I don't believe more data storage may or may not be a bad thing. Although you write that "in fact" it's bad, actually this is your opinion, not an established fact, and certainly not a point of consensus among people who are intimately familiar with the common points you raise.
More storage capacity can create some problems, and the ones you describe are among them. It also solves some problems, among which are problems that have held back basic scientific and medical research, as well as other fields that some people consider useful.
Just to address a few points:
Increased storage capacity can lead to a decrease in average data quality, not the total amount of quality data. So this only renders data useless if you have no way of finding just the data you want, or if you feel obligated to use all of it. In the rare cases that meet these criteria, having smaller storage doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem logically impossible to solve rather than logistically (because the data are gone, not just hard to find).
I find the argument that data will continue to grow fast enough to fill available storage unconvincing. The amount of storage I have now is much more than I had 20 years ago. Just like 20 years ago, I could probably use more disk space, so you're right in that sense. But I'm able to do many more things with that disk space now, like storing music, video, and data for my research. It's not that the same things I was doing before are now taking up more space. It's that the bigger disks I have now have made it possible to store much more of the data I would like to keep. Sure, digital pictures and movies keep sucking up more space. But that's a huge benefit of bigger storage. Right now I'm throwing away a lot of data I'd rather keep, in part because of storage (and in part because my current cameras have sensors that aren't up to it). I really do want these data, and bigger storage is critical to making it possible for me to keep them. The amount of storage I have could easily grow by two or three orders of magnitude without making it the least bit more difficult for me to index my data.
Lastly, I doubt that data storage is the limiting factor in shepherding us towards an Orwellian future. A few gigabytes of storage for everyone in this country seems like a good start. Mining that data will be difficult. Yet I doubt the mining difficulties are seen by the relevant people as a reason why more storage would be bad.
In short, I agree that dealing with large amounts of data can be difficult in some cases. I don't agree that it's bad for society.
"Those of us who live by algorithms should recognize that there are some sorts of human creative intelligence which cannot be captured by formulas, or replaced by them (see physicist Roger Penrose's books on this)."
I'm not sure what you mean by "formulas," but if you mean there are kinds of intelligence which machines will never achieve, this is a very odd comment. Certainly there is not widespread agreement on this subject (about which hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written), even among fairly intelligent people who all have access to the same information. It's simply not a settled issue in any useful sense. I believe the opposite of what you believe, and I believe it as strongly as you do. But at the same time, I recognize that neither of us can really argue our cases without resorting to hand waving at some level. Roger Penrose is in the same position, although he can shout a little louder due to his bigger soapbox.
"If something like this firm's algorithm is really accurate, it should be possible to evolve a neural net to compose pop songs simply by having the success of its efforts defined by feedback from the formula. Would you find living in that world inspiring?"
We already live in that world, essentially. The most popular, widely-played music today is nothing if not formulaic. I'm sure at some level the record companies are doing more or less what you describe, although the occasional bit of good music slips by. I don't find this state of affairs inspiring, but fortunately the growth of the internet is making it easier to find alternatives.
"Is some company storing their copyrighted material in my garage now?"
If so, that makes your garage door a copy protection technology, and your garage door opener a device for circumventing it. Every time you park you violate the DMCA.
It's easy to mistakenly believe that anyone who criticized a divergence from the books thinks movies (or at least these movies) should be literal translations of the original sources. I think that far more often, the criticism is simply that among the enormous numer of translation decisions the filmmaker has to make, one or two were errors. I have zero knowledge of filmmaking, but it only takes a miniscule bit of common sense to appreciate that books can't generally be made into films by 1:1 translation.
I think Peter Jackson overall has exhibited a mind bogglingly deft touch in adapting material to which many people feel very close. But legitimate criticism is possible, even if there's no obvious way to solve certain problems. It's hard to believe Jackson doesn't himself have some reservations about the various cuts of the films. But you can't tinker forever, and you can't go back and work material into movies that have already been released.
In this case, I suspect if he could go back and adjust things a bit, he'd find a way to squeeze the confrontation scene into the second movie, at least into the extended version. It has a worthwhile dramatic impact in the book, and it can be included while still omitting the later shire scenes. It facilitates a potentially very cinematic scene later with the palantir, and gives both Lee and Dourif more screen time. Functionally, it brings Saruman's role in the movie to what feels to me like a more decisive (or at least more personal) end. I can imagine places for cuts, too, but that's another discussion.
I have a concern about the use of charts that parallels concerns about using statistics. Either, poorly done, can be misleading. But the real problem is in the illusion that ordinary, average people can be expected to make sense of either charts or statistics. I may present a graph or statistical test that really does demonstrate what I claim it does (within the limits of what's afforded by my data). It's still at some level irresponsible of me to present this to people who I know are not able to evaluate whether or not I've done things right. Although they may not be misled by my data, the mode of argumentation isn't the actual weight of evidence (which I know quite well they probably can't evaluate for even the most basic errors), but more the apparent weight of evidence. This is a potentially harmful way to go about conducting public debate.
I think Tufte's advice is well taken, but I don't see an obvious way around this problem. Doing things right seems of limited value if the real weight of your argument would be equally well captured with a simple "trust me." I'd feel better if there were ultimately some accounting, but there never seems to be.
Here's a shocker: Strauss's mode of argumentation is sarcasm. He's an astonishingly inept writer, so it's not even particularly well crafted sarcasm. I don't know if this is because his understanding of the subject matter is negligible or if it's because he thought this would be the best way to make his nebulous point, but it seems sort of wasteful to engage him in any sort of debate (with or without his participation). There may be smarter and more articulate people who share his views, and it would be much more worthwhile to find them and have an intelligent discussion than it would be to waste time debunking the content implied by his article.
A few points here are worth clarifying. First, certainly you can have a stronger fMRI (i.e., BOLD) response in one stimulus condition vs. another. What you can't know for certain, generally, is whether a given difference in mean signal is really due to a stronger BOLD response (vs. noise). But that's what statistics are for. So a comparison of this kind is not necessarily meaningless.
Second, anyone who's both done science and read science reporting knows that the quality of science reporting in the popular media is disturbingly bad. Supposedly reputable publications routinely get the basic facts and implications associated with studies wrong. Reporters frequently approach stories with ideas about what they'd like to write and set about collecting material that supports their story. So I'd be very reluctant to criticize a study based on anything short of a full-length article in a refereed journal. (I don't think this work has come out yet.)
Incidentally, at my institution, the hardest part about getting BOLD data on short notice is that you have zero chance of getting IRB approval in that time frame. Slapping together an experiment with someone resting vs. reading vs. watching a movie would be a minor hassle, but collecting and crunching through the data from one subject would be no big deal.
Part of the reason people don't do this is because if you want to understand something that is, as you say, "pretty straightforward in most cases," a nice summary is much more useful than plowing through law school curriculum, a process that could easily take many years for someone who is also trying to earn a living writing. I do like the idea of consulting a law review, if it's easy to find good reviews that will bring a layperson up to speed on the basics in a given area. But although I agree that treating the newspaper and web sites as sources for legal education is not generally a good idea, that's why the authors of this book wrote a book. It may not have been subject to the same kind of review as an article in a law review, but it's also more likely to cover the material in a way that will be useful to non-lawyers. (Whether or not this book succeeds at that, I don't know.)
I'm not sure how you can say on the one hand that basically all legal web sites are garbage and on the other hand that people should seek out law school curricula to educate themselves. As far as I can tell, a large proportion of the reputable web sites concerning IP law are hosted by universities. At least that's true of nearly all of the ones I've been steered towards, I assume that's a fair sample. Is your point that we should consult the primary sources these web sites list as part of their curricula, but not the other content at those same sites?
It's also possible the FBI called you to try to sort this out, you said something like "Aieee!" and they mistook the sound for a modem.
More seriously, I doubt the justice department would balk at any ridiculous overextension of this or any other statute if they decided they needed a reporter's notes or email. I guess that's already been demonstrated. So at that level I think your concern is justified, and not even so hypothetical. At the same time, it seems unlikely they'd press it if NYT lawyers got involved. (And it seems like they'd have to at some point.) Ultimately if push comes to shove they'll need the support of the courts, right?
Maybe a better hypothetical case would be a reporter working on behalf of an ISP. Our local cable company provides broadband and seems to have some sports news programming. It isn't too hard to imagine one of their reporters having notes on some kind of sports-related racketeering thing that the FBI would find interesting. Maybe it's happened already.
"At least in the UK, a limited company is a separate legal entity to whomever is in it, so one would imagine that if you do run an ISP, it would be set up as a limited company and thus stand on it's own."
Of course, if your ISP is really just a mailing list, and your other business is just a column that you write, would you really have legal entities set up? Actually, I'm in that position, and I've never set up businesses for either. Maybe I should. I'm no Declan McCullagh, though.
"Especially for a country like the US, that likes unambiguous laws."
I think you meant to say "that would probably like unambiguous laws if we knew where to get some."
The relevant code describes "A provider of wire or electronic communication services or a remote computing service." Does that describe Declan? If it comes to that, only the courts can provide the legal answer. He does have a mailing list, so maybe so (somehow that factoid didn't make it into his column).
I don't know how far the reach of the relevant code extends. If I run an ISP and an ice cream store, can they subpoena records from my store? What if it's an ISP and a computer repair service? Anyway, it probably doesn't matter that much. If the justice department decided that under some other bit of code he was an "exotic dancer," and could find a court to agree, he would be an exotic dancer for all practical purposes.
Of course I'm not a lawyer. Nothing in this message should be misconstrued as legal advice or information. Actually, I'm against misconstrual in general.
I'm afraid it's the other way around - the kilo prefix was in use long before the CS people got their hands on it. The hard drive manufacturers are entirely correct - kilo=10^3 - while it's the OS and software programmers who decided that kilo=2^10. They're the ones that have redefined the term "kilo".
I can't imagine what you're saying is "the other way around." I certainly didn't either state or imply that any rational person thinks the sense used by programmers preceded the other sense of the kilo prefix. If there's something in my last post I did get backwards, let me know and I'll retract it.
I did point out that in the context of computer storage, kilo is used almost invariably to mean 1024, and has for at least as long as I've been alive. In other contexts kilo means 1000. This is obviously true, and I hope not in dispute. The fact that the computer sense was appropriated from a real world meaning of the prefix doesn't make it incorrect usage, just new usage.
The hard drive manufacturers are absolutely not correct, unless you arbitrarily decide that the first meaning ever used for a term is the correct one for ever after. Of course that would be ludicrous, and would render virtually everything written in modern English unintelligible. In fact, everyone with the least bit of familiarity with computers knows that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes and a kilogram is 1000 grams. This is true regardless of how the prefix "kilo" has been used historically for the past thousand years or so. The fact that hard drive manufacturers figured out they can report bigger drive sizes if they use the prefixes in an inappropriate sense doesn't make them technically correct. It makes them dishonest.
The fact that "programmers" have redefined some terms likewise doesn't make those new meanings less correct. These new meanings have been used consistently and exclusively for a long time now (when used to refer to storage). We can argue about whether or not it was a good idea to use existing terms with numerically close but different meanings. It doesn't bother me, but I can appreciate the other view. But clearly a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, regardless of how attached you are to the original use of the prefix. If you wander around in the world assuming that every time someone talks about a kilobyte they mean 1000 bytes, you are simply going to be wrong very close to 100% of the time.
Also, the point of my post wasn't pedantic - rather it was to point out that while in the limited and tiny world of programmers, kilo=2^10 might be well accepted, but in the much larger world of consumers, kilo=10^3, and always has. The hard drive manufacturers didn't come along and redefine the term - they're using it properly.
This is just plain incorrect. The hard drive manufacturers are taking advantage of the fact that kilo has a different meaning in a different context and using that meaning in a computer storage context. If they were describing the weight of their drives, kilo=1000 would be correct. For capacity, it's not.
This argument it patently bizarre. Clearly you're aware of the fact that hard drive documentation is computer-related. And clearly you're aware that in the context of computer storage, kilo is used to mean 1024. In what sense then is using kilo to mean 1000 (or giga to mean 10^9) in a computer storage context proper or correct? Only a pedantic one.
"Really? I want to know what high school you took physics at."
I just can't believe this is a sincere reply, but I'll clarify for the truly dense. I'm not talking about physics, I'm talking about computer storage. Many many natural language words have multiple meanings in different contexts. Sometimes closely related meanings. I'm not saying I was raised to believe that "giga" or "kilo" always refer to numbers that are powers of two. I'm claiming that that's the sense I was raised to use when they're used in computer contexts. This would be no less true if "giga" were commonly used in botany to mean 950 and in cooking to mean 800. If hard drive manufacturers released hard drives measured in cooking gigas, I would be completely justified in complaining. In fact, they've used these terms in senses that are probably perfectly valid in botany, mileposts, and physics. But not in computer storage. I was raised like anyone fluent in a natural language to understand terms in context. In this context, yes, I was of course raised to understand kilo- as 1024. If you weren't, then it's not a credit to your physics education, it's a sad commentary on your computer education.
In the same way, if I tell you that I was raised to understand the term "drive" to be some kind of computer storage device, it would just be pointlessly pedantic to reply sarcastically that you want to know where I learned to operate motor vehicles.
More to the point, I can't believe you're sincerely arguing that hard drive manufacturers can accurately describe the sizes of their drives using the kilo=1000 metrics just because in some other context that's correct. This kind of argument has some purely legalistic appeal, but no value beyond that. If you advertise something as a kilogram, it better be 1000 grams. If you advertise something as a kilobyte it better be 1024 bytes. Anything else is either ignorance or willful deception. And that's true no matter how bad my high school physics was.
I don't know the etymology all that well, but let's say you're right -- the only reason we use kilo for 1024 is because some geek thought it would be cool. Fine. Whatever geek that was, it was many years ago, let's say at least 30, and today it's the most common sense of kilo used in connection with computers, period. If the hard drive manufacturers are being technically correct according to the definition of giga intended by the original caveman who first grunted that sound, that has no bearing on whether or not they're acting deceptively. The truth is they're describing their hard drives using units that are just plain not used, ever, in connection with computers. To people who care (a ridiculously small minority), that's a deceptive practice, and one that anyone with the least familiarity with computers would be well aware is deceptive.
The only relevant issue is the meaning of words like kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte. Wiebe describes how you can arrive at two different answers for drive capacity depending on how you define the word "gigabyte," but does so completely uncritically. For example, he describes the drive manufacturer logic and writes that "the drive's claim of 123.5 GB is verified with this simple mathematical formula." But the issue is what the word "gigabyte" means, and the formula presented sheds no light on the word's conventional usage or etymology. I personally was raised to use these terms to correspond the numbers that are powers of two. Wiebe doesn't give me any point of reference to shed light on whether it's reasonable to use the meanings drive manufacturers do. (Of course I already know the answer, but that's beside the point.)
Wiebe uses some other odd logic, exemplified in point 3.7. He writes that the consumer was never cheated, because a drive advertised as having a capacity of 123.5GB had just that in "decimal based" capacity. This is a bizarre way to characterize the complaints. Consumers who believe they were cheated aren't claiming they didn't get 123.5GB for any definition of the word gigabyte. They're claiming they didn't get 123.5GB by the conventional definition of the word as commonly used in connection with computers. In my view, they're right, although I don't personally get too upset about it.
NDAs are probably most useful in a society in which just about anything, no matter how trivial or obvious, can be patented. That seems like about where we are right now.
The possibility of functional structure, look and feel, algorithms, ideas (obvious and otherwise), and other such things being granted copyright protection is particularly upsetting in light of the fact that the US government seems inclined to grant basically unlimited copyright protection. Patent protection, right or wrong, is at least still something that we can reasonably expect to expire during the lifetime of someone now living. One unfortunate copyright ruling could take something of value out of circulation for a century or more.
I have my domains with register.com, even though I have at least five sd more computer knowledge than your average AOL user. The cost is completely insignificant to me, basically equivalent to being free, so there's no monetary incentive not to, even though other registrars may be cheaper. One of the reasons I used them originally was because I thought a popular and widely used registrar would be less likely to engage in monkey business if someone else wanted to slip them a few thousand dollars to find some kind of imaginary flaw in my renewal. I don't really know if this is a concern, although I do have one domain that people would be happy to steal. My unfounded intuition is that register.com has more of a business to protect than some of the cheaper registrars.
"The open v/s closed source nature of your project should be pretty irrelevant to your research proposal."
Lots of funding agencies have reasons to want to fund open source or free software. Government agencies, NIH Institutes and Offices for example, aren't generally concerned with the software being sold for profit. They're concerned with the software being demonstrably useful in promoting public health and basic medical research. Preferably the kind of demonstrable utility that looks good in the annual report and that will help demonstrate why they deserve a bigger slice of the extramural funding pie next year.
Although licensing is liable to be only a small part of a proposal, it can be an important one. If that's the most innovative part of your project, it's your responsibility (to whoever reviews your proposal) to make it as clear as possible why the licensing terms are so important. (Of course, if you find this step difficult, then you need to step back and re-think the proposal.)
One example I'm familiar with is the NIH Office on Neuroinformatics (no link provided, I don't want to Slashdot my funding agency!) supports the development of software for things like brain imaging and databasing. Their funded projects include lots of open source and GPLed projects, some directed by Slashdot readers (well, at least one). I don't know of any place where you can find successful applications, but you can at least browse some project descriptions.
This is just one example, I'm sure there are many others even just at the NIH (incl. at the new NIBIB).
Government influence over software isn't likely to work by government heavies leaning on you to make your software do this or that. It's much more likely to work by the government deciding to fund the people who do what they want, and not to fund others. If what you want to do isn't in line with what the government wants, you probably weren't going to get funded anyway. If it is, it's hard to imagine the government investing heavily in micro-managing your project.
The US, through the NIH (Dept. HHS), funds software development projects, some of which are free (GPLed) software projects. NIH funding comes to researchers through a variety of mechanisms, including specific requests for proposals, and often through programs devoted to particular public health related goals. Fundees are often at Universities and sometimes have the freedom to release their software under whatever licenses they choose.
I don't want to Slashdot the particular office that funds my work, but if you poke around on the NIH web site (www.nih.gov) for informatics-related programs, you can find some good examples of programs that fund software development. If you poke further, you'll find that some of those projects develop GPLed software.
I don't know that this is the ultimate expression of a government supporting free software as a public good, but it's certainly an area in which you'll find examples of government-funded free software that's designed to promote public health and/or basic science.
You're partly right. No-limit hold'em is about things like bluffing. The kinds of poker most people play in public cardrooms (mostly limit hold'em and stud) are more about the cards, although understanding your opponents is critical to doing well at either one. Either way, online poker has a lot to offer. It's still about understanding your opponents, you just don't get as much information by way of physical behavior. There are tons of bad players online -- players who make fundamental mistakes (i.e., don't play their cards well) and who don't adjust to their opponents well (both in failing to take proper advantage and in playing easily exploited strategies). It's true that the game isn't the same at all. But many of the differences are positive, and like live poker, it's still a game of skill (a fact that's well obscured by short-term variance).
(Blatant plug: I'm a little biased, the new edition of my book ("Serious Poker," an introduction to the serious game) has a chapter on online poker. But I do believe online poker has a lot to offer, and the sites do offer poker for play money as well.)
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I don't believe more data storage may or may not be a bad thing. Although you write that "in fact" it's bad, actually this is your opinion, not an established fact, and certainly not a point of consensus among people who are intimately familiar with the common points you raise.
More storage capacity can create some problems, and the ones you describe are among them. It also solves some problems, among which are problems that have held back basic scientific and medical research, as well as other fields that some people consider useful.
Just to address a few points:
Increased storage capacity can lead to a decrease in average data quality, not the total amount of quality data. So this only renders data useless if you have no way of finding just the data you want, or if you feel obligated to use all of it. In the rare cases that meet these criteria, having smaller storage doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem logically impossible to solve rather than logistically (because the data are gone, not just hard to find).
I find the argument that data will continue to grow fast enough to fill available storage unconvincing. The amount of storage I have now is much more than I had 20 years ago. Just like 20 years ago, I could probably use more disk space, so you're right in that sense. But I'm able to do many more things with that disk space now, like storing music, video, and data for my research. It's not that the same things I was doing before are now taking up more space. It's that the bigger disks I have now have made it possible to store much more of the data I would like to keep. Sure, digital pictures and movies keep sucking up more space. But that's a huge benefit of bigger storage. Right now I'm throwing away a lot of data I'd rather keep, in part because of storage (and in part because my current cameras have sensors that aren't up to it). I really do want these data, and bigger storage is critical to making it possible for me to keep them. The amount of storage I have could easily grow by two or three orders of magnitude without making it the least bit more difficult for me to index my data.
Lastly, I doubt that data storage is the limiting factor in shepherding us towards an Orwellian future. A few gigabytes of storage for everyone in this country seems like a good start. Mining that data will be difficult. Yet I doubt the mining difficulties are seen by the relevant people as a reason why more storage would be bad.
In short, I agree that dealing with large amounts of data can be difficult in some cases. I don't agree that it's bad for society.
"Those of us who live by algorithms should recognize that there are some sorts of human creative intelligence which cannot be captured by formulas, or replaced by them (see physicist Roger Penrose's books on this)."
I'm not sure what you mean by "formulas," but if you mean there are kinds of intelligence which machines will never achieve, this is a very odd comment. Certainly there is not widespread agreement on this subject (about which hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written), even among fairly intelligent people who all have access to the same information. It's simply not a settled issue in any useful sense. I believe the opposite of what you believe, and I believe it as strongly as you do. But at the same time, I recognize that neither of us can really argue our cases without resorting to hand waving at some level. Roger Penrose is in the same position, although he can shout a little louder due to his bigger soapbox.
"If something like this firm's algorithm is really accurate, it should be possible to evolve a neural net to compose pop songs simply by having the success of its efforts defined by feedback from the formula. Would you find living in that world inspiring?"
We already live in that world, essentially. The most popular, widely-played music today is nothing if not formulaic. I'm sure at some level the record companies are doing more or less what you describe, although the occasional bit of good music slips by. I don't find this state of affairs inspiring, but fortunately the growth of the internet is making it easier to find alternatives.
dan
"Is some company storing their copyrighted material in my garage now?"
If so, that makes your garage door a copy protection technology, and your garage door opener a device for circumventing it. Every time you park you violate the DMCA.
It's easy to mistakenly believe that anyone who criticized a divergence from the books thinks movies (or at least these movies) should be literal translations of the original sources. I think that far more often, the criticism is simply that among the enormous numer of translation decisions the filmmaker has to make, one or two were errors. I have zero knowledge of filmmaking, but it only takes a miniscule bit of common sense to appreciate that books can't generally be made into films by 1:1 translation.
I think Peter Jackson overall has exhibited a mind bogglingly deft touch in adapting material to which many people feel very close. But legitimate criticism is possible, even if there's no obvious way to solve certain problems. It's hard to believe Jackson doesn't himself have some reservations about the various cuts of the films. But you can't tinker forever, and you can't go back and work material into movies that have already been released.
In this case, I suspect if he could go back and adjust things a bit, he'd find a way to squeeze the confrontation scene into the second movie, at least into the extended version. It has a worthwhile dramatic impact in the book, and it can be included while still omitting the later shire scenes. It facilitates a potentially very cinematic scene later with the palantir, and gives both Lee and Dourif more screen time. Functionally, it brings Saruman's role in the movie to what feels to me like a more decisive (or at least more personal) end. I can imagine places for cuts, too, but that's another discussion.
I have a concern about the use of charts that parallels concerns about using statistics. Either, poorly done, can be misleading. But the real problem is in the illusion that ordinary, average people can be expected to make sense of either charts or statistics. I may present a graph or statistical test that really does demonstrate what I claim it does (within the limits of what's afforded by my data). It's still at some level irresponsible of me to present this to people who I know are not able to evaluate whether or not I've done things right. Although they may not be misled by my data, the mode of argumentation isn't the actual weight of evidence (which I know quite well they probably can't evaluate for even the most basic errors), but more the apparent weight of evidence. This is a potentially harmful way to go about conducting public debate.
I think Tufte's advice is well taken, but I don't see an obvious way around this problem. Doing things right seems of limited value if the real weight of your argument would be equally well captured with a simple "trust me." I'd feel better if there were ultimately some accounting, but there never seems to be.
Here's a shocker: Strauss's mode of argumentation is sarcasm. He's an astonishingly inept writer, so it's not even particularly well crafted sarcasm. I don't know if this is because his understanding of the subject matter is negligible or if it's because he thought this would be the best way to make his nebulous point, but it seems sort of wasteful to engage him in any sort of debate (with or without his participation). There may be smarter and more articulate people who share his views, and it would be much more worthwhile to find them and have an intelligent discussion than it would be to waste time debunking the content implied by his article.
A few points here are worth clarifying. First, certainly you can have a stronger fMRI (i.e., BOLD) response in one stimulus condition vs. another. What you can't know for certain, generally, is whether a given difference in mean signal is really due to a stronger BOLD response (vs. noise). But that's what statistics are for. So a comparison of this kind is not necessarily meaningless.
Second, anyone who's both done science and read science reporting knows that the quality of science reporting in the popular media is disturbingly bad. Supposedly reputable publications routinely get the basic facts and implications associated with studies wrong. Reporters frequently approach stories with ideas about what they'd like to write and set about collecting material that supports their story. So I'd be very reluctant to criticize a study based on anything short of a full-length article in a refereed journal. (I don't think this work has come out yet.)
Incidentally, at my institution, the hardest part about getting BOLD data on short notice is that you have zero chance of getting IRB approval in that time frame. Slapping together an experiment with someone resting vs. reading vs. watching a movie would be a minor hassle, but collecting and crunching through the data from one subject would be no big deal.
Part of the reason people don't do this is because if you want to understand something that is, as you say, "pretty straightforward in most cases," a nice summary is much more useful than plowing through law school curriculum, a process that could easily take many years for someone who is also trying to earn a living writing. I do like the idea of consulting a law review, if it's easy to find good reviews that will bring a layperson up to speed on the basics in a given area. But although I agree that treating the newspaper and web sites as sources for legal education is not generally a good idea, that's why the authors of this book wrote a book. It may not have been subject to the same kind of review as an article in a law review, but it's also more likely to cover the material in a way that will be useful to non-lawyers. (Whether or not this book succeeds at that, I don't know.)
I'm not sure how you can say on the one hand that basically all legal web sites are garbage and on the other hand that people should seek out law school curricula to educate themselves. As far as I can tell, a large proportion of the reputable web sites concerning IP law are hosted by universities. At least that's true of nearly all of the ones I've been steered towards, I assume that's a fair sample. Is your point that we should consult the primary sources these web sites list as part of their curricula, but not the other content at those same sites?
It's also possible the FBI called you to try to sort this out, you said something like "Aieee!" and they mistook the sound for a modem.
More seriously, I doubt the justice department would balk at any ridiculous overextension of this or any other statute if they decided they needed a reporter's notes or email. I guess that's already been demonstrated. So at that level I think your concern is justified, and not even so hypothetical. At the same time, it seems unlikely they'd press it if NYT lawyers got involved. (And it seems like they'd have to at some point.) Ultimately if push comes to shove they'll need the support of the courts, right?
Maybe a better hypothetical case would be a reporter working on behalf of an ISP. Our local cable company provides broadband and seems to have some sports news programming. It isn't too hard to imagine one of their reporters having notes on some kind of sports-related racketeering thing that the FBI would find interesting. Maybe it's happened already.
"At least in the UK, a limited company is a separate legal entity to whomever is in it, so one would imagine that if you do run an ISP, it would be set up as a limited company and thus stand on it's own."
Of course, if your ISP is really just a mailing list, and your other business is just a column that you write, would you really have legal entities set up? Actually, I'm in that position, and I've never set up businesses for either. Maybe I should. I'm no Declan McCullagh, though.
"Especially for a country like the US, that likes unambiguous laws."
I think you meant to say "that would probably like unambiguous laws if we knew where to get some."
The relevant code describes "A provider of wire or electronic communication services or a remote computing service." Does that describe Declan? If it comes to that, only the courts can provide the legal answer. He does have a mailing list, so maybe so (somehow that factoid didn't make it into his column).
I don't know how far the reach of the relevant code extends. If I run an ISP and an ice cream store, can they subpoena records from my store? What if it's an ISP and a computer repair service? Anyway, it probably doesn't matter that much. If the justice department decided that under some other bit of code he was an "exotic dancer," and could find a court to agree, he would be an exotic dancer for all practical purposes.
Of course I'm not a lawyer. Nothing in this message should be misconstrued as legal advice or information. Actually, I'm against misconstrual in general.
I can't imagine what you're saying is "the other way around." I certainly didn't either state or imply that any rational person thinks the sense used by programmers preceded the other sense of the kilo prefix. If there's something in my last post I did get backwards, let me know and I'll retract it.
I did point out that in the context of computer storage, kilo is used almost invariably to mean 1024, and has for at least as long as I've been alive. In other contexts kilo means 1000. This is obviously true, and I hope not in dispute. The fact that the computer sense was appropriated from a real world meaning of the prefix doesn't make it incorrect usage, just new usage.
The hard drive manufacturers are absolutely not correct, unless you arbitrarily decide that the first meaning ever used for a term is the correct one for ever after. Of course that would be ludicrous, and would render virtually everything written in modern English unintelligible. In fact, everyone with the least bit of familiarity with computers knows that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes and a kilogram is 1000 grams. This is true regardless of how the prefix "kilo" has been used historically for the past thousand years or so. The fact that hard drive manufacturers figured out they can report bigger drive sizes if they use the prefixes in an inappropriate sense doesn't make them technically correct. It makes them dishonest.
The fact that "programmers" have redefined some terms likewise doesn't make those new meanings less correct. These new meanings have been used consistently and exclusively for a long time now (when used to refer to storage). We can argue about whether or not it was a good idea to use existing terms with numerically close but different meanings. It doesn't bother me, but I can appreciate the other view. But clearly a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, regardless of how attached you are to the original use of the prefix. If you wander around in the world assuming that every time someone talks about a kilobyte they mean 1000 bytes, you are simply going to be wrong very close to 100% of the time.
This is just plain incorrect. The hard drive manufacturers are taking advantage of the fact that kilo has a different meaning in a different context and using that meaning in a computer storage context. If they were describing the weight of their drives, kilo=1000 would be correct. For capacity, it's not.
This argument it patently bizarre. Clearly you're aware of the fact that hard drive documentation is computer-related. And clearly you're aware that in the context of computer storage, kilo is used to mean 1024. In what sense then is using kilo to mean 1000 (or giga to mean 10^9) in a computer storage context proper or correct? Only a pedantic one.
"Really? I want to know what high school you took physics at."
I just can't believe this is a sincere reply, but I'll clarify for the truly dense. I'm not talking about physics, I'm talking about computer storage. Many many natural language words have multiple meanings in different contexts. Sometimes closely related meanings. I'm not saying I was raised to believe that "giga" or "kilo" always refer to numbers that are powers of two. I'm claiming that that's the sense I was raised to use when they're used in computer contexts. This would be no less true if "giga" were commonly used in botany to mean 950 and in cooking to mean 800. If hard drive manufacturers released hard drives measured in cooking gigas, I would be completely justified in complaining. In fact, they've used these terms in senses that are probably perfectly valid in botany, mileposts, and physics. But not in computer storage. I was raised like anyone fluent in a natural language to understand terms in context. In this context, yes, I was of course raised to understand kilo- as 1024. If you weren't, then it's not a credit to your physics education, it's a sad commentary on your computer education.
In the same way, if I tell you that I was raised to understand the term "drive" to be some kind of computer storage device, it would just be pointlessly pedantic to reply sarcastically that you want to know where I learned to operate motor vehicles.
More to the point, I can't believe you're sincerely arguing that hard drive manufacturers can accurately describe the sizes of their drives using the kilo=1000 metrics just because in some other context that's correct. This kind of argument has some purely legalistic appeal, but no value beyond that. If you advertise something as a kilogram, it better be 1000 grams. If you advertise something as a kilobyte it better be 1024 bytes. Anything else is either ignorance or willful deception. And that's true no matter how bad my high school physics was.
I don't know the etymology all that well, but let's say you're right -- the only reason we use kilo for 1024 is because some geek thought it would be cool. Fine. Whatever geek that was, it was many years ago, let's say at least 30, and today it's the most common sense of kilo used in connection with computers, period. If the hard drive manufacturers are being technically correct according to the definition of giga intended by the original caveman who first grunted that sound, that has no bearing on whether or not they're acting deceptively. The truth is they're describing their hard drives using units that are just plain not used, ever, in connection with computers. To people who care (a ridiculously small minority), that's a deceptive practice, and one that anyone with the least familiarity with computers would be well aware is deceptive.
The only relevant issue is the meaning of words like kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte. Wiebe describes how you can arrive at two different answers for drive capacity depending on how you define the word "gigabyte," but does so completely uncritically. For example, he describes the drive manufacturer logic and writes that "the drive's claim of 123.5 GB is verified with this simple mathematical formula." But the issue is what the word "gigabyte" means, and the formula presented sheds no light on the word's conventional usage or etymology. I personally was raised to use these terms to correspond the numbers that are powers of two. Wiebe doesn't give me any point of reference to shed light on whether it's reasonable to use the meanings drive manufacturers do. (Of course I already know the answer, but that's beside the point.)
Wiebe uses some other odd logic, exemplified in point 3.7. He writes that the consumer was never cheated, because a drive advertised as having a capacity of 123.5GB had just that in "decimal based" capacity. This is a bizarre way to characterize the complaints. Consumers who believe they were cheated aren't claiming they didn't get 123.5GB for any definition of the word gigabyte. They're claiming they didn't get 123.5GB by the conventional definition of the word as commonly used in connection with computers. In my view, they're right, although I don't personally get too upset about it.
"Patents are public disclosures. Having an NDA to discuss a patent is an oxymoron."
Which explains why you're the first person ever to have raised this possibility!
NDAs are probably most useful in a society in which just about anything, no matter how trivial or obvious, can be patented. That seems like about where we are right now.
The possibility of functional structure, look and feel, algorithms, ideas (obvious and otherwise), and other such things being granted copyright protection is particularly upsetting in light of the fact that the US government seems inclined to grant basically unlimited copyright protection. Patent protection, right or wrong, is at least still something that we can reasonably expect to expire during the lifetime of someone now living. One unfortunate copyright ruling could take something of value out of circulation for a century or more.
I have my domains with register.com, even though I have at least five sd more computer knowledge than your average AOL user. The cost is completely insignificant to me, basically equivalent to being free, so there's no monetary incentive not to, even though other registrars may be cheaper. One of the reasons I used them originally was because I thought a popular and widely used registrar would be less likely to engage in monkey business if someone else wanted to slip them a few thousand dollars to find some kind of imaginary flaw in my renewal. I don't really know if this is a concern, although I do have one domain that people would be happy to steal. My unfounded intuition is that register.com has more of a business to protect than some of the cheaper registrars.
"The open v/s closed source nature of your project should be pretty irrelevant to your research proposal."
Lots of funding agencies have reasons to want to fund open source or free software. Government agencies, NIH Institutes and Offices for example, aren't generally concerned with the software being sold for profit. They're concerned with the software being demonstrably useful in promoting public health and basic medical research. Preferably the kind of demonstrable utility that looks good in the annual report and that will help demonstrate why they deserve a bigger slice of the extramural funding pie next year.
Although licensing is liable to be only a small part of a proposal, it can be an important one. If that's the most innovative part of your project, it's your responsibility (to whoever reviews your proposal) to make it as clear as possible why the licensing terms are so important. (Of course, if you find this step difficult, then you need to step back and re-think the proposal.)
One example I'm familiar with is the NIH Office on Neuroinformatics (no link provided, I don't want to Slashdot my funding agency!) supports the development of software for things like brain imaging and databasing. Their funded projects include lots of open source and GPLed projects, some directed by Slashdot readers (well, at least one). I don't know of any place where you can find successful applications, but you can at least browse some project descriptions.
This is just one example, I'm sure there are many others even just at the NIH (incl. at the new NIBIB).
Government influence over software isn't likely to work by government heavies leaning on you to make your software do this or that. It's much more likely to work by the government deciding to fund the people who do what they want, and not to fund others. If what you want to do isn't in line with what the government wants, you probably weren't going to get funded anyway. If it is, it's hard to imagine the government investing heavily in micro-managing your project.
The US, through the NIH (Dept. HHS), funds software development projects, some of which are free (GPLed) software projects. NIH funding comes to researchers through a variety of mechanisms, including specific requests for proposals, and often through programs devoted to particular public health related goals. Fundees are often at Universities and sometimes have the freedom to release their software under whatever licenses they choose.
I don't want to Slashdot the particular office that funds my work, but if you poke around on the NIH web site (www.nih.gov) for informatics-related programs, you can find some good examples of programs that fund software development. If you poke further, you'll find that some of those projects develop GPLed software.
I don't know that this is the ultimate expression of a government supporting free software as a public good, but it's certainly an area in which you'll find examples of government-funded free software that's designed to promote public health and/or basic science.
The author uses the term "scalability" to mean something like forward compatibility for hardware. Seems like an odd lapse.
You're partly right. No-limit hold'em is about things like bluffing. The kinds of poker most people play in public cardrooms (mostly limit hold'em and stud) are more about the cards, although understanding your opponents is critical to doing well at either one. Either way, online poker has a lot to offer. It's still about understanding your opponents, you just don't get as much information by way of physical behavior. There are tons of bad players online -- players who make fundamental mistakes (i.e., don't play their cards well) and who don't adjust to their opponents well (both in failing to take proper advantage and in playing easily exploited strategies). It's true that the game isn't the same at all. But many of the differences are positive, and like live poker, it's still a game of skill (a fact that's well obscured by short-term variance).
(Blatant plug: I'm a little biased, the new edition of my book ("Serious Poker," an introduction to the serious game) has a chapter on online poker. But I do believe online poker has a lot to offer, and the sites do offer poker for play money as well.)