*And* that she doesn't have any useful skills to speak of; she's the sort of person who'll end up sitting in front of a computer reading and sending useless memos all day.
I'd bet a nickel that she ends up working for the government.
Merriwhether said her son knew why he was being arrested, but didn't know that what he was doing was against the law.
Translation: "Merriwhether said that her son was a *@#$%&# idiot."
During an initial court appearance Monday, Judge Morton Denlow set Carter's bond at $4,500 and put him under the supervision of his mother. He was instructed to not use any broadcasting devices.
Interesting. So he can't use wifi? I wonder what the judge's order actually said.
This isn't exactly Pump Up the Volume, frankly. Interfering with transit operations is a pretty dumb and dangerous thing to do (though I might be a bit paranoid given that I'm a Boston resident). Glad they got the guy.
Nah. One can be clever without being smart; consider a person who possesses a superficial wit, an aptitude for puns, and a tendency to pull clumsy yet effective pranks. Alternatively, consider a person who always manages to land on his feet, can bafflegab his way out of any situation, and who manages to survive no matter what gaffes he commits. Such people may not be terribly bright, but they *are* clever.
Feynman was clever and smart. Noam Chomsky is smart (just going by his work on linguistics and leaving politics aside) but not particularly clever. Lots of politicians are clever but not smart--I'd put both W Bush and Sarah Palin in this category. (No doubt there are Democrats too, but I can't think of any at the moment. Biden, maybe, but I don't think he's particularly clever. Barney Frank?)
First off, electronic submission provides an automatic backup. You can't destroy an electronically-submitted manuscript by spilling tea or wine on it, nor can your cats attack it, nor can you misplace it. If it's on the website, you can always print off another copy.
Second, an electronic submission system can be set up to provide timestamps. Almost every semester, I get late papers from students who swear up and down that they/their friend/their significant other dropped off their paper before the deadline, and it must simply have been lost/misfiled/stolen/whatever, and it's not their fault. Doesn't matter if you insist in the syllabus (and in class) that late papers are late papers and no excuses will be entertained; you'll still have to deal with the whining. Timestamping eliminates all that. Sure, they can still claim that the website was down or some such thing, but this is usually independently verifiable (and anyway you can always have students email the paper to you).
Third, electronic editing is not all that cumbersome. I can type a lot faster than I can handwrite, so I can get through the papers faster. Moreover, I often have to make essentially the same comment on multiple papers, and it's tedious to write it out over and over again.
Finally, electronic submission (and editing, to a degree) are becoming standard, at least in the world of academic publishing. They might as well get used to it.
I use this strategy on a regular basis, and it *usually* works. A few companies (Publishers' Clearing House, some singles company) simply will not give up, and it's very hard to get rid of mail addressed to "Resident." The Mail Preference Service also helps reduce the flow of junk.
My own access point is secured, but I do use unsecured ones from time to time (there are a few in my neighborhood). It's an advantage when I'm having problems with my own wifi--I can check to see if other connections in the neighborhood are working (if not, it's probably a problem with the cable company) and I can access the internet to look up troubleshooting information, etc. All of that is much quicker than calling Comcast.
I don't do anything *important* while I'm using someone else's wifi, but it is convenient.
And I don't encrypt anything on my home hard drive. Frankly, I don't think I have any files that are that important. I do encrypt many of my work files, but that's because they include medical data....
Actually, you don't even get your name on the review in any meaningful way. Peer review is usually anonymous--the author never officially knows who reviewed the article (but can sometimes guess), and the reviewers' names generally don't appear on the published manuscript.
The editor knows, of course, and can invite you to join the editorial board if you consistently provide good reviews, but that's about the only benefit there is. Then again, it's a "benefit" that requires you to spend even more time issuing reviews and pissing off authors by rejecting their articles.
I find it fun, to be honest. If it weren't, I'm not sure I'd spend a minute of my time doing it. I suppose the editor of a journal might get pissed off if you *never* agreed to review anything, but there are so many journals in my field that you could always find another outlet if you needed to.
I just took a look at the contracts for my published articles. With one or two exceptions, they ALL require a transfer of copyright. I don't really own the rights to anything I've written (with some exceptions; I can pass out a single copy to someone, use it in my own teaching, etc.) Of course, academics are notorious for ignoring these agreements. I actually asked the journals for permission to reuse some of my published work in my dissertation. They had no idea what to do--apparently nobody had ever asked them such a thing before. Most people just go ahead and reuse the stuff under the (reasonable but wrong) assumption that they own the material they created.
I don't particularly *like* transferring copyright, but it seems to be necessary if I want to publish in the major journals in my field. I am leaning towards publishing in the PLoS journals next time around, though, since as I recall their copyright/licensing/etc. schemes are much more reasonable.
The BBC article says that "the site does not filter news results to remove politically sensitive information." I wonder what exactly gets through. I've heard that certain American political sites (nationalreview.com, democraticunderground.com) are not filtered in China--I don't know if that's true, but it suggests an alternative strategy for finding interesting information.
I find it hard to believe that they could censor *everything*, unless they set the default to 'banned' and allowed sites on a case-by-case basis. But even that's hard--a seemingly innocuous site could suddenly have "objectionable" content one day.
So? We can still criticize them, just as other folks can criticize us. If someone thinks that we should count our votes "in the open," whatever that means, that's fine. We just reserve the right to ignore them if we want. I don't see why the whole "soverign nation" thing matters.
Exactly. I'm doing something I love. I work lots of hours per week, but I get to decide when I work, and I can (with few restrictions) decide what I want to work on.
Only if you don't want a roommate. I happen to be married to mine, and on our combined 80k we live fairly well. Commute's a pain, but it's LA, so there you go.
Now if only I could figure out how to break into the acting business....
Uh...as a researcher, I work 60-80 hours a week and make more like $40k. In Los Angeles. And I don't get the free goodies that these guys get.
Somehow I cannot sympathize too much. If the author actually understood what sweatshop conditions are like, or how galley slaves actually lived, I might sympathize.
One day these guys will win a big "victory" from EA that gives them overtime pay, benefits, etc. That's the day that they get outsourced to India. Then they'll be bitching about how evil the corps are when it's really they themselves who made it advantageous for the corp to do so.
1) The article says that the proposed law was revised to cover ALL online media: "a March 2003 draft dropped the word 'professional' and intentionally covered all 'online media' of any type." Unless there are other exclusions elsewhere in the law, this means bloggers, slashdotters, everythingians, online newspapers and magazines, websites covering history, sites hosting PDFs of scientific articles, etc.
2) If this were passed, I'd expect to see bloggers, etc., reduce the number of specific people they criticized, just to avoid the "right" of reply. Otherwise, in an article that criticized numerous people, you'd end up with an unmanageable cascade of replies, replies to replies, replies to replies to replies.
3) The article says that the reply *can* be a link. Can the original author insist that it be a link, or can the responder require that the author post it on the original site?
4) (really a combination of 2 and 3) Does this mean that the mandated "right" to reply is endless? If I criticize someone on my site, and she makes me link to something on her site, does the presence of that article *on her site* then give me the "right" to reply? In other words, does her reply automatically confer on me the right to reply? How many steps are permitted? How many links will need to be posted on the original page?
5) Do groups have the "right" of reply, or does that just apply to individuals? If I criticize Microsoft, "the Linux community," the Democrats, the Republicans, Slashdot, Scientology, whatever, must I allow them to reply on my site? If I want to avoid triggering Bill Gates's "right" to reply, can I get around this by talking about "the senior leadership at Microsoft"?
6) This isn't mandating a "right to reply" anyway. You always have the right to reply. I just don't think you have the right to force me to publish certain things on my website, be those documents or links. I think free speech does just fine without that.
Where I work, we're seriously considering shelling out the dough for one of the Enterprise editions, even though it feels like a bit of a scam to me. We use several large-capacity machines to store and serve brain imaging data, and we have a lot of in-house programs that we've developed over the years. If we have to keep upgrading our version of Redhat every few months, we'll end up spending all our time testing it to make sure it's sufficiently secure, as well as re-tweaking our in-house programs. Now, you can say that we shouldn't have to tweak anything, but inevitably there's SOMETHING that doesn't work the way it used to. If we were dumb enough to deploy without testing, it'd cost us lots in downtime; as it is, it costs us in development and testing time. And then we end up having to use crap like 8, which isn't all that stable, or 9, which hadn't been out for all that long when they made their final announcement about ending support for 6.2 and 7.x.
Now, for people who have lots of gurus and lots of time to do in-house support, Enterprise probably isn't necessary. For us, it might be a good option.
I doubt that ethics courses will really help all that much. As a medical researcher, I've been forced to sit through any number of such classes. I don't think any of them taught me anything I didn't already know, except how to comply with innumerable arcane Federal regulations (which is useful, but isn't really the same as ethics anyway). Most of the ethics components offered useful advice like "Don't lie to your patients." (I never would've thought of that, and now that you've told us, I'm sure all the immoral people out there will immediately stop doing it!) When instructors tried to present more complicated ethical issues, they usually could not adequately defend their "answers," and were viciously beset from all sides by doctors (and occasionally techs like me) who actually understood the moral complexities of the situations the ethicists were talking about.
I think such classes are basically there to help stave off lawsuits; they allow you to say "Hey, we tried, we gave him ethics training; if he violates it, that's HIS responsibility." It gets rid of the (usually bullshit) argument that the kid simply didn't know it's wrong.
The more people who know this, the better. If system defense becomes general knowledge, presumably the number of effective crack attempts, etc., will go down. Moreover, if people know how to take advantage of security holes, maybe Microsoft et al. will learn to take security more seriously--there would just be too many people who could put pressure on them.
(Of course, everyone should learn how to use their computer to do simple things first, but that's another story.)
Of course, none of this takes into account what happens when an overexcited script kiddie targets the wrong address for attack. This happened in the Ralsky case--if you go back, you'll see that people mistakenly posted his old address, the wrong phone number, etc. So some poor innocent sap (who could just as well be you) gets a dozen subscriptions to Hot Wet Naked Shaved Teenage Catholic Schoolgirls and Buff Biker Bears that he has to explain to his wife.
Yes, Opera does choke on some webpages, but the overall number has dropped substantially with version 6.0. The problem seems to stem from web designers who don't bother checking their HTML properly. It seems that the average arrogant web designer tests his pages on IE 5.5, and, if you're lucky, he'll give 'em a run on Netscape/Mozilla. If he's really good, he'll remember the portion of the population that has old computers and test them on earlier versions of IE and Netscape. If he's actually competent, he'll run the pages through a validator and then fix it so it works with multiple versions of both browsers. And if he's fantastic, he'll check it with Lynx, too.
I have a standard email that I send whenever I encounter a page that doesn't render properly with Opera. It takes me maybe 30 seconds to fill in the necessary information and send it. It varies a bit depending on the nature of the page (store, personal website, etc.) Sometimes people fix it, and sometimes they don't, but at the very least they'll have heard of Opera.
Star Wars may have borrowed heavily from pulp sci-fi, but pulp sci-fi borrowed heavily from mythology. The pulp authors themselves would probably tell you that straight out....
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. They're illegal in Los Angeles, and for good reason. You don't mess around with brushfires in LA.
*And* that she doesn't have any useful skills to speak of; she's the sort of person who'll end up sitting in front of a computer reading and sending useless memos all day.
I'd bet a nickel that she ends up working for the government.
Merriwhether said her son knew why he was being arrested, but didn't know that what he was doing was against the law.
Translation: "Merriwhether said that her son was a *@#$%&# idiot."
During an initial court appearance Monday, Judge Morton Denlow set Carter's bond at $4,500 and put him under the supervision of his mother. He was instructed to not use any broadcasting devices.
Interesting. So he can't use wifi? I wonder what the judge's order actually said.
This isn't exactly Pump Up the Volume, frankly. Interfering with transit operations is a pretty dumb and dangerous thing to do (though I might be a bit paranoid given that I'm a Boston resident). Glad they got the guy.
Nah. One can be clever without being smart; consider a person who possesses a superficial wit, an aptitude for puns, and a tendency to pull clumsy yet effective pranks. Alternatively, consider a person who always manages to land on his feet, can bafflegab his way out of any situation, and who manages to survive no matter what gaffes he commits. Such people may not be terribly bright, but they *are* clever.
Feynman was clever and smart. Noam Chomsky is smart (just going by his work on linguistics and leaving politics aside) but not particularly clever. Lots of politicians are clever but not smart--I'd put both W Bush and Sarah Palin in this category. (No doubt there are Democrats too, but I can't think of any at the moment. Biden, maybe, but I don't think he's particularly clever. Barney Frank?)
What purpose does electronic submission serve?
Several.
First off, electronic submission provides an automatic backup. You can't destroy an electronically-submitted manuscript by spilling tea or wine on it, nor can your cats attack it, nor can you misplace it. If it's on the website, you can always print off another copy.
Second, an electronic submission system can be set up to provide timestamps. Almost every semester, I get late papers from students who swear up and down that they/their friend/their significant other dropped off their paper before the deadline, and it must simply have been lost/misfiled/stolen/whatever, and it's not their fault. Doesn't matter if you insist in the syllabus (and in class) that late papers are late papers and no excuses will be entertained; you'll still have to deal with the whining. Timestamping eliminates all that. Sure, they can still claim that the website was down or some such thing, but this is usually independently verifiable (and anyway you can always have students email the paper to you).
Third, electronic editing is not all that cumbersome. I can type a lot faster than I can handwrite, so I can get through the papers faster. Moreover, I often have to make essentially the same comment on multiple papers, and it's tedious to write it out over and over again.
Finally, electronic submission (and editing, to a degree) are becoming standard, at least in the world of academic publishing. They might as well get used to it.
I use this strategy on a regular basis, and it *usually* works. A few companies (Publishers' Clearing House, some singles company) simply will not give up, and it's very hard to get rid of mail addressed to "Resident." The Mail Preference Service also helps reduce the flow of junk.
My own access point is secured, but I do use unsecured ones from time to time (there are a few in my neighborhood). It's an advantage when I'm having problems with my own wifi--I can check to see if other connections in the neighborhood are working (if not, it's probably a problem with the cable company) and I can access the internet to look up troubleshooting information, etc. All of that is much quicker than calling Comcast.
I don't do anything *important* while I'm using someone else's wifi, but it is convenient.
And I don't encrypt anything on my home hard drive. Frankly, I don't think I have any files that are that important. I do encrypt many of my work files, but that's because they include medical data....
Actually, you don't even get your name on the review in any meaningful way. Peer review is usually anonymous--the author never officially knows who reviewed the article (but can sometimes guess), and the reviewers' names generally don't appear on the published manuscript.
The editor knows, of course, and can invite you to join the editorial board if you consistently provide good reviews, but that's about the only benefit there is. Then again, it's a "benefit" that requires you to spend even more time issuing reviews and pissing off authors by rejecting their articles.
I find it fun, to be honest. If it weren't, I'm not sure I'd spend a minute of my time doing it. I suppose the editor of a journal might get pissed off if you *never* agreed to review anything, but there are so many journals in my field that you could always find another outlet if you needed to.
I just took a look at the contracts for my published articles. With one or two exceptions, they ALL require a transfer of copyright. I don't really own the rights to anything I've written (with some exceptions; I can pass out a single copy to someone, use it in my own teaching, etc.) Of course, academics are notorious for ignoring these agreements. I actually asked the journals for permission to reuse some of my published work in my dissertation. They had no idea what to do--apparently nobody had ever asked them such a thing before. Most people just go ahead and reuse the stuff under the (reasonable but wrong) assumption that they own the material they created.
I don't particularly *like* transferring copyright, but it seems to be necessary if I want to publish in the major journals in my field. I am leaning towards publishing in the PLoS journals next time around, though, since as I recall their copyright/licensing/etc. schemes are much more reasonable.
Now I get to hear the following conversation every time I fly somewhere:
"Hello? HELLO!?"
"Yeah, I-I'm on the plane."
"No, I'm ON THE PLANE."
"Yeah, we just took off from Cincinnati."
"CINCINNATI."
"Yeah, we're in the air! It's a new thing, you can talk on the phone in the air now."
"No, the plane's not gonna crash! Would they let me use the phone if they thought it was gonna crash the plane?"
"How should I know how it works? What am I, an aerospace engineer?"
"Screw you too, honey."
"Hey, you gonna be there to pick me up? Terminal B."
"No, B. As in boy."
"No, BOY. B as in boy, baseball, uh...Bush...uh..."
"Book! Yeah, didn't think of that. That's a good one, honey."
"Hang on, honey. There's this guy standing over me with an oxygen mask and he wants to...BLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!"
Oh, sure, it's relevant to matters of international law, but I don't see why it should affect our ability to criticize another nation.
And I would feel a bit better about China's "sovereignity" if it were actually a democracy.
The BBC article says that "the site does not filter news results to remove politically sensitive information." I wonder what exactly gets through. I've heard that certain American political sites (nationalreview.com, democraticunderground.com) are not filtered in China--I don't know if that's true, but it suggests an alternative strategy for finding interesting information.
I find it hard to believe that they could censor *everything*, unless they set the default to 'banned' and allowed sites on a case-by-case basis. But even that's hard--a seemingly innocuous site could suddenly have "objectionable" content one day.
So? We can still criticize them, just as other folks can criticize us. If someone thinks that we should count our votes "in the open," whatever that means, that's fine. We just reserve the right to ignore them if we want. I don't see why the whole "soverign nation" thing matters.
Sadly, after a childhood spent listening to Daffy Duck, I can't hear the word 'despicable] without giggling a bit.
Which is sad, because it is. Should be legal, but despicable nonetheless.
And yeah, the sequel would probably involve something about seeing how many drinks it takes before you go off the bridge at Chappaquidick.
Exactly. I'm doing something I love. I work lots of hours per week, but I get to decide when I work, and I can (with few restrictions) decide what I want to work on.
There are more "benefits" than just money.
Only if you don't want a roommate. I happen to be married to mine, and on our combined 80k we live fairly well. Commute's a pain, but it's LA, so there you go.
Now if only I could figure out how to break into the acting business....
Uh...as a researcher, I work 60-80 hours a week and make more like $40k. In Los Angeles. And I don't get the free goodies that these guys get.
Somehow I cannot sympathize too much. If the author actually understood what sweatshop conditions are like, or how galley slaves actually lived, I might sympathize.
One day these guys will win a big "victory" from EA that gives them overtime pay, benefits, etc. That's the day that they get outsourced to India. Then they'll be bitching about how evil the corps are when it's really they themselves who made it advantageous for the corp to do so.
1) The article says that the proposed law was revised to cover ALL online media: "a March 2003 draft dropped the word 'professional' and intentionally covered all 'online media' of any type." Unless there are other exclusions elsewhere in the law, this means bloggers, slashdotters, everythingians, online newspapers and magazines, websites covering history, sites hosting PDFs of scientific articles, etc.
2) If this were passed, I'd expect to see bloggers, etc., reduce the number of specific people they criticized, just to avoid the "right" of reply. Otherwise, in an article that criticized numerous people, you'd end up with an unmanageable cascade of replies, replies to replies, replies to replies to replies.
3) The article says that the reply *can* be a link. Can the original author insist that it be a link, or can the responder require that the author post it on the original site?
4) (really a combination of 2 and 3) Does this mean that the mandated "right" to reply is endless? If I criticize someone on my site, and she makes me link to something on her site, does the presence of that article *on her site* then give me the "right" to reply? In other words, does her reply automatically confer on me the right to reply? How many steps are permitted? How many links will need to be posted on the original page?
5) Do groups have the "right" of reply, or does that just apply to individuals? If I criticize Microsoft, "the Linux community," the Democrats, the Republicans, Slashdot, Scientology, whatever, must I allow them to reply on my site? If I want to avoid triggering Bill Gates's "right" to reply, can I get around this by talking about "the senior leadership at Microsoft"?
6) This isn't mandating a "right to reply" anyway. You always have the right to reply. I just don't think you have the right to force me to publish certain things on my website, be those documents or links. I think free speech does just fine without that.
Where I work, we're seriously considering shelling out the dough for one of the Enterprise editions, even though it feels like a bit of a scam to me.
We use several large-capacity machines to store and serve brain imaging data, and we have a lot of in-house programs that we've developed over the years. If we have to keep upgrading our version of Redhat every few months, we'll end up spending all our time testing it to make sure it's sufficiently secure, as well as re-tweaking our in-house programs. Now, you can say that we shouldn't have to tweak anything, but inevitably there's SOMETHING that doesn't work the way it used to. If we were dumb enough to deploy without testing, it'd cost us lots in downtime; as it is, it costs us in development and testing time. And then we end up having to use crap like 8, which isn't all that stable, or 9, which hadn't been out for all that long when they made their final announcement about ending support for 6.2 and 7.x.
Now, for people who have lots of gurus and lots of time to do in-house support, Enterprise probably isn't necessary. For us, it might be a good option.
I doubt that ethics courses will really help all that much. As a medical researcher, I've been forced to sit through any number of such classes. I don't think any of them taught me anything I didn't already know, except how to comply with innumerable arcane Federal regulations (which is useful, but isn't really the same as ethics anyway). Most of the ethics components offered useful advice like "Don't lie to your patients." (I never would've thought of that, and now that you've told us, I'm sure all the immoral people out there will immediately stop doing it!) When instructors tried to present more complicated ethical issues, they usually could not adequately defend their "answers," and were viciously beset from all sides by doctors (and occasionally techs like me) who actually understood the moral complexities of the situations the ethicists were talking about.
I think such classes are basically there to help stave off lawsuits; they allow you to say "Hey, we tried, we gave him ethics training; if he violates it, that's HIS responsibility." It gets rid of the (usually bullshit) argument that the kid simply didn't know it's wrong.
The more people who know this, the better. If system defense becomes general knowledge, presumably the number of effective crack attempts, etc., will go down. Moreover, if people know how to take advantage of security holes, maybe Microsoft et al. will learn to take security more seriously--there would just be too many people who could put pressure on them.
(Of course, everyone should learn how to use their computer to do simple things first, but that's another story.)
Of course, none of this takes into account what happens when an overexcited script kiddie targets the wrong address for attack. This happened in the Ralsky case--if you go back, you'll see that people mistakenly posted his old address, the wrong phone number, etc. So some poor innocent sap (who could just as well be you) gets a dozen subscriptions to Hot Wet Naked Shaved Teenage Catholic Schoolgirls and Buff Biker Bears that he has to explain to his wife.
I guess that's just "collateral damage," right?
Yes, Opera does choke on some webpages, but the overall number has dropped substantially with version 6.0. The problem seems to stem from web designers who don't bother checking their HTML properly. It seems that the average arrogant web designer tests his pages on IE 5.5, and, if you're lucky, he'll give 'em a run on Netscape/Mozilla. If he's really good, he'll remember the portion of the population that has old computers and test them on earlier versions of IE and Netscape. If he's actually competent, he'll run the pages through a validator and then fix it so it works with multiple versions of both browsers. And if he's fantastic, he'll check it with Lynx, too.
I have a standard email that I send whenever I encounter a page that doesn't render properly with Opera. It takes me maybe 30 seconds to fill in the necessary information and send it. It varies a bit depending on the nature of the page (store, personal website, etc.) Sometimes people fix it, and sometimes they don't, but at the very least they'll have heard of Opera.
Star Wars may have borrowed heavily from pulp sci-fi, but pulp sci-fi borrowed heavily from mythology. The pulp authors themselves would probably tell you that straight out....