What $8 trillion would that be? Are they the long-term loans that were almost all balanced as of last June? Are they (as is much more likely) the overnight loans that were either paid back the next day or rolled over (and recounted)?
Most of the Fed's reported figures are noting loans only, but not repayments. A major aspect of the economy is how much liquid cash (usable as trading assets) is available, and those numbers reflect that. A better way to interpret it is "how much more money would the economy have needed if the Fed didn't exist" rather than "how much money did the Fed hand out".
Interesting you should use that analogy, given the reputation of car mechanics when I was growing up for being shady places whose work you'd often want double-checked... Nowadays, almost all mechanics shops are certified by various industry groups, and the ones that aren't go out of business real quick.
Computers (and especially mobile devices) are still magic boxes to most people (as cars used to be), so outside of the Slashdot crowd, fly-by-night repair shops are a common resource for repairs. Anyone bold enough to claim they can fix this complicated device obviously has a deep understanding of what's involved, so they are clearly well-educated and trustworthy, right?
An authorized facility has gone through the process to get authorized (though I don't know what that entails), so it carries the expectation that they'll follow the procedure to not run a screw through a battery.
(A separate post, because it's rather tangentially off-topic)
Thank you for showing me that paper. I like a good laugh in the morning. More seriously, what the hell is this elitist ivory-tower bullshit, and who approved this?
The premise is that a given percentage fail the programming class, and therefore must be unable to learn to program. In fact, there's a significant percentage (I've heard as high as 25% back when I was teaching, but don't have sources at the moment) that fail every introductory course, in every academic program. They're the freshmen who can't handle the college environment, don't do homework, or have to leave partway through the semester. That percentage is lower (though still present) for each further year, and that's not even considering actual academic problems like simply having a bad teacher for this or a previous course. The researchers immediately discount all language or environment choice as irrelevant, based on their personal teaching experience.
The paper claims that they're making a test for innate programming ability, that can be taken with no prior programming knowledge. Their example question includes variable definition and formatting syntax, and even requires knowledge of what language is being used before an accurate answer can be given. As an experienced programmer myself, I can identify three answers (out of 8) that could be correct, just based on the paradigm being used.
A few choice quotes from the paper, illustrating the researchers' methods:
In a bizarre event which one of the authors insists was planned, and the other maintains was a really stupid idea that just happened to work...
We believe (without any interview evidence at all) that they had had no contact with programming...
Anonymisation introduced diculties, because some students had forgotten their nicknames. Comparison of handwriting and some inspired guesses mean that we got them all.
And one of their sample questions, with at least four answers:
The _________-controlled loop is used to do a task a known number of times.
Perhaps most entertaining is their analysis. Rather than actually deem any particular answer as being "right", the researchers instead look for consistency, where the same subject answered the same way both before and after several weeks of instruction. The subjects whose answers remained the same were found to correlate well with those who passed the class. In essence, if you fail this ability test, but do it consistently, you're more likely to pass the programming class.
Finally, they examine the results of students who entered the program with high entry test scores (the so-called high achievers) and those who were admitted to the program mainly to boost numbers (the low achievers), and found that the students who did well on tests scored higher on another technical test.
One more quote, to conclude:
We have speculated on the reasons for its success, but in truth we don’t understand how it works...
Even if that paper were accurate, you're assuming that the knowledge required to pass an introductory programming course is exactly the same as (or even significantly overlapping with) the knowledge required to be an informed juror. That's simply not the case. Even the most basic concepts laid out in that paper (assignment and sequence) are more in-depth than what's really necessary for this case. For what I've seen of this case so far, a juror only needs to know a few details. Programs come from source, which is turned into an executable by a compiler, either ahead of time or as it's needed. That source is a list of instructions, some of which say "go run that other list". The descriptions of what other lists are available is the API.
Again, jurors don't need to know how to program, but just the basic underlying concepts. I also don't need to know how to rebuild my car's engine in order to drive it. Beyond that, there's just the legal issues that make up much more of the case, like "did Google write this program because they thought it'd be better, or to avoid talking to Oracle?"
Similar, indeed, but Pascal's Wager also assumes that the choice to believe has no cost, where it actually does have a significant expense of time and money involved.
Likewise, there is an expense involved with improved environmental policies, but most of the implementation costs of policies I support are offset by reduced operating costs. For example, a car with better gas mileage may cost more upfront and for repairs because of the more complex machinery, but the decreased expense of buying gas breaks even in a few years (except for all-electric... those are still in the "too much extra cost" side of the scale).
This is exactly right. Given the somewhat representative sample of experts on this site, consider how much bias there is about trivial things like Google playing with augmented reality or Oracle running Java on a Raspberry Pi... There's a group who thinks that Google's always out to steal information, and absolutely must have a nefarious agenda behind its glasses. There's an independent group of people (myself included) who believe that Oracle is trying to piggyback on any good PR they can get to dull the pain of their reputation for sneaky licensing tricks.
Finding a dozen IT experts with no opinions or prior commercial histories with either company simply isn't feasible. It's better to take bus drivers and secretaries, and just educate them on the issues at hand. They don't need to know about algorithmic complexity, microarchitecture, or how to write a secure SQL query, but just what an API is. That can be taught adequately in about two hours.
Poor form replying to myself and all that, but 100 points to anybody knowledgeable and/or ambitious enough to find the right term for the phenomenon, and preferably a better (yet layman-accessible) description of how it works.
And that's my #1 reason for preferring GIMP to Photoshop. I rarely do any image editing these days, so usually I find myself installing GIMP onto a different computer than last time just so I can clean up one picture. Having something freely available that does what I need to get the job done is what I really care about, not a duplication tool that lets me add floors onto a building, or whatever features Photoshop's adding these days - the last time I used Photoshop was in the early 2000's (licensed, in a professional photo lab).
If you need absolutely every imaging algorithm discovered in the past 20 years, use Photoshop. If you just need to manipulate an image now, use GIMP. The two are comparable, yet different, in the way that a Dodge pickup truck is comparable to a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Wasn't a big fan of their dark gray on light black theme.
Don't ever do pro image work, then.
You may be familiar with those oddly-colored pictures that you stare at for a while, then look at a white wall and see the true-color image. Your eyes get used to whatever colors are around, and try to compensate by altering your perception. When working for hours on the same image, editors' eyes will start changing the color balance as they're working, and suddenly that bright red shirt is just a little too dull on that left side, so they raise the saturation until it looks good... then ten minutes later it looks like the shirt's plastic.
Professional retouchers often surround themselves with as much matte 50% gray as possible, because it doesn't affect the color balance. Sure, it's ugly, but it makes for better pictures.
The majority of those treaties are as flawed and biased as the studies I detest.
Some policies I think are beneficial:
Increased fuel efficiency in vehicles
Recycling of paper, metals, and most plastics
Limits on greenhouse gas emission from factories (that cannot be exchanged)
Cleaner energy, like nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar
General-purpose electronics for better reuse
That's all I can think of offhand. Generally, I feel that policies of "do this to save the world!" waste time and money, while policies of "this is more efficient" are better.
And that's why I hold the position I do: Climate change may or may not happen, and it may or may not be human-caused, and it may or may not be as severe as predictions claim. Unfortunately, the whole debate has become an issue of religion more than science, and everybody's tainting data to make their point. I don't trust any of it anymore.
A simple outcome analysis:
Climate is changing, and we don't do anything: we die.
Climate is changing, and we change our environmental policy to reduce it: we survive a little longer.
Climate is not changing, and we don't do anything: we survive a little longer, until something else gets us.
Climate is not changing, and we change our environmental policy anyway: we survive a little longer, until something else gets us.
So one choice (not changing our ways) may or may not kill us, and the other (cleaning up) lets us survive a little longer, regardless of what the climate does. For once, let's just ignore those silly scientists and just do what won't get us killed.
No, no, no.... See, the vaccines contain chemicals like dihydrogen monoxide that travel through the bloodstream up to the brain, where they interact with the homeopathic echoes of infancy still resonating in the neurons. These deadly chemicals then alter the genes to cause further infant behavior, as has been observed here. Since the child now has to fight against these infant tendencies, development is slowed in what we call "autism".
Oh, good... a whole post where every sentence is either a fallacy or insult. This means that under my doctrine of "debate anything where facts are valued" I can ignore you now.
You keep making the argument that if I disagree with the patent system, it must be because I do not understand it.
That's because you keep saying things that show complete ignorance of how the patent system works.
It is as if your reaction to beheadings in Saudi Arabia was saying that they were ordered by a court and so everything is OK.
No, it's as if I think the death penalty's okay for a confessed serial killer (which I do, by the way). Morality and legality are separate issues. Here, I think it's moral that someone who invests time and effort in working out an idea should get a chance to make it a business, without getting screwed by the fast-moving predatory companies out there. The legal system currently aligns with that.
And I sincerely believe that you are sick and evil.
And I sincerely believe that's irrelevant to the conversation, yet you keep bringing it up. I believe you're a self-absorbed asshole who hasn't bothered to learn about the patent system more than read Slashdot, see lawsuits, and declare it broken and bad. I believe you're so arrogant in your assumption that you know everything that you can't even condescend to make a logical argument in your favor. I believe that, instead of logic, you resort to ad hominem attacks right from the start, claiming that anyone disagreeing with you must be evil. I believe that you're a Ron Paul supporter, because you share his believe that any imperfect system should be scrapped, and somehow magically the Free Market God will fix everything.
Nobody that comes come up with the same process independently should be forbidden from using it at will.
That's rather the point... the court found that they did NOT come up with it independently. They willfully infringed, knowing that the process was patented and using the patent in their designs.
Since push email was upheld, as well as one click, it is clear that the system as a whole is broken.
Or, it's clear that you have no idea what's actually involved in patents. Push email and one-click purchasing both describe a particular back-end system to reduce the overhead of making such a system work. The one-click purchasing patent in particular covered such things as keeping payment information readily available (yet separate enough to avoid insecurity) and the system for initiating order processing immediately while still allowing it to be canceled without excessive cost. Upon re-examination, some parts of the patent were clarified, some were rejected, and some were kept.
In the case of push email, several patents were involved, and many were overturned (though after RIM and NTP had settled). The remaining ones describe a clearly-defined system that RIM knew about when it designed BlackBerry's push email service.
Since both cases were clarified to include only clearly-defined utilities, the system is working as intended. Any set of rules that would reject clear patents is simply sick.
Are all headlines nowadays conjured up by a dedicated company full of marketing types?
Of course not. There are several companies in this thriving industry, each taking up a particular niche. There's one for the "everything's racist" stories, some for "mediocrity is amazing", a few for "this is the best/worst/biggest/smallest/oldest/newest thing ever (since that other one)", a couple whose shtick is "everything is interesting to nerds because it will change the world", and so on...
What lawsuits could they hammer you with? While trying to license your patent, they have no grounds to stop you - by being awarded a patent, the government says it thinks you have the rights to it. If you're trying to produce a product, you have no more nor less legal vulnerability that if you didn't have the patent - if you come close to one of theirs, they can sue.
Compared to the late 19th century, there are now more available and affordable lawyers for an average person, so legal troubles are more easily mitigated. Getting an appointment with legal counsel doesn't require being one of the white-collar good old boys. It might require borrowing money and gambling on your future financial security (and that sucks in its own right), but it's not as bad as the late 19th century, by a long shot.
You think that comming up with something minor, and then smuggling it into a standard,
Again, [citation needed]. Please enlighten me as to any case where a patented technology was actually a minor part of a standard, yet still so vital as to make the standard unusable without it. Please show me how the rest of the standards body was so blind as to miss the unfair advantage this gave one company, at the expense of the others. Please show me how any person or company became rich and powerful through a standard.
Letters get counted, and you are represented by your portion of the constituency. One person gets one small part of the representative's decision.
Well-organized protests don't get people arrested, don't break laws, and don't make news outside the jurisdiction concerned. They also certainly don't involve trespassing and erecting tents and structures on private property, but that's another large rant I don't have time for today...
Lobbyists belong to anybody who can convince (by plea or payment) them to use their connections. There's an activist group for every cause, and that group usually has lobbyists.
One more for your list: jury nullification doesn't establish precedent.
Slashdot Mirror
What $8 trillion would that be? Are they the long-term loans that were almost all balanced as of last June? Are they (as is much more likely) the overnight loans that were either paid back the next day or rolled over (and recounted)?
Most of the Fed's reported figures are noting loans only, but not repayments. A major aspect of the economy is how much liquid cash (usable as trading assets) is available, and those numbers reflect that. A better way to interpret it is "how much more money would the economy have needed if the Fed didn't exist" rather than "how much money did the Fed hand out".
I would fly more if I were being checked by pirates! And the acting might just make the lines so much more bearable!
A good fake accent would be awesome, too...
Arr, me hearties! Whar be yer pahssport and barding pahss?
The Pauls have a quick fix for everything, and it's usually some form of "pull the plug".
Ron Paul 2012: because quick fixes haven't screwed up the world enough already.
Interesting you should use that analogy, given the reputation of car mechanics when I was growing up for being shady places whose work you'd often want double-checked... Nowadays, almost all mechanics shops are certified by various industry groups, and the ones that aren't go out of business real quick.
Computers (and especially mobile devices) are still magic boxes to most people (as cars used to be), so outside of the Slashdot crowd, fly-by-night repair shops are a common resource for repairs. Anyone bold enough to claim they can fix this complicated device obviously has a deep understanding of what's involved, so they are clearly well-educated and trustworthy, right?
An authorized facility has gone through the process to get authorized (though I don't know what that entails), so it carries the expectation that they'll follow the procedure to not run a screw through a battery.
(A separate post, because it's rather tangentially off-topic)
Thank you for showing me that paper. I like a good laugh in the morning. More seriously, what the hell is this elitist ivory-tower bullshit, and who approved this?
The premise is that a given percentage fail the programming class, and therefore must be unable to learn to program. In fact, there's a significant percentage (I've heard as high as 25% back when I was teaching, but don't have sources at the moment) that fail every introductory course, in every academic program. They're the freshmen who can't handle the college environment, don't do homework, or have to leave partway through the semester. That percentage is lower (though still present) for each further year, and that's not even considering actual academic problems like simply having a bad teacher for this or a previous course. The researchers immediately discount all language or environment choice as irrelevant, based on their personal teaching experience.
The paper claims that they're making a test for innate programming ability, that can be taken with no prior programming knowledge. Their example question includes variable definition and formatting syntax, and even requires knowledge of what language is being used before an accurate answer can be given. As an experienced programmer myself, I can identify three answers (out of 8) that could be correct, just based on the paradigm being used.
A few choice quotes from the paper, illustrating the researchers' methods:
In a bizarre event which one of the authors insists was planned, and the other maintains was a really stupid idea that just happened to work...
We believe (without any interview evidence at all) that they had had no contact with programming...
Anonymisation introduced diculties, because some students had forgotten their nicknames. Comparison of handwriting and some inspired guesses mean that we got them all.
And one of their sample questions, with at least four answers:
The _________-controlled loop is used to do a task a known number of times.
Perhaps most entertaining is their analysis. Rather than actually deem any particular answer as being "right", the researchers instead look for consistency, where the same subject answered the same way both before and after several weeks of instruction. The subjects whose answers remained the same were found to correlate well with those who passed the class. In essence, if you fail this ability test, but do it consistently, you're more likely to pass the programming class.
Finally, they examine the results of students who entered the program with high entry test scores (the so-called high achievers) and those who were admitted to the program mainly to boost numbers (the low achievers), and found that the students who did well on tests scored higher on another technical test.
One more quote, to conclude:
We have speculated on the reasons for its success, but in truth we don’t understand how it works...
Yeah. That's pretty clear.
Even if that paper were accurate, you're assuming that the knowledge required to pass an introductory programming course is exactly the same as (or even significantly overlapping with) the knowledge required to be an informed juror. That's simply not the case. Even the most basic concepts laid out in that paper (assignment and sequence) are more in-depth than what's really necessary for this case. For what I've seen of this case so far, a juror only needs to know a few details. Programs come from source, which is turned into an executable by a compiler, either ahead of time or as it's needed. That source is a list of instructions, some of which say "go run that other list". The descriptions of what other lists are available is the API.
Again, jurors don't need to know how to program, but just the basic underlying concepts. I also don't need to know how to rebuild my car's engine in order to drive it. Beyond that, there's just the legal issues that make up much more of the case, like "did Google write this program because they thought it'd be better, or to avoid talking to Oracle?"
Similar, indeed, but Pascal's Wager also assumes that the choice to believe has no cost, where it actually does have a significant expense of time and money involved.
Likewise, there is an expense involved with improved environmental policies, but most of the implementation costs of policies I support are offset by reduced operating costs. For example, a car with better gas mileage may cost more upfront and for repairs because of the more complex machinery, but the decreased expense of buying gas breaks even in a few years (except for all-electric... those are still in the "too much extra cost" side of the scale).
My kingdom for mod points...
This is exactly right. Given the somewhat representative sample of experts on this site, consider how much bias there is about trivial things like Google playing with augmented reality or Oracle running Java on a Raspberry Pi... There's a group who thinks that Google's always out to steal information, and absolutely must have a nefarious agenda behind its glasses. There's an independent group of people (myself included) who believe that Oracle is trying to piggyback on any good PR they can get to dull the pain of their reputation for sneaky licensing tricks.
Finding a dozen IT experts with no opinions or prior commercial histories with either company simply isn't feasible. It's better to take bus drivers and secretaries, and just educate them on the issues at hand. They don't need to know about algorithmic complexity, microarchitecture, or how to write a secure SQL query, but just what an API is. That can be taught adequately in about two hours.
No, this story is "Thursday". Tomorrow's R-Pi story will be totally different, about a completely different computer program running on a computer.
Poor form replying to myself and all that, but 100 points to anybody knowledgeable and/or ambitious enough to find the right term for the phenomenon, and preferably a better (yet layman-accessible) description of how it works.
And that's my #1 reason for preferring GIMP to Photoshop. I rarely do any image editing these days, so usually I find myself installing GIMP onto a different computer than last time just so I can clean up one picture. Having something freely available that does what I need to get the job done is what I really care about, not a duplication tool that lets me add floors onto a building, or whatever features Photoshop's adding these days - the last time I used Photoshop was in the early 2000's (licensed, in a professional photo lab).
If you need absolutely every imaging algorithm discovered in the past 20 years, use Photoshop. If you just need to manipulate an image now, use GIMP. The two are comparable, yet different, in the way that a Dodge pickup truck is comparable to a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Wasn't a big fan of their dark gray on light black theme.
Don't ever do pro image work, then.
You may be familiar with those oddly-colored pictures that you stare at for a while, then look at a white wall and see the true-color image. Your eyes get used to whatever colors are around, and try to compensate by altering your perception. When working for hours on the same image, editors' eyes will start changing the color balance as they're working, and suddenly that bright red shirt is just a little too dull on that left side, so they raise the saturation until it looks good... then ten minutes later it looks like the shirt's plastic.
Professional retouchers often surround themselves with as much matte 50% gray as possible, because it doesn't affect the color balance. Sure, it's ugly, but it makes for better pictures.
The majority of those treaties are as flawed and biased as the studies I detest.
Some policies I think are beneficial:
That's all I can think of offhand. Generally, I feel that policies of "do this to save the world!" waste time and money, while policies of "this is more efficient" are better.
And that's why I hold the position I do: Climate change may or may not happen, and it may or may not be human-caused, and it may or may not be as severe as predictions claim. Unfortunately, the whole debate has become an issue of religion more than science, and everybody's tainting data to make their point. I don't trust any of it anymore.
A simple outcome analysis:
So one choice (not changing our ways) may or may not kill us, and the other (cleaning up) lets us survive a little longer, regardless of what the climate does. For once, let's just ignore those silly scientists and just do what won't get us killed.
No, no, no.... See, the vaccines contain chemicals like dihydrogen monoxide that travel through the bloodstream up to the brain, where they interact with the homeopathic echoes of infancy still resonating in the neurons. These deadly chemicals then alter the genes to cause further infant behavior, as has been observed here. Since the child now has to fight against these infant tendencies, development is slowed in what we call "autism".
Totally makes sense, I swear...
Oh, good... a whole post where every sentence is either a fallacy or insult. This means that under my doctrine of "debate anything where facts are valued" I can ignore you now.
Goodbye, you fucking moron.
You keep making the argument that if I disagree with the patent system, it must be because I do not understand it.
That's because you keep saying things that show complete ignorance of how the patent system works.
It is as if your reaction to beheadings in Saudi Arabia was saying that they were ordered by a court and so everything is OK.
No, it's as if I think the death penalty's okay for a confessed serial killer (which I do, by the way). Morality and legality are separate issues. Here, I think it's moral that someone who invests time and effort in working out an idea should get a chance to make it a business, without getting screwed by the fast-moving predatory companies out there. The legal system currently aligns with that.
And I sincerely believe that you are sick and evil.
And I sincerely believe that's irrelevant to the conversation, yet you keep bringing it up. I believe you're a self-absorbed asshole who hasn't bothered to learn about the patent system more than read Slashdot, see lawsuits, and declare it broken and bad. I believe you're so arrogant in your assumption that you know everything that you can't even condescend to make a logical argument in your favor. I believe that, instead of logic, you resort to ad hominem attacks right from the start, claiming that anyone disagreeing with you must be evil. I believe that you're a Ron Paul supporter, because you share his believe that any imperfect system should be scrapped, and somehow magically the Free Market God will fix everything.
But again, that sort of thing's irrelevant.
Nobody that comes come up with the same process independently should be forbidden from using it at will.
That's rather the point... the court found that they did NOT come up with it independently. They willfully infringed, knowing that the process was patented and using the patent in their designs.
It is you who is sick.
You have yet to show any evidence of this claim.
Except that they're totally different and are intended for and accomplish totally different things.
You only read news, don't you?
Since push email was upheld, as well as one click, it is clear that the system as a whole is broken.
Or, it's clear that you have no idea what's actually involved in patents. Push email and one-click purchasing both describe a particular back-end system to reduce the overhead of making such a system work. The one-click purchasing patent in particular covered such things as keeping payment information readily available (yet separate enough to avoid insecurity) and the system for initiating order processing immediately while still allowing it to be canceled without excessive cost. Upon re-examination, some parts of the patent were clarified, some were rejected, and some were kept.
In the case of push email, several patents were involved, and many were overturned (though after RIM and NTP had settled). The remaining ones describe a clearly-defined system that RIM knew about when it designed BlackBerry's push email service.
Since both cases were clarified to include only clearly-defined utilities, the system is working as intended. Any set of rules that would reject clear patents is simply sick.
Are all headlines nowadays conjured up by a dedicated company full of marketing types?
Of course not. There are several companies in this thriving industry, each taking up a particular niche. There's one for the "everything's racist" stories, some for "mediocrity is amazing", a few for "this is the best/worst/biggest/smallest/oldest/newest thing ever (since that other one)", a couple whose shtick is "everything is interesting to nerds because it will change the world", and so on...
Guess which website you're on now?
What lawsuits could they hammer you with? While trying to license your patent, they have no grounds to stop you - by being awarded a patent, the government says it thinks you have the rights to it. If you're trying to produce a product, you have no more nor less legal vulnerability that if you didn't have the patent - if you come close to one of theirs, they can sue.
Compared to the late 19th century, there are now more available and affordable lawyers for an average person, so legal troubles are more easily mitigated. Getting an appointment with legal counsel doesn't require being one of the white-collar good old boys. It might require borrowing money and gambling on your future financial security (and that sucks in its own right), but it's not as bad as the late 19th century, by a long shot.
You think that comming up with something minor, and then smuggling it into a standard,
Again, [citation needed]. Please enlighten me as to any case where a patented technology was actually a minor part of a standard, yet still so vital as to make the standard unusable without it. Please show me how the rest of the standards body was so blind as to miss the unfair advantage this gave one company, at the expense of the others. Please show me how any person or company became rich and powerful through a standard.
Letters get counted, and you are represented by your portion of the constituency. One person gets one small part of the representative's decision.
Well-organized protests don't get people arrested, don't break laws, and don't make news outside the jurisdiction concerned. They also certainly don't involve trespassing and erecting tents and structures on private property, but that's another large rant I don't have time for today...
Lobbyists belong to anybody who can convince (by plea or payment) them to use their connections. There's an activist group for every cause, and that group usually has lobbyists.
One more for your list: jury nullification doesn't establish precedent.