Comments on: Redefining Plagiarism

By: Nell

Nell — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:00:18 +0000

Anyone else willing to cop to being a BtVS/Angle fan and unintentionally substituting Wolfram & Hart for every Wolfram|Alpha reference – and having the post and discussion still make sense?

By: K Ackermann

K Ackermann — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:34:49 +0000

It was a different Isaac Asimov that wrote some of the Isaac Asimov stories. Let’s be clear on this.

By: ignalina

ignalina — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:14:10 +0000

Or Alt + 7 on a Swedish Mac keyboard.

By: Detlef

Detlef — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:43:56 +0000

Peter wrote:

“Still, I imagine if you find the “” key, above it you’ll see a (possibly broken) vertical line. That will come out as “|” when you type shift-.
Not exactly impossible to type. It’s a nearly completely-useless search engine though :)”

Just for the sake of Europeans here. :)
Because I looked for it quite some minutes.
On this European keyboard (in Germany) you´ll find it down left. The “< ” key.
Use “Alt Gr” with the “< ” key and it´ll produce a “|”.

By: joel hanes

joel hanes — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:18:31 +0000

Argh. html eats special characters, so the poem loses critical bits.

The original is archived here.

Lack of preview considered harmful.

By: joel hanes

joel hanes — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:15:45 +0000

The vertical line is used in Unix command lines, right? To “pipe” something?

Yes. Speaking aloud, Unix geeks prounounce it “pipe” or “bar”

It’s also used as the bitwise-OR arithmetic operator in C and in the Verilog hardware-design language,
and doubled, ||, it’s the logical-OR operator in Unix shells, C, Verilog, and perl.
(The shell logical-OR means roughly “perform the command following if the preceding command fails”.)

I type that character hundreds of times every day,
even when not crafting flat-ASCII maps for my emailed party invitations.

Here’s a famous poem written entirely in special characters, with translation :

Re: Stuck shift key poetry
davez@ashtate.a-t.com (Dave Zobel)

A fragment of a drinking (or financing?) song called “Hatless Atlas”:

^< @
;`+$?^?
,#”~|)^G

hat less at less point at star
backbrace double base pound space bar
dash at cash and slash base rate
wow open tab at bar is great
semi backquote plus cash huh DEL
comma pound double tilde bar close BEL

By: Wax Banks

Wax Banks — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:45:40 +0000

The vertical line is used in Unix command lines, right? To “pipe” something?

Yes, in addition to being an important character for those men of wealth and taste who include ASCII-art maps with their electronic party invitations (and by necessity use fixed-width fonts, God’s fonts, for their email).

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:02:11 +0000

But being just a little faster at answering relatively trivial questions doesn’t strike me as a reason to assign ownership of the results.

I’ve tried it a bunch, but the number of times it returned some variation of a blank for an answer was off-putting, and no I don’t want to help it learn if another search engine can get me there faster. Not useful at all to me.

By: Adam Kotsko

Adam Kotsko — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:22:39 +0000

The vertical line is used in Unix command lines, right? To “pipe” something?

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:13:42 +0000

Plagiarism in academia ? Say it ain’t so…

By: SJ

SJ — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:10:55 +0000

Type in "potrzebie". Wolfram|Alpha interprets it as a unit of length (about 2.26 mm). There's no link to any other source, so it appears that W|A is claiming copyright to this information. But the definition actually comes from a Mad Magazine gag from 1957 written by Donald "Art of Computer Programming" Knuth. Copyright would belong to either Mad or Knuth, depending on the arrangement between them, and certainly not to W|A. The way I see it, if someone not only copies something without attribution, but goes so far as to assert a fresh copyright over it, they are committing both plagiarism and copyright violation.

By: Omega Centauri

Omega Centauri — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:55:26 +0000

The little bit of messing around I did with it gives me the impression, it is perhaps a little quicker way to get certain type of information, and perhaps just a bit quicker as a calculator. But being just a little faster at answering relatively trivial questions doesn’t strike me as a reason to assign ownership of the results.

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:28:19 +0000

26: There’s a reason they were ~~jokingly~~ called a “high priesthood.”

There. All fixed now.

By: rm

rm — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:33:16 +0000

Vertical line over the Enter key . . . let's see . . . sh*%, there it is. D#$%, I never would have seen that in a thousand years. This is where the tech geeks start blaming the users for not knowing things, but really, who ever uses that key? ||||||||||||, ha ha. I think the pomposity of Wolfram | Alpha's rhetoric -- which extends to the |-containing name -- compared to the plain-language rhetoric of Google is symptomatic of the whole enterprise. It's too techy for most people to want to adopt, and then when you ask the techy people about it, you find that it doesn't really work for the experts either.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:41:39 +0000

“Not on European keyboards. Backspace is above the Enter key, which is an inverted L shape covering two rows.”

Still, I imagine if you find the “” key, above it you’ll see a (possibly broken) vertical line. That will come out as “|” when you type shift-.
Not exactly impossible to type. It’s a nearly completely-useless search engine though :)