It's the law, apparently, at least if you're not a common carrier. From Yahoo's compliance guide,
Federal law (See 18 U.S.C. 2706) requires law enforcement to reimburse providers like Yahoo! for costs incurred responding to subpoena requests, court orders, or search warrants. Yahoo! generally requests reimbursement when responding to legal process, except that Yahoo! maintains an exception to this policy for cases involving the abduction or exploitation of children.
The law is available here. It's a requirement for law enforcement requesting information, not the organizations providing it (except that the amount is "mutually agreed by the governmental entity and the person or entity providing the information").
A governmental entity obtaining the contents of communications, records, or other information under section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information. Such reimbursable costs shall include any costs due to necessary disruption of normal operations of any electronic communication service or remote computing service in which such information may be stored.
So, the guide is a means for law enforcement to interact with Yahoo (and the law) in a standard, easier way. Does it make it more likely that investigators would ask Yahoo for documents if Yahoo makes it easy, as opposed to cooperating as little as possible? Probably. But Yahoo has no reason not to cooperate.
They might see an increase in sales via preview assuming they have good content—if it's only okayish, however, someone listening to a free preview might decide not to buy it, instead of committing to do so. The reverse, of course, also applies.
I don't think record companies are disallowing copies of their content for that reason (surely they'd see both sides of the free preview coin), but it's an interesting side effect, and one that's generally relevant to free-content business models.
"Publicly viewable" helps transparency, but it also introduces a host of other problems. Let us not forget the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Open discussion might cause some people to be more insightful and logically thorough, but it will cause other people to spew idiotic invective and troll. If the Obama Transition Team chooses to ignore submitted comments, there's no reason to think they would read through a forum overrun with trolls, or waste resources implementing a moderation system. I have a feeling that the Obama Administration will be one that attempts to shape its public image meticulously. The feedback form has the purpose of getting a cross-section of the public opinion, which is both self-serving and constructive, although which motive is dominant I'm not sure. Compared to an open conservation, however, I suspect there will be by far fewer useless comments.
The Spiderman "application" may be useful for explaining the general function of the glue, but I wonder how it would fare in actual building-scaling. The fact that one only needs change the angle of the glue application area to detach it makes it seem too unreliable to use for holding up objects. I'd much rather be held 100 feet in the air by a cable than by a square inch of an adhesive (and in fact, I'd rather not be held in the air at all). This is just my intuition, of course, and not carefully researched. I'd be a lot happier seeing it used in other commercial applications—e.g., in the place of soldering—when/if it becomes commercial viable to do so.
You have it backwards. Wikipedia is about producing free content, instead of being encumbered by reuse restrictions that (for example) Nielsen imposes. Using copyrighted content in Wikipedia doesn't make the content free, and it does nothing to further the use of content that actually is free.
I wonder how the animations here would compare to those of of closed source projects that use a revision control system. I'd imagine there would be less flying around of files (i.e., one piece of code might have a specific maintainer), much less people involved, etc.
fyi: Java won't protect you when submitting a generic java.sql.Statement, but will for a properly used java.sql.PreparedStatement (which extends Statement). Escapes strings and all automatically.
They both try to solve the same problem of shared data management across threads in a similar way, and I think neither will really scale to huge multi-core systems so long as the lock-and-key mechanisms remain in place.
Java introduced many more sophisticated tools with the java.util.concurrent package (and subpackages) that allow for programs with high CPU thoroughput and scalability. These include synchronization primitives such as a count-down latch, cyclic barrier, semaphore, an exchanger, and so on. Several concurrent collections were introduced, notably a variety of queues that serve a variety of unique purposes. An executor framework was introduced to replace Timer/TimerTask, and includes all sorts of thread pools, rejected execution policies, delayed executors... you get the idea.
java.util.concurrent.atomic has several atomic value holders, some of them reflection-based, all of which use compare-and-swap, a low-level algorithm, for lock-free access/modification. java.util.concurrent.lock contains locking utilities, including a ReentrantLock. (This class was so much faster than synchronized, btw, than synchronized was changed to use ReentrantLock's algorithm in Java 6.) Finally, there's the AbstractQueuedSynchronizer, a robust class for building synchronizers, that (again) uses compare-and-swap to maintain state.
There's no doubt that less data shared between processes, and increased parallelization, is good for any concurrent application. In terms of concurrency, though, Java offers quite a bit of flexibility and sophistication, though sacrificing some of the simplicity of functional programming languages. In my opinion, anyway.
And there are plenty more of them than are listed there. In addition, people copy and paste Wikipedia articles without attribution frequently, e.g. in darker corners of the internet to use them as "filler text" to improve search engine "relevancy".
Sort of, yes... Wikipedia is little more than a bunch of revisions of wikitext stored in the database, which is either retrieved from a server cache or parsed into HTML by the "script" when it needs to accessed. Wikitext is a bit more light-weight than HTML, although you may not "know and love" it.
Actually, there is a secure connection, which, depending on the type of block, can be used to access Wikipedia; also with a poor connection. And there are always open proxies, if only for reading Wikipedia, not editing it (open proxies are blocked for various reasons). Draco would be proud.
Same with me. Those with an account, though, can just log in and edit using whichever IP from which they're accessing the internet. (It didn't always used to be that way.)
As a student, I hate homework, and am fully aware of our differences in this regard. Homework it one of the reasons that I dislike school. I just don't have the perseverance to answer questions to which I know the answer, or to do calculus problems on paper when I can otherwise do them in 5 seconds by merely looking. I mostly do it anyway. I think that anyone sensible would be disillusioned upon seeing the question
What is the significance of the song "there are no cats in America"?
which, among others in a similar vein, was graded. Yes, work is important. I write essays, do extraordinarily on exams. But the problem with homework is not that it's so much work: the issue is that it's so little, but there's so much of it. In my experience, teachers don't assign homework in order to make students learn, but because they feel that they have to, or if they don't ask us questions such as "What is the symbolic meaning of Glinda in terms of progressivism", they're not doing their job. I would love for you to explain how I could tremendously benefit from that. If a real job consisted of tedious tasks, I would be fine keeping it. But this is just over the edge.
But, Wikipedia is amazingly neutral in articles about itself. Seriously, this article is one of the most balanced, dispassionate descriptions of Wikipedia that exist.
And of course nobody has heard that joke before, jman.
There already is a project for that, Wikibooks, many of which are developed enough such that you can download them as a PDF and study from them. Nobody's going to buy a textbook if there are other free ones, and if Wikibooks becomes a paid service, nobody's going to be happy.
Unless you're talking about distributing Wikipedia articles in text form. It's interesting, and is already being planned (the page mentions releasing WP 1.0 in text, CD, or DVD form), except that once again, I'd rather buy a CD version of the best of Wikipedia than heavy, heavy textbooks of the same.
Actually, the foundation that runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and the like does currently have six staff members. By "free", Wikipedia means that its content can be freely distributed, and nothing else really, although Wikipedia does lean towards free, open source software (it runs on MediaWiki). Having several paid encyclopedia-writers could be troubling, though, because it promotes inequality and even envy in the community, possibly driving away or discouraging those that put their free time into improving Wikipedia, or promoting elitism. Check out this page for a perspective on that; and think of the further problems that would result if this forced elitism applied to article writers!
Often, it's easier to write a featured article about something like this than something like this. As far as I am aware, there have been no repeat Featured Articles on the Main Page, so that means that featured articles keep on coming... but some are also being defeatured due to quality concerns. There was a net gain of four featured articles this week—gained nine, lost five. Often vandalism gets in the way of constructive article writing, and people have to spend more time on that, rather than on content-producing.
Finally, one of the goals of featured articles is to get an article to a place where it is incorruptible... but not unimprovable. (Motivation is another goal.) So if someone helped bring an article to featured status, they might notice any factual errors that were introduced. Wikipedia certainly has dynamic... but it's losing some of that. With a team of vandal-fighters and no content-writers, Wikipedia will only be able to preserve integrity -- not improve it.
Suppose an encyclopedia is defined to be a document that sums up and summarizes human knowledge; if you will, a compendium.
Agreed—encyclopedias are not meant to be primary sources, that's pretty obvious, since someone can't sum up knowledge that doesn't widely exist. So a primary source can't be a sum of knowledge, let alone an accurate sum. And an encyclopedia shouldn't purely be a secondary source, either. Historians' goal is to take primary sources and analyze, interpret, or explain them; if an encyclopedia-writer does that, it may not reflect the consensus in the researching community, and because of that, not be an accurate sum of knowledge. If there is consensus that a primary source should be analyzed a certain way, or if it's freaking obvious what the author of the primary source is saying, perhaps a primary source could be cited by a tertiary source.
An encyclopedia is a tertiary source. In fact, Wikipedia's "no original research" policy is the statement:
Tertiary sources are publications, such as encyclopedias, that sum up other secondary sources, and sometimes primary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source. (policy) Of course, citing a tertiary source makes one's paper a quaternary document, which is... crazy. It could be defended, yes, but it's just odd to cite an encyclopedia as source, since it's redundant and doesn't stimulate knowledge.
This is the Technology Age. Information has to be the most valuable commodity around. And this is both good and bad.
I'm fully for such things as the Open Voting Consortium. In fact, I'm an active supporter. The Consortium wants to change the implementation of the voting system by making it open. But this knowledge of nuclear warfare can go unknown by the masses. Not knowing something can be a part of honesty and integrity. If you don't know the location of the secret hideout of your secret organization (that is, you've been brought there blindfolded), all the sodium thiopental in the world can't make you remember (although you could be overdosed and die).
On the other hand, if your government is lying to you, your honesty and integrity is absolutely based on the relative truth value of that administration. The latter is as good as a house built on sand during a storm, and the former is as good as shingles on the roof of that house.
I don't see how anyone could feel entitled to this knowledge, and I support the United States' decision. An important part of this Age of Information is that, in my opinion, with knowledge should come responsibility. Everyone should be able to handle the responsibility of knowing that there may have been some government scandal. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and the masses simply can't handle the responsibility of knowing how to make an atomic bomb. So I'm assuming bad faith? You betcha.
Page history does not go "all the way back to the beginning" nor does it "store all edits," at least publicly. This record-keeping only occurs until after a certain number of edits. Granted, this is a large number. For example, the main page history reveals 83831322 edits, while there are 83971314 total. Nonetheless, in any sort of remotely historical "long run," looking for data on the past by this means is futile.
Slashdot Mirror
The law is available here. It's a requirement for law enforcement requesting information, not the organizations providing it (except that the amount is "mutually agreed by the governmental entity and the person or entity providing the information").
So, the guide is a means for law enforcement to interact with Yahoo (and the law) in a standard, easier way. Does it make it more likely that investigators would ask Yahoo for documents if Yahoo makes it easy, as opposed to cooperating as little as possible? Probably. But Yahoo has no reason not to cooperate.
They might see an increase in sales via preview assuming they have good content—if it's only okayish, however, someone listening to a free preview might decide not to buy it, instead of committing to do so. The reverse, of course, also applies.
I don't think record companies are disallowing copies of their content for that reason (surely they'd see both sides of the free preview coin), but it's an interesting side effect, and one that's generally relevant to free-content business models.
Is anybody else here thinking of Jonathan Coulton's Re: Your Brains?
Yeah, samzenpus is.
Normal people have just issued a reminder that this isn't reddit.
"Publicly viewable" helps transparency, but it also introduces a host of other problems. Let us not forget the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Open discussion might cause some people to be more insightful and logically thorough, but it will cause other people to spew idiotic invective and troll. If the Obama Transition Team chooses to ignore submitted comments, there's no reason to think they would read through a forum overrun with trolls, or waste resources implementing a moderation system. I have a feeling that the Obama Administration will be one that attempts to shape its public image meticulously. The feedback form has the purpose of getting a cross-section of the public opinion, which is both self-serving and constructive, although which motive is dominant I'm not sure. Compared to an open conservation, however, I suspect there will be by far fewer useless comments.
The Spiderman "application" may be useful for explaining the general function of the glue, but I wonder how it would fare in actual building-scaling. The fact that one only needs change the angle of the glue application area to detach it makes it seem too unreliable to use for holding up objects. I'd much rather be held 100 feet in the air by a cable than by a square inch of an adhesive (and in fact, I'd rather not be held in the air at all). This is just my intuition, of course, and not carefully researched. I'd be a lot happier seeing it used in other commercial applications—e.g., in the place of soldering—when/if it becomes commercial viable to do so.
You have it backwards. Wikipedia is about producing free content, instead of being encumbered by reuse restrictions that (for example) Nielsen imposes. Using copyrighted content in Wikipedia doesn't make the content free, and it does nothing to further the use of content that actually is free.
I wonder how the animations here would compare to those of of closed source projects that use a revision control system. I'd imagine there would be less flying around of files (i.e., one piece of code might have a specific maintainer), much less people involved, etc.
fyi: Java won't protect you when submitting a generic java.sql.Statement, but will for a properly used java.sql.PreparedStatement (which extends Statement). Escapes strings and all automatically.
Java introduced many more sophisticated tools with the java.util.concurrent package (and subpackages) that allow for programs with high CPU thoroughput and scalability. These include synchronization primitives such as a count-down latch, cyclic barrier, semaphore, an exchanger, and so on. Several concurrent collections were introduced, notably a variety of queues that serve a variety of unique purposes. An executor framework was introduced to replace Timer/TimerTask, and includes all sorts of thread pools, rejected execution policies, delayed executors... you get the idea.
java.util.concurrent.atomic has several atomic value holders, some of them reflection-based, all of which use compare-and-swap, a low-level algorithm, for lock-free access/modification. java.util.concurrent.lock contains locking utilities, including a ReentrantLock. (This class was so much faster than synchronized, btw, than synchronized was changed to use ReentrantLock's algorithm in Java 6.) Finally, there's the AbstractQueuedSynchronizer, a robust class for building synchronizers, that (again) uses compare-and-swap to maintain state.
There's no doubt that less data shared between processes, and increased parallelization, is good for any concurrent application. In terms of concurrency, though, Java offers quite a bit of flexibility and sophistication, though sacrificing some of the simplicity of functional programming languages. In my opinion, anyway.
And there are plenty more of them than are listed there. In addition, people copy and paste Wikipedia articles without attribution frequently, e.g. in darker corners of the internet to use them as "filler text" to improve search engine "relevancy".
Sort of, yes... Wikipedia is little more than a bunch of revisions of wikitext stored in the database, which is either retrieved from a server cache or parsed into HTML by the "script" when it needs to accessed. Wikitext is a bit more light-weight than HTML, although you may not "know and love" it.
Goodness; I thought that my school had it bad.
Actually, there is a secure connection, which, depending on the type of block, can be used to access Wikipedia; also with a poor connection. And there are always open proxies, if only for reading Wikipedia, not editing it (open proxies are blocked for various reasons). Draco would be proud.
Same with me. Those with an account, though, can just log in and edit using whichever IP from which they're accessing the internet. (It didn't always used to be that way.)
But, Wikipedia is amazingly neutral in articles about itself. Seriously, this article is one of the most balanced, dispassionate descriptions of Wikipedia that exist.
And of course nobody has heard that joke before, jman.
There already is a project for that, Wikibooks, many of which are developed enough such that you can download them as a PDF and study from them. Nobody's going to buy a textbook if there are other free ones, and if Wikibooks becomes a paid service, nobody's going to be happy.
Unless you're talking about distributing Wikipedia articles in text form. It's interesting, and is already being planned (the page mentions releasing WP 1.0 in text, CD, or DVD form), except that once again, I'd rather buy a CD version of the best of Wikipedia than heavy, heavy textbooks of the same.
Actually, the foundation that runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and the like does currently have six staff members. By "free", Wikipedia means that its content can be freely distributed, and nothing else really, although Wikipedia does lean towards free, open source software (it runs on MediaWiki). Having several paid encyclopedia-writers could be troubling, though, because it promotes inequality and even envy in the community, possibly driving away or discouraging those that put their free time into improving Wikipedia, or promoting elitism. Check out this page for a perspective on that; and think of the further problems that would result if this forced elitism applied to article writers!
Often, it's easier to write a featured article about something like this than something like this. As far as I am aware, there have been no repeat Featured Articles on the Main Page, so that means that featured articles keep on coming... but some are also being defeatured due to quality concerns. There was a net gain of four featured articles this week—gained nine, lost five. Often vandalism gets in the way of constructive article writing, and people have to spend more time on that, rather than on content-producing.
Finally, one of the goals of featured articles is to get an article to a place where it is incorruptible... but not unimprovable. (Motivation is another goal.) So if someone helped bring an article to featured status, they might notice any factual errors that were introduced. Wikipedia certainly has dynamic... but it's losing some of that. With a team of vandal-fighters and no content-writers, Wikipedia will only be able to preserve integrity -- not improve it.
Agreed—encyclopedias are not meant to be primary sources, that's pretty obvious, since someone can't sum up knowledge that doesn't widely exist. So a primary source can't be a sum of knowledge, let alone an accurate sum. And an encyclopedia shouldn't purely be a secondary source, either. Historians' goal is to take primary sources and analyze, interpret, or explain them; if an encyclopedia-writer does that, it may not reflect the consensus in the researching community, and because of that, not be an accurate sum of knowledge. If there is consensus that a primary source should be analyzed a certain way, or if it's freaking obvious what the author of the primary source is saying, perhaps a primary source could be cited by a tertiary source.
An encyclopedia is a tertiary source. In fact, Wikipedia's "no original research" policy is the statement: Tertiary sources are publications, such as encyclopedias, that sum up other secondary sources, and sometimes primary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source. (policy) Of course, citing a tertiary source makes one's paper a quaternary document, which is... crazy. It could be defended, yes, but it's just odd to cite an encyclopedia as source, since it's redundant and doesn't stimulate knowledge.
-Gracenotes, Wikipedian
This is the Technology Age. Information has to be the most valuable commodity around. And this is both good and bad.
I'm fully for such things as the Open Voting Consortium. In fact, I'm an active supporter. The Consortium wants to change the implementation of the voting system by making it open. But this knowledge of nuclear warfare can go unknown by the masses. Not knowing something can be a part of honesty and integrity. If you don't know the location of the secret hideout of your secret organization (that is, you've been brought there blindfolded), all the sodium thiopental in the world can't make you remember (although you could be overdosed and die).
On the other hand, if your government is lying to you, your honesty and integrity is absolutely based on the relative truth value of that administration. The latter is as good as a house built on sand during a storm, and the former is as good as shingles on the roof of that house.
I don't see how anyone could feel entitled to this knowledge, and I support the United States' decision. An important part of this Age of Information is that, in my opinion, with knowledge should come responsibility. Everyone should be able to handle the responsibility of knowing that there may have been some government scandal. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and the masses simply can't handle the responsibility of knowing how to make an atomic bomb. So I'm assuming bad faith? You betcha.
Page history does not go "all the way back to the beginning" nor does it "store all edits," at least publicly. This record-keeping only occurs until after a certain number of edits. Granted, this is a large number. For example, the main page history reveals 83831322 edits, while there are 83971314 total. Nonetheless, in any sort of remotely historical "long run," looking for data on the past by this means is futile.