I don't know that there's a real good guy in this story, but I'm going to nominate the lawyer, Sullivan, who in a paragraph that tragically has no direct quote, describes student note-taking as "protected infringement" (I'm quoting the article, possibly not Sullivan). I liked this phrase a lot, but I wanted to google it, in case it turns out to be some kind of standard legalese. No, it seems like Sullivan just about has it all to himself, if he in fact said it.
A quick skim, and I didn't see any details on the false alarm rate of this method, or any detail on how a user could log in with a broken (or severely papercut!) finger. Or when breaking in a new keyoard. It would certainly be a fatal problem for this method if it would lock out users who for whatever reason have their timings temporarily altered. It would also be a pretty fatal flaw if it turns out there's a substantial false alarm rate.
On the whole I agree with you, but let me mention two issues. First, advertising doesn't have to be effective on everyone to be worthwhile. The fact that advertisers find their methods effective would in no way be inconsistent with there being a few thousand Slashdot readers who truly are not affected by advertising. It would be in no way inconsistent with three quarters of the population being unmoved by advertising. Second, I think you're giving advertisers too much credit. Admittedly, I don't have an insider's view. But from the limited glimpses I've had, stories from people in market research and such, if your a priori belief is that something is 50% likely to be true, and some intensive market research by a team of highly skilled researchers and statisticians says it's a dead solid fact, you should up that to about 50.01%. So I don't necessarily assume that just because some industry has dropped a few billion dollars on an advertising campaign that it's really based on solid reason to believe it will have the effect they want.
It's very easy to imagine neuromarketing getting big, and since I know a bit about fMRI, I'll be in a better position to know if what these people are doing makes any sense. So far it doesn't look good for them.
I have a little bit of expertise in telling the difference between what you can and can't tell with BOLD fMRI, and on the whole you're right -- the neuromarketers aren't exactly selling snake oil, but they're probably not discouraging their customers from developing an inflated view of what you can and can't learn from it.
I don't know how bad you can feel about MRI scanners getting tied up for advertising "research." It's really just money, and MRI scanners are way at the bottom of the list of things wasted on advertisers. Oxygen would be at the top of my list.
Card counting is also way overhyped in terms of the brilliance of its practitioners. Sure, it takes some insight to come up with the idea of card counting, and somewhat less insight to come up with a new, useful, card counting system. So we're talking about a handful of people in those clubs. And it takes some imagination, if not technical genius, to circumvent the defenses casinos have put in place, handle the logistics, etc., so I'll give someone a little bit of credit for that. The rest of the people involved, like most of the people in Mezrich's books, are sheep. The fact that Mezrich hypes the genius of the team members so relentlessly (at least in Bringing Down the House) is just a form of dishonesty. They may each have been brilliant in some way, but the kind of brilliance involved in card counting is more akin to assembly line work than higher mathematics. Einstein mowing the lawn. Unfortunately, this kind of dishonesty is readily propagated, because the reality is not as sexy (metaphorically speaking) as a team of super-geniuses led by a super-super-genius mastermind.
Incidentally, while it's true that the edges are narrow, another reason card counting is tough is because casinos do things to the rules and procedures to make it unprofitable. I think shuffling machines are a big culprit. With many decks and poor penetration, it's an uphill battle even before you consider the half dozen rules that might be set the wrong way. Not to mention the fact that at least in Las Vegas, they can kick you out if your betting patterns are too obvious. Last I heard, most of the effort in beating blackjack was related to finding good games before they went away. That's also something that doesn't take a super-genius, it takes someone who's good with a cell phone.
Fortunately, it looks like many of the companies making LED bulbs are not the same companies making incandescents and CFLs. They will do good business replacing incandescents for the next 50 years, and they will do plenty of business replacing bulbs for people who want better bulbs, even though the old ones work fine, as the technology improves (and the cost declines). They may eventually have to get creative about finding new ways to sell bulbs to people who already have them, but posters to this thread have already come up with some terrific ideas.
As long as we're hijacking a thread on mercury in CFLs to tout the promise of LEDs, someone should mention heat output. LED bulbs apparently generate much less heat than incandescents or CFLs, which makes them safer.
I'm personally intrigued by the GeoBulb described on the C Crane web site. I know nothing about the company, except that they google well for LED bulbs. This forthcoming bulb has promising specs (approx. 800 lumens).
Ben Goldacre, who writes a regular column on bad science for the Guardian on bad science wrote a great column about this once, in which he pointed out the obvious-in-retrospect: science journalists don't have science backgrounds. He regularly takes on both bad science and bad science reporting, and his blog/column is a lot of fun to read. Fun in a deeply disturbing way.
The one startling regularity I have noticed across all science reporting is that the more I know about the subject area, the more misleading the article seems. It seems clear this pattern can't be completely limited to science reporting. I cut popular media a lot of slack in terms of glossing over details and simplifying for a popular audience. But the distortions I see are more often fundamentally misleading about the nature of the work and the details that are relevant to the story. Disturbingly, I'm still tempted to believe some of what I read in areas about which I know little. Even more disturbing, I find this mode of reporting seeping into the scientific articles I read and review. I guess this saves the reporters the trouble, but points out one of the many problems with science reporting done by people who have no ability to read science critically.
The one time I was interviewed about my work, I had the sense the reporter already had a story outlined, based on a science-fiction-y reading of the press release, and was basically fishing for quotes to add meat to the story.
I guess if someone were accusing me of something, and they told a judge that they had some top-secret trust-me evidence that proved my guilt, I'd have little choice but to introduce my own top-secret trust-me evidence. I'm pretty sure by the time I was done the RIAA would be implicated in the deaths of Jimmy Hoffa and JFK.
I went right to the section that looked like it might explain the considerations in choosing GPL license options (2 vs 3 vs 2 or later vs 3 or later vs LGPL, etc.), and found it very disappointing. The relevant section starts with a mention of the two versions (2 and 3), but then drifts off into vague generalities about how you should consider a version of the GPL if you want to take advantage of GPLed code. They don't even mention the important and difficult issues having to do with the emergence of GPLv3, but seem to assume that the GPL is the GPL.
Does this mean that xen will become subtly but increasingly unstable on the linux platform?
Does this mean that Microsoft is going to launch a virtualization patent army (of lawyers), forcing vmware to devote most of its resources to legal matters?
Ultimately, if a large enough organization wants to sue you for something, and they can build a big enough pile of garbage that makes it look plausible, it's going to cost you a boatload of money to prove otherwise, and you're going to be vulnerable to the vagaries of the legal system. At least in the US. The point of the article wasn't that you're actually liable to be sued for millions of dollars for forwarding email or reading poetry in class. It was more that the law, taken literally, is ridiculous (and the article made this point by actually ridiculing it). But I think there is still a valid point to be made about fair use. Although the article cited some scary case law, the truth is that most of these apparent copyright violations are at least meant to be covered under fair use. So I think your response is fairly incisive, but I would still argue that the article is misleading. The problem isn't copyright law so much as the fact that you can get seriously screwed obeying the law.
Current DVDs, at least those for popular new releases, tend to have 5+ uninterruptible previews/ads up front. I guess these new ones will be more intrusive, but cheaper. There are things to like about that, I guess. As long as they're starting down the road for tiered pricing, it would be nice if they could offer ad-free DVDs as well, a product that's not available for most titles now. For that matter, it would be nice if they offered extremely cheap DVDs with ads interrupting the movie every scene or so.
From the brief report, it sounds like any bug whatsoever would be sufficient to compromise any system. In the slightly more detailed version to which someone posted a link, you see that the vulnerability requires knowing of a pair of integers whose product is computed incorrectly. It also requires some more minor assumptions.
Alas, Shamir's post didn't clarify, at least to my undereducated ears, how the targeted machines are coerced into producing a reply. Do most machines have ports open that will engage in RSA-based dialogues?
You send the garbage back to the guy, saying, I couldn't read your message, all I got was this junk. While this could certainly happen, the brief reports I've seen suggest that the math error is in itself sufficient, you don't also need the targeted user to be incredibly stupid.
I was awesome at diameters in grade school, but no one ever told me there was a career path for "diameter scientists." This is easily the most exciting thing about this story, which if anything just tells us that it's a slow news day in the solar system.
I inhabit a planet circling a nearby "sun." Actually, we call our "sun" Sol, and we find it a little insulting that your SF writers have assumed the name was unclaimed. Stop it. We don't call our "moon" Luna, so you're safe there, but I have to say, on behalf of my people, that it sounds stupid, and "moon" wasn't taken anyway (we call our little satellite thing "Kodak"). There's lots of other stuff you guys have wrong, too, but here on our planet we're not really supposed to be reading Slashdot during work hours. Maybe I'll post from home later.
If you're committed to influencing elections, you can probably have more influence on elections, for the rest of your life, with the annual interest on $300,000, than you would with your single vote. And that leaves you $700,000 to play with. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
The user license is a little hard to interpret for those of us who don't speak legalese. Can someone help with the following bit:
2. The following copyright and trademark notice and these Terms and Conditions shall be included in all copies of one or more of the Font typefaces and any derivative work created as permitted under this License:... Does this apply to simply using the fonts in a document?
You obviously understand nothing about gambling. The way to make money here is not by betting on who's going to win. It's by taking advantage of the disparity in betting lines in the WTO-USA battle between Antigua and Las Vegas. For example, take bets from American bettors who think the US is going to win this fight, and place them in Antigua. (The line is only 6:5 in favor of the US here, because Americans want to bet US no matter what.)
Elements is about $100, not about $700. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for $100 you only get the right to run the current version on a single machine. Also, it only appears to work on a proprietary operating system, which may be a serious impediment for some.
chroot neither is nor isn't a security tool
on
When Not to Use chroot
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Any discussion that revolves around whether or not chroot "is a security tool" is just another one of those meaningless semantic merry-go-rounds, and will never accomplish anything. We know what chroot does, and we know what it doesn't do. Whether or not it's deemed to be an official card-carrying security tool, it's undeniable that there are cases where it's useful, and it's likely that there exist programs that (a) use chroot appropriately and (b) are less vulnerable as a result. I don't care if it's a security tool or not, I care if it provides functionality that will make my code do what I need, and one of my needs is security. I'll bet some very talented programmers also use the assignment operator ("=") in code that needs to be secure, and I'll bet it sometimes plays a role in the code's functionality, part of which is being secure. Is it a security tool? Who could possibly care?
Before I forget, let me refer you to Ben Goldacre's column and web site at badscience.net. In a column that I believe I found via a link on Slashdot, Goldacre points out that at a typical newspaper, virtually no one involved in science journalism has any science background. It shouldn't be hard to find the link.
That said, I think you're confusing things. Good science journalism is not the same thing as good science reporting. What you're doing, we hope, is good reporting of the science you've done. A journalist trying to write a popular article based on your scientific article is not responsible for understanding and reporting on every nuance of your work. The journalist is simply responsible for conveying, as accurately as possible, the nature and importance of your work. This should involve nothing more challenging than sitting down with you and having a detailed conversation, and later having you look at a draft of the article. I don't believe anything like this is the norm in science reporting.
One of my studies was reported in the local newspaper once. The reporter read a press release issued by my institution, written by someone with no science background, with whom I had had a very brief phone conversation. Based on this, the reporter came in with a story already in mind, collected quotes to give the story some apparent substance, and had it published without making even a superficial effort to have anyone with knowledge in the area sanity-check the story. The published story was written in such a way that anyone who read it would be less well informed afterwards than before. How could this process have been fixed? I'm capable of explaining my work accurately to a lay audience, and that includes any reporter with half a brain. But whatever the fix, we really don't need journalists to be able to understand scientific reports. We need them to be willing to talk to people who are capable of understanding those reports, and to find out from those people what the reports really mean.
When people express concern that the GPL may or may not be "upheld," I don't think they're really worried (or should be) that the GPL will be found to be null in the sense you're describing. The GPL conditionally grants certain rights that would otherwise be reserved for the copyright holder, and there's a valid concern that through some mechanism as yet unidentified, someone will claim to have been granted those rights without having agreed to the conditions in the way we all understand them. At this point, it seems like a farfetched possibility, but that would certainly be a more meaningful concern if a big company with deep pockets and fast-talking lawyers went to court to claim their right to use GPLed code inappropriately.
You write:
Tort exists precisely for the purpose of settling claims like this. and then later: stop bitching and let the judiciary do their job You should take your own advice. Instead of asserting that this is a legitimate use of tort law, how about you let the court system sort it out. A lot of Slashdot readers obviously believe that, contra your assertion, this is going to turn out to be a flagrant abuse of the tort system, not (as you claim) the kind of thing for which tort law was created. Nobody's complaining about tort law, that I've seen. I have seen many comments complaining about what looks like it could be an egregious abuse of tort law. I don't know which it is, but your post doesn't provide either evidence or argument, just a very hollow claim.
It sounds like you'd consider Russian Roulette a safe activity.
I don't disagree with your conclusion (that flying is safe, driving is less so), but if you want to move the discussion towards more quantitative arguments, you should make sure you use the right numbers. The percentage of accidental deaths caused by cars vs. planes tells me very little about their relative safety.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know that there's a real good guy in this story, but I'm going to nominate the lawyer, Sullivan, who in a paragraph that tragically has no direct quote, describes student note-taking as "protected infringement" (I'm quoting the article, possibly not Sullivan). I liked this phrase a lot, but I wanted to google it, in case it turns out to be some kind of standard legalese. No, it seems like Sullivan just about has it all to himself, if he in fact said it.
A quick skim, and I didn't see any details on the false alarm rate of this method, or any detail on how a user could log in with a broken (or severely papercut!) finger. Or when breaking in a new keyoard. It would certainly be a fatal problem for this method if it would lock out users who for whatever reason have their timings temporarily altered. It would also be a pretty fatal flaw if it turns out there's a substantial false alarm rate.
On the whole I agree with you, but let me mention two issues. First, advertising doesn't have to be effective on everyone to be worthwhile. The fact that advertisers find their methods effective would in no way be inconsistent with there being a few thousand Slashdot readers who truly are not affected by advertising. It would be in no way inconsistent with three quarters of the population being unmoved by advertising. Second, I think you're giving advertisers too much credit. Admittedly, I don't have an insider's view. But from the limited glimpses I've had, stories from people in market research and such, if your a priori belief is that something is 50% likely to be true, and some intensive market research by a team of highly skilled researchers and statisticians says it's a dead solid fact, you should up that to about 50.01%. So I don't necessarily assume that just because some industry has dropped a few billion dollars on an advertising campaign that it's really based on solid reason to believe it will have the effect they want.
It's very easy to imagine neuromarketing getting big, and since I know a bit about fMRI, I'll be in a better position to know if what these people are doing makes any sense. So far it doesn't look good for them.
I have a little bit of expertise in telling the difference between what you can and can't tell with BOLD fMRI, and on the whole you're right -- the neuromarketers aren't exactly selling snake oil, but they're probably not discouraging their customers from developing an inflated view of what you can and can't learn from it.
I don't know how bad you can feel about MRI scanners getting tied up for advertising "research." It's really just money, and MRI scanners are way at the bottom of the list of things wasted on advertisers. Oxygen would be at the top of my list.
Card counting is also way overhyped in terms of the brilliance of its practitioners. Sure, it takes some insight to come up with the idea of card counting, and somewhat less insight to come up with a new, useful, card counting system. So we're talking about a handful of people in those clubs. And it takes some imagination, if not technical genius, to circumvent the defenses casinos have put in place, handle the logistics, etc., so I'll give someone a little bit of credit for that. The rest of the people involved, like most of the people in Mezrich's books, are sheep. The fact that Mezrich hypes the genius of the team members so relentlessly (at least in Bringing Down the House) is just a form of dishonesty. They may each have been brilliant in some way, but the kind of brilliance involved in card counting is more akin to assembly line work than higher mathematics. Einstein mowing the lawn. Unfortunately, this kind of dishonesty is readily propagated, because the reality is not as sexy (metaphorically speaking) as a team of super-geniuses led by a super-super-genius mastermind.
Incidentally, while it's true that the edges are narrow, another reason card counting is tough is because casinos do things to the rules and procedures to make it unprofitable. I think shuffling machines are a big culprit. With many decks and poor penetration, it's an uphill battle even before you consider the half dozen rules that might be set the wrong way. Not to mention the fact that at least in Las Vegas, they can kick you out if your betting patterns are too obvious. Last I heard, most of the effort in beating blackjack was related to finding good games before they went away. That's also something that doesn't take a super-genius, it takes someone who's good with a cell phone.
Fortunately, it looks like many of the companies making LED bulbs are not the same companies making incandescents and CFLs. They will do good business replacing incandescents for the next 50 years, and they will do plenty of business replacing bulbs for people who want better bulbs, even though the old ones work fine, as the technology improves (and the cost declines). They may eventually have to get creative about finding new ways to sell bulbs to people who already have them, but posters to this thread have already come up with some terrific ideas.
As long as we're hijacking a thread on mercury in CFLs to tout the promise of LEDs, someone should mention heat output. LED bulbs apparently generate much less heat than incandescents or CFLs, which makes them safer.
I'm personally intrigued by the GeoBulb described on the C Crane web site. I know nothing about the company, except that they google well for LED bulbs. This forthcoming bulb has promising specs (approx. 800 lumens).
Ben Goldacre, who writes a regular column on bad science for the Guardian on bad science wrote a great column about this once, in which he pointed out the obvious-in-retrospect: science journalists don't have science backgrounds. He regularly takes on both bad science and bad science reporting, and his blog/column is a lot of fun to read. Fun in a deeply disturbing way.
The one startling regularity I have noticed across all science reporting is that the more I know about the subject area, the more misleading the article seems. It seems clear this pattern can't be completely limited to science reporting. I cut popular media a lot of slack in terms of glossing over details and simplifying for a popular audience. But the distortions I see are more often fundamentally misleading about the nature of the work and the details that are relevant to the story. Disturbingly, I'm still tempted to believe some of what I read in areas about which I know little. Even more disturbing, I find this mode of reporting seeping into the scientific articles I read and review. I guess this saves the reporters the trouble, but points out one of the many problems with science reporting done by people who have no ability to read science critically.
The one time I was interviewed about my work, I had the sense the reporter already had a story outlined, based on a science-fiction-y reading of the press release, and was basically fishing for quotes to add meat to the story.
I guess if someone were accusing me of something, and they told a judge that they had some top-secret trust-me evidence that proved my guilt, I'd have little choice but to introduce my own top-secret trust-me evidence. I'm pretty sure by the time I was done the RIAA would be implicated in the deaths of Jimmy Hoffa and JFK.
I went right to the section that looked like it might explain the considerations in choosing GPL license options (2 vs 3 vs 2 or later vs 3 or later vs LGPL, etc.), and found it very disappointing. The relevant section starts with a mention of the two versions (2 and 3), but then drifts off into vague generalities about how you should consider a version of the GPL if you want to take advantage of GPLed code. They don't even mention the important and difficult issues having to do with the emergence of GPLv3, but seem to assume that the GPL is the GPL.
Does this mean that xen will become subtly but increasingly unstable on the linux platform?
Does this mean that Microsoft is going to launch a virtualization patent army (of lawyers), forcing vmware to devote most of its resources to legal matters?
Ultimately, if a large enough organization wants to sue you for something, and they can build a big enough pile of garbage that makes it look plausible, it's going to cost you a boatload of money to prove otherwise, and you're going to be vulnerable to the vagaries of the legal system. At least in the US. The point of the article wasn't that you're actually liable to be sued for millions of dollars for forwarding email or reading poetry in class. It was more that the law, taken literally, is ridiculous (and the article made this point by actually ridiculing it). But I think there is still a valid point to be made about fair use. Although the article cited some scary case law, the truth is that most of these apparent copyright violations are at least meant to be covered under fair use. So I think your response is fairly incisive, but I would still argue that the article is misleading. The problem isn't copyright law so much as the fact that you can get seriously screwed obeying the law.
Am I a lawyer? I can't remember, why do you ask?
Current DVDs, at least those for popular new releases, tend to have 5+ uninterruptible previews/ads up front. I guess these new ones will be more intrusive, but cheaper. There are things to like about that, I guess. As long as they're starting down the road for tiered pricing, it would be nice if they could offer ad-free DVDs as well, a product that's not available for most titles now. For that matter, it would be nice if they offered extremely cheap DVDs with ads interrupting the movie every scene or so.
From the brief report, it sounds like any bug whatsoever would be sufficient to compromise any system. In the slightly more detailed version to which someone posted a link, you see that the vulnerability requires knowing of a pair of integers whose product is computed incorrectly. It also requires some more minor assumptions.
Alas, Shamir's post didn't clarify, at least to my undereducated ears, how the targeted machines are coerced into producing a reply. Do most machines have ports open that will engage in RSA-based dialogues?
I was awesome at diameters in grade school, but no one ever told me there was a career path for "diameter scientists." This is easily the most exciting thing about this story, which if anything just tells us that it's a slow news day in the solar system.
I inhabit a planet circling a nearby "sun." Actually, we call our "sun" Sol, and we find it a little insulting that your SF writers have assumed the name was unclaimed. Stop it. We don't call our "moon" Luna, so you're safe there, but I have to say, on behalf of my people, that it sounds stupid, and "moon" wasn't taken anyway (we call our little satellite thing "Kodak"). There's lots of other stuff you guys have wrong, too, but here on our planet we're not really supposed to be reading Slashdot during work hours. Maybe I'll post from home later.
If you're committed to influencing elections, you can probably have more influence on elections, for the rest of your life, with the annual interest on $300,000, than you would with your single vote. And that leaves you $700,000 to play with. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
You obviously understand nothing about gambling. The way to make money here is not by betting on who's going to win. It's by taking advantage of the disparity in betting lines in the WTO-USA battle between Antigua and Las Vegas. For example, take bets from American bettors who think the US is going to win this fight, and place them in Antigua. (The line is only 6:5 in favor of the US here, because Americans want to bet US no matter what.)
Any discussion that revolves around whether or not chroot "is a security tool" is just another one of those meaningless semantic merry-go-rounds, and will never accomplish anything. We know what chroot does, and we know what it doesn't do. Whether or not it's deemed to be an official card-carrying security tool, it's undeniable that there are cases where it's useful, and it's likely that there exist programs that (a) use chroot appropriately and (b) are less vulnerable as a result. I don't care if it's a security tool or not, I care if it provides functionality that will make my code do what I need, and one of my needs is security. I'll bet some very talented programmers also use the assignment operator ("=") in code that needs to be secure, and I'll bet it sometimes plays a role in the code's functionality, part of which is being secure. Is it a security tool? Who could possibly care?
Before I forget, let me refer you to Ben Goldacre's column and web site at badscience.net. In a column that I believe I found via a link on Slashdot, Goldacre points out that at a typical newspaper, virtually no one involved in science journalism has any science background. It shouldn't be hard to find the link.
That said, I think you're confusing things. Good science journalism is not the same thing as good science reporting. What you're doing, we hope, is good reporting of the science you've done. A journalist trying to write a popular article based on your scientific article is not responsible for understanding and reporting on every nuance of your work. The journalist is simply responsible for conveying, as accurately as possible, the nature and importance of your work. This should involve nothing more challenging than sitting down with you and having a detailed conversation, and later having you look at a draft of the article. I don't believe anything like this is the norm in science reporting.
One of my studies was reported in the local newspaper once. The reporter read a press release issued by my institution, written by someone with no science background, with whom I had had a very brief phone conversation. Based on this, the reporter came in with a story already in mind, collected quotes to give the story some apparent substance, and had it published without making even a superficial effort to have anyone with knowledge in the area sanity-check the story. The published story was written in such a way that anyone who read it would be less well informed afterwards than before. How could this process have been fixed? I'm capable of explaining my work accurately to a lay audience, and that includes any reporter with half a brain. But whatever the fix, we really don't need journalists to be able to understand scientific reports. We need them to be willing to talk to people who are capable of understanding those reports, and to find out from those people what the reports really mean.
When people express concern that the GPL may or may not be "upheld," I don't think they're really worried (or should be) that the GPL will be found to be null in the sense you're describing. The GPL conditionally grants certain rights that would otherwise be reserved for the copyright holder, and there's a valid concern that through some mechanism as yet unidentified, someone will claim to have been granted those rights without having agreed to the conditions in the way we all understand them. At this point, it seems like a farfetched possibility, but that would certainly be a more meaningful concern if a big company with deep pockets and fast-talking lawyers went to court to claim their right to use GPLed code inappropriately.
It sounds like you'd consider Russian Roulette a safe activity.
I don't disagree with your conclusion (that flying is safe, driving is less so), but if you want to move the discussion towards more quantitative arguments, you should make sure you use the right numbers. The percentage of accidental deaths caused by cars vs. planes tells me very little about their relative safety.