to have a term to refer to, since it is useful to describe a problem as occuring there when you no that it is somewhere between an input action and an expected output, but you don't know if it is in the input device, in the processing in the system box, or in the output device, or at least you can only narrow it down to two of those.)
To then go on to talk about a Bill of Rights as some arbitrarily-agreed upon standards is ridiculous and on some level scary, because it implies your humans rights and worth is something up for democratic debate and potentially is yet another chip on the political bargaining table.
I don't know why its scary: the Bill of Rights itself is the product of discussion, debate, and democratic process. Sure, they reflect a means of protecting what at least a significant portion of those discussing and debating thought were fundamental rights in natural law, but they were no less a product of political process than any other law.
The treatment of the Constitution (whether the main text or the Bill of Rights) as some sort of quasi-religious revealed document given by quasi-divine Founders, rather than a political document created by men and subject to debate on its merits, is what I find scary.
Well, people have said its not trying to compete with Google, even though its designed to do something better that people currently use Google for. They are either simply hoping Alpha won't to be compared to Google, perhaps for fear the comparison will come out negative, or they know what "compete" means.
Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast.
The process of putting a website that is available currently only in invitation-only test into general public release isn't exactly something worth watching. Presumably, a scripts been set up to do it. And someone is going to sit at a terminal and run a shell command to execute the script. Or maybe click on an icon. And then the website will be live.
The interesting part (if there is any) of a website launch isn't the process of launching it on the server end, its the user experience at the other end of the connections once it is launched.
Wouldn't the word have gotten out just the same if it had been televised instead?
It seems to me whether it was a wise move depends on: 1) Who he let know about it, 2) How well he knew them, and 3) How justified his belief that the President was working to have him killed was.
Now, if you've got information that sheds light on those points and supports your idea that this wasn't wise, please, share with the rest of us.
Does the fact that YouTube was involved make this a computer story somehow?
Quite arguably yes, though its not posted as a "computer" story, but as a "Politics" story. That it is, in fact, accurately labeled as a "Politics" story I think is pretty clear, whether or not one agrees that it is a "computer" story.
Wouldn't the word have gotten out just the same if it had been televised instead?
J. Random Citizen can't post a video to "television" and get it global exposure, particularly if they live in a country where the government has its thumb on the press. While there are certainly also governments that try very hard to control what goes on on the internet, it takes a lot less hardware to put something on the internet than to broadcast it on TV, making it much hardware for governments to control. So, yeah, if it had been televised around the world rather than being carried around the world on YouTube, word would have gotten out just the same -- its just a lot less likely that it would have successfully been televised around the world before the government threatened by it managed to sweep the message (and the people trying to distribute it) under the rug, permanently.
Are there any good, free resources for learning Algebra and up?
I haven't used any of them, but there are quite a few free (gratis and/or libre) mathematics texts available online. Some are here, and you can probably find more by Googling.
I know that's meant as a joke, but I can't help thinking that the problem here is a database one (though one for database implementors more than DBAs)--with an efficient, scalable distributed database as the central repository of information about the state of the game universe, you can distribute clients freely among servers (giving instant balance) without worrying about their relation to particular locations in the game. So if you have enough servers to handle the total player load, it doesn't matter if they are spread out uniformly at one time and all concentrated in one place at another.
Of course, that's a big database implementation problem to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but he was the one who was being cited. If someone had cited the vey similar objections raised by Madison before he turned around and actually wrote the Bill of Rights, my response would have been different.
Like most humans (including the rest of the Founders), there was plenty each of good and bad one could find with him, sure.
What law, specifically?
Because copyright is tied to the original work of authorship, and while a database of public facts that someone compiles may require original work, a list generated by a computer program in response to a user query has no original work specific to the output involved except the users in coming up with the query, so there is no basis for anyone, except maybe the user submitting the query, to claim copyright on the result. The program itself, of course, is subject to copyright by whoever created it, but creating a tool does not give you copyright to what other people create using the tool, even if you have a copyright to the tool itself.
They don't identify the sources of particular facts used (for instance, if you ask for the population of a country, you'll get a Wolfram|Alpha "Primary Source" -- and a whole list of other sources that are generically root sources of population data.)
Meanwhile, if I ask Google for the population of a country, I get a numeric answer with a specific website that is the source of the information. (I point to that specific example because its one thing that has been repeatedly held up, I assume by people who have never actually used Google, as something that W|A is good at that Google can't do.)
When you ask W|A a fact question (as opposed to an abstract mathematical/logic question), you get some response, with no idea of how the response was derived or what actual source data was, in fact, used to derive it. That might be occasionally entertaining, but its pretty much useless for any serious purpose.
Google does, in fact, host all of the information used in their searches (it doesn't go out a spider the web in response to your request, it spiders it earlier, creates a database, supplements that database with information about your and other users past searches and behavior, and uses that database when you enter a search query.)
From the terms of service:
If it didn't exist before I asked for it, and my asking for it was the only human action that caused it to come into existence, if there is an "author" for copyright purposes, it's me. The only way Wolfram could, therefore, claim copyright on it is if it was a work for hire, but since I'm not a Wolfram employee acting within the scope of my employment, and since there is no agreement signed by both parties designating it a work for hire, that doesn't work either.
Consequently, I'd say their own terms of service defeat their claim to copyright.
How is a document generated by a computer program in response to an external users query an original work of authorship created by Wolfram? Sure, the computer program itself is, but that's a different issue. If its not, it isn't subject to copyright by Wolfram, and nothing in W|A's terms of service can make it so.
So, according to Microsoft, problems with open architecture systems is that:
(1) The people who license (whether by purchase or otherwise) those systems can use them fully, and
(2) People can easily develop application software for them.
Why would anyone want to buy (or, for that matter, develop software for) an operating system from anyone who considers those things problems?
There's certainly vast precedent for it in application software even in the conventional desktop market, so I'm not sure what they are doing with operating systems that is new enough to even arguably not fail for reasons of obviousness.
Giant flatscreens aren't very portable, which makes them less practical for on-the-go applications (including, but not limited to, augmented reality) compared to HMDs -- presuming, of course, you can get a good HMD. Which is one reason why people want HMDs.
Which is great, if you want to hang out in that room. Not so great if you don't.
Uh, yeah. But all the things you are talking about -- dedicated rooms with big flatscreens and position tracking -- are the tools of (advanced versions of) 1990s-style VR. HMDs that go with you in your day-to-day life, connect to wearable computers which themselves connect to ubiquitous wireless data networks, and present information on demand (or, better, autonomously) relevant to your immediate needs are the tools augmented reality.
Actually, in my office experience, for most people it would be beneficial in the long run. Many, many problems with documents that must be maintained, updated, and reissued stem from the fact that people use Word either without using logical styles or with inconsistent use of them, which may make something that looks okay the first time, but makes long term maintenance a nightmare.
Most people probably don't know they'd benefit from it, but that's not the same thing as most people not actually being able to benefit.
Given how much of an authoritarian, centralizer, and advocate of the idea of broad implied government powers Hamilton turned out to be once the Constitution was in force (and, in fact, had already shown himself to be as a member of the Congress under the Articles of Confederation), one might reasonably take his rhetoric about why the Constitution shouldn't explicitly protect individual rights with a grain of salt.
One should not forget that the Founders were also politicians.
Familiarity breeds contempt, and a couple centuries of deliberately focussing on the good (and minimizing the bad) in the founders -- as part of building the mythology of America -- exaggerates the degree to which the Founders seem superior.
FTFA:
Really? Not only is it not intuitive, I can't think of any credible argument that would convince anyone that understands basic supply and demand curves (or even what the words "supply" and "demand" mean in economics) that would suggest that increasing fuel efficiency, all other things being equal, would decrease demand. The only thing that would decrease demand would be a change which decreased the marginal utility of consumption of a unit of oil or which increased the marginal utility of subsitutes for oil, and since increasing efficiency increasess the the marginal utility of oil, it should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that increasing efficiency wil, all other things being equal, will increase demand.
What the author here probably wanted to say is that it seems intuitive that increasing efficiency will, all other things being equal, decrease the quantity demanded at the market-clearing price, or, put more simply, total consumption. And, indeed, that is a common and not unreasonable intuition, but one that is sometimes inaccurate.
Of course, as the comments on TFA note, the idea that it is specifically wrong in the case of increased fuel economy is less clear than the author of the editorial tries to make it seem, since average automobile fuel economy actual decreased over the period the author notes that fuel consumption has increased as "evidence" that increasing fuel econonmy increases total fuel consumption.
.
I've heard people in my office complain about "Microsoft isn't working right" or "I can't get Microsoft to work" when they have a problem that they believe stems from any component of Office, particularly Word, and even though they have access to various Oracle Forms apps (as well as SQL*Plus, but the people who don't understand it thankfully don't tend to touch that) as well, consistently refer to Oracle Discoverer simply as "Oracle", and when they run into any of the limitations they face in Discoverer (some due to Discoverer itself, some due to the way the End-User Layer happens to be configured, some due to the settings on their machine), they say "Oracle won't let you do X" or "Oracle doesn't do Y right".
No, the "case" is just a component of the thing being talked about; particularly, its the component that holds all the functional components together. It is as wrong to use "case" as it is to use "hard drive".
The old term I remember being used was "system unit"--I still like it, but it doesn't seem to be in general use.
"Computer"--as some in the thread have suggested--is not bad, but its frequently used in conversation for the collection of the "system unit" and the main interactive I/O peripherals (keyboard, monitor, and since GUIs became the norm, mouse), and its useful to be able to be able to unambiguously indicate that one is specifically referring to the "system unit" rather than the whole system.
I touch the thing we used to call "the system unit" about as much as the monitor, more if you count touching internal drives for removable optical media. Unfortunately, even among technicians, there is no real consistent name the "the system unit"; its frequently called the CPU (distinguished from the chip only by context) even by techs, in my experience, and hard drive is fairly common among less-technical users. (Why not just call it "the computer"? Because "the computer" is usually used to refer to the collection of the "system unit" and the main I/O components -- keyboard, mouse, and monitor -- which its important to have a term to refer to, since it is useful to describe a problem as occuring there when you no that it is somewhere between an input action and an expected output, but you don't know if it is in the input device, in the processing in the system box, or in the output device, or at least you can only narrow it down to two of those.)
I don't know why its scary: the Bill of Rights itself is the product of discussion, debate, and democratic process. Sure, they reflect a means of protecting what at least a significant portion of those discussing and debating thought were fundamental rights in natural law, but they were no less a product of political process than any other law.
The treatment of the Constitution (whether the main text or the Bill of Rights) as some sort of quasi-religious revealed document given by quasi-divine Founders, rather than a political document created by men and subject to debate on its merits, is what I find scary.
Yeah, if only there was some way of tracking information without keeping at all in your head at once.
Well, people have said its not trying to compete with Google, even though its designed to do something better that people currently use Google for. They are either simply hoping Alpha won't to be compared to Google, perhaps for fear the comparison will come out negative, or they know what "compete" means.
The process of putting a website that is available currently only in invitation-only test into general public release isn't exactly something worth watching. Presumably, a scripts been set up to do it. And someone is going to sit at a terminal and run a shell command to execute the script. Or maybe click on an icon. And then the website will be live.
The interesting part (if there is any) of a website launch isn't the process of launching it on the server end, its the user experience at the other end of the connections once it is launched.
Yeah, you are still elected.
Its possible to be an elected dictator, though the hypothetical presented doesn't even necessarily mean that.
That much, OTOH, is true (in at least the moral sense of the word "murderer".)
Being bad, even criminal, even murdering doesn't make a leader suddenly not an elected leader. "Elected" is not the same thing as "good".
It seems to me whether it was a wise move depends on:
1) Who he let know about it,
2) How well he knew them, and
3) How justified his belief that the President was working to have him killed was.
Now, if you've got information that sheds light on those points and supports your idea that this wasn't wise, please, share with the rest of us.
Quite arguably yes, though its not posted as a "computer" story, but as a "Politics" story. That it is, in fact, accurately labeled as a "Politics" story I think is pretty clear, whether or not one agrees that it is a "computer" story.
J. Random Citizen can't post a video to "television" and get it global exposure, particularly if they live in a country where the government has its thumb on the press. While there are certainly also governments that try very hard to control what goes on on the internet, it takes a lot less hardware to put something on the internet than to broadcast it on TV, making it much hardware for governments to control. So, yeah, if it had been televised around the world rather than being carried around the world on YouTube, word would have gotten out just the same -- its just a lot less likely that it would have successfully been televised around the world before the government threatened by it managed to sweep the message (and the people trying to distribute it) under the rug, permanently.
I haven't used any of them, but there are quite a few free (gratis and/or libre) mathematics texts available online. Some are here, and you can probably find more by Googling.
I know that's meant as a joke, but I can't help thinking that the problem here is a database one (though one for database implementors more than DBAs)--with an efficient, scalable distributed database as the central repository of information about the state of the game universe, you can distribute clients freely among servers (giving instant balance) without worrying about their relation to particular locations in the game. So if you have enough servers to handle the total player load, it doesn't matter if they are spread out uniformly at one time and all concentrated in one place at another.
Of course, that's a big database implementation problem to solve.