My guess is that the university hired this guy to avoid having to provide legal aid to students -- i.e., catch them before the RIAA does and handle the matter internally. It would be nice if they took a hard line in defense of students' rights instead, but you can't necessarily expect them to do that. It seems like universities' responses to the RIAA's anti-student campaign have been all over the map. A few do defend their students to the end, more actively collaborate with the RIAA, and most are somewhere in the middle. State schools are in a particular bind, of course, since (a) most of them are having serious financial problems these days, and (b) they depend for much of their budgets on easily-bought state legislators.
Actually the first airplane to break the speed of sound was the Bell X-1 with Chuck Yeager aboard - and it most definitely did not break apart due to the stress.
No, the first airplane to break the sound barrier in level flight was the X-1, and it was built to do so. A number of late WW2 fighters almost certainly did so in dives... and most of the time, ended up in pieces scattered across the landscape.
Otherwise, as long as he doesn't go very far past TV, he shouldn't have to worry too much in that regard
Remember, he's going to be falling for a good long time in air so thin it's pretty close to vacuum -- I'd guess that terminal velocity at 120,000 feet is a hell of a lot faster than it is down here. He'll be moving very, very fast when he gets down to the thicker parts of the atmosphere. Fast enough to cause deceleration significantly greater than 1G? Dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Any given technology can be said to exist in one of two states: Growing, or dying.
There's a third choice: stable. Mature technologies are all around us, silently doing their jobs without much fuss or bother. We don't notice them, because we've grown up with them, but at one time they were the Next Big Thing. They stopped growing except for very incremental improvements years or decades ago, but they're not going away any time soon.
Look at your refrigerator. Unless you've spent a lot of money for one with various gizmos, odds are pretty good it's much like the one your parents had when you were a kid. It may be a little quieter, a little more energy-efficient, and the temperature control may be a little more consistent, but it's basically the same machine. But there was a time, just within living memory, when temperature-controlled, electric-powered food storage in the home was absolutely revolutionary. It changed the way people lived at least as much as the internet has, and it addresses a far more fundamental need. But unless it breaks, you probably don't spend much time thinking about it. Why should you? It's just a fridge.
I suspect that the classic desktop (or "desktop replacement" laptop) PC is going the same way. It's a useful machine, and there's really no particular reason to change it, or -- for the vast majority of users, anyway -- to run out and get the latest and greatest. Nor is there any reason to get rid of it. There have of course been many incremental improvements, and there will continue to be. But the fundamentals of the user experience haven't really changed that much for the last decade. It's my strong impression that a much higher proportion of computer users are quite comfortably using ten-year-old computers than was the case ten years ago, and I expect that proportion will only continue to increase. Using a 1990 computer in 2000 was a constant exercise in frustration; using a 2000 computer in 2010 is just fine for what the majority of users do on a daily basis. By 2020, they'll be refrigerators.
A study which actually states its correlation and not causation!
Any decent study will state the correlation and then describe what steps were taken to isolate causative factors. This is not new. The reporting is a little better than usual, though.
With the gross misinterpretation of studies and statistics, I am surprised the headline didn't read "Study Finds Brain Structure is the Cause of Video Game Success!"
The "gross misinterpretation of studies and statistics" is almost always the fault of (a) reporters trying to read more into the study than is usually there, and (b) on Slashdot, people quoting half-remembered maxims from the one stats class they took, ten years ago, to fulfill a requirement for their CS degree.
The main difference, I think -- besides the fact that the Nazis were motivated by loony ideology and the modern researchers, presumably, are motivated by scientific curiosity -- is that the Hecks could only breed for phenotype, while the groups currently working on the problem are breeding for genotype. A project like this is really impossible without modern DNA sequencing technology.
That being said, it would be interesting to know how close the Hecks got. The Wiki article doesn't mention if there's been any comparison of the Heck genome to the reconstructed aurochs genome; I'd like to know the results of such a study.
It's also amusing to speculate what would have happened if sequencing had been available back then. Der Fuehrer's apoplexy upon learning that an awful lot of the Jews and Slavs he was bent on exterminating were genetically indistinguishable from the general German population would have been a site to behold.
Presumably, it depends on which 99% they've recovered. If it includes all or most of the genes that make an aurochs an aurochs rather than Bessie, they're good to go.
Also, TFA says they're not trying to create an aurochs genome de novo. They're carefully breeding modern cattle to try to get a genome that's as close as possible to the reconstructed aurochs genome. So the intermediate generations may not be aurochs, exactly, but they won't be nonviable; they'll just be different breeds of cow.
I'd like to believe you're right, but the serious lobbying hasn't started yet. And the fact that patents like the one discussed in this story are still being granted shows that there's still life in the old beast.
Software patents are inherently wrong. It doesn't matter if you invent an algorithm or not, because algorithms are just mathematical expressions, and you can't (or shouldn't be able to) patent math. And algorithms are usually implemented, not in physical (patentable) devices, but in software programs, for which the appropriate protection is copyright, not patent.
The obvious exception is in chip design, where algorithms are implemented in physical devices. I don't have a problem with chip patents, just as long as we remember that it's the implementation being patented, not the idea, and limit lawsuits accordingly.
Don't even get me started on "business processes."
Go to those libraries' sites, and notice what's missing?
Kindle.
This is kind of like an ISP saying "you can access any site you want through our network, as long as it's not Google." Note that I'm not blaming the libraries for this, at all -- it's strictly Amazon's fault -- but it's still the elephant in the living room for e-book lending.
We're probably never going to get rid of software patents, odious as they are; at this point there are too many enormous players, of which Google is not at all the worst offender, with way too much invested in them. But it occurs to me that one change to patent law that might be politically feasible, and which would really help cut down on clearly frivolous patents like this one:
If any claim in the patent is held to be invalid, the entire patent is invalid.
Claim 1 of the patent is simply an arcane, legalistic description of the operation of pretty much every parallel processing algorithm ever. Some of the subsequent claims actually do describe novel, non-obvious, and useful ways of handling large data sets across multiple processors. If the patent were restricted to these claims, well, it would still be a software patent and therefore Evil, but it might at least have some claim to promoting "the progress of science and the useful arts."
In general, it seems like this would make both patent trolling, and big companies like Google lawyering small independent developers to death, a little more difficult.
(I wonder why this is? Are they such Luddites? Or are they just ignorant of the technology? Or perhaps they don't see a way to collect overdue fines.;-)
Actually, I think it's because most new e-books come with EULAs which specifically prohibit lending. And they have the DRM to back it up.
Publishers fought like hell against the public lending library concept when it first started becoming widespread ~150 years ago. Fortunately for everyone, they lost the battle. Now they see a chance to fight it again, and in the current IP-philic legal environment, they have a good chance of winning.
if Apple is going to be in bed with a competitor, its much better that it be Microsoft rather than google
Not with respect to search. Look, there's a reason that Google dominates the search market despite the large number of alternatives, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft-style marketing and lock-in. Google is simply so much better a search engine than any other, for general-purpose (as opposed to domain-specific) search, that for years there's been no reason to use anything else. Apple or any other company that makes Bing (or any non-Google search engine, really) the default on their products is making a huge mistake.
Now, this isn't to say that at some point there won't be a better search engine out there; there was a time, after all, when it seemed like AltaVista was the be-all and end-all. But you can bet that if and when the Google-killer comes along, it won't be from Microsoft.
The reason you were modded off-topic is probably because your reply had absolutely nothing to do with dual licensing, and everything to do with ranting about what a butthead Monty Widenius is and how much better PostgreSQL and SQLite are than MySQL. All of which may be true, but it's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Responding to an on-topic post with an off-topic rant does nothing to answer the story submitter's question.
No, you made your point accurately. This isn't a story about the misuse of statistics; it's a story about the misuse of the concept "the misuse of statistics." TFA repeatedly claims that an absurd comparison of voting patterns and cancer rates is "just as valid" as studies showing a meaningful causal link between lack of insurance and death from lack of medical care -- but making that claim (and repeating it ad nauseam) doesn't make it true. The moral is not "stupid Democrats don't understand statistics," it's "stupid Republicans don't understand statistics and make fools of themselves when they try to make fun of Democrats who do."
Fortunately, FOX News is always on the alert for suchg shenanigans, and takes prompt corrective action by clearly identifying nefarious Democrats such as Foley and Sandford.
Have you paid any attention to the net neutrality debate at all? Because your rant is so completely ignorant, so completely the opposite of what's actually happening, that I find it hard to believe you have any idea what you're talking about.
Cities are cheap to replace, there is plenty of room, and the way to get better cities (especially in the US) is to smash old infrastructure instead of trying to save it.
That idea in the 1950s and '60s was called "urban renewal," and it led to entire neighborhoods of solid old buildings being knocked down and replaced with shoddy crap. Not to mention that, you know, people lived there, and the effects on them were pretty destructive. Ever thought about why "living in the projects" is considered to be a bad thing? There may occasionally be times when "bulldoze it all away" is the right solution -- sections of Detroit, as you mention, are largely deserted and probably unsalvageable -- but such times are very much the exception.
New Orleans did it badly. The Corps of Engineers had been warning for a very, very long time that the levees were in terrible shape (and in many cases poorly sited) but everyone ignored the warnings until they were illustrated in dramatic fashion.
How long a time? Well, my great-grandfather, William Elam, was one of the leading hydrological engineers of his day; he wrote "Speeding Floods to the Sea" which was pretty much the standard textbook on flood control on the Mississippi for the mid-twentieth century. And he warned about a Katrina-type scenario then, in 1946, and probably well before that. The knowledge was there to fix the problem. What was lacking, for decades, was the political will.
When you're talking about coastal areas as densely populated as much of England's are, 90 years is about the right amount of time to plan. Short-sighted, "ahhh, we'll worry about it when it happens" thinking is responsible for most of the death and destruction from natural disasters of any sort.
As long as there are people like you around who persist in defending his grotesque legacy, it's important for others to keep reminding people just how bad the last eight years really were.
But I think if you ask the Kurds (Don't gas me, bro!) aka "brown people" getting rid of Saddam was a good thing even if the war was started under false pretenses. Not to mention the Kuwaitis and the "scorched earth" policy of a retreating Saddam.
Yes, yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Do you understand that the world is full of bad guys, many of them much worse than he ever was? We can't fight them all. The only legitimate reason to go to war is if we or our allies are attacked. Trying to be policeman-to-the-world is a recipe for national disaster.
And as a purely practical consequence, some of those Really Bad Guys I mentioned above are running Iraq right now. We deposed a corrupt secular dictatorship which had a strong interest in containing religious fanaticism, and replaced it with a corrupt theocracy run on the principles of warlordism, Sharia law, and ethnic hatred. If you think this has been an improvement, you're insane.
Of course, for thousands of years of recorded history, people did kill each other en masse at arm's length. Alexander's soldiers may have been more honest about what they were doing than somebody today sitting in a bunker pressing a button and killing people on the other side of the globe, but they were no less bloodthirsty. So I don't think you can blame the modern willingness to kill on the impartiality created by modern military technology, because the modern willingness to kill looks remarkably like the ancient willingness to kill, just with different tools.
OTOH, I agree with you completely about the absurdity of calling some methods of killing heroic and others evil. Dead is dead.
... they should also have to deactivate every (legal) copy that's currently out in the wild. After all, the software industry has been telling us for years that we don't really get to buy software, just rent it. So surely it can't be legal for Microsoft to continue to rent out software that violates someone else's patent!
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that the university hired this guy to avoid having to provide legal aid to students -- i.e., catch them before the RIAA does and handle the matter internally. It would be nice if they took a hard line in defense of students' rights instead, but you can't necessarily expect them to do that. It seems like universities' responses to the RIAA's anti-student campaign have been all over the map. A few do defend their students to the end, more actively collaborate with the RIAA, and most are somewhere in the middle. State schools are in a particular bind, of course, since (a) most of them are having serious financial problems these days, and (b) they depend for much of their budgets on easily-bought state legislators.
Actually the first airplane to break the speed of sound was the Bell X-1 with Chuck Yeager aboard - and it most definitely did not break apart due to the stress.
No, the first airplane to break the sound barrier in level flight was the X-1, and it was built to do so. A number of late WW2 fighters almost certainly did so in dives ... and most of the time, ended up in pieces scattered across the landscape.
Otherwise, as long as he doesn't go very far past TV, he shouldn't have to worry too much in that regard
Remember, he's going to be falling for a good long time in air so thin it's pretty close to vacuum -- I'd guess that terminal velocity at 120,000 feet is a hell of a lot faster than it is down here. He'll be moving very, very fast when he gets down to the thicker parts of the atmosphere. Fast enough to cause deceleration significantly greater than 1G? Dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Any given technology can be said to exist in one of two states: Growing, or dying.
There's a third choice: stable. Mature technologies are all around us, silently doing their jobs without much fuss or bother. We don't notice them, because we've grown up with them, but at one time they were the Next Big Thing. They stopped growing except for very incremental improvements years or decades ago, but they're not going away any time soon.
Look at your refrigerator. Unless you've spent a lot of money for one with various gizmos, odds are pretty good it's much like the one your parents had when you were a kid. It may be a little quieter, a little more energy-efficient, and the temperature control may be a little more consistent, but it's basically the same machine. But there was a time, just within living memory, when temperature-controlled, electric-powered food storage in the home was absolutely revolutionary. It changed the way people lived at least as much as the internet has, and it addresses a far more fundamental need. But unless it breaks, you probably don't spend much time thinking about it. Why should you? It's just a fridge.
I suspect that the classic desktop (or "desktop replacement" laptop) PC is going the same way. It's a useful machine, and there's really no particular reason to change it, or -- for the vast majority of users, anyway -- to run out and get the latest and greatest. Nor is there any reason to get rid of it. There have of course been many incremental improvements, and there will continue to be. But the fundamentals of the user experience haven't really changed that much for the last decade. It's my strong impression that a much higher proportion of computer users are quite comfortably using ten-year-old computers than was the case ten years ago, and I expect that proportion will only continue to increase. Using a 1990 computer in 2000 was a constant exercise in frustration; using a 2000 computer in 2010 is just fine for what the majority of users do on a daily basis. By 2020, they'll be refrigerators.
A study which actually states its correlation and not causation!
Any decent study will state the correlation and then describe what steps were taken to isolate causative factors. This is not new. The reporting is a little better than usual, though.
With the gross misinterpretation of studies and statistics, I am surprised the headline didn't read "Study Finds Brain Structure is the Cause of Video Game Success!"
The "gross misinterpretation of studies and statistics" is almost always the fault of (a) reporters trying to read more into the study than is usually there, and (b) on Slashdot, people quoting half-remembered maxims from the one stats class they took, ten years ago, to fulfill a requirement for their CS degree.
The main difference, I think -- besides the fact that the Nazis were motivated by loony ideology and the modern researchers, presumably, are motivated by scientific curiosity -- is that the Hecks could only breed for phenotype, while the groups currently working on the problem are breeding for genotype. A project like this is really impossible without modern DNA sequencing technology.
That being said, it would be interesting to know how close the Hecks got. The Wiki article doesn't mention if there's been any comparison of the Heck genome to the reconstructed aurochs genome; I'd like to know the results of such a study.
It's also amusing to speculate what would have happened if sequencing had been available back then. Der Fuehrer's apoplexy upon learning that an awful lot of the Jews and Slavs he was bent on exterminating were genetically indistinguishable from the general German population would have been a site to behold.
Presumably, it depends on which 99% they've recovered. If it includes all or most of the genes that make an aurochs an aurochs rather than Bessie, they're good to go.
Also, TFA says they're not trying to create an aurochs genome de novo. They're carefully breeding modern cattle to try to get a genome that's as close as possible to the reconstructed aurochs genome. So the intermediate generations may not be aurochs, exactly, but they won't be nonviable; they'll just be different breeds of cow.
I'd like to believe you're right, but the serious lobbying hasn't started yet. And the fact that patents like the one discussed in this story are still being granted shows that there's still life in the old beast.
Software patents are inherently wrong. It doesn't matter if you invent an algorithm or not, because algorithms are just mathematical expressions, and you can't (or shouldn't be able to) patent math. And algorithms are usually implemented, not in physical (patentable) devices, but in software programs, for which the appropriate protection is copyright, not patent.
The obvious exception is in chip design, where algorithms are implemented in physical devices. I don't have a problem with chip patents, just as long as we remember that it's the implementation being patented, not the idea, and limit lawsuits accordingly.
Don't even get me started on "business processes."
Go to those libraries' sites, and notice what's missing?
Kindle.
This is kind of like an ISP saying "you can access any site you want through our network, as long as it's not Google." Note that I'm not blaming the libraries for this, at all -- it's strictly Amazon's fault -- but it's still the elephant in the living room for e-book lending.
We're probably never going to get rid of software patents, odious as they are; at this point there are too many enormous players, of which Google is not at all the worst offender, with way too much invested in them. But it occurs to me that one change to patent law that might be politically feasible, and which would really help cut down on clearly frivolous patents like this one:
If any claim in the patent is held to be invalid, the entire patent is invalid.
Claim 1 of the patent is simply an arcane, legalistic description of the operation of pretty much every parallel processing algorithm ever. Some of the subsequent claims actually do describe novel, non-obvious, and useful ways of handling large data sets across multiple processors. If the patent were restricted to these claims, well, it would still be a software patent and therefore Evil, but it might at least have some claim to promoting "the progress of science and the useful arts."
In general, it seems like this would make both patent trolling, and big companies like Google lawyering small independent developers to death, a little more difficult.
(I wonder why this is? Are they such Luddites? Or are they just ignorant of the technology? Or perhaps they don't see a way to collect overdue fines. ;-)
Actually, I think it's because most new e-books come with EULAs which specifically prohibit lending. And they have the DRM to back it up.
Publishers fought like hell against the public lending library concept when it first started becoming widespread ~150 years ago. Fortunately for everyone, they lost the battle. Now they see a chance to fight it again, and in the current IP-philic legal environment, they have a good chance of winning.
Because of the anger among the cyclists, Critical Mass was started which generally only pisses off the drivers but also is a lot of fun.
And you wonder why so many drivers get pissed off to the point of violence? Golly gee, I can't imagine how that could happen.
if Apple is going to be in bed with a competitor, its much better that it be Microsoft rather than google
Not with respect to search. Look, there's a reason that Google dominates the search market despite the large number of alternatives, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft-style marketing and lock-in. Google is simply so much better a search engine than any other, for general-purpose (as opposed to domain-specific) search, that for years there's been no reason to use anything else. Apple or any other company that makes Bing (or any non-Google search engine, really) the default on their products is making a huge mistake.
Now, this isn't to say that at some point there won't be a better search engine out there; there was a time, after all, when it seemed like AltaVista was the be-all and end-all. But you can bet that if and when the Google-killer comes along, it won't be from Microsoft.
The reason you were modded off-topic is probably because your reply had absolutely nothing to do with dual licensing, and everything to do with ranting about what a butthead Monty Widenius is and how much better PostgreSQL and SQLite are than MySQL. All of which may be true, but it's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Responding to an on-topic post with an off-topic rant does nothing to answer the story submitter's question.
No, you made your point accurately. This isn't a story about the misuse of statistics; it's a story about the misuse of the concept "the misuse of statistics." TFA repeatedly claims that an absurd comparison of voting patterns and cancer rates is "just as valid" as studies showing a meaningful causal link between lack of insurance and death from lack of medical care -- but making that claim (and repeating it ad nauseam) doesn't make it true. The moral is not "stupid Democrats don't understand statistics," it's "stupid Republicans don't understand statistics and make fools of themselves when they try to make fun of Democrats who do."
Fortunately, FOX News is always on the alert for suchg shenanigans, and takes prompt corrective action by clearly identifying nefarious Democrats such as Foley and Sandford.
Oh, wait a minute ...
Have you paid any attention to the net neutrality debate at all? Because your rant is so completely ignorant, so completely the opposite of what's actually happening, that I find it hard to believe you have any idea what you're talking about.
Cities are cheap to replace, there is plenty of room, and the way to get better cities (especially in the US) is to smash old infrastructure instead of trying to save it.
That idea in the 1950s and '60s was called "urban renewal," and it led to entire neighborhoods of solid old buildings being knocked down and replaced with shoddy crap. Not to mention that, you know, people lived there, and the effects on them were pretty destructive. Ever thought about why "living in the projects" is considered to be a bad thing? There may occasionally be times when "bulldoze it all away" is the right solution -- sections of Detroit, as you mention, are largely deserted and probably unsalvageable -- but such times are very much the exception.
New Orleans did it badly. The Corps of Engineers had been warning for a very, very long time that the levees were in terrible shape (and in many cases poorly sited) but everyone ignored the warnings until they were illustrated in dramatic fashion.
How long a time? Well, my great-grandfather, William Elam, was one of the leading hydrological engineers of his day; he wrote "Speeding Floods to the Sea" which was pretty much the standard textbook on flood control on the Mississippi for the mid-twentieth century. And he warned about a Katrina-type scenario then, in 1946, and probably well before that. The knowledge was there to fix the problem. What was lacking, for decades, was the political will.
When you're talking about coastal areas as densely populated as much of England's are, 90 years is about the right amount of time to plan. Short-sighted, "ahhh, we'll worry about it when it happens" thinking is responsible for most of the death and destruction from natural disasters of any sort.
Well some will never let the memory of GWB die.
As long as there are people like you around who persist in defending his grotesque legacy, it's important for others to keep reminding people just how bad the last eight years really were.
But I think if you ask the Kurds (Don't gas me, bro!) aka "brown people" getting rid of Saddam was a good thing even if the war was started under false pretenses. Not to mention the Kuwaitis and the "scorched earth" policy of a retreating Saddam.
Yes, yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Do you understand that the world is full of bad guys, many of them much worse than he ever was? We can't fight them all. The only legitimate reason to go to war is if we or our allies are attacked. Trying to be policeman-to-the-world is a recipe for national disaster.
And as a purely practical consequence, some of those Really Bad Guys I mentioned above are running Iraq right now. We deposed a corrupt secular dictatorship which had a strong interest in containing religious fanaticism, and replaced it with a corrupt theocracy run on the principles of warlordism, Sharia law, and ethnic hatred. If you think this has been an improvement, you're insane.
Of course, for thousands of years of recorded history, people did kill each other en masse at arm's length. Alexander's soldiers may have been more honest about what they were doing than somebody today sitting in a bunker pressing a button and killing people on the other side of the globe, but they were no less bloodthirsty. So I don't think you can blame the modern willingness to kill on the impartiality created by modern military technology, because the modern willingness to kill looks remarkably like the ancient willingness to kill, just with different tools.
OTOH, I agree with you completely about the absurdity of calling some methods of killing heroic and others evil. Dead is dead.
Compliment by self-deprecation is fine. Compliment by half-the-human-race-deprecation is not.
... they should also have to deactivate every (legal) copy that's currently out in the wild. After all, the software industry has been telling us for years that we don't really get to buy software, just rent it. So surely it can't be legal for Microsoft to continue to rent out software that violates someone else's patent!