they have three similar elements (stove, chair, and window)

First you oversimplified the similarities, and you then minimized its significance. Minimizing AFTER oversimplifying is essentially a straw man argument.

The window in Rockwell's piece, for instance, is small and rectangular while the one in Bazille's is huge and arched.

They are both structurally rectangular and similarly proportioned (height vs width).

The chair in the Rockwell piece is actually barely identifiable as a chair at first glance, whereas the one in the Bazille piece is immediately recognizable as a wooden chair.

They are the same thing in terms of scene composition.

They're also three objects that are likely to be close to one another.

But they are not merely close to one another they are arranged in a particular way creating similar scene composition.

Plus, you missed entirely the angular element on the left side. The staircase in one, vs the bookcase in the other, again both serving the same compositional task.

For instance, my aunt heats with wood and has a stove roughly the same distance from a window as in the Rockwell and Bazille pictures

And if you happen to have a photo that not only illustrates the 3 objects in roughly the same positions, with an angular element on the left side, but also that the photo was taken from such an vantage point so as to frame them compositionally in a similar scene... then you might have something.

Lets stipulate that your aunt actually lives in a room just like that. Even then, you might well have hundreds of photos of your aunts home, and not a single one of them have the same composition as these paintings.

I think all this proves is that people tend to put their stoves in rooms with windows and chairs.

And then take a photo from a vantage pont with an angular element on the left, a single chair in the foreground, with a group of people in the background, but not the focal point, catching the wood stove on the right?

How many of them paint this particular scene composition?

Frankly, these paintings ARE remarkably similar -- that one influenced the other is not a foregone conclusion, it could be coincidence, but it certainly merits consideration, even investigation.

"Killing in war video games is to holding your breath, as killing in real war is to holding your breath while someone holds your head under water."

Video game violence is to war what blowing out birthday cake candles is to fighting a massive and out of control fire at an industrial chemical plant.

Really, comparing them is absurd, and that is the lesson that should be taught. This is a toy. It is so far removed from the real thing -- don't even pretend for a second that you have any real insight into killing in war after playing call of Duty.

not entirely true. It just can't install it in c:\program files or your platforms equivalent. It can drop executables in folders you DO have access to though, and run them from there. And even get them to auto run if it puts the start command in a settings file you can edit as that user.

This is one of the reasons that I don't use an admin/root level account for normal activity.

A good practice to be sure.

While that also won't prevent all hacks, it drastically reduces my exposure.

Well, at least your device drivers are safe, and its a little harder for you to join a bot net.

But pretty much everything you have of value can be accessed from user space, including all your documents. That's generally what identity and data thief hackers (and state actors) want.

but what of the 80486 doing about 80% of the MIPS of the clock frequency, while 386 only 33% and the Pentium I did 150% (e.g. 75MHz == 125 million x86 MIPS) ?

What about it? That just serves to further amplify the improvement from CPU generation to CPU generation.

Some would argue Mac with MacOSX with Motorola chip is a next-gen NeXT, and a LOT of those sold.

Perhaps, but they weren't selling them to people who were basing the purchasing decisions based on their performance relative to DOS/Windows PCs.

There was always another reason.

Not many people buying computers cared about comparing platforms. They picked their platform, and then shopped within it.

In the Intel DOS/Windows PC world MHz and CPU generation were the primary performance stats for comparing two units.

There was virtually nobody out there who decided to buy a sparc vs a mac vs an intel pc based on which was faster.

Its like today, people decide whether to buy an iphone or an android or a blackberry or a windows phone FIRST. Then they pick a 'fast one' or the 'slow one' within the platform. Practically nobody walks in chooses a phone based on a sythentic performance benchmark. Majority of people buy PCs the same way.

Sun was selling 50,000 sparc workstations per quarter in 1992.

Thus it had 0.01% of the market. 20,000,000 PCs sold in 1992 vs ~200k sparcs workstations.

But there was ALWAYS alternatives to intel processors even for personal computer (e.g. motorola) from day one of the personal computer movement, and so the Megahertz Myth was always meaningless.

Only if you cared about comparison with non-intel PCs. People buying Macs weren't worried about performance comparisons with PCs, they were only concerned about performance compared to OTHER macs. The (much larger) DOS/Windows PC crowd only cared about performance relative to other intels.

My home computer in 1991 had a Motorola chip (NeXTStation), in 1996 it had a Sparc chip.

Heh, NeXT sold what 50,000 units total? Very VERY few people were terribly interested in comparing the performance of those to DOS boxes -- and for that sure their were other benchmark methodologies. But, much as you seem not to want to admit it, CPU MHz *was*:

a) used to measure relative performance of DOS/Windows PCs for several years

b) a pretty reasonable and adequate means for doing so, for quite a few years

1996 it had a Sparc chip.

Again its very few users weren't selecting it for performance vis-a-vis an intel dos bos. :)

More accurate would be to say that each bot is 1 millishape, and a kilobot is one shape.

A millibot would be a thousandth of a bot, not of a thousandth of a shape.

For example, if you join a football team then you are 1/nth of a football team, but we don't say generally say that makes you 1 nth of a human... (some might of course, but usually they have a pretty low opinion of football players and jocks in general)

Marketing and sales to ignorant consumers don't count.

Originally it was useful enough. Marketing and sales perpetrated it long after it wasn't anymore.

The "MHz Myth" has been time and again a subject in many a PC magazines

Only once the truth had become myth. The Mhz "myth" only existed because it was sufficiently useful and accurate to compare intel CPUs by MHz within a generation and even within limits from generation to generation for some 8 generations.

It wasn't really until Pentium 4 that MHz lost its usefulness. The Pentium 4 clocked at 1.4GHz was only about as fast as a P3 1000 or something; and AMD's Athlon XP series came out and for the first time in a decade MHz was next to useless. Prior to that, however, it was a very useful proxy for performance.

More meaningful benchmarks have existed long before that era (e.g. Whetstone from early 70s) and many were (e.g. Dhrystone in mid 80s) used all through the rise of the microprocessor (8080, 6502, etc.)

Sure they did. But for about decade or so, if you wanted a PC, CPU + MHz was nearly all you really needed to know.

What you say is true only if you bought all your processors from Intel.

You say that like this wasn't common as dirt for most of a decade or so.

Once AMD came along

Yeah, that was mostly later. Pentium 4 vs Athlon XP etc. My suggested time frame ended with the Pentium III for a reason.

It was not true if you compared to Mac that used 680x0 and later PowerPC.

Also true, but comparatively few did that. Choosing a Mac vs a PC rarely had anything to do with performance. It was entirely about OS+applications; then once you chose a platform you combared models within it. Practically nobody cared whether their Centris 610 was faster than a 486 or if their Dell Pentium II 333 would have been faster had it been an iMac G3.

three decades in the industry and I've never seen performance measured or stated in MHz

Erm... from the 80286 through the Pentium 3 CPU clockspeed was pretty much THE proxy stat for "PC performance".

I'm sure it would take years of practice for me to notice the difference between a $30K and a $60K flute

Would it? Or is the only difference that used nickle plated silver vs sterling silver vs fusing it with 9k gold, and you are just paying a premium for rarer more difficult to work with materials.

But the idea that "it would take years of practice" to notice the difference might be fallacious. It might only take 2 seconds: The difference is this one is made of more exotic materials that cost more and that's the only real difference.

It may well sound slightly different. But would anybody actually say better? Does using more gold sound better than silver? Maybe its subjectively not even as good if it were played in a double blind test, but its still rarer and harder to make so it still costs more.

It's not evolution it's erosion, we are losing the original meaning and gaining nothing.

New words with new nuances, and reusing old worlds with new nuances happens all the time too. English is richer by far than it was 2 centuries ago. We may have gained nothing on this particular transaction, but we're far and away net positive.

Once you have IPV6, with no (supposed) need for firewalls

Um... you'll still need a firewall. You just won't need a NAT gateway.

Quite a few writers do 'stream-of-consciousness' writing and then go back and edit it... If we're lucky. :p

But even them I doubt really are planning to go to school to learn stenography.

More than that though, my typing speed isn't a bottleneck. The bottleneck is envisioning the idea and subsequently debugging the resulting code.

Sounds about right.

Is anyone really being held back from writing the next great american novel because they only type at 90 wpm?

Doubtful, these modern hipster authors are bragging that they pecked it out on a smartphone keyboard; and we're lucky if we don't have to read it in typical texting shorthand.

By my interpretation that means that once violated you don't have a license, and complying with GPL terms after the fact has no effect.

It has no effect on the previous copyright infringement, but it does mean you can move forward with distribution.

I'm pretty sure bringing yourself into compliance won't change the fact that the license was revoked.

The license revocation is on the copy of the software that wasn't distributed in compliance with the license. That *copy* was not distributed under license. That *copy* is now in violation of copyright law.

But most vendors might be willing to extend a new GPL license to you

A vendor cannot refuse to license GPL code. The license offer is in the code itself. The only thing anyone can do is pursue infringers for copyright infringment damages.

[...] just as a way to end the case.

Right, the infringer might offer to bring his code into compliance with the GPL (as opposed to ceasing to use the GPL library in his product) as part of his settlement offer. Many GPL rights holders would be inclined to accept that as part of a settlement, since that is really what they want all along.

But we are in agreement, the GPL in no way mandates that outcome, and it would be absurd to imagine it did.