The fact that the average person might know or recognize the extent to which they are using the military is why I don't consider it a direct use. But point taken.
You may pay far more than your equal share. That does not mean that you pay far more than your fair share. In this context, the word "fair" is a loaded, and mostly meaningless term. That's the entire point.
If a man can claim with impunity that most blogs constitute some form of journalism, then this does not bode well for the future of citizen journalism.
I think this is an overly simplistic view. If my rich friend invites several people out to an expensive restaurant for his birthday, some people share dishes while others get for themselves, with one person getting something obscenely expensive that nobody else could even afford, what is the fair way to pay the bill? It wouldn't be fair to just split things evenly, because not everybody contributed to the cost equally. It could be argued that the fair way is for everybody to pay for what they ate, but what about the people who can't afford even that, and wouldn't have come unless explicitly asked to? Maybe, since it is his birthday, the rich friend shouldn't have to pay anything? Maybe since he invited the people out, he should have to pay everything? Maybe just the tip should be split evenly? There are dozens of different ways to split the bill, each with it's own rationale, and none of them clearly "the" fair bill payment method.
Taxes are the same way. Not everybody uses government services the same. Many government services (like having a military) are not directly used by the majority of people. Everything needs to be funded* somehow, and charging the people who both use less and make less an amount which is more than their annual salary is not fair by any means. What is the most fair tax plan, then? It doesn't exist! But a system that charges more money to the people who can afford it or who use more government services is a lot more fair than charging a homeless man more money than he has spent in the last decade while charging Bill Gates less than he makes in 5 minutes from bank interest.
*let's not debate whether the budget is just or not.
The thing you have to consider is that there is only one real reason why someone would join a particular swarm: to downloads/upload whatever the swarm is trading. The drug dealer analogy is flawed, because there are legitimate reasons why you might want to hang out with people who happen to be drug dealers. This is the first I have heard of anybody except a monitoring company joining a swarm for the purpose of anything other than downloading, and they joined for the express purpose of seeing if monitoring companies thought they looked guilty. The cops would investigate you if you put up a classified ad saying "Looking to buy and sell drugs" even if you had no intention of buying or selling. It wouldn't be enough to send you to prison on, but they could probably get a warrant to search your house because there is no legitimate reason why a reasonable person would place such an add. Similarly, there is no legitimate reason why a reasonable person would join a swarm trading illegal content. The fact that we have a single instance of someone joining a swarm without uploading or downloading anything changes nothing.
They are entirely right, many of the most revolutionary search engines out there are not mainstream. Did you know that the big four comprise less than half of the top 10 most innovative search engines?
They said that it was a bad business decision, not a bad moral decision. If they don't see themselves currently engaged in something wrong, and if there is absolutely nothing to be gained by pulling out of the market (because they can't just not censor in china, it was either they censored or they couldn't be in the Chinese market), why would they pull out? The "damage" done was to their image, not to the people of China, and no more damage is being done. They are not constantly losing credibility, but by leaving China, they will lose a good deal of their investment in the country. It would be an utterly stupid business decision. From a strictly monetary point of view, they are better off staying in China and hiring well trained assassins to get rid of the people who would honestly care if they pulled out. They should just worry about not compromising their principles, they shouldn't worry about not compromising yours too.
If you take the view that freedom of speech is a right given to individuals and not to corporations, and that in exchange for letting them use the airwaves, broadcasters have a duty to present the news in as balanced a way as possible, then something like the fairness doctrine isn't a violation of the first amendment and might even be (if you believe that the ensuing view presented will be more balanced in any sense) a good thing. What I would like, though, is for the FCC's policy against the falsification of news to be made into law so that people like this can claim whistle blower status when broadcasters do blatantly lie (which I consider worse than not giving every side of a story).
Re:Do first things first!
on
More A's, More Pay
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree that fixing the discipline problem is probably the single most important thing that can be done in schools, but I don't think that it is something that can be done alone. You can't get kids to be disciplined about their work unless they either feel it is important or they feel there are consequences to doing poorly. This won't happen unless there is a dramatic shift in American culture. Parents need to be involved, teachers need to be competent, students need to stop viewing being knowledgeable as being uncool. Unfortunately, all these have to be addressed simultaneously. My guess is that it will take a decline of American hegemony followed by a surge in nationalism to get people to care about this stuff, but I hope I'm wrong.
The NSA is a good example of an organization that uses security through obscurity well. They employ the best cryptographers and system designers around, but they are also not about to tell anyone how those systems work. If you did know exactly what they were doing, though, you would still find them to be some of the most secure systems anywhere.
If the NSA were a good example of an organization using security through obscurity well, you would have no idea how secure their systems actually were. No, something isn't right here...
If I had to guess, I would say that this kind of marketing is akin to the way companies will hire people to talk to their "friends" on the street about how awesome a new album is or to go to a bar and talk about how great their drink is, or something along those lines. When people aren't directly targeted with what they view as advertising, they are more susceptible to the pitch. Similarly, when an executive doesn't realize that the adds are tailored especially for him, he is less on his guard. I think that this method of advertising is somewhat clever because it will keep the product on the executive's mind without his analytical side going "but they are only telling me what they think I want to hear." I don't know if this will actually be successful, but from a psychology experiment point of view, it is fascinating.
"As for probability, please remember the Birthday Paradox. If you have 30 people in a room, the chance that two of them share a birthday is NOT 30/365, which would be under 10%, but rather considerably higher. Google if you want the exact answer, there are lots of good explanations of it online."
Are you honestly trying to argue that since not all probability problems have a solution that fits with naive intuition, it must be that all uses of probability by all people are suspect? You don't need to have taken graduate level courses in probability or statistics to think that it is not highly probable that the RIAA would fabricate evidence to sue someone they have never met, have no reason to suspect of any wrongdoing, have no chance of recovering even lawyers fees from, and who would make abysmally bad press for them once all those facts came out. Regardless of what you might think, they are not that stupid.
Of course, my post never actually explicitly mentioned probability, so I don't quite know what you were rebutting.
Call me crazy, but something doesn't make sense. For the RIAA to have a screen shot of any relevance, it has to be of a file listing on a p2p network of someone with an IP traced back to Mr. Wilke. A screen shot of his actual computer would not only be impossible to obtain, but would also not show any infringement, and there aren't many other types of screen shots that would make any sense in this context. If it is also true that "3. He has never used any "online media distribution system" to download, distribute, or make available for distribution, any of plaintiffs' copyrighted recordings," then the only scenario that makes sense is the following:
The RIAA took a screen shot of something on a P2P network with either IP addresses or user names which were then incorrectly traced back to Mr. Wilke, who had never logged onto the network but coincidently had the songs in the screen shot.
This sounds a bit unlikely to me. The statement sounds a lot like, "I never touched the girl, and in any case she kissed me first." Perhaps even more accurately, "Yeah, sure I did it, but we both know you can't prove it." I don't approve of the RIAA lawsuits, but I don't really like to see dishonesty coming from either side. I wish that the side getting sued would counter sue (to keep the RIAA from just backing away from people who try to fight them), be honest about what they did, and then win in such a way as precedent keeps the RIAA from ever successfully wining such a suit again. Getting the suit dropped because they accidentally put down the wrong first name seems like a hollow victory at best.
If you look at the summary, you come to the conclusion that proprietary software is five times less buggy than open source. It is also unclear how software can have five times as many bugs but be of higher quality. However, if you read the article, you find:
In our research using automatic bug-hunting technology, no open-source project we analyzed had fewer software defects (per thousand lines of code) than the top-of-the-line closed-source application. That proprietary code, written for an aerospace company, is better than the best in open source--more than five times better, in fact. That company's software won't let you down when you're flying from New York to London.
If we ignore that the automatic bug finding algorithms might not be a good measure for anything, we have a few issues with the summary. The richest american is twice as rich as the richest Swiss man. Does it follow that Americans are on average twice as rich as Swiss people? No. In the same way, the statement does not imply that the average open source software has five times as many bugs as the average proprietary software does. The coding practices of mission critical apps like flight control systems are different from those of most of the industry, and it is almost wrong to lump them together with everything else.
The problem with statistics is not that they give an inaccurate picture, or even that selecting the right statistics can give a skewed picture, but that people who don't appreciate what statistics actually give use them to form opinions, make decisions, and summarize articles. Statistics don't lie, but the people who misreport them do, even if they don't realize it.
The arXiv (pronounced "archive") is a preprint server where people post their papers. Sometimes the papers are awaiting publication, sometimes they aren't going to be published, and sometimes they are just rough things like lecture notes that people just figure others might appreciate. As such, it is fairly unsurprising that the paper would be a rough draft. That doesn't mean that the ideas aren't all there, but it most likely hasn't been peer reviewed in any broad sense yet. Putting it on the arXiv is perhaps a first step in getting peers to look it over.
As much as it pains me to say this, Google is not a number. The number that you are thinking of is googol. Yes, Google (and the googleplex) are named after the numbers googol and Googleplex, but they are spelled differently. They are, in fact, different words. Even the Google toolbar spellchecker agrees with me!
I just don't understand things like slots where they show you the payouts right in front of you and they're not in your favor
Well, there are a few issues at play. First, many people don't understand statistics, or even believe that playing at a slot machine for several turns make the next turn more likely to win. Second, some people enjoy risk and uncertainty, and find it exciting or addicting to gamble for the sake of gambling. For these people, the payoff is enough.
Third, and most important, is people's utility of money. The value of money to an individual is not constant. If you have $30,000, doubling your money would make a huge impact in your life. If you had $1,000,000,000, doubling your money would have a slightly less huge impact in your life. This is why people with very little money can feel comfortable gambling (the gains in money are worth the risk) and people with a lot of money can make risky investments (the potential loss in money is worth the risk), but people in the middle don't feel safe doing either. It is also why people buy insurance: people would rather pay a little more than the expected value of a loss to guarantee that they don't end up severely disadvantaged because their utility with almost nothing is so much less than their utility of only losing the cost of insurance.
Risk and utility are strange concepts at times, but they are very useful at explaining human behavior.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?
There are so many problems with this statement that I don't know quite where to begin. First, just because "statistically speaking" members of group A are of type B doesn't mean that individuals or people of some subgroup will be of type B. Statistically speaking, golfers are white. Does that mean that, as a golfer, Tiger Woods should not have his doctor check for medical conditions that are more likely to affect people of african descent? Statistically speaking, American women do worse than American men on math tests (and for the sake of argument, I don't care whether it is due entirely to social factors or not). If a man and a woman take a math test for an employer and the woman does better, should the man get the job because he was expected to have done better?
Even if the people complaining had downloaded copyrighted material from the internet, does that mean that they fall completely out of the jurisdiction of copyright law? Is this because they are hypocrites, or merely because two wrongs make a right? The people who actually plagiarized papers might have no moral ground to stand on when they don't want their (plagiarized) papers to be used by others, but to suggest that a student who wrote his own paper but downloaded a Metallica mp3 should have no legal rights is preposterous. If a GPL developer sued Microsoft over GPL violations, and if the developer had once downloaded an album or used DeCSS to help rip a DVD, would that mean that he should lose all rights to his program and that Microsoft should be allowed to use it as they see fit? Would those facts be at all germane to the case? If the lawyers brought up the subject, wouldn't you laugh at them?
The automated testing of papers for plagiarism is probably a good thing if it keeps teachers from wasting time doing it by hand and if it encourages students to do original work. Maybe having papers automatically entered into a database serves some common good. However, a commercial entity which sells this service shouldn't be ignoring the copyright of the students to make a profit off their work. Why should we condemn exploitation everywhere but here?
The thing is, Yau's work is well known in at least some sense to the mathematics community. Calabi-Yau manifolds are named after him, and they are very well known to people who work in fields that use them (such as string theory, or even algebraic geometry). My impression is that he is brilliant, well known, and has accomplished a lot, but that he cannot handle starting work on a problem without getting the lions share of credit when someone finally solves it.
When you are racing to solve a big problem, some people can gracefully step aside when they lose the race. I guess humility isn't for everybody.
Also, Harvard's soldier field sports stadium had banners reading "Ivy League" the last time I saw it, so even if the history ever did include an "IV League", the phrase does not fit current usage.
"Some attribute the name to the Roman numerals for four (IV), asserting that there was such a sports league originally with four members. The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins helped to perpetuate this belief. The supposed "IV League" was formed over a century ago and consisted of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a 4th school that varies depending on who is telling the story."
It doesn't sound like the author of the wikipedia article gives the story much creedence.
It isn't IV league, but ivy league. It is called this because of the ivy that grows on the old buildings at these schools. IV would suggest something like "fourth level", but if you ignore sports (I don't know what division most Ivy's are), most of them are considered top tier.
There is a reason many top teir schools (not just Ivy's) aren't accepting AP credit, and it isn't just because they want people to get their education at their school. Not all college classes on a given subject are created equal, and the content and difficulty of a particular class can vary wildly from school to school. I took several of my classes in high school at a local college, and I can't deny that the classes there were much easier than where I went for undergrad. AP classes might be better than many high school classes, and they might even be as good as college classes at some places, but they are not a good substitute for a well taught class at a good university given by someone who truly knows their field.
As an example, a friend of mine recently helped grade an undergraduate math placement test, and several of the people who got 5's on their BC calculus AP exam (the highest grade) were lacking an understanding of basic concepts like limits, continuity, and the definition of the derivative.
The problem with giving people credit for AP classes, then, is that they are either ill prepared for further study, or else you can't confirm when they graduate that they know everything that they should. A diploma should be more than just a piece of paper, but rather a stamp of approval that says "To the best of our knowledge, this university certifies that you can think and reason and that you have a working knowledge of a certain set of things." If half of your credits come from AP classes that are of a lesser quality, a university can't make such a statement with as much confidence.
Viewed in this light, it isn't just arrogance that keeps the schools from accepting AP credit, but rather the need for a diploma to have meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the average person might know or recognize the extent to which they are using the military is why I don't consider it a direct use. But point taken.
You may pay far more than your equal share. That does not mean that you pay far more than your fair share. In this context, the word "fair" is a loaded, and mostly meaningless term. That's the entire point.
If a man can claim with impunity that most blogs constitute some form of journalism, then this does not bode well for the future of citizen journalism.
I think this is an overly simplistic view. If my rich friend invites several people out to an expensive restaurant for his birthday, some people share dishes while others get for themselves, with one person getting something obscenely expensive that nobody else could even afford, what is the fair way to pay the bill? It wouldn't be fair to just split things evenly, because not everybody contributed to the cost equally. It could be argued that the fair way is for everybody to pay for what they ate, but what about the people who can't afford even that, and wouldn't have come unless explicitly asked to? Maybe, since it is his birthday, the rich friend shouldn't have to pay anything? Maybe since he invited the people out, he should have to pay everything? Maybe just the tip should be split evenly? There are dozens of different ways to split the bill, each with it's own rationale, and none of them clearly "the" fair bill payment method.
Taxes are the same way. Not everybody uses government services the same. Many government services (like having a military) are not directly used by the majority of people. Everything needs to be funded* somehow, and charging the people who both use less and make less an amount which is more than their annual salary is not fair by any means. What is the most fair tax plan, then? It doesn't exist! But a system that charges more money to the people who can afford it or who use more government services is a lot more fair than charging a homeless man more money than he has spent in the last decade while charging Bill Gates less than he makes in 5 minutes from bank interest.
*let's not debate whether the budget is just or not.
The thing you have to consider is that there is only one real reason why someone would join a particular swarm: to downloads/upload whatever the swarm is trading. The drug dealer analogy is flawed, because there are legitimate reasons why you might want to hang out with people who happen to be drug dealers. This is the first I have heard of anybody except a monitoring company joining a swarm for the purpose of anything other than downloading, and they joined for the express purpose of seeing if monitoring companies thought they looked guilty. The cops would investigate you if you put up a classified ad saying "Looking to buy and sell drugs" even if you had no intention of buying or selling. It wouldn't be enough to send you to prison on, but they could probably get a warrant to search your house because there is no legitimate reason why a reasonable person would place such an add. Similarly, there is no legitimate reason why a reasonable person would join a swarm trading illegal content. The fact that we have a single instance of someone joining a swarm without uploading or downloading anything changes nothing.
They are entirely right, many of the most revolutionary search engines out there are not mainstream. Did you know that the big four comprise less than half of the top 10 most innovative search engines?
Is there any chance that Video (on Demand) killed the webmaster? He wouldn't be the first victim...
They said that it was a bad business decision, not a bad moral decision. If they don't see themselves currently engaged in something wrong, and if there is absolutely nothing to be gained by pulling out of the market (because they can't just not censor in china, it was either they censored or they couldn't be in the Chinese market), why would they pull out? The "damage" done was to their image, not to the people of China, and no more damage is being done. They are not constantly losing credibility, but by leaving China, they will lose a good deal of their investment in the country. It would be an utterly stupid business decision. From a strictly monetary point of view, they are better off staying in China and hiring well trained assassins to get rid of the people who would honestly care if they pulled out. They should just worry about not compromising their principles, they shouldn't worry about not compromising yours too.
If you take the view that freedom of speech is a right given to individuals and not to corporations, and that in exchange for letting them use the airwaves, broadcasters have a duty to present the news in as balanced a way as possible, then something like the fairness doctrine isn't a violation of the first amendment and might even be (if you believe that the ensuing view presented will be more balanced in any sense) a good thing. What I would like, though, is for the FCC's policy against the falsification of news to be made into law so that people like this can claim whistle blower status when broadcasters do blatantly lie (which I consider worse than not giving every side of a story).
I agree that fixing the discipline problem is probably the single most important thing that can be done in schools, but I don't think that it is something that can be done alone. You can't get kids to be disciplined about their work unless they either feel it is important or they feel there are consequences to doing poorly. This won't happen unless there is a dramatic shift in American culture. Parents need to be involved, teachers need to be competent, students need to stop viewing being knowledgeable as being uncool. Unfortunately, all these have to be addressed simultaneously. My guess is that it will take a decline of American hegemony followed by a surge in nationalism to get people to care about this stuff, but I hope I'm wrong.
"Google is only as good as it's knowledge base, and it's users, so this isn't a cure for everything."
It might not cure everything, but how does Google fare as a cure for the common cold?
If the NSA were a good example of an organization using security through obscurity well, you would have no idea how secure their systems actually were. No, something isn't right here...
If I had to guess, I would say that this kind of marketing is akin to the way companies will hire people to talk to their "friends" on the street about how awesome a new album is or to go to a bar and talk about how great their drink is, or something along those lines. When people aren't directly targeted with what they view as advertising, they are more susceptible to the pitch. Similarly, when an executive doesn't realize that the adds are tailored especially for him, he is less on his guard. I think that this method of advertising is somewhat clever because it will keep the product on the executive's mind without his analytical side going "but they are only telling me what they think I want to hear." I don't know if this will actually be successful, but from a psychology experiment point of view, it is fascinating.
"As for probability, please remember the Birthday Paradox. If you have 30 people in a room, the chance that two of them share a birthday is NOT 30/365, which would be under 10%, but rather considerably higher. Google if you want the exact answer, there are lots of good explanations of it online."
Are you honestly trying to argue that since not all probability problems have a solution that fits with naive intuition, it must be that all uses of probability by all people are suspect? You don't need to have taken graduate level courses in probability or statistics to think that it is not highly probable that the RIAA would fabricate evidence to sue someone they have never met, have no reason to suspect of any wrongdoing, have no chance of recovering even lawyers fees from, and who would make abysmally bad press for them once all those facts came out. Regardless of what you might think, they are not that stupid.
Of course, my post never actually explicitly mentioned probability, so I don't quite know what you were rebutting.
Call me crazy, but something doesn't make sense. For the RIAA to have a screen shot of any relevance, it has to be of a file listing on a p2p network of someone with an IP traced back to Mr. Wilke. A screen shot of his actual computer would not only be impossible to obtain, but would also not show any infringement, and there aren't many other types of screen shots that would make any sense in this context. If it is also true that "3. He has never used any "online media distribution system" to download, distribute, or make available for distribution, any of plaintiffs' copyrighted recordings," then the only scenario that makes sense is the following:
The RIAA took a screen shot of something on a P2P network with either IP addresses or user names which were then incorrectly traced back to Mr. Wilke, who had never logged onto the network but coincidently had the songs in the screen shot.
This sounds a bit unlikely to me. The statement sounds a lot like, "I never touched the girl, and in any case she kissed me first." Perhaps even more accurately, "Yeah, sure I did it, but we both know you can't prove it." I don't approve of the RIAA lawsuits, but I don't really like to see dishonesty coming from either side. I wish that the side getting sued would counter sue (to keep the RIAA from just backing away from people who try to fight them), be honest about what they did, and then win in such a way as precedent keeps the RIAA from ever successfully wining such a suit again. Getting the suit dropped because they accidentally put down the wrong first name seems like a hollow victory at best.
The arXiv (pronounced "archive") is a preprint server where people post their papers. Sometimes the papers are awaiting publication, sometimes they aren't going to be published, and sometimes they are just rough things like lecture notes that people just figure others might appreciate. As such, it is fairly unsurprising that the paper would be a rough draft. That doesn't mean that the ideas aren't all there, but it most likely hasn't been peer reviewed in any broad sense yet. Putting it on the arXiv is perhaps a first step in getting peers to look it over.
As much as it pains me to say this, Google is not a number. The number that you are thinking of is googol. Yes, Google (and the googleplex) are named after the numbers googol and Googleplex, but they are spelled differently. They are, in fact, different words. Even the Google toolbar spellchecker agrees with me!
Well, there are a few issues at play. First, many people don't understand statistics, or even believe that playing at a slot machine for several turns make the next turn more likely to win. Second, some people enjoy risk and uncertainty, and find it exciting or addicting to gamble for the sake of gambling. For these people, the payoff is enough.
Third, and most important, is people's utility of money. The value of money to an individual is not constant. If you have $30,000, doubling your money would make a huge impact in your life. If you had $1,000,000,000, doubling your money would have a slightly less huge impact in your life. This is why people with very little money can feel comfortable gambling (the gains in money are worth the risk) and people with a lot of money can make risky investments (the potential loss in money is worth the risk), but people in the middle don't feel safe doing either. It is also why people buy insurance: people would rather pay a little more than the expected value of a loss to guarantee that they don't end up severely disadvantaged because their utility with almost nothing is so much less than their utility of only losing the cost of insurance.
Risk and utility are strange concepts at times, but they are very useful at explaining human behavior.
There are so many problems with this statement that I don't know quite where to begin. First, just because "statistically speaking" members of group A are of type B doesn't mean that individuals or people of some subgroup will be of type B. Statistically speaking, golfers are white. Does that mean that, as a golfer, Tiger Woods should not have his doctor check for medical conditions that are more likely to affect people of african descent? Statistically speaking, American women do worse than American men on math tests (and for the sake of argument, I don't care whether it is due entirely to social factors or not). If a man and a woman take a math test for an employer and the woman does better, should the man get the job because he was expected to have done better?
Even if the people complaining had downloaded copyrighted material from the internet, does that mean that they fall completely out of the jurisdiction of copyright law? Is this because they are hypocrites, or merely because two wrongs make a right? The people who actually plagiarized papers might have no moral ground to stand on when they don't want their (plagiarized) papers to be used by others, but to suggest that a student who wrote his own paper but downloaded a Metallica mp3 should have no legal rights is preposterous. If a GPL developer sued Microsoft over GPL violations, and if the developer had once downloaded an album or used DeCSS to help rip a DVD, would that mean that he should lose all rights to his program and that Microsoft should be allowed to use it as they see fit? Would those facts be at all germane to the case? If the lawyers brought up the subject, wouldn't you laugh at them?
The automated testing of papers for plagiarism is probably a good thing if it keeps teachers from wasting time doing it by hand and if it encourages students to do original work. Maybe having papers automatically entered into a database serves some common good. However, a commercial entity which sells this service shouldn't be ignoring the copyright of the students to make a profit off their work. Why should we condemn exploitation everywhere but here?
The thing is, Yau's work is well known in at least some sense to the mathematics community. Calabi-Yau manifolds are named after him, and they are very well known to people who work in fields that use them (such as string theory, or even algebraic geometry). My impression is that he is brilliant, well known, and has accomplished a lot, but that he cannot handle starting work on a problem without getting the lions share of credit when someone finally solves it.
When you are racing to solve a big problem, some people can gracefully step aside when they lose the race. I guess humility isn't for everybody.
Also, Harvard's soldier field sports stadium had banners reading "Ivy League" the last time I saw it, so even if the history ever did include an "IV League", the phrase does not fit current usage.
Yes, to quote the wikipedia article:
"Some attribute the name to the Roman numerals for four (IV), asserting that there was such a sports league originally with four members. The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins helped to perpetuate this belief. The supposed "IV League" was formed over a century ago and consisted of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a 4th school that varies depending on who is telling the story."
It doesn't sound like the author of the wikipedia article gives the story much creedence.
It isn't IV league, but ivy league. It is called this because of the ivy that grows on the old buildings at these schools. IV would suggest something like "fourth level", but if you ignore sports (I don't know what division most Ivy's are), most of them are considered top tier.
There is a reason many top teir schools (not just Ivy's) aren't accepting AP credit, and it isn't just because they want people to get their education at their school. Not all college classes on a given subject are created equal, and the content and difficulty of a particular class can vary wildly from school to school. I took several of my classes in high school at a local college, and I can't deny that the classes there were much easier than where I went for undergrad. AP classes might be better than many high school classes, and they might even be as good as college classes at some places, but they are not a good substitute for a well taught class at a good university given by someone who truly knows their field.
As an example, a friend of mine recently helped grade an undergraduate math placement test, and several of the people who got 5's on their BC calculus AP exam (the highest grade) were lacking an understanding of basic concepts like limits, continuity, and the definition of the derivative.
The problem with giving people credit for AP classes, then, is that they are either ill prepared for further study, or else you can't confirm when they graduate that they know everything that they should. A diploma should be more than just a piece of paper, but rather a stamp of approval that says "To the best of our knowledge, this university certifies that you can think and reason and that you have a working knowledge of a certain set of things." If half of your credits come from AP classes that are of a lesser quality, a university can't make such a statement with as much confidence.
Viewed in this light, it isn't just arrogance that keeps the schools from accepting AP credit, but rather the need for a diploma to have meaning.
"The bottom line is a lot of good people fought and died to uphold the ideal of one person, one vote and take pride that we run honest elections."
In Chicago, we honor their memory by still allowing them to vote!