A while back, IIRC, there was a story about the different ways that vulnerabilities are counted in Linux vs. Windows. There have been various MS-sponsored "studies" which sum the total number of vulnerabilities for all distros, so that if, for instance, the same vulnerability exists in Debian and Fedora, it's counted twice. (Likely much more than twice, since if it's in Debian, it's probably in all the Ubuntus too.) Meanwhile, of course, Windows vulnerabilities only get counted once. So don't be at all surprised to see stories along the lines of "5000 new Linux vulnerabilities discovered!" coming from the astroturfers soon.
I know that most people here are internet techies, but why do most of you not understand that net neutrality is a BAD thing.
Because we're actual techies, i.e. people who pay attention to what's actually going on in the tech world, as opposed to people who have swallowed the corporate "we have to be able to abuse our customers so we can provide service for our customers!" propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
China's health care isn't nearly as government-run as you probably think it is. As with most other aspects of the Chinese economy, it's been communist-in-name-only for decades; the health care "system" they have now is a public-private patchwork that's just as Byzantine as it is in the US.
I don't think that's true. One can of Pepsi won't give you diabetes, true enough; it's also true that one cigarette won't give you lung cancer and one beer won't give you liver disease. But all of these products do cause immediate, measurable reactions in the body at the time of consumption, and it's the additive effect of these reactions over time that kills people. It's hard to argue that any of the businesses of producing them is more dependent on "harmful use" than any other -- for all of them, addicts are their best customers.
As soon as we take the attitude that abuses of IP law aren't newsworthy because they happen all the time, we might as well just give up and resign ourselves to living in MicrosoftSonyDisneyWorld (c)(tm)(pat.pend.) The only chance we have of working our way out of the current insane mess is to keep people aware that this does happen, all the time, and that it affects pretty much everyone who wants to do anything creative that doesn't come prepackaged with the big-corporate stamp of approval.
Houses burn down all the time, too. If your neighbor's house is on fire and it looks like the flames are getting close to your own home, do you just shrug and say, "Meh, it happens"?
Bizarrely, the USPTO doesn't require code for software patents; I assume other patent offices worldwide, in those countries which allow software patents, follow the same practice. You can't patent a mechanical device without schematics (I think) but for software, a vague description of the algorithm -- too vague to be of any use in implementation -- is enough. This is yet another example of why the idea of patenting things that aren't physical objects is fundamentally broken, but don't expect the situation to change any time soon.
At Berkeley, on the other hand, the Freshman orientation program treats this as a more or less settled societal issue.
I suspect Berkeley's approach may be more in keeping with reality. (How many times are you ever going to hear that statement?) The genie's not only out of the bottle, he's moved to a different town and denies ever having lived at that address.
Do we need a "Godwin" variant for Gattaca references every time genetics are mentioned? "Dude! You just Gatted the thread!"
Apparently we do. Of course, the paranoid citation of science fiction as an objection to actual science goes at least back to Frankenstein, but Gattaca really seems to have taken on that role in the modern discussion of genetic issues. Jurassic Park often gets thrown in as a lagniappe.
Just in case this isn't clear to everybody: Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, and Gattaca were all fiction. They're stories. They're made up. They didn't really happen. At least Hitler and the Nazis actually existed...
Most people out there understand the basic tenets of healthy living such as good food and moderation but choose to ignore them.
After years in patient care, I have to disagree. Oh, there are plenty of people who know what they're doing to themselves and choose to do it anyway, of course (actually, almost everyone does this to one degree or another) but I honestly think "most" is an overestimate... especially when you're talking about 18-year-olds. A very large number of even intelligent, generally well-educated people are deeply ignorant of how their own bodies work. Anything that increases the general level of knowledge, at whatever level (from genes on up) is IMO a Good Thing. If they still make bad choices, well, at least they'll be better informed choices.
When you go to a university, the school knows your name, your date of birth, your social security number, your address, much of your financial history, and your entire academic record. If you're a traditional-age student (18-year-old freshman) they know much of that information about your parents, too, with the exception of the last bit. Public release of that information would be enough to wreck your life. If you don't trust them to handle sensitive personal information, you probably shouldn't go to school there in the first place. I really don't see how genetic information is any more sensitive than the items listed above.
You wrote, "the article is an effective demonstration of how you can prove anything with statistics... toxoplasmosis mortality [nationmaster.com] shows the final four in this year's world cup should be Brazil, USA, Mexico and South Africa. Obviously that didn't happen, so this story is wrong." In that post, it sure looks to me like you're attributing things to the author he never said, and making over-the-top claims about the results which his findings "should" imply. Granted, the article starts out with a grandiose claim ("What if I told you that last week I predicted all eight winners of a round of the World Cup?") but once he gets into the nitty-gritty of the analysis, it's clear that he's not cherry-picking or making any unjustifiable inferences.
True. It's also true that the researcher/writer is very careful not to make any absolute claims. He's just saying, as I said above, "here's this interesting correlation, and here's a possible causal mechanism." In such cases, a lot of people seem to take step two in my list above themselves -- they read the reasonable claim, turn it into an unreasonable claim in their own heads, and then proceed to tear that unreasonable claim down. It's amusing and a little sad that such people often link to the Philosophy 101 lists of logical fallacies that abound on the web; perhaps they should try reading down those lists until they encounter the phrase "straw man."
Researcher: "We found an interesting correlation between A and B, and here's a possible mechanism by which A may increase the probability of B."
Press release: "Scientists prove A causes B!"
Random/. reader: "Here's a case where B happened without A! Lies, damned lies, and statistics! Stupid scientists! Correlation is not causation! Look how smart I am!"
You can be as confident in predicting this cycle in any/. story which mentions anything having to do with statistics as you can in predicting that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.
Your post would make a lot more sense if there were any evidence that Microsoft is interested in any kind of disclosure at all, responsible or otherwise. But there's not. Pretty clearly, what they want is no disclosure, so they can patch whatever holes they get around to and let the others just sit there. The only time they admit to anything is when they're forced to do so.
I'm assuming you don't use your laptop right next to your deep fryer?
Seriously, the conditions a fryer plug is exposed to, and the conditions a laptop plug is exposed to, should be two completely different things. The power connection on my MacBook seems to be holding up just fine after a couple of years of use, but there's no way in hell I'd want it (or any other part of the machine) to spend any time in my kitchen.
Some departments do a very good job of organizing their faculty lists by research interest. Some don't. Unfortunately, it's almost completely up to whoever the department hires to do their web site design (or they use a school-wide template, but in that case, it's up to whoever designs the template.) AFAIK, there's no real standard in any field -- not even in CS, which seems like it would be the most likely place for such a standard to emerge.
The US military has been doing things in metric for decades; it's taking the press a while to catch up. My favorite was when I read a story in which a soldier was talking about something being "about ten clicks [sic] down the road" and the reporter helpfully explained that "a 'click' is military slang for about three-fifths of a mile." No, klick is military slang for a kilometer, which is a unit of measurement well understood by anyone with more than half a brain, and which does happen to be about three-fifths of a mile, but certainly isn't defined that way! The thing is, I suspect the reporter knew perfectly well what a kilometer was (and if he didn't understand "klick," he could have, you know, asked) but felt that it was necessary to dumb it down for the presumed audience.
You need the law that was interpreted during Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad to mean corporations were people in order to find where the whole thing originates.
The law in question was the 14th Amendment, which says nothing about corporations, and was clearly written to refer to individuals. The corporate intepretation was made up out of whole cloth. It was a mistake, and one which the SC could easily correct.
I read somewhere that a legal clerk messed up something citing judges "Corporation is in no way a person" to "Corporation is a person", I'm assuming that carries some weight.
That appears to be a myth, although as with many such, it has some origin in truth. Apparently a court reporter put corporate personhood into the writeup of the case (as opposed to reversing the meaning, as the myth would have it) and did in fact get the Chief Justice's kinda-sorta approval for doing so. But the reporter in question may have had some personal reasons for what he did, and the court probably should have made its decision a lot more clear.
Slashdot Mirror
A while back, IIRC, there was a story about the different ways that vulnerabilities are counted in Linux vs. Windows. There have been various MS-sponsored "studies" which sum the total number of vulnerabilities for all distros, so that if, for instance, the same vulnerability exists in Debian and Fedora, it's counted twice. (Likely much more than twice, since if it's in Debian, it's probably in all the Ubuntus too.) Meanwhile, of course, Windows vulnerabilities only get counted once. So don't be at all surprised to see stories along the lines of "5000 new Linux vulnerabilities discovered!" coming from the astroturfers soon.
I know that most people here are internet techies, but why do most of you not understand that net neutrality is a BAD thing.
Because we're actual techies, i.e. people who pay attention to what's actually going on in the tech world, as opposed to people who have swallowed the corporate "we have to be able to abuse our customers so we can provide service for our customers!" propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
China's health care isn't nearly as government-run as you probably think it is. As with most other aspects of the Chinese economy, it's been communist-in-name-only for decades; the health care "system" they have now is a public-private patchwork that's just as Byzantine as it is in the US.
I don't think that's true. One can of Pepsi won't give you diabetes, true enough; it's also true that one cigarette won't give you lung cancer and one beer won't give you liver disease. But all of these products do cause immediate, measurable reactions in the body at the time of consumption, and it's the additive effect of these reactions over time that kills people. It's hard to argue that any of the businesses of producing them is more dependent on "harmful use" than any other -- for all of them, addicts are their best customers.
the disbursants being injected into the water
If BP were being that free with its disbursing, people might be rather less upset.
As soon as we take the attitude that abuses of IP law aren't newsworthy because they happen all the time, we might as well just give up and resign ourselves to living in MicrosoftSonyDisneyWorld (c)(tm)(pat.pend.) The only chance we have of working our way out of the current insane mess is to keep people aware that this does happen, all the time, and that it affects pretty much everyone who wants to do anything creative that doesn't come prepackaged with the big-corporate stamp of approval.
Houses burn down all the time, too. If your neighbor's house is on fire and it looks like the flames are getting close to your own home, do you just shrug and say, "Meh, it happens"?
Bizarrely, the USPTO doesn't require code for software patents; I assume other patent offices worldwide, in those countries which allow software patents, follow the same practice. You can't patent a mechanical device without schematics (I think) but for software, a vague description of the algorithm -- too vague to be of any use in implementation -- is enough. This is yet another example of why the idea of patenting things that aren't physical objects is fundamentally broken, but don't expect the situation to change any time soon.
QED's worked pretty well so far.
Newtonian mechanics worked pretty well for a number of centuries, until it didn't.
Okay, okay, it still works pretty well for most things. But the places where it doesn't are kind of important.
At Berkeley, on the other hand, the Freshman orientation program treats this as a more or less settled societal issue.
I suspect Berkeley's approach may be more in keeping with reality. (How many times are you ever going to hear that statement?) The genie's not only out of the bottle, he's moved to a different town and denies ever having lived at that address.
Do we need a "Godwin" variant for Gattaca references every time genetics are mentioned? "Dude! You just Gatted the thread!"
Apparently we do. Of course, the paranoid citation of science fiction as an objection to actual science goes at least back to Frankenstein, but Gattaca really seems to have taken on that role in the modern discussion of genetic issues. Jurassic Park often gets thrown in as a lagniappe.
Just in case this isn't clear to everybody: Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, and Gattaca were all fiction. They're stories. They're made up. They didn't really happen. At least Hitler and the Nazis actually existed ...
Most people out there understand the basic tenets of healthy living such as good food and moderation but choose to ignore them.
After years in patient care, I have to disagree. Oh, there are plenty of people who know what they're doing to themselves and choose to do it anyway, of course (actually, almost everyone does this to one degree or another) but I honestly think "most" is an overestimate ... especially when you're talking about 18-year-olds. A very large number of even intelligent, generally well-educated people are deeply ignorant of how their own bodies work. Anything that increases the general level of knowledge, at whatever level (from genes on up) is IMO a Good Thing. If they still make bad choices, well, at least they'll be better informed choices.
And come on, "indoctrination"? Really?
When you go to a university, the school knows your name, your date of birth, your social security number, your address, much of your financial history, and your entire academic record. If you're a traditional-age student (18-year-old freshman) they know much of that information about your parents, too, with the exception of the last bit. Public release of that information would be enough to wreck your life. If you don't trust them to handle sensitive personal information, you probably shouldn't go to school there in the first place. I really don't see how genetic information is any more sensitive than the items listed above.
Whoeever came up with this "study" is a moron.
Whoever calls a researcher a moron without bothering to read a short, easily accessible article about the research ... is a moron.
In this case, that would be you.
You wrote, "the article is an effective demonstration of how you can prove anything with statistics ... toxoplasmosis mortality [nationmaster.com] shows the final four in this year's world cup should be Brazil, USA, Mexico and South Africa. Obviously that didn't happen, so this story is wrong." In that post, it sure looks to me like you're attributing things to the author he never said, and making over-the-top claims about the results which his findings "should" imply. Granted, the article starts out with a grandiose claim ("What if I told you that last week I predicted all eight winners of a round of the World Cup?") but once he gets into the nitty-gritty of the analysis, it's clear that he's not cherry-picking or making any unjustifiable inferences.
Even the correlation is not absolute here.
"A is positively correlated with B" does not mean the same thing as "if A, then B." So griping that the correlation isn't "absolute" is kind of silly.
True. It's also true that the researcher/writer is very careful not to make any absolute claims. He's just saying, as I said above, "here's this interesting correlation, and here's a possible causal mechanism." In such cases, a lot of people seem to take step two in my list above themselves -- they read the reasonable claim, turn it into an unreasonable claim in their own heads, and then proceed to tear that unreasonable claim down. It's amusing and a little sad that such people often link to the Philosophy 101 lists of logical fallacies that abound on the web; perhaps they should try reading down those lists until they encounter the phrase "straw man."
Researcher: "We found an interesting correlation between A and B, and here's a possible mechanism by which A may increase the probability of B."
Press release: "Scientists prove A causes B!"
Random /. reader: "Here's a case where B happened without A! Lies, damned lies, and statistics! Stupid scientists! Correlation is not causation! Look how smart I am!"
You can be as confident in predicting this cycle in any /. story which mentions anything having to do with statistics as you can in predicting that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.
Your post would make a lot more sense if there were any evidence that Microsoft is interested in any kind of disclosure at all, responsible or otherwise. But there's not. Pretty clearly, what they want is no disclosure, so they can patch whatever holes they get around to and let the others just sit there. The only time they admit to anything is when they're forced to do so.
I'm assuming you don't use your laptop right next to your deep fryer?
Seriously, the conditions a fryer plug is exposed to, and the conditions a laptop plug is exposed to, should be two completely different things. The power connection on my MacBook seems to be holding up just fine after a couple of years of use, but there's no way in hell I'd want it (or any other part of the machine) to spend any time in my kitchen.
Yes.
Some departments do a very good job of organizing their faculty lists by research interest. Some don't. Unfortunately, it's almost completely up to whoever the department hires to do their web site design (or they use a school-wide template, but in that case, it's up to whoever designs the template.) AFAIK, there's no real standard in any field -- not even in CS, which seems like it would be the most likely place for such a standard to emerge.
The US military has been doing things in metric for decades; it's taking the press a while to catch up. My favorite was when I read a story in which a soldier was talking about something being "about ten clicks [sic] down the road" and the reporter helpfully explained that "a 'click' is military slang for about three-fifths of a mile." No, klick is military slang for a kilometer, which is a unit of measurement well understood by anyone with more than half a brain, and which does happen to be about three-fifths of a mile, but certainly isn't defined that way! The thing is, I suspect the reporter knew perfectly well what a kilometer was (and if he didn't understand "klick," he could have, you know, asked) but felt that it was necessary to dumb it down for the presumed audience.
Besides - most people here aren't citizens, they're subjects of whatever country they are from.
Most people who live in most countries are citizens rather than subjects. The use of the word "citizen" is hardly unique to the USA.
I can't wait for the day when the government is allowed to regulate internet traffic through "net neutrality" legislation.
Please educate yourself on what "net neutrality" actually means. Jesus. It's not that hard.
You need the law that was interpreted during Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad to mean corporations were people in order to find where the whole thing originates.
The law in question was the 14th Amendment, which says nothing about corporations, and was clearly written to refer to individuals. The corporate intepretation was made up out of whole cloth. It was a mistake, and one which the SC could easily correct.
I read somewhere that a legal clerk messed up something citing judges "Corporation is in no way a person" to "Corporation is a person", I'm assuming that carries some weight.
That appears to be a myth, although as with many such, it has some origin in truth. Apparently a court reporter put corporate personhood into the writeup of the case (as opposed to reversing the meaning, as the myth would have it) and did in fact get the Chief Justice's kinda-sorta approval for doing so. But the reporter in question may have had some personal reasons for what he did, and the court probably should have made its decision a lot more clear.