Sun Founders' Push For Open Source Education 169
theodp writes "Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school."
Information... (Score:3, Funny)
$8-15 billion wants to be free?
Re:Information... (Score:5, Informative)
$8-15 billion wants to be free?
Yes, but...
Important distinction: You don't put stuff online for free, you make it free when you put it online. I work for a 'free' legal information service that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year being Free. People give us money because they understand that if ignorance of the law is no excuse, then free access to legal materials is kind of an important corollary.
McNealy's right - there are tons of good reasons to make educational materials available online, free of charge. It will take a considerable investment to do so.
Re:Information... (Score:5, Insightful)
This one's sat at the back of my mind ever since I read Feynmans account of reviewing math books.
I mean for some things like history every country/area would want significantly different books to focus on local history etc but how is it that basic math books haven't been supplanted by a handful of public domain high quality books?
of course I know the answer is that companies making thin margins printing public domain books don't have so much money to spend on guys in suits to go around and convince the people in charge to use their textbooks.
I know how terrible some of the schoolbooks are yet they get chosen by schools year after year.
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I always thought the colleges were accomplices as it was another source of revenue for them having an on-campus book store without raising tuition.
Schools I'm not so sure, as they often have to answer to their state capital although I'm sure there are kickbacks there as well (like the annual chocolate selling scheme and/or gift catalog is one major kickback to the school).
Re:Information... (Score:4, Informative)
This one's sat at the back of my mind ever since I read Feynmans account of reviewing math books.
I was curious about this so i googled around and came across a copy here [textbookleague.org]. It seems that not a day goes by in which I fail to see more evidence reinforcing my decision to home-school.
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That girl was just being a good Christian. That "zero" thing is an invention from the DEVIL!
My minister says that it was made by Osama's great-great-daddy, an arab, and we all know they are all agents of the devil.
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Gosh, amazing how your friend never noticed that during any of the quality time he spent with her.
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Which high-quality public domain books are those?
The book makers don't just make books. They screen them, and educate the school boards, so the schools don't waste students' time with crappy, outmoded texts.
In a similar vein, old drugs are often better then new ones (in some cases), but nobody helps practicing doctors get educated on which old drugs to prescribe. Whereas there's lots of good educational information on new (albeit expensive) ones.
Maybe they could add (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Maybe they could add (Score:4, Informative)
Rather than re-invent the wheel, he could also have a look at South Africa's free science and math textbooks: http://www.fhsst.org
-Gareth
CK12.org - Probability and Stastics - nice book (Score:2)
Downloaded it directly and reading it on my iPad.
Looks nice, and very readable... will be nice to refresh my knowledge.
The effort to reduce cost of schooling in general is admirable and book publishers are a leech on society so I hope McNealy and Khosla are successful.
Re:CK12.org - Probability and Stastics - nice book (Score:4, Interesting)
(All the examples are real life examples, often quite important ones as well.)
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Actually, it is VERY important that there be more than one textbook for each topic-grade level combination.
Competition will be important for:
* Quality
* Differing viewpoints
* Different teaching styles
* etc.
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Indeed, one of my pals used to say that the best book on any subject is two books.
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I've talked with them about an iPad app specifically for their content, and it's in the works.
K-12 level... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know of any pre-1923 (i.e. out of copyright) series of educational books for early education that could serve as the foundation for some "open source" textbooks?
Perhaps Google's book scanning project will be digitizing some relevant books, or is there some other on-line resource? Ideally it would be the original books that would be scanned, to preclude any argument of copyright being held by re-publishers via minor changes.
Surely for basic education technology won't have made much of a significant difference in content (I'm a big fan of old-school education at basic levels - calculators are to be used AFTER you learn the basics, not instead of)
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Tried the Prelinger Archive?
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger [archive.org]
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Write your own.
Early education has some pretty clear goalposts. ... get this ... textbook!
Any teacher worth his salt (there are still a few, I assure you!) can write their own lesson plans. A year's worth of lesson plans bound together and typed up would be a
Seriously.
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So we should all start reinventing the wheel from zero?
Just to give you an example, many years ago I bought a wonderful book on statistics [google.com] in a used book store in London.
This book is a classic, everybody who has read it says so. But it's out of print. And still in copyright.
If I knew how to do it, I would gladly pay M. J. Moroney a good price for his book. But it's in copyright and out of print...
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Not sure when he was born, but there was this dude called Euclid or something.
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Archimedes' textbooks might be useful, too. No, wait, they don't teach calculus or combinatorics at that age. Sorry.
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Don't worry, both Newton and Leibniz lived well before the cut-off date for copyright, as well. (They even died long enough ago for the current copyright terms to expire, though the growing copyright terms might soon fix that.)
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Is it true that Congress is going to change copyright to expire 75 years after cryogenic containment fails or the sun explodes, whichever happens later?
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I wouldn't be surprised if Disney had already pre-written that legislation. :P
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Is it true that Congress is going to change copyright to expire 75 years after cryogenic containment fails or the sun explodes, whichever happens later?
Not going to happen.
Politicians aren't stupid (about things like this), you know --- they can only do that once. In the "add twenty years every twenty years" scenario, the politicians end up earning a lot more.
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Great Ceasar's ghost, you're right - axiom 23(c)XVI says exactly that!
USSR science texbooks. (Score:5, Informative)
USSR science textbooks. Seriously, they are great (with some obvious exceptions :) ) and they are out of copyright.
For example, Fichtenholz's "Differential and Integral Calculus" is THE best textbook on calculus ever created. It's so clear and written in so beautiful language that I had actually re-read it just for fun. I don't know if there are translations into English, alas.
Landau and Lifshitz's "Course of Theoretical Physics" is the one of the best reference books for the modern physics, and it's available in English. It's out of copyright but its translations might be copyrighted.
I'm certain it's possible to create a decent course on math/physics without much problem. Also, other countries should also have a lot of good material.
It'd be different for the modern fast-moving fields of biology, chemistry, etc. But there's no reason for math/physics books to change every year (or even every decade).
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Opportunity: produce one.
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While I don't know the Russian language myself (although I'm 1/4 Russian), I'd be happy to chip in $100 towards a collective effort to have them translated.
Re:USSR science texbooks. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the most popular science books ever printed was Physics for Entertainment, http://www.archive.org/details/physicsforentert035428mbp [archive.org] by Yakov Perelman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Perelman [wikipedia.org]
During the great days of the Soviet Union, the Russian Foreign Languages Printing House translated it into every major language, and sold copies at third-world prices. Those devious Communists -- promoting socialism by distributing cheap science books! Many scientists, engineers and mathematicians working today were inspired to go into their careers by this book.
The most notable was Grigory Perelman (no relation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Perelman [wikipedia.org] who solved the last step of the Poincaré conjecture and was eccentric even by Slashdot standards. Grigory's father gave him Physics for Entertainment.
It used to sell for $3.99. Then it went out of print, and I tried to buy it, but it was going for $200. Now somebody reprinted it in a (probably) unauthorized edition, and it's also in the Internet Archive.
The Soviet publishing house had an army of editors translating Russian books into all the world's languages, and they probably did Fichtenholz if it's that good.
Dover Publications got started reprinting out-of-print and out-of-copyright science books, and as I recall, a lot of their trade list was Soviet books translated into English. At that time, the Soviet Union didn't believe in copyright, and they were happy to see their work reprinted. One thing the Soviets did well was science education. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin)
You might check out the old Dover catalog to see if there are any out-of-copyright English translations. Scan them and put them on the Internet.
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I'm pretty sure it's illegal to say that either in Russia or the US.
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Does anyone know of any pre-1923 (i.e. out of copyright) series of educational books for early education that could serve as the foundation for some "open source" textbooks?
Surely for basic education technology won't have made much of a significant difference in content (I'm a big fan of old-school education at basic levels - calculators are to be used AFTER you learn the basics, not instead of)
I would think that the presentation would be too outdated. While in theory the content hasn't changed, the way things are described has changed enough to make it hard to follow. Though I suppose if you're just talking arithmetic, with no word descriptions, that hasn't changed much.
Build the new and they will come (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have a feeling your and our definition of 'significant' is somewhat different, especially in instances where said pictures had little to do with the learning material anyway and were merely there to spruce things up a bit.
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As it currently stands, the author could change a few equations, and add a couple graphs, and call it a new edition.
Or they can just do nothing at all and call it a new edition. They can literally throw on a different cover and call it a different edition. I've seen quite a few "international editions" that don't have a single difference except the cover art. Sometimes it's not even different art, it just has "international edition, not for sale in the US" stamped on it in big red letters. And it's paperback instead of hardcover...which I highly prefer anyway.
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Yea, nobody will buy back the international editions, but when you're paying $20 instead of $100, it's still a better deal. Plus you can still sometimes sell them through friends, facebook, craigslist, etc.
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The international editions are a completely different thing from them coming out with near-identical "new editions".
In many countries they cannot afford to buy textbooks at the price that Americans do, so the publisher will make a version that is cheaper to produce (paperback, lower quality printing) and charge less for it. The publisher profits because once they have payed for the creation, editing, typesetting, etc. they need to achieve the maximum profit with respect to production and distribution costs
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This is more like the concept behind DVD-region codes. Which are generally unpopular outside the actual media industry itself.
But wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
That would make it much harder for me, as an educator, to require my students to use a textbook written by one of my colleagues, who just happens to require his students to use the textbook I wrote (because, of course, it would be unethical to require your students to purchase your own textbook.
Once we have that tidy arrangement going, we merely have to make minor changes to the texts (new pictures - you know, the important stuff), and then obsolete the previous editions.
Mr. McNealy, you already got your payday - why are you trying to prevent me from getting mine?
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Failure to pay enough?
If the pay was too low they would find other jobs, that is just a scam. Happened to me once, we went and complained to the ombudsman who got us a good deal of the money back. She got a mark against her that would come up in any tenure preceding.
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If the pay was too low --- ummm, the pay isn't a hell of a lot more than burger-flippers get, for many teaching jobs. My first professional software engineering job paid more than my father's senior lecturer job at one of Britain's top Universities. Difference? He wanted to teach and he wanted to research. Those were his life-blood. When he retired (and he only semi-retired at that) he continued teaching and researching, just on his own time and out of his own house. Most people thought he'd die rather than
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Someone like that is not going to "work somewhere else" if they get paid too little. If they can keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, the rest of the world be damned.
Which means they are being paid enough. Jobs only pay enough to fill them, if the jobs are filled they pay enough.
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But "filled" covers quite a range, don't you think?
Re:But wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on how you define "enough" and "filled". Classrooms are often understaffed and a healthy teacher getting good nutrition and good access to fresh material will teach better than an unhealthy teacher who survives on Burger King and hasn't seen a new idea in a decade.
I have a preference for a well-educated populace, with "well-educated" being defined as being the least-educated can function well in multiple branches of society (ie: nobody is deprived of a choice in life through circumstance), the average person has the ability to get into a middle-of-the-road University, and the brightest person is never deprived of the opportunity to learn, with the additional proviso that all people have the necessary knowledge, skills and means to make choices that are sensible for them if they so wish.
It is impossible to have a well-educated populace if you work purely on paying the least that will fill fewest positions you can get away with. In fact, it's almost impossible to educate people at all like that. It is impossible to have a well-educated populace if you work purely on paying the least but have just enough positions to actually teach sensibly. You will, however, likely get the least-able and even some of the average-able up to par.
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You'll get people that are unambitious, probably not willing to get extra training and almost certainly not provided with the resources to do a good job.
Teaching is similar in that respect, you might fill the position, but if you're not paying enough to get qualified, compe
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If the pay was too low they would find other jobs
Those who can, get six figure jobs doing. Those who can't, teach.
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The conflict of interest is pretty obvious, but it also makes some sense--- if a physics prof is going to choose a physics book to teach from, why would he choose any book besides the one he wrote himself? Of all the books out there, it's presumably the one that: 1) he is most familiar with; and that 2) covers the material closest to the way he wants to cover it in his class.
The advantages of using your own textbook are high enough that I've had profs actually assign their own unpublished book for free (sen
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Authors could still be paid ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's not just math books (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole textbook business is one of the biggest scams in education, and it only gets worse in college. New editions are churned out for the college market simply to ensure a fresh revenue stream for all involved. I think in 95% of math, science, lit, and history courses, you could go to Dover Publishers (the people that basically make their living reprinting stuff in the public domain), get the books in paperback, and actually get better textbooks in the end. I have a weird hobby of collecting pre-1950 textbooks, and frankly I think kids learned "more" back then from their textbooks than they do today. Obviously, some knowledge has been added here and there, but I've got an 8th grade science textbook that does a much better job imparting the principles of physics and chemistry to kids because of the practical examples used.
I have to disagree with McNealy's push to go all-online though. There's no substitute for having a physical book at times. We just need to get off of the "new textbook" gravy-train.
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Re:It's not just math books (Score:4, Informative)
Foner [fonerbooks.com] claims they can profitably sell a 168-page print-on-demand book for $14.95.
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That's what printers are for. I suppose you could also get a more rugged book produced by getting it done at a print shop. But a manilla folder of printouts would accomplish the same thing, really.
The other benefit of going open source is that bugs can get fixed very easily. And the number of people capable of fixing spelling
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CK-12, the nonprofit listed in the summary, makes "flexbooks". They're basically PDFs, which of course they allow you to print out. Total cost for books? Whatever it costs to print the PDFs.
Japan has a good model (Score:3, Insightful)
at least in school (can't speak for higher education). The have softcover booklets, with about 8-10 weeks worth of material. That means they are about 100 pages long, maybe shorter. Plus, they contain the practice problems and you can write in them. I never understood the practice of carry these heavy tomes called textbooks around, especially even after a year, that half of it is never relevant to the course in many instances. You also get to keep the booklets and don't have to go through the nonsense
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Heavy, well made textbooks last longer. So in the old days, kids could inherit their older sister's textbook, who inherited it from her older brother etc., or in fact communal textbooks could be kept by the school and distributed to the same grade year in, year out.
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In my opinion, the NY Times article focuses mostly on aspects of the free textbook movement that have been the least successful. It focuses on K-12, but actually there are very few high-quality, free K-12 textbooks; most of the high-quality, free texts are at the college level, and especially at the graduate level. This is probably partly because the opportunities for profit in a non-free book get thinner and thinner as you go to higher and higher levels, and also partly because most states' public K-12 sy
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You think society has been as egalitarian and meritocratic in the past[1] as it is now? Are you seriously suggesting that in 1830 an inherently smart slum kid has a much chance of getting into Oxford as the slightly inbred son of a baronet?
If so, you're a fucking twerp.
[1] By "the past" I mean ro
Not a New Idea (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+textbooks [google.com]
I also thought that the 10 + 10 = 20 example was a bit simplistic, since textbooks get updated frequently. Although, to be fair, if people can create open-source textbooks, it's a benef
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> Uh, what? It's weird to act like Sun's decline was due to the fact that they went "too little, too late"
> with open-source. Open Source was never going to save Sun no matter when they "switched over".
Trying to ignore x86 is generally what DOOMED Sun and allowed for the rise of Free Unix.
They tried to fight the future and it ran them over like a freight train.
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Linux was announced to the world in 1991 with the following announcement:
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
SunOS started in 1982, that means they had 9+ years to get their OS into the hands of kids using x86. They failed and it killed them. They might not have seen it coming, no one really did, but it still did them in.
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Heck, solaris started in 1992 had they made it FREE software to begin with it would have prevented linux killing them.
From the same folks who brought you HCL games.... (Score:2)
Will they just drop support for an old edition of a book on a whim a la Sun? Or will they do the right thing and not follow in the publishers' footsteps?
theodp is a cunt (Score:2)
Perhaps McNearly should lobby for a decent textbook on how to use apostrophes.
Re:theodp (Score:2)
"Push" is a noun in the headline. That is, it is about a push, by the Sun founders, for open source education.
Also, the editor usually writes the headline, not the submitter.
If you're going to post flamebait, at least try to be correct.
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McNealy is (thankfully) singular, so just die in a fire.
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Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy)
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You read the whole of the article? LOL @ ur phale, n00b.
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[citation needed]
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It's amazing what basic reading skills can do. If textbooks weren't so expensive, perhaps your school could have given you those skills or at least the ability to use your browser's built in search feature to search for 'McNealy' and 'Khosla'
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Perhaps McNearly should lobby for a decent textbook on how to use apostrophes.
There's already a good resource [angryflower.com] available.
Availability of free books is not the problem (Score:3, Informative)
When it comes to college level stuff, mathematics has more free books available online than any other discipline.
Yet, most universities use either James Stewart or one other book for calculus.
Why? I really don't know. I asked a math grad student friend of mine, and he said it ultimately boiled down to politics: Calculus level textbooks are decided by a committee, and the professor teaching it only has some say - and it's hard to convince a committee. As hundreds of students will take calculus every semester, they need the warm and fuzzy feeling an established textbook gives them.
To be fair, the mathematics departments are also perhaps the most likely to use free/cheap textbooks (compared to sciences and engineering). This usually happens for upper division courses, though.
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Hong Kong's solution (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr97-98/english/panels/ed/papers/ed1601-3.htm [legco.gov.hk]
The Education Department (ED) issues a Recommended Textbook List. If the publishers want to be on that list, they have to reduce the unnecessary revisions. That seems to work extremely well:
>According to the Consumer Council's surveys, unnecessary textbook revisions have been greatly reduced in recent years, dropping from 21% in 1992 (six out of 28 textbooks) to 2% in 1996 (one out of 44 textbooks). From a random selection of revised textbooks in 1997, no unnecessary revision was detected (out of the eight sets of books examined, revisions to two were found necessary and those to the remaining six quite necessary).
What about English textbooks? (Score:2)
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For HS, new textbooks are not so easy... (Score:2)
It should be pointed out that at least for the HS high school market, the math content of the textbook is only one aspect upon which sales are based.
Most importantly, in most states and provinces, there is an approval process for textbooks that measures dozens if not hundreds of parameters including binding quality, use of names in examples (should reflect diverse population), male/female ratios in illustrations, avoidance of culturally specific contexts in problems, etc.
It can easily cost tens, if not over
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You mean people who tend to think people should be educated for little to no cost are going to be more involved in this than those who think they should be paid to get up in the morning? What a shock.
If people with other opinions, like maybe you, want their side represented I suggest they take an active role and write a book for Curriki.
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That would be totally awesome. I keep a stack of old magazines in the netty, but when they run out what could be better?
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If someone is riding a member of $class, they are automatically[1] riding a member of $superclass_of_aforementioned_class.
If someone said Babe was a movie about a pig, would you "correct" the poster by saying that it's about an even-toed ungulate?
I suspect, sadly, that y'all would.
[1] Assuming single inheritance - a reasonable assumption in zoological taxonomy.
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The Brontosaurus was a separate genus, i.e., a sibling class. Both the 'Brontosaurus' and the Apatosaurus were children of the Diplodocidae family. The 'Brontosaurus' was then discovered to be so close to the Apatosaurus that it was then placed in the same genus. The problem with the name 'Brontosaurus' is that it refers to a genus that has not existed for over 100 years. If they want to be specific, then they can call it an apatosaurus excelsus.
To directly answer your question, no, I wouldn't correct them