User:Lee Daniel Crocker

I am a computer programmer, poker player, amateur philosopher (specifically a devotee of Karl Popper), and a dilettante at just about everything else. My major usefulness here was that I was the primary author of the current MediaWiki software. For the last year or so, since America has gone poker-crazy, I've been earning my living at the table and haven't had much time for programming or Wiki writing. My personal server is currently undergoing a major cleanup, so my personal pages aren't up at the moment. My email (lee AT piclab DOT com) is working now.

I am not a lawyer. I have studied the law and follow intellectual property law in particular as an involved citizen, and have strong opinions about it (as I do about everything else). Indeed, those opinions are a major reason for my involvement here. I often express those opinions here, as is my right under the first amendment. These opinions should not be construed as legal advice; you rely on my interpretations of the law at your own peril. If you want a definitive legal opinion, you should seek the advice of a licensed professional (most of whom will probably not know any more about the issue than I do, but who will have lobbied for laws protecting their monopoly and requiring me to post silly disclaimers like this).

Because I am skeptical of the value of intellectual property law in general and copyrights in particular, I explicitly place all creative works original to me in the public domain. If you see an article here that looks like it was primarily written by me and you wish to use it in a way not permitted by the GNU Free Documentation License, contact me. I may have a public domain version containing only my work which I will happily give you. I intend to put much of that on my personal Wiki.

It seems to be a tradition here to list pages one has created or edited. I've long since lost track of how many pages I've edited, and many of the pages I created or overhauled no longer bear any resemblance to my original text. Also, many of my pages no longer list me in their history because I edited them in the early days of Wikipedia when edit histories were periodically deleted. But to give some sense of what I'm interested in and what my style of writing is, I list below a few pages which still contain a majority of their text written by me:

Karl Popper - Mortimer Adler - Ken Kesey - Walter Annenberg

Game theory - Playing card - Stone, Paper, Scissors - Scrabble - Poker (and all of its related pages) - Casino - Gambling - Pai gow - Pai gow poker - Chinese dominoes

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - American and British English Differences - Lojban - Loglan - Umlaut - Ambiguity

Prisoner's dilemma - Milgram experiment - Critical philosophy - Scientific method - Prion - Probability - Scientific mythology - Selfish Gene - Meme - Reductionism - Social Darwinism

Intellectual property - Copyright - Patent - Trademark (and some related pages like Feist v. Rural) - United States Constitution - Calendar - Gregorian calendar

ASCII - Code - Character - Character encoding - Text encoding - Markup language - Unicode - wikipedia:Special characters (and several related pages) - Internet - World Wide Web - Hypertext - XML - HTML - Data compression

Interpreted language - Java programming language - Object-oriented programming (and its referenced pages Abstraction in object-oriented programming, Encapsulation in object-oriented programming, Inheritance in object-oriented programming, and Polymorphism in object-oriented programming)

Cooking - Bourbon - Cocktail - Bloody Mary - Manhattan cocktail - Martini

Use of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

As many here know, various versions of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica are available and are in the public domain. http://www.1911encyclopedia.com/ is one such source. While this is a great resource, especially for history, it should be noted that much of the text is quite dated both in content and style, and reflects the academic culture of late-19th-century England. Good use can be made of it, however, by judicious editing. Below are a few example of what I think are good articles with content taken from that EB and updated:

Almond - Olive - Marsala - Great Pyramid of Giza