In short, yes... this has been pretty widely known for a long time. That's not their point. Their point is that all the people who over to North America came from a single, highly localized area in East Asia... not from all over the place in Asia and elsewhere.
Thank you for taking my advice! I never said that I agreed with the article... I said that none of the arguments that were given actually tackled the article on a scientific basis. Thank you for doing exactly what I asked!
Incidentally, since you seem to think that it was my intent to back up the article, please review my actual post... 4000 105000 is a true statement, unless perhaps you're aware of some strange new mathematical rules that I haven't heard of. I didn't lie, nor did I actually take a stance on whether anything said in the article was correct... I said "this is what the article says... please discuss it on these grounds, and not some emotional bullshit with no scientific basis."
As usual, the hyper-reactionary crowd here on Slashdot completely misses the point of the article and immediately pulls the same bullshit so often seen in discussions about other topics where a minority voice says something along the lines of "this isn't as bad as everyone seems to think", i.e. Global Warming.
Yes, 4,000 children developing cancer is absolutely terrible, even if "only" 9 of them die. Yes "only" 800 deaths due to radiation after the blast is a tragedy. The 4,000 deaths of cleanup workers at Chernobyl is completely unexcusable. However, the point of the article wasn't to claim "there have not been tragedies"... it was to claim "the tragedies are magnitudes less horrible than is popularly believed". 800 deaths are objectively fewer than the 105,000 reported in Wikipedia. 4,000 deaths are objectively fewer than "the six-figure death counts that opponents of nuclear power once cited".
Certainly, the fact that people died at all, and many more were disabled for life and suffer from other side-effects, is a tragedy. However, this article is simply stating that these tragedies are significantly less all-encompassing and absolute than is commonly thought. The conclusion, roughly, is that each of these is on the scale of a major earthquake, not a Holocaust. While it may be insensitive to subjectively compare the "level of badness" of different tragedies, it is simply a fact that there exist objective differences between them. That's what they are doing. I don't see people debating the accuracy of the numbers they use, I see people complaining that these are evil shills who are minimizing human suffering to increase corporate profits. Grow up and RTFA people.
In short, yes, I would still complain. Spore is only being allowed to happen at all because Will Wright is one of the biggest names in the game industry, with proven commercial success and huge "brand recognition" (no longer really brand recognition since it's no longer Maxis, but more like genre recognition). Try to find a small development company who has ever pitched a good idea to EA as "radical" as Spore is who actually succeeded in getting the project funded.
Actually, the official name is the République de Côte d'Ivoire. I think you may have misinterpreted him... the question isn't "what the f- is the Côte d'Ivoire", it's "what the f- is the Côte d'Ivoire doing on this ISO committee". Seems like they might have very little reason to be on the committee other than to act as Microsoft's stooge.
Here's where the real story is...
Fleshing out UMG's strategy, Levy said it planned to focus on better exploiting the "monetization of an artist's image" which included branded clothes and TV shows.
"This is what we hope will revive our business," Levy said. "People indulge in piracy but spend a lot of money on many other things that are linked to an artist."
Have they actually discovered that their business model is broken?!? I would laud their efforts to revamp their business model, if only they were smart enough not to shoot themselves in the foot yet again by moving their product off of the world's most popular online music store...
"Rocket powered" doesn't seem to be a really accurate description of this device... in truth, it's closer to "steam powered". Sure, the steam is generated the same way some rockets use hydrogen peroxide to generate thrust, but the steam is not vented out of a series of small nozzles to produce thrust, but is rather fed into pistons and so forth. The valves act as an escape mechanism for the steam in the pistons, so any vented gas is not vented to produce thrust, but to reset the pistons to a relaxed state.
Wow, this is truly going to be revolutionary, allowing automakers to finally produce truly interchangable parts. [/sarcasm]
Anybody else feel pretty certain they'll still change the shape and size and mounting locations on every single part every year so that there will still be almost no compatibility between models and years and so forth? What does this really buy us?
Certainly, the correlation/causation argument is largely irrelevant here and GP is... statistical methods can be used quite reliably to show causation, not just mere correlation.
However, I must object to the title of the article here on Slashdot. Any statistician whose worth is >= shit will tell you that statistics (which this study uses as its sole source of evidence for these claims) neverproves anything... ever. The most you can ever say is that statistics provides evidence for a conclusion.
The source article never says anything was proven (though it does mention "standards of proof" in a way largely unrelated to my point), and though I can't find the journal article itself, I would bet you dollars to donuts it never says anything was proven, either. A fine distinction, perhaps, but to me this seems like more sensationalism on the part of/. editors.
Well, since they allow you to download PDFs of the books, I'd say they've probably solved these problems just about as well as could be done without first mailing a free eBook reader to every person on Earth.
Is it just me or does it seem like the only correct answer to the bank's request would be, "I'm sorry, I am so security conscious that I simply cannot allow you to access my computer"?
I think maybe you misunderstand the issue here... it's not that multithreading is hard. In fact, the XBox 360 has three cores if I remember correctly... any game for the XBox 360 is multithreaded. The problem is that the Cell processor uses heterogeneous cores... that is, there is one main core which is basically a regular PowerPC core, as well as 8 additional cores (1 of which is disabled on the PS3) which are completely different, designed for number crunching on large amounts of data, and are radically different to program for. Having actually done a good bit of programming on this architecture, I find that it is not actually that difficult to get a program to take advantage of a reasonable amount of the processing bandwidth in the Cell processor... however, it is VERY difficult to utilize a larger amount of the available computing capability of the processor. Therefore, most developers have found it to be much easier to get X amount of performance out of the XBox 360 than it would be to get X amount out of the PS3, even though in theory the PS3 is capable of X+Y.
Why should content aggregators (or anyone) have to take proactive steps to avoid stepping on people's toes when they put it online in syndicated RSS feeds, which have the effective purpose of being aggregated?
This is the exact type of argument that I believe cannot win without an unnecessarily long legal battle. Consider an analogy; record companies sell licenses to radio stations allowing them to distribute music... radio stations provide the music over the air for all to hear for free in some aggregated block of music programming time (really simple syndication), and they make money through ads. The record companies are happy with this because the radio stations both pay for the right to play the music, and drive spending by promoting the music... it's win-win, with a doubleplusbig win for the record company which effectively gets paid twice.
However, what if some third-party radio station starts recording the music that other stations are playing, organizing it, then playing it over the air without the original radio station's ads, but with it's own ads. This goes far beyond mere peer-to-peer music sharing (which I feel is truly a boon for record companies that they are failing to recognize)... this third party is making a significant profit off of this work, without any reimbursement to any of the original parties involved. I think even the most ardent supporter of copy-left can recognize that this activity is at the very least illegal, if not outright unethical. This is effectively the legal reason why "content aggregators... have to take proactive steps to avoid stepping on people's toes".
If they were really so upset over having their content show up in other places on the interwebs, my question is, why don't the content producers remove the offending material?
This statement is tantamount to saying "why doesn't the legal radio station go off the air."
Of course, this analogy fails in one unique way... in this case, the "radio station" (the Google News) is actually encouraging and facilitating people to listen to the radio station which legally played the song. While this is probably not a good legal defense for the illegal station's actions, it is certainly a benefit to the legal radio station, which will lose some potential listeners to the aggregator station, but will gain many actual listeners thanks to the free advertising.
The tendency to litigate indicates to me that the outrage is simply faked- they're after money like every other trigger-happy lawyer.
Of course you are correct here... the "legal" radio station has nothing to be really outraged about... it is making more money than it would have otherwise. However, the fact remains that the "illegal" radio station is breaking the law, and because lawyers and companies love money, the legal station will sue they hell out of the illegal station, hoping to strike a deal where the illegal station will continue to advertise for free, but will also pay the legal station licensing fees. This is doubleplusgood for the legal station as well. Now the legal radio station is basically a useless middleman which has contracts ensuring it continues to get paid for no reason.
Really, these content aggregators haven't got much of a leg to stand on except the fair use angle (since they aren't providing the entire item, just the most important parts summarized)... and as we all know fair use is no longer protected the way it should be. In all, these guys will have an incredibly hard time defending this. The easiest and most effective way out is simply to end the free advertising for those content producers which no longer want the increased revenue (due to free advertising). When put in those terms, I would guess that very few content producers actually fall into that category.
As easy as it is to jump on the fair use bandwagon, taking that stance is an uphill battle... if it weren't, this matter would have been settled once and for all long ago. The fact of the matter is, these companies really are making money as a direct result of other people's work, even if they are "adding value" in some way... and are doing so without direct compensation. Whether increased traffic counts as compensation is a fuzzy matter at best.
It would be MUCH more effective for the really popular news aggregators and so forth to whole-heartedly comply with those content-producers that are upset about this.... simply remove the offending material. One might argue that this wouldn't work if every one of these content-producers made the same requests, but I am pretty sure that most would not... after all, there is an undeniable benefit these producers receive from these services, whether it is direct enough to count legally or not.
Slashdot Mirror
In short, yes... this has been pretty widely known for a long time. That's not their point. Their point is that all the people who over to North America came from a single, highly localized area in East Asia... not from all over the place in Asia and elsewhere.
* Sorry, should have read, "4000 is less than 105000."
Thank you for taking my advice! I never said that I agreed with the article... I said that none of the arguments that were given actually tackled the article on a scientific basis. Thank you for doing exactly what I asked! Incidentally, since you seem to think that it was my intent to back up the article, please review my actual post... 4000 105000 is a true statement, unless perhaps you're aware of some strange new mathematical rules that I haven't heard of. I didn't lie, nor did I actually take a stance on whether anything said in the article was correct... I said "this is what the article says... please discuss it on these grounds, and not some emotional bullshit with no scientific basis."
As usual, the hyper-reactionary crowd here on Slashdot completely misses the point of the article and immediately pulls the same bullshit so often seen in discussions about other topics where a minority voice says something along the lines of "this isn't as bad as everyone seems to think", i.e. Global Warming.
Yes, 4,000 children developing cancer is absolutely terrible, even if "only" 9 of them die. Yes "only" 800 deaths due to radiation after the blast is a tragedy. The 4,000 deaths of cleanup workers at Chernobyl is completely unexcusable. However, the point of the article wasn't to claim "there have not been tragedies"... it was to claim "the tragedies are magnitudes less horrible than is popularly believed". 800 deaths are objectively fewer than the 105,000 reported in Wikipedia. 4,000 deaths are objectively fewer than "the six-figure death counts that opponents of nuclear power once cited".
Certainly, the fact that people died at all, and many more were disabled for life and suffer from other side-effects, is a tragedy. However, this article is simply stating that these tragedies are significantly less all-encompassing and absolute than is commonly thought. The conclusion, roughly, is that each of these is on the scale of a major earthquake, not a Holocaust. While it may be insensitive to subjectively compare the "level of badness" of different tragedies, it is simply a fact that there exist objective differences between them. That's what they are doing. I don't see people debating the accuracy of the numbers they use, I see people complaining that these are evil shills who are minimizing human suffering to increase corporate profits. Grow up and RTFA people.
In short, yes, I would still complain. Spore is only being allowed to happen at all because Will Wright is one of the biggest names in the game industry, with proven commercial success and huge "brand recognition" (no longer really brand recognition since it's no longer Maxis, but more like genre recognition). Try to find a small development company who has ever pitched a good idea to EA as "radical" as Spore is who actually succeeded in getting the project funded.
Actually, the official name is the République de Côte d'Ivoire. I think you may have misinterpreted him... the question isn't "what the f- is the Côte d'Ivoire", it's "what the f- is the Côte d'Ivoire doing on this ISO committee". Seems like they might have very little reason to be on the committee other than to act as Microsoft's stooge.
Fleshing out UMG's strategy, Levy said it planned to focus on better exploiting the "monetization of an artist's image" which included branded clothes and TV shows.
"This is what we hope will revive our business," Levy said. "People indulge in piracy but spend a lot of money on many other things that are linked to an artist."
Have they actually discovered that their business model is broken?!? I would laud their efforts to revamp their business model, if only they were smart enough not to shoot themselves in the foot yet again by moving their product off of the world's most popular online music store...
"Rocket powered" doesn't seem to be a really accurate description of this device... in truth, it's closer to "steam powered". Sure, the steam is generated the same way some rockets use hydrogen peroxide to generate thrust, but the steam is not vented out of a series of small nozzles to produce thrust, but is rather fed into pistons and so forth. The valves act as an escape mechanism for the steam in the pistons, so any vented gas is not vented to produce thrust, but to reset the pistons to a relaxed state.
Wow, this is truly going to be revolutionary, allowing automakers to finally produce truly interchangable parts. [/sarcasm] Anybody else feel pretty certain they'll still change the shape and size and mounting locations on every single part every year so that there will still be almost no compatibility between models and years and so forth? What does this really buy us?
Certainly, the correlation/causation argument is largely irrelevant here and GP is ... statistical methods can be used quite reliably to show causation, not just mere correlation.
/. editors.
However, I must object to the title of the article here on Slashdot. Any statistician whose worth is >= shit will tell you that statistics (which this study uses as its sole source of evidence for these claims) never proves anything... ever. The most you can ever say is that statistics provides evidence for a conclusion.
The source article never says anything was proven (though it does mention "standards of proof" in a way largely unrelated to my point), and though I can't find the journal article itself, I would bet you dollars to donuts it never says anything was proven, either. A fine distinction, perhaps, but to me this seems like more sensationalism on the part of
Well, since they allow you to download PDFs of the books, I'd say they've probably solved these problems just about as well as could be done without first mailing a free eBook reader to every person on Earth.
Having a DX10 graphics card must be really important on OSX. You know, with all its DirectX drivers.
Is it just me or does it seem like the only correct answer to the bank's request would be, "I'm sorry, I am so security conscious that I simply cannot allow you to access my computer"?
I think maybe you misunderstand the issue here... it's not that multithreading is hard. In fact, the XBox 360 has three cores if I remember correctly... any game for the XBox 360 is multithreaded. The problem is that the Cell processor uses heterogeneous cores... that is, there is one main core which is basically a regular PowerPC core, as well as 8 additional cores (1 of which is disabled on the PS3) which are completely different, designed for number crunching on large amounts of data, and are radically different to program for. Having actually done a good bit of programming on this architecture, I find that it is not actually that difficult to get a program to take advantage of a reasonable amount of the processing bandwidth in the Cell processor... however, it is VERY difficult to utilize a larger amount of the available computing capability of the processor. Therefore, most developers have found it to be much easier to get X amount of performance out of the XBox 360 than it would be to get X amount out of the PS3, even though in theory the PS3 is capable of X+Y.
This is the exact type of argument that I believe cannot win without an unnecessarily long legal battle. Consider an analogy; record companies sell licenses to radio stations allowing them to distribute music... radio stations provide the music over the air for all to hear for free in some aggregated block of music programming time (really simple syndication), and they make money through ads. The record companies are happy with this because the radio stations both pay for the right to play the music, and drive spending by promoting the music... it's win-win, with a doubleplusbig win for the record company which effectively gets paid twice.
However, what if some third-party radio station starts recording the music that other stations are playing, organizing it, then playing it over the air without the original radio station's ads, but with it's own ads. This goes far beyond mere peer-to-peer music sharing (which I feel is truly a boon for record companies that they are failing to recognize)... this third party is making a significant profit off of this work, without any reimbursement to any of the original parties involved. I think even the most ardent supporter of copy-left can recognize that this activity is at the very least illegal, if not outright unethical. This is effectively the legal reason why "content aggregators
This statement is tantamount to saying "why doesn't the legal radio station go off the air."
Of course, this analogy fails in one unique way... in this case, the "radio station" (the Google News) is actually encouraging and facilitating people to listen to the radio station which legally played the song. While this is probably not a good legal defense for the illegal station's actions, it is certainly a benefit to the legal radio station, which will lose some potential listeners to the aggregator station, but will gain many actual listeners thanks to the free advertising.
Of course you are correct here... the "legal" radio station has nothing to be really outraged about... it is making more money than it would have otherwise. However, the fact remains that the "illegal" radio station is breaking the law, and because lawyers and companies love money, the legal station will sue they hell out of the illegal station, hoping to strike a deal where the illegal station will continue to advertise for free, but will also pay the legal station licensing fees. This is doubleplusgood for the legal station as well. Now the legal radio station is basically a useless middleman which has contracts ensuring it continues to get paid for no reason.
Really, these content aggregators haven't got much of a leg to stand on except the fair use angle (since they aren't providing the entire item, just the most important parts summarized)... and as we all know fair use is no longer protected the way it should be. In all, these guys will have an incredibly hard time defending this. The easiest and most effective way out is simply to end the free advertising for those content producers which no longer want the increased revenue (due to free advertising). When put in those terms, I would guess that very few content producers actually fall into that category.
As easy as it is to jump on the fair use bandwagon, taking that stance is an uphill battle... if it weren't, this matter would have been settled once and for all long ago. The fact of the matter is, these companies really are making money as a direct result of other people's work, even if they are "adding value" in some way... and are doing so without direct compensation. Whether increased traffic counts as compensation is a fuzzy matter at best. It would be MUCH more effective for the really popular news aggregators and so forth to whole-heartedly comply with those content-producers that are upset about this.... simply remove the offending material. One might argue that this wouldn't work if every one of these content-producers made the same requests, but I am pretty sure that most would not... after all, there is an undeniable benefit these producers receive from these services, whether it is direct enough to count legally or not.