It's all arbitrary. In common American parlance, "Hispanic" (or in large parts of the US, "Mexican," regardless of actual country of origin) is a "race" just as much as "white" or "black" or, God help us all, "Asian," which last category of course includes almost 2/3 of the population of the Earth. None of it means anything real.
But it means a great deal to individual societies at particular moments -- which is why Ricky and Lucy's marriage wasn't considered interracial in the 1950s, while Kirk and Uhura's kiss was considered interracial in the 1960s; and as LWATCDR's post shows, the perception is quite different in 2010.
This is actually an interesting example of how fluid our conception of "race" is: in the 1950s, the Cuban Desi Arnaz was considered "white," and "Hispanic" as a racial category didn't exist. We were without doubt more racist half a century ago than we are now, but today's prejudices aren't just a milder version of yesterday's.
The summary does not state that this is what the listed companies are doing; it states that this is what OSI is worried they're doing. It's a small but critical difference. And the linked OSI statement explains quite succinctly why they're worried about this.
You can quote anything out of context to make it sound ridiculous.
Which was, in fact, my point in the first place. The poster I was replying to said "I think their main motivation is to make money for themselves," and I was simply pointing out that money, in and of itself, is a pretty lousy motivation for running for office, because there are much easier and more direct routes toward wealth. That's all. Obviously the non-monetary rewards are worth it in a lot of people's minds... and if you say "monetary and non-monetary" then you've covered every possible motivation for doing anything in the world.
Fine, add up all the money they get from both salary and non-salary sources, and you'll still find that the President, cabinet members, Senators, Representatives, and Supreme Court Justices still make a lot less than executives of major corporations. They're making good money, to be sure, but nothing like what's available at the C*O level. Again, if you want to get really rich, running for office isn't the way to do it.
I think their main motivation is to make money for themselves.
Take a look at the salaries of the top people in government, from the President on down, and compare it to executive pay in major corporations. If you want to get rich, there are a hell of a lot more direct ways to do it than running for office.
What Wikileaks did though was release the stuff that should have been released and much, much more.
What is some of this "much, much more" you're referring to? Be specific.
Releasing shit that needed to stay secret is not reporting.
Which is exactly the argument that has always been used against reporters who release information that the government finds embarrassing. You must be very proud of yourself, keeping company with the likes of Harding and Nixon.
By not doing the required work (submit peer review) are they cheating?
Ha! Yes, exactly. And they're not cheating to get a better grade; they're cheating to suck money out of the schools which will purchase their services -- many of which schools are no doubt in dire financial straits already. This is a level of scumminess which your run-of-the-mill cheating student can only dream of attaining.
You can patent this kind of thing these days, you know. Not that I think algorithms and statistical analyses should be patentable, but they are. So Caveon could patent and publish, and not have to worry about their competitors gaining an unfair advantage. In any case, they are making very specific methodological claims which should not be accepted without peer review.
Reading comprehension FAIL. Caveon is too busy doing work to freely publish their methods, as you say for peer review. However, if you pay them (thus becoming a client), they have someone available to explain it to you.
Logic FAIL. If there is someone at the company who can take the time to explain the methods to clients (and I mean really explain, not just spout a bunch of buzzwords) then that same person can also take the time to write an article suitable for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Also, methodology FAIL. Writing up results for publication is not just something you do when you have time, when you get around to it. In any real research field, it is an integral part of doing the work.
That is why they don't automatically assume you are a cheater... You get flagged and they do a further investigation.
Being accused of cheating in the academic world is kind of like being accused of a sex crime in the world at large -- the burden of proof is essentially on you to prove your innocence no matter what the law says, it's very difficult to prove you didn't do it, there are people who will go to insane lengths to get you convicted, and even if you're cleared the damage to your reputation is done.
It would be easy enough to do; require everyone who drives a vehicle over a certain size to hold a CDL, just like semi drivers do. A CDL isn't all that expensive to get in most places, but it takes a fair amount of skill -- you have to really prove that you can handle a vehicle that size. People who need a large vehicle for their work would get it, and there would be a few egotistical dickheads who would go to the trouble because they really, really want to drive a giant deathtank back and forth the work and the grocery store, but I guarantee you that the number of these monsters clogging up city streets would go way down.
Politically infeasible, of course, but I can dream.
If movies gave a true depiction of being a scientist, they would be full of people writing submissions for funding, trying to get some budget for new equipment and emailing off papers for publication. There has not, ever, been a real-to-life scientist characterised in any movie - ever. If people see "scientists" in movies and are then inspired to become like those characters they are in for a massive let down if they try to pursue that mythical career. It simply doesn't exist.
That's true of just about every job portrayed in movies, though. FBI agents don't spend most of their time chasing down brilliant serial killers, physicians don't spend most of their time making life-saving diagnoses of mysterious illnesses, etc. The real problem is that movies and TV have given us an unrealistic expectation of everything, and they seem to be about the most pervasive single influence on how we perceive the world. (And no, geeks are not immune to this -- look how often Gattaca and Jurassic Park come up whenever/. runs a story having anything to do with genetics.) Hell, talk to anyone who works in Hollywood about how absurd movies that portray the movie business are!
Truth is, if you gave kids a realistic picture of what their adult working lives would be like, in any job, most of them would probably give up on having any kind of future at all.;) It takes adult judgement to understand that a good job has real rewards (beyond a paycheck, I mean) that make putting up with all the drudgery worthwhile.
I don't see the adoption of something by a dictator as a great endorsement.
Endorsement? Who cares about endorsement? What matters is results.
If the Russian government moves to F/OSS, that will be good for F/OSS, just like IBM making F/OSS an integral part of its business plan has been. It doesn't mean they're good guys. They don't have to be. Dictatorial governments and giant corporations alike are pretty much always evil. Sometimes they do good as a side effect. When that happens, we should take advantage of it. "No permanent allies, only permanent interests."
Leave the worrying about "endorsements" to people buying overpriced athletic shoes.
Care to lay odds on Putin losing an election, ever?
Modern Russia is not so much post-Soviet as pre-Soviet; it's always been an autocracy and probably always will be. Or rather, it's long periods of autocracy punctuated by moments of sheer chaos. At least they've got a pretty good autocrat these days.
Like you, I'm an American vet, and what we fought for is still worth preserving, however tattered it may be.
Look, Putin is a very, very smart guy, and he's made a lot of decisions that have been good for Russia. But the problem is that the system under which he makes those decisions -- Tsarism in all but name -- depends on having the decisions made by someone smart who has his country's best interests in mind. Putin's not immortal, and if he's followed by someone with similarly autocratic powers, there's no way to know what he'll be like. All it takes is one bad absolute ruler to wreck any amount of progress made.
In the US, we can in fact limit the power of our leaders -- of course it doesn't work perfectly, and the current corporatocracy it seems like our "choices" at the ballot box don't matter a hell of a lot, but we do have a legal and non-violent mechanism by which we can replace our entire government in a period of no more than six years. Russia doesn't, not really; its electoral system is as firmly under government control as it ever was in the Soviet days. Which, as a lot of my older relatives can tell you, is pretty much the way things have always been in Russia, no matter the title of the guy in charge. Tsar, General Secretary, President, Prime Minister... nothing really changes.
Corruption, gridlock, and general incompetence may be the practical result of our system most of the time, but historically, autocracy is a hell of a lot worse.
He located evidence that the mother is not the best suited of the two parents to keep custody of the child. In the US this is blasphemy of the highest order. He shall be stoned forthwith.
You're being ridiculous. It's true that the court's default assumption in divorce cases involving children is that the woman should have custody of the children, but it's by no means impossible to get that assumption overturned. I know several divorced couples with children in which the man got custody, with no stoning involved.
Let me guess, you're one of those guys who goes around whining about how women really run everything, and thanks to those man-hating, hairy-legged feminists you can't get laid?
There really isn't much that even the best defense attorney can do to keep an overzealous prosecutor from dragging someone through the mud like this. A friend of mine was recently charged for a crime that didn't even happen because the prosecutor just wouldn't give up -- the defense attorney, who was quite competent, filed several motions to dismiss on the grounds of unreliable witnesses, etc., but the prosecutor managed to get the case to trial. Fortunately he was acquitted, and the fact that the acquittal took place after about half an hour of deliberation indicates how flimsy the prosecutor's case was. But the moral of the story is that only a decent jury can stop an out-of-control prosecutor, and Walker had better hope he gets that.
But this opens a door for the legal trolls that would be worse than all the spam of the world combined.
The terms laid out seem entirely reasonable to me, and I've certainly never sent an e-mail that would violate them. It's true, I suppose, that a troll could set up a website with insane terms buried on the site somewhere ("If you send the owner of this site e-mail for any reason, you agree to pay $1,000,000 per byte") but the solution to that problem would be either not to e-mail any of the listed addresses, or sue the site owner for... oh, hell, I don't know, something that a good lawyer could no doubt come up with. Some kind of fraud, I'm guessing.
A scummy lawyer sueing scummy email company, nothing to see here.
Please detail exactly how you think the lawyer's actions are scummy. Or are you saying that all lawyers are scummy, just by virtue of being lawyers? In that case, I hope for your sake that you're never sued or accused of a crime, because it might be hard to maintain your self-righteousness when you're relying on those scum to keep you from going bankrupt or to prison.
When a large, powerful corporate organization sends a "request" like that, it's a demand. If someone puts a gun to your head and says, "I'd like to request your wallet now," do you think you're not being mugged?
Um, did you read the same letters I did? The Cards Association's letter was exactly a take-down notice ("Our key concern is that this type of research was ever considered suitable for publication by the University... we would ask that this research be removed from public access immediately") and the reason it doesn't mention the DMCA is because, you know, it's in the UK. And the only reason it's not David-and-Goliath is because Cambridge is Cambridge, a huge and ancient university with one of the best academic reputations in the world, which is ready, willing, and able to fight for academic freedom, as the response letter shows. Your criticism of Slashdot for daring to present the story accurately is bizarre; I honestly have to wonder if you're being paid, or if you're just so blindly faithful to the Golden Rule ("he who has the gold makes the rules") that you can't properly interpret what's right in front of your face.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, go fuck yourself.
It's all arbitrary. In common American parlance, "Hispanic" (or in large parts of the US, "Mexican," regardless of actual country of origin) is a "race" just as much as "white" or "black" or, God help us all, "Asian," which last category of course includes almost 2/3 of the population of the Earth. None of it means anything real.
But it means a great deal to individual societies at particular moments -- which is why Ricky and Lucy's marriage wasn't considered interracial in the 1950s, while Kirk and Uhura's kiss was considered interracial in the 1960s; and as LWATCDR's post shows, the perception is quite different in 2010.
This is actually an interesting example of how fluid our conception of "race" is: in the 1950s, the Cuban Desi Arnaz was considered "white," and "Hispanic" as a racial category didn't exist. We were without doubt more racist half a century ago than we are now, but today's prejudices aren't just a milder version of yesterday's.
The concept of sarcasm is lost on you, isn't it?
You also might want to Google for phrases of the form "I for one welcome our new ___ overlords." That would be a start.
The summary does not state that this is what the listed companies are doing; it states that this is what OSI is worried they're doing. It's a small but critical difference. And the linked OSI statement explains quite succinctly why they're worried about this.
You can quote anything out of context to make it sound ridiculous.
Which was, in fact, my point in the first place. The poster I was replying to said "I think their main motivation is to make money for themselves," and I was simply pointing out that money, in and of itself, is a pretty lousy motivation for running for office, because there are much easier and more direct routes toward wealth. That's all. Obviously the non-monetary rewards are worth it in a lot of people's minds ... and if you say "monetary and non-monetary" then you've covered every possible motivation for doing anything in the world.
Fine, add up all the money they get from both salary and non-salary sources, and you'll still find that the President, cabinet members, Senators, Representatives, and Supreme Court Justices still make a lot less than executives of major corporations. They're making good money, to be sure, but nothing like what's available at the C*O level. Again, if you want to get really rich, running for office isn't the way to do it.
I think their main motivation is to make money for themselves.
Take a look at the salaries of the top people in government, from the President on down, and compare it to executive pay in major corporations. If you want to get rich, there are a hell of a lot more direct ways to do it than running for office.
What Wikileaks did though was release the stuff that should have been released and much, much more.
What is some of this "much, much more" you're referring to? Be specific.
Releasing shit that needed to stay secret is not reporting.
Which is exactly the argument that has always been used against reporters who release information that the government finds embarrassing. You must be very proud of yourself, keeping company with the likes of Harding and Nixon.
By not doing the required work (submit peer review) are they cheating?
Ha! Yes, exactly. And they're not cheating to get a better grade; they're cheating to suck money out of the schools which will purchase their services -- many of which schools are no doubt in dire financial straits already. This is a level of scumminess which your run-of-the-mill cheating student can only dream of attaining.
You can patent this kind of thing these days, you know. Not that I think algorithms and statistical analyses should be patentable, but they are. So Caveon could patent and publish, and not have to worry about their competitors gaining an unfair advantage. In any case, they are making very specific methodological claims which should not be accepted without peer review.
Reading comprehension FAIL. Caveon is too busy doing work to freely publish their methods, as you say for peer review. However, if you pay them (thus becoming a client), they have someone available to explain it to you.
Logic FAIL. If there is someone at the company who can take the time to explain the methods to clients (and I mean really explain, not just spout a bunch of buzzwords) then that same person can also take the time to write an article suitable for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Also, methodology FAIL. Writing up results for publication is not just something you do when you have time, when you get around to it. In any real research field, it is an integral part of doing the work.
That is why they don't automatically assume you are a cheater ... You get flagged and they do a further investigation.
Being accused of cheating in the academic world is kind of like being accused of a sex crime in the world at large -- the burden of proof is essentially on you to prove your innocence no matter what the law says, it's very difficult to prove you didn't do it, there are people who will go to insane lengths to get you convicted, and even if you're cleared the damage to your reputation is done.
It would be easy enough to do; require everyone who drives a vehicle over a certain size to hold a CDL, just like semi drivers do. A CDL isn't all that expensive to get in most places, but it takes a fair amount of skill -- you have to really prove that you can handle a vehicle that size. People who need a large vehicle for their work would get it, and there would be a few egotistical dickheads who would go to the trouble because they really, really want to drive a giant deathtank back and forth the work and the grocery store, but I guarantee you that the number of these monsters clogging up city streets would go way down.
Politically infeasible, of course, but I can dream.
If movies gave a true depiction of being a scientist, they would be full of people writing submissions for funding, trying to get some budget for new equipment and emailing off papers for publication. There has not, ever, been a real-to-life scientist characterised in any movie - ever. If people see "scientists" in movies and are then inspired to become like those characters they are in for a massive let down if they try to pursue that mythical career. It simply doesn't exist.
That's true of just about every job portrayed in movies, though. FBI agents don't spend most of their time chasing down brilliant serial killers, physicians don't spend most of their time making life-saving diagnoses of mysterious illnesses, etc. The real problem is that movies and TV have given us an unrealistic expectation of everything, and they seem to be about the most pervasive single influence on how we perceive the world. (And no, geeks are not immune to this -- look how often Gattaca and Jurassic Park come up whenever /. runs a story having anything to do with genetics.) Hell, talk to anyone who works in Hollywood about how absurd movies that portray the movie business are!
Truth is, if you gave kids a realistic picture of what their adult working lives would be like, in any job, most of them would probably give up on having any kind of future at all. ;) It takes adult judgement to understand that a good job has real rewards (beyond a paycheck, I mean) that make putting up with all the drudgery worthwhile.
the sexy colleagues
Actually, in the biomedical realm, this is a factor. Seriously. Walk around a med school campus some time and you'll see what I mean.
I don't see the adoption of something by a dictator as a great endorsement.
Endorsement? Who cares about endorsement? What matters is results.
If the Russian government moves to F/OSS, that will be good for F/OSS, just like IBM making F/OSS an integral part of its business plan has been. It doesn't mean they're good guys. They don't have to be. Dictatorial governments and giant corporations alike are pretty much always evil. Sometimes they do good as a side effect. When that happens, we should take advantage of it. "No permanent allies, only permanent interests."
Leave the worrying about "endorsements" to people buying overpriced athletic shoes.
Care to lay odds on Putin losing an election, ever?
Modern Russia is not so much post-Soviet as pre-Soviet; it's always been an autocracy and probably always will be. Or rather, it's long periods of autocracy punctuated by moments of sheer chaos. At least they've got a pretty good autocrat these days.
Like you, I'm an American vet, and what we fought for is still worth preserving, however tattered it may be.
Look, Putin is a very, very smart guy, and he's made a lot of decisions that have been good for Russia. But the problem is that the system under which he makes those decisions -- Tsarism in all but name -- depends on having the decisions made by someone smart who has his country's best interests in mind. Putin's not immortal, and if he's followed by someone with similarly autocratic powers, there's no way to know what he'll be like. All it takes is one bad absolute ruler to wreck any amount of progress made.
In the US, we can in fact limit the power of our leaders -- of course it doesn't work perfectly, and the current corporatocracy it seems like our "choices" at the ballot box don't matter a hell of a lot, but we do have a legal and non-violent mechanism by which we can replace our entire government in a period of no more than six years. Russia doesn't, not really; its electoral system is as firmly under government control as it ever was in the Soviet days. Which, as a lot of my older relatives can tell you, is pretty much the way things have always been in Russia, no matter the title of the guy in charge. Tsar, General Secretary, President, Prime Minister ... nothing really changes.
Corruption, gridlock, and general incompetence may be the practical result of our system most of the time, but historically, autocracy is a hell of a lot worse.
He located evidence that the mother is not the best suited of the two parents to keep custody of the child. In the US this is blasphemy of the highest order. He shall be stoned forthwith.
You're being ridiculous. It's true that the court's default assumption in divorce cases involving children is that the woman should have custody of the children, but it's by no means impossible to get that assumption overturned. I know several divorced couples with children in which the man got custody, with no stoning involved.
Let me guess, you're one of those guys who goes around whining about how women really run everything, and thanks to those man-hating, hairy-legged feminists you can't get laid?
There really isn't much that even the best defense attorney can do to keep an overzealous prosecutor from dragging someone through the mud like this. A friend of mine was recently charged for a crime that didn't even happen because the prosecutor just wouldn't give up -- the defense attorney, who was quite competent, filed several motions to dismiss on the grounds of unreliable witnesses, etc., but the prosecutor managed to get the case to trial. Fortunately he was acquitted, and the fact that the acquittal took place after about half an hour of deliberation indicates how flimsy the prosecutor's case was. But the moral of the story is that only a decent jury can stop an out-of-control prosecutor, and Walker had better hope he gets that.
But this opens a door for the legal trolls that would be worse than all the spam of the world combined.
The terms laid out seem entirely reasonable to me, and I've certainly never sent an e-mail that would violate them. It's true, I suppose, that a troll could set up a website with insane terms buried on the site somewhere ("If you send the owner of this site e-mail for any reason, you agree to pay $1,000,000 per byte") but the solution to that problem would be either not to e-mail any of the listed addresses, or sue the site owner for ... oh, hell, I don't know, something that a good lawyer could no doubt come up with. Some kind of fraud, I'm guessing.
A scummy lawyer sueing scummy email company, nothing to see here.
Please detail exactly how you think the lawyer's actions are scummy. Or are you saying that all lawyers are scummy, just by virtue of being lawyers? In that case, I hope for your sake that you're never sued or accused of a crime, because it might be hard to maintain your self-righteousness when you're relying on those scum to keep you from going bankrupt or to prison.
When a large, powerful corporate organization sends a "request" like that, it's a demand. If someone puts a gun to your head and says, "I'd like to request your wallet now," do you think you're not being mugged?
Um, did you read the same letters I did? The Cards Association's letter was exactly a take-down notice ("Our key concern is that this type of research was ever considered suitable for publication by the University ... we would ask that this research be removed from public access immediately") and the reason it doesn't mention the DMCA is because, you know, it's in the UK. And the only reason it's not David-and-Goliath is because Cambridge is Cambridge, a huge and ancient university with one of the best academic reputations in the world, which is ready, willing, and able to fight for academic freedom, as the response letter shows. Your criticism of Slashdot for daring to present the story accurately is bizarre; I honestly have to wonder if you're being paid, or if you're just so blindly faithful to the Golden Rule ("he who has the gold makes the rules") that you can't properly interpret what's right in front of your face.