Seriously, is that the most you can add to the conversation is a cheap shot at religion?
It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.
I will agree that if such a claim is made it should be picked apart but can we just hold off the hostilities until it happens? For once?
Hostilities were opened a long time ago. Your objection makes as much sense as saying to the captain of a US Navy ship, "I agree that if that Japanese ship over there shoots at us, we should blow them out of the water, but can we just hold off the hostilities until in happens?" in 1943.
Fair enough; 1997 was probably the height of the browser wars, and there was a lot of "this site best viewed in..." crap floating around. But I do remember a lot of "fill out the form, get the data" sites, like the one OP referenced, that looked just fine in both Netscape and IE -- and which loaded faster over a 28.8 modem than many of their "modern" counterparts do over DSL.
The interface is clunky and 1997ish but hey.. that's your government at work!
By "clunky and 1997ish," you apparently mean "loads quickly, works the same on any browser, and gives you useful information without a bunch of extraneous crap." Man, I miss 1997.
Okay, seriously: no, it is not. Copyright infringement is not theft. "Piracy," in the sense you're using the word, is not theft. And anyone who says it is has shown that they have nothing meaningful to say on the subject.
What is in that 2TB of data? A human genome only takes up 750MB. (A base may hold 1 of 4 values A, C, G and T. So each base can be represented with 2 bits. 2 bits * 3 billion = 750MB)
What you get out of next-gen sequencing isn't actually the sequence of a genome; it's the sequences of a bunch of fragments, each of which has to be resequenced several times (8 or 16 is the current standard, so you'll hear about "8x sequencing" for example; anything less than 4x sequencing is considered so unreliable as to be worthless, and even 16x may not really be enough) to reduce the number of read and assembly errors to an acceptable level. And although the final "consensus sequence" which is the outcome of this process can indeed be stored in 750MB, or considerably less with good compression, the original data still has to be kept around somewhere in order to reproduce the work.
No, sequence assembly is still an area of active research; here is a sampling of papers published on the problem this year alone. Part of the problem is that "next gen" sequencing produces reads which are less reliable the farther down the fragment you go -- and the fragments are short, so there a hell of a lot of them to reassemble. The overall volume of sequencing is getting bigger and cheaper all the time, but there are some really serious reliability problems that need to be ironed out.
The company that now calls itself AT&T isn't really the same company as the one that was broken up.
Considering that the AT&T which remained after the original breakup was bought out (largely for the name) by one of the Baby Bells, and that's the AT&T we have now, I'm not sure how much difference there really is. The old Ma Bell culture stayed alive and well throughout. Monoplies like Standard Oil and the original AT&T are like goddamn T-1000s: break them up all you want, they'll just reassemble and keep coming after you.
A judge ruling in favor of a company seeking to protect their trademarks is not government censorship.
A judge ruling that search engines must de-index sites offering counterfeit wares is stupid and practically unenforceable, but not censorship.
Yes, both of these things are in fact government censorship. If you say otherwise, then you're using a definition of censorship completely different from the commonly understood meaning of the word; feel free to do that if you want, but don't expect everyone else to play along.
It all ties together. Booksellers, whether retail outlets like Amazon or the publishers themselves, want to charge paper-book prices for e-books. They see DRM as a mechanism to enable them to do that. The alternative, which is to sell e-books for reasonable prices (i.e., prices which reflect the fact that printing and distribution costs for e-books are effectively zero) and thereby sell more books, is so far mostly the domain of the self-publishing and small-press world.
What's the big deal? The pilots on a commercial flight are just there to make the passengers feel better.
No, they are not. I wish people would stop repeating this stupid myth. Airline pilots do an enormous amount of work during a flight, particularly takeoff and landing. It may well be that their jobs could be automated away, or that this will be possible in the near future, but it's nowhere near happening yet.
Use MAFIAA accounting to figure out what each bit of private information was worth, then fine FB for the total amount. I'm guessing the amount would be non-trivial even by FB's standards.
Were the anti-HSR people asking for ridership studies for the Sepulveda Pass? Were they asking for the expansion to run an operational profit, let alone an overall profit? Of course not; only rail is subjected to such standards.
This is an important point, and one that needs to be repeated over and over. The money the US and state governments spend on rail is a tiny fraction of what we spend on roads and air transportation. I mean, it's pocket change by comparison. And yet there seems to be a visceral negative reaction to rail on the part of a large number of people -- any kind of rail, whether local or long-distance -- that is all out of line with the numbers. It's particularly odd given our country's history, and the fact that the same people who gripe the loudest about any new rail project tend to be the ones who wave the flag at every opportunity.
Something tells me that the state government of California isn't particularly interested in building a railroad for Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
Hmm interesting. So, The Left even has their own motto? Did The Left vote on it? I didn't realize The Left was such a monolithic institution that was well coordinated.
GPP, as a right-winger, is assuming that everyone thinks like he does. The anarchic debate and wide range of opinions on nearly every conceivable subject which are characteristic of the left are completely alien to people whose political beliefs are shaped solely by Fox News talking points.
Well, one big difference is that video gamers don't generally get millions of dollars in tax money to build enormous facilities to play video games in.
The people who would be fooled by this, would not have the capacity to adjust their monitor settings in Windows, let alone possess the skill necessary to Photoshop an image's brightness and contrast.
So you're saying it's okay to defraud people if they're ignorant?
Here's a tip: everyone's ignorant about something. In fact, everyone's ignorant about most things. You know enough to spot the fraud in the Dell ad, great, good for you. But I guarantee you that there are people working very hard to part you from your money who will do their best to find the gaps in your knowledge -- and they will find those gaps, because you have just as many of them as everyone else does.
Normally, when (not if, when) that happens, people will be sympathetic. In your case, they'll point and laugh.
Mind you, that is from the undergrad level, the Ph.D. level could be very different.
Yes. Yes, it is.
A graduate CS degree is really a degree in applied math. If you have the background to get into the program, they assume you know how to code already. It's in the graduate work that you learn to understand why you code what you code.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, is that the most you can add to the conversation is a cheap shot at religion?
It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.
I will agree that if such a claim is made it should be picked apart but can we just hold off the hostilities until it happens? For once?
Hostilities were opened a long time ago. Your objection makes as much sense as saying to the captain of a US Navy ship, "I agree that if that Japanese ship over there shoots at us, we should blow them out of the water, but can we just hold off the hostilities until in happens?" in 1943.
Fair enough; 1997 was probably the height of the browser wars, and there was a lot of "this site best viewed in ..." crap floating around. But I do remember a lot of "fill out the form, get the data" sites, like the one OP referenced, that looked just fine in both Netscape and IE -- and which loaded faster over a 28.8 modem than many of their "modern" counterparts do over DSL.
Something like this would never happen in private enterprise, where the invisible hand of the free market weeds out such inefficiencies.
Oh, wait ...
The interface is clunky and 1997ish but hey.. that's your government at work!
By "clunky and 1997ish," you apparently mean "loads quickly, works the same on any browser, and gives you useful information without a bunch of extraneous crap." Man, I miss 1997.
Whee, what a fun game this debating stuff is!
Quoting an altered version of someone's words back at them is not debate, and anyone who says it is ... oh, hell, you know the rest.
its stealing either way
What is the "it" to which the stealing belongs?
Okay, seriously: no, it is not. Copyright infringement is not theft. "Piracy," in the sense you're using the word, is not theft. And anyone who says it is has shown that they have nothing meaningful to say on the subject.
Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further."
It's always nice to run into a fellow member of the Class of 1827 here on /.
No, bioinformaticists have a bunch of extra DNA. It codes for redundancy in the brain structures that we burn out thinking about this stuff.
What is in that 2TB of data? A human genome only takes up 750MB. (A base may hold 1 of 4 values A, C, G and T. So each base can be represented with 2 bits. 2 bits * 3 billion = 750MB)
What you get out of next-gen sequencing isn't actually the sequence of a genome; it's the sequences of a bunch of fragments, each of which has to be resequenced several times (8 or 16 is the current standard, so you'll hear about "8x sequencing" for example; anything less than 4x sequencing is considered so unreliable as to be worthless, and even 16x may not really be enough) to reduce the number of read and assembly errors to an acceptable level. And although the final "consensus sequence" which is the outcome of this process can indeed be stored in 750MB, or considerably less with good compression, the original data still has to be kept around somewhere in order to reproduce the work.
I thought that was a solved problem.
No, sequence assembly is still an area of active research; here is a sampling of papers published on the problem this year alone. Part of the problem is that "next gen" sequencing produces reads which are less reliable the farther down the fragment you go -- and the fragments are short, so there a hell of a lot of them to reassemble. The overall volume of sequencing is getting bigger and cheaper all the time, but there are some really serious reliability problems that need to be ironed out.
The company that now calls itself AT&T isn't really the same company as the one that was broken up.
Considering that the AT&T which remained after the original breakup was bought out (largely for the name) by one of the Baby Bells, and that's the AT&T we have now, I'm not sure how much difference there really is. The old Ma Bell culture stayed alive and well throughout. Monoplies like Standard Oil and the original AT&T are like goddamn T-1000s: break them up all you want, they'll just reassemble and keep coming after you.
A judge ruling in favor of a company seeking to protect their trademarks is not government censorship.
A judge ruling that search engines must de-index sites offering counterfeit wares is stupid and practically unenforceable, but not censorship.
Yes, both of these things are in fact government censorship. If you say otherwise, then you're using a definition of censorship completely different from the commonly understood meaning of the word; feel free to do that if you want, but don't expect everyone else to play along.
It all ties together. Booksellers, whether retail outlets like Amazon or the publishers themselves, want to charge paper-book prices for e-books. They see DRM as a mechanism to enable them to do that. The alternative, which is to sell e-books for reasonable prices (i.e., prices which reflect the fact that printing and distribution costs for e-books are effectively zero) and thereby sell more books, is so far mostly the domain of the self-publishing and small-press world.
What's the big deal? The pilots on a commercial flight are just there to make the passengers feel better.
No, they are not. I wish people would stop repeating this stupid myth. Airline pilots do an enormous amount of work during a flight, particularly takeoff and landing. It may well be that their jobs could be automated away, or that this will be possible in the near future, but it's nowhere near happening yet.
Fine them for some hundred thousands?
Use MAFIAA accounting to figure out what each bit of private information was worth, then fine FB for the total amount. I'm guessing the amount would be non-trivial even by FB's standards.
Were the anti-HSR people asking for ridership studies for the Sepulveda Pass? Were they asking for the expansion to run an operational profit, let alone an overall profit? Of course not; only rail is subjected to such standards.
This is an important point, and one that needs to be repeated over and over. The money the US and state governments spend on rail is a tiny fraction of what we spend on roads and air transportation. I mean, it's pocket change by comparison. And yet there seems to be a visceral negative reaction to rail on the part of a large number of people -- any kind of rail, whether local or long-distance -- that is all out of line with the numbers. It's particularly odd given our country's history, and the fact that the same people who gripe the loudest about any new rail project tend to be the ones who wave the flag at every opportunity.
Something tells me that the state government of California isn't particularly interested in building a railroad for Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
Has anyone noticed any recent appointees or elected officials seemingly always wearing a plain gold ring?
Well, you wouldn't notice them when they had the ring on, would you?
Hmm interesting. So, The Left even has their own motto? Did The Left vote on it? I didn't realize The Left was such a monolithic institution that was well coordinated.
GPP, as a right-winger, is assuming that everyone thinks like he does. The anarchic debate and wide range of opinions on nearly every conceivable subject which are characteristic of the left are completely alien to people whose political beliefs are shaped solely by Fox News talking points.
Yes, I "get" all the naive Slashdotian idealism, but to many people (self included) dead convicts are literally "enemy casualties" and no loss at all.
So do you think we should impose the death penalty for every single crime?
Well, one big difference is that video gamers don't generally get millions of dollars in tax money to build enormous facilities to play video games in.
Is this really worth any kind of discussion?
The people who would be fooled by this, would not have the capacity to adjust their monitor settings in Windows, let alone possess the skill necessary to Photoshop an image's brightness and contrast.
So you're saying it's okay to defraud people if they're ignorant?
Here's a tip: everyone's ignorant about something. In fact, everyone's ignorant about most things. You know enough to spot the fraud in the Dell ad, great, good for you. But I guarantee you that there are people working very hard to part you from your money who will do their best to find the gaps in your knowledge -- and they will find those gaps, because you have just as many of them as everyone else does.
Normally, when (not if, when) that happens, people will be sympathetic. In your case, they'll point and laugh.
... using words like "misleading" and "unfair." It's fraud, plain and simple.
Oh, well played!
Mind you, that is from the undergrad level, the Ph.D. level could be very different.
Yes. Yes, it is.
A graduate CS degree is really a degree in applied math. If you have the background to get into the program, they assume you know how to code already. It's in the graduate work that you learn to understand why you code what you code.