Jeez, relax & take a breath. This was just a short fluff piece. If you want to point a finger, point it at Slashdot, which increasingly fails to meet its primary obligation as a news-filtering aggregator. It seems like any kind of silly little thing can become a high-profile/. piece these days.
And, of course, maybe the membership deserves what it gets. Take a look, e.g., at all the self-important, clueless responses from Slashdotter Wikipedia Wile E. Coyotes. An idiotic statement like "A 24bit CD has a 144dB dynamic range and 1/33,554,432th of the signal will be noise" is wrong in so many ways. How many of them do you think even know how to pronounce 'Nyquist'"
As for the issue at hand, here's what I think is a reasonable analysis: Analog tape v. high-res digital files is a controversial topic on which reasonable minds may differ. Most truly knowledgeable people -- e.g., long-time contributors to "The Absolute Sound" -- listening through highest-quality gear (think Focal or Wilson) generally report that 15ips master tape played back on excellent-quality gear matches or exceeds the quality of any of their reference 24/192 digital recordings. Some of the newer tape decks and multi-hundred-buck tape reissues of classic rock albums (e.g., the limited rerelease of "Sgt. Pepper's" on tape) have apparently become sonic standards among the hardcore audiophile mags. Sweeping generalizations are, of course, by their nature conclusory, and there's no indication that Albini is anything other than a stopped clock, but I think that dismissing the possibility that analog tape may produce stunning sound quality is more often than not rooted in the arrogance of ignorance.
Reported in Wired over a year ago. Check out the cover story that described the Utah NSA construction. A paragraph is buried in there about reports within the encryption community about the NSA making a "game-changing" advance in encryption-cracking a few years after 9/11. I don't think I'm reading too much into it to interpret Wired's language as implying that cryptologists had figured a way to circumvent even 128-bit keys.
Or maybe I am? Read the piece and let me know what you think. The language does appear to be deliberately vague.P?
1. Because this infomercial of an article reads like a shameless advertisement for some dickhead's Web site, I think you have to take it a grain of salt. There's obviously an agenda here.
2. A cursory look at the complaint reveals that the cause of action isn't, as implied, a general act of teaching individuals how to fool polygraphs. The allegation is that the teaching was performed in specific cases related to conspiring to suborn perjury or to fraudulently obtain security clearance. These are more specific charges and have less to do with the involvement of a polygraph than the the act of assisting an individual in committing a crime.
3. This case appears to be little more than a filed complaint. Anybody can file charges for anything, but there's no analysis here re:whether the charges are frivolous, likely to be dismissed, or have a good chance of reaching trial. That's the context one needs to understand what is really going on here. Instead, we get an advertisement that fluffs up the facts.
Slashdot: Clear Channel talk radio for geeks!! Now complete with its own version of Glenn Beck "ageless male" & "You don't have to run from the IRS!" advertisers.
I am a lawyer and have found Slashdot to be a hellhole for those looking for legal advice. Quantity, yes, but quality cringeworthy. Gaia help anybody who relies on legal advice from Rush Limbaugh, William Shatner, or Slashdot.
I didn't see much in this article that supported the headline. Sending emails instead of texting your boss? In a post-SarbOx world, why would anyone think differently? My impression is that this is an article written for really friggin' dumb kids who don't know how to act in a professional environment. Condescending and patronizing, but in a nice way. Remove the "don't" advice, leaving only the "do" advice, and you have guidelines that would have applied since "Mad Men."
>Since there is no such thing as a "software patent" in law, it's important to understand what has been changed, and to be clear about what could or should be changed. Here's the key wording of the new law. It's not patentable if: "A claim in a patent or an application relates to a computer program as such if the actual contribution made by the alleged invention lies solely in it being a computer program."
>In other words, if it's not a new invention, just an old invention with "on a computer" added to the end, it's not patentable. That is, if it's not a new invention if made of wood, it's still not new when made of silicon (or magnetic tracks).
Um, which is how it works in this country, too. See, e.g., the CAFC's landmark 2013 case Alice Bank v. Ultramercial, in which the Court, while disagreeing on underlying policy, emphatically underscored this point. So what's the brouhaha? Apparently, software patents are illegal here, too, right?
Wait, wait, also try this: If you type -A, you SELECT EVERYTHING ON THE PAGE!! It's like having a magic guy scroll through the entire page and highlight everything. Really, a little bit of Lourdes on your desktop.
See, e.g., dictionary.com, defining "be comprised of" as an acceptable, albeit idiomatic, synonym for "be composed of," stating: "be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of: The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores."
I speak as a former journalist when I say that a language Nazi who can't even scold with authority is a sad creature indeed.
Somebody gave me 4oz of Kopi beans last year for Xmas, as a gag gift. It took a few cups to get used to it, because, to my surprise, it really did taste unlike any other coffee I'd ever had. By the time I finished that 4 oz, it was hard going back to the more affordable burnt-tasting dark roasts (or even the nominal Central American light roasts) that Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts have made so popular. In fact, the difference was so dramatic that, even if it wasn't unanticipated, there's no way it could have been chalked up to confirmation error. The Kopi had a distinctive, woody flavor, without a trace of acidity or harshness. Like the difference between macrobiotic or authentic Asian vegetarian fare (which hasn't been sweetened or deep-fried for the Western palette) and burnt-black overcooked BBQ. Or better, yet, like the difference between "Kind of Blue" and "Yeezus." Not for everybody, obviously, but it gave me the sense of drinking a beverage made from a vegetable source. And no, despite the Valley Girl ewwww factor, I could's no detect no residue of the, um, civet digestive process.
So I suggest trying a cup of the real stuff before dismissing out of hand. I've been a (Gaia help me) "coffee enthusiast" for decades, but I've never tasted anything as radical as Kopi. My new favorite.
Jeez, what are *you* doing on Slashdot? You actually know how to cite to the U.S.C. I invite you to contribute to the conversation the next time/. publishes an item about patent law. In a country where legal discourse is dominated by the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, Clear Channel political pundits, and other I-Anal-infested Wile E. Coyote types, it's refreshing to bump into someone who not only corrects a common-but-dopey misstatement of the law, but who backs up the correction with an accurate reference to a primary source. Too bad I'm already married.
Actually, I believe that the Vegas and Atlantic City casinos have been using facial recognition in this way for over a decade. I remember reading a piece some years ago about how the technology had been applied, either in a trade magazine or in some mainstream mag, like Wired. Supposedly -- and this is how far back this goes -- a person of interest (like a reported purse-snatcher or card-counter) could be identified by the software upon entering a casino -- based on facial characteristics shared by the casinos via a cooperative fax (!) network.
C'mon, you know how this will play out. Not just anybody will be allowed access. What's the difference between a drug that increases your muscle mass without exercise (i.e., the andros & other steroids) and one that increases your aerobic capability? If it actually does work, it'll first be banned by all sports organizations, amateur and professional, and then, like steroids, legally classified as a controlled substance and regulated as tightly as methadone. A result of our Puritan background -- if you don't earn something, you don't deserve it. You know I'm right: Even here, what was the first/. response? "People should just go out and walk instead of taking a drug."
Groklaw was the IP world's equivalent of the Glenn Beck show. It was a venue for people with strong opinions who had no idea what they were talking about to debate subtle legal issues that were way over their heads. The dark underbelly of an enabling technology. It never changed anything meaningful in any meaningful way and was generally considered noise by anyone with a nontrivial knowledge of U.S. intellectual property law. The reasons for its closure sound like pure BS, something along the lines of: "I've been advised that one should never send any important information via email and since Groklaw can't survive without email, I need to shut it down." What, huh, really?? More likely, Ms. Groklaw just got tired of having to face dopey-but-heated I-ANAL debates all day every day and was too lazy to even spend the time to come up with a rationalization that made sense. So good friggin' riddance. The Internet's aggregate IQ just went up. If you're really interested in intelligent discussions of intellectual-property issues, it's not hard to Google a better-informed IP law blog that is entertaining and that attracts posters who, regardless of whether they're experts in the field, at least have a clue. Patently-O, for example, has its moments. And if losing this silly site breaks you up too much, Glenn Beck can always help you get your fill of start-with-a-conclusion-and-then-cherry-pick-facts-to-support-it debates. I-ANAL, indeed.
EVERYONE should use "Anonymous Coward," for all but the most innocuous postings. It's just common sense. The only argument against doing so is that it might provide a false sense of security if a poster doesn't realize that not revealing some dopey screen name increases his online security from, say, a 2.5 to a 2.9. Still, that 0.4 is better than nothing. The First Amendment has long protected one's right to speak anonymously, noting that requiring, or even an expectation of, identifying a source of controversial speech, can have a chilling effect. It may not be macho to post anonymously, but it's smart and at least nominally effective.
Seriously, only an idiot would give a reference, one way or the other, to a former employee, other than to just confirm dates of employment. Liability issues have made such things untenable from a legal perspective. When was the last time you heard of any Fortune 100 firm giving a reference that had real information in? Probably not in the last 20 years.
Using words like "religious fanatic" is pretty much the same thing as saying "shut up."
But other than that, I pretty much agree. The significant contribution of man-made greenhouse gas to climate change has been supported by an incontrovertible body of evidence since the late 1990s -- and even before that, the greenhouse gas model was generally accepted as likely to be true by most of the scientific community worldwide in three fields of science. You're not going to convince people who believe otherwise that their beliefs are just silly, because they're operating on faith, not science. Faith is a bad thing when it's passed off as fact.
Good luck with all that. Good luck with finding reporters, even highly intelligent ones, capable of inserting, or even intelligently reporting, math in a mainstream news article. In law school -- where one might assume that most of the students are bright enough to do well on the LSAT, which is not all that unlike an IQ test -- my tax-law professor had to promise that the exam would contain arithmetic that that comprised only numbers ending with a string of zeros. When he tried dividing 1000 by 6 in class, there was a revolution in the lecture center. "Wait, no, what? Why do we have to know this stuff? You're going too fast! Wait, let me launch my calculator app."
Americans are repulsed and terrified by arithmetic. Forget about math. Won't happen. Readership would be lost. As far as science or math goes, most people in this country would rather be titillated by the mind-boggling physics explanations on shows like "Fringe" ("Time travel should be relatively easy to understand, Olivia. It's just like lassoing a calf, where the cowboy is a particle accelerator, the calf is a magnetic bottle of entangled positrosn, and the lariat operates in a way analogous to the Arrow of Time. Look at it that way, and there's no question that you could kill your grandfather before you were born.")
Sorry for the caps, but that's what Spolsky's silly rant is. This guy knows so lilttle about the patent system that he doesn't even understand what he did. He didn't "shoot down" a Microsoft patent. He found prior art that generated a rejection in non-final office action. This is a normal part of the prosecution of a patent application. Now Microsoft gets to respond, either by amending claims or by explaining why Spolsky's prior art does not apply. And Joel is running in circles with his hands over his head because he generated a "clean sweep" of rejections for every claim?? What a maroon. All you have to do is challenge the independent claim; because the dependent claims all depend from the independent claim, one rejection automatically results in rejections of every claim. That's pretty standard stuff and makes his prior art no less easily overcome. Joel accomplished little other than boosting his own considerable ego and he's too ignorant to even realize it.
And wtf, Spolsky has a " very readable introduction to the patent system"? Really?? Come on. OK, I guess maybe it is readable, but that's because it's so condescending & silly. This is particularly true of the cited quote: "Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for." Yeah, OK, I've seen some poorly written software (and other types of) patents, but many were hard to understand because they were auto-translated from another language. I've also seen some brilliantly written software patents, and not just a few. A sweeping, conclusory statement like this one belongs in a dorm room, not in what purports to be a serious discussion of legal issues.
And sure, anybody who doesn't understand what they're reading can propose prior art and may even generate an interim rejection from a harried examiner who wants an applicant to assume the burden of distinguishing the prior art. But making a rejection stick is another story, and I speak from experience as an attorney who has worked long and hard to "shoot down" overly broad patents in reexam proceedings. If a patent comprises a well-written specification, it takes a lot of work. And you've got to know what you're doing. I'm working on one reexam now, e.g., in which I've probably logged 150 hours drafting leakproof arguments to invalidate 70 claims -- and I'm maybe halfway there. I can tell you right off the bat, Joel's silly efforts -- which apparently amount to little more than Googling prior art that sounds like similar to the subject matter of an application -- won't take much work for a knowledgeable patent agent to blow off. "Friggin' mosquitos!"
But wait, it gets worse! Joel's unsupported claim that patents are deliberately written obtusely to make them difficult to overcome?? HOLY SHIT! Think about that for 30 seconds. Patents are legal documents that concern technical subject matter, not technical documents. If you're an engineer, you're probably not going to be able to understand the language, or even understand why the language exists in the form it does, unless you make some effort to understand the character of what you're reading. I mean, imagine an attorney writing that IEEE engineering papers are deliberately written with unnecessary calculus because the authors want them to be hard to understand, so that they'll make it through the peer-review process. That's how dumb Joel's statement is.
Okay, Bob Lablaw, I know my word count already exceeds the attention span of the average reader here, so let me just close with two concrete statements that may have more probative value than a "he said - he said":
i) six months from now, check Joel's PAIR cite and read Microsoft's response to his prior art, and the PTO's analysis of Micosoft's arguments or amendments. Betcha donuts to torii that Joel's stupid prior art is effortlessly "shot down."
ii) If Spolsky thinks that patents are deliberately written to be obfuscatory, heck, I'm willing to spend a few minutes educating him. I'll let him p
Actually, I kinda like it. Definitely the gayest WiFi visualization I've ever seen. If WiFi really covered the landscape in rainbows, you can't tell me it wouldn't be a better world.
Seriously, what is the real topic here? LInus Pauling or dietary supplementation? The Atlantic article (apparently an excerpt from a recently published anti-supplementation book) conflates the two.
If you *really* RTFA critically, the logic piece easy to pick it apart.
Merely citing a handful of studies that support a particular position on an issue, ignoring contrary evidence, is hardly probative. And making conclusory statements based on non-sequitors may impress a/. readership raised on talk radio, but they still don't make sense.
E.g., consider the paragraph: "researchers from the University of Minnesota evaluated 39,000 older women and found that those who took supplemental multivitamins, magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron died at rates higher than those who didn't. They concluded, "Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements." But waitaminnit, haven't several studies over the last decade concluded that ingestion of higher levels of iron by post-menopausal women increases the risk of several serious, life-threatening conditions? Throw in that additional fact and it's hard to find the facts, as reported here, justification for the sweeping generalization of the conclusion. Did the study control for the iron supplementation? How could possible negative effects of increasing a person's ingestion of minerals, including several heavy metals, debunk in any way Pauling's claimed empirical effects of vitamin C?
If this article were published in a peer-reviewed journal, it would likely be picked apart in a dozen ways. Its premise may or may not be true -- although it's such a sweeping generalization that the truth is likely somewhere in the middle -- but without more, it's no more worthy of our time than, say, Glenn Beck.
Bottom line? Pauling may have been sensationalistic and agenda-driven, but so is this Atlantic article. There have been at least hundreds of studies performed over the last 50 years that purport to analyze the health effects of dietary supplementation and many of them have found benefits. And others have not. The two studies that found slightly increased risk of death from E supplementation disagreed on many details and I haven't heard of any other research over the last 3 years that found results supporting the popular media's conclusions drawn from those two studies. So representing this as some sort of "the scientific community now agrees..." situation is disingenuous.
So, look, people believe what they want to believe, but what's really annoying is the usual surfeit of self-important morons here on Slashdot who presume to dictate a black-and-white view of the world, throwing a little "STFU! You go off on some rant that literally makes no sense at all," to boot. The book cited by The Atlantic (and consider the context for a moment: What is the subject matter of The Atlantic? It's not scientific research.) appears to be an attempt to push paper by presenting cherry-picked evidence that supports an extraordinarily broad premise. I doubt if many in the medical community would give it a second thought.
Reasonable minds may differ. But don't throw out your vitamins yet.
Everyone knows you can't trust the liberal media. This story was reported by the Associated Press and picked up by CBS. I'm sure Rush & Glenn Beck will both condemn the conclusion, based solely on their scientific background and canny understanding of the "mainstream media."
Seriously, though, just in case there's somebody reading this who really is interested in an objective analysis, this study certainly does have some probative value. How much value, of course, is a function of the design and the scope of the research methodology, and the conclusion should be considered within the context of existing research. These results might be game-changing; but they might be characterize a case that's three standard deviations from the mean; or they might be wrong. And the sources cited here don't provide enough detail to figure that out. Interested parties should investigate further before spouting opinions.
Although asking the right questions, like some are doing here, seems to me to be a logical first step toward putting these findings into perspective. Bravo to you!
For the record, this is a silly urban legend, something that even the Wikipedia link above hints at. The thing is, you would be linked to anyone on earth through six links if the probability of linking to any individual was equal and if redundant linkages are not accounted for. But in reality, social networks tend to turn in on themselves. That is, it's much more likely that a person you're linked to is herself linked to people already linked to you, or who are linked to each other via a relatively small number of links. In other words, as you advance to each more distant degree of separation, you encounter a lower rate at which the relationships between more distantly linked parties attenuates.
So in a simple example, if you live in NYC you might be linked through 1 degree of separation to 100 people who live in NYS, 80% of which are in the Metro NYC area. The second degree introduces 100*100 two-degree linkages, but a lot of these people share social settings, know each other, or know the same people, so your 10,000 links boil down to 1500 unique linkages. Furthermore, these 1500 linkages aren't scattered randomly -- 50% are in the Metro area, 20% elsewhere in NYS, 15% on the East Coast, and 15% throughout the rest of the US. 3rd link, the attenuating FX are greater. The potential 100*100*100 linkages, now 1500*100=150,000, may resolve to 4500 unique 3-degree linkages, because so many people in the 2d-degree linkages share common social networks. Some of the 1st-degree linkages who disappeared at the 2d-degree may now be back as redundant 3d degree contacts. And although the geographic distribution is still smearing, the rate of smearing is likely continuing to decrease -- there's still a noticeable bias toward Metro NYC and a lesser one to NYS. Linkages in Australia, Antarctica, Islamabad, if any, are greatly underrepresented in comparison to what they would be under the assumptions of the random-linkage "six degrees" model.
OK, a complicated example, but I hope you at least get the idea. Three degrees of separation yields a pretty big number of linkages, but not nearly as enormous as one might be led to believe by the popular movie-driven model.
One other point: This isn't necessarily a good thing from a security standpoint, because all this means is that the linkages that are found are already preselected by relevance.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, maybe the membership deserves what it gets. Take a look, e.g., at all the self-important, clueless responses from Slashdotter Wikipedia Wile E. Coyotes. An idiotic statement like "A 24bit CD has a 144dB dynamic range and 1/33,554,432th of the signal will be noise" is wrong in so many ways. How many of them do you think even know how to pronounce 'Nyquist'"
As for the issue at hand, here's what I think is a reasonable analysis: Analog tape v. high-res digital files is a controversial topic on which reasonable minds may differ. Most truly knowledgeable people -- e.g., long-time contributors to "The Absolute Sound" -- listening through highest-quality gear (think Focal or Wilson) generally report that 15ips master tape played back on excellent-quality gear matches or exceeds the quality of any of their reference 24/192 digital recordings. Some of the newer tape decks and multi-hundred-buck tape reissues of classic rock albums (e.g., the limited rerelease of "Sgt. Pepper's" on tape) have apparently become sonic standards among the hardcore audiophile mags. Sweeping generalizations are, of course, by their nature conclusory, and there's no indication that Albini is anything other than a stopped clock, but I think that dismissing the possibility that analog tape may produce stunning sound quality is more often than not rooted in the arrogance of ignorance.
Or maybe I am? Read the piece and let me know what you think. The language does appear to be deliberately vague.P?
2. A cursory look at the complaint reveals that the cause of action isn't, as implied, a general act of teaching individuals how to fool polygraphs. The allegation is that the teaching was performed in specific cases related to conspiring to suborn perjury or to fraudulently obtain security clearance. These are more specific charges and have less to do with the involvement of a polygraph than the the act of assisting an individual in committing a crime.
3. This case appears to be little more than a filed complaint. Anybody can file charges for anything, but there's no analysis here re:whether the charges are frivolous, likely to be dismissed, or have a good chance of reaching trial. That's the context one needs to understand what is really going on here. Instead, we get an advertisement that fluffs up the facts.
Slashdot: Clear Channel talk radio for geeks!! Now complete with its own version of Glenn Beck "ageless male" & "You don't have to run from the IRS!" advertisers.
I am a lawyer and have found Slashdot to be a hellhole for those looking for legal advice. Quantity, yes, but quality cringeworthy. Gaia help anybody who relies on legal advice from Rush Limbaugh, William Shatner, or Slashdot.
I didn't see much in this article that supported the headline. Sending emails instead of texting your boss? In a post-SarbOx world, why would anyone think differently? My impression is that this is an article written for really friggin' dumb kids who don't know how to act in a professional environment. Condescending and patronizing, but in a nice way. Remove the "don't" advice, leaving only the "do" advice, and you have guidelines that would have applied since "Mad Men."
>In other words, if it's not a new invention, just an old invention with "on a computer" added to the end, it's not patentable. That is, if it's not a new invention if made of wood, it's still not new when made of silicon (or magnetic tracks).
Um, which is how it works in this country, too. See, e.g., the CAFC's landmark 2013 case Alice Bank v. Ultramercial, in which the Court, while disagreeing on underlying policy, emphatically underscored this point. So what's the brouhaha? Apparently, software patents are illegal here, too, right?
So where's my Slashdot byline?
Or, you could choose the browser menu selection History/RecentlyStoredTabs/Restore. What am I missing here??
See, e.g., dictionary.com, defining "be comprised of" as an acceptable, albeit idiomatic, synonym for "be composed of," stating: "be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of: The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores."
I speak as a former journalist when I say that a language Nazi who can't even scold with authority is a sad creature indeed.
So I suggest trying a cup of the real stuff before dismissing out of hand. I've been a (Gaia help me) "coffee enthusiast" for decades, but I've never tasted anything as radical as Kopi. My new favorite.
Jeez, what are *you* doing on Slashdot? You actually know how to cite to the U.S.C. I invite you to contribute to the conversation the next time /. publishes an item about patent law. In a country where legal discourse is dominated by the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, Clear Channel political pundits, and other I-Anal-infested Wile E. Coyote types, it's refreshing to bump into someone who not only corrects a common-but-dopey misstatement of the law, but who backs up the correction with an accurate reference to a primary source. Too bad I'm already married.
Actually, I believe that the Vegas and Atlantic City casinos have been using facial recognition in this way for over a decade. I remember reading a piece some years ago about how the technology had been applied, either in a trade magazine or in some mainstream mag, like Wired. Supposedly -- and this is how far back this goes -- a person of interest (like a reported purse-snatcher or card-counter) could be identified by the software upon entering a casino -- based on facial characteristics shared by the casinos via a cooperative fax (!) network.
C'mon, you know how this will play out. Not just anybody will be allowed access. What's the difference between a drug that increases your muscle mass without exercise (i.e., the andros & other steroids) and one that increases your aerobic capability? If it actually does work, it'll first be banned by all sports organizations, amateur and professional, and then, like steroids, legally classified as a controlled substance and regulated as tightly as methadone. A result of our Puritan background -- if you don't earn something, you don't deserve it. You know I'm right: Even here, what was the first /. response? "People should just go out and walk instead of taking a drug."
Groklaw was the IP world's equivalent of the Glenn Beck show. It was a venue for people with strong opinions who had no idea what they were talking about to debate subtle legal issues that were way over their heads. The dark underbelly of an enabling technology. It never changed anything meaningful in any meaningful way and was generally considered noise by anyone with a nontrivial knowledge of U.S. intellectual property law. The reasons for its closure sound like pure BS, something along the lines of: "I've been advised that one should never send any important information via email and since Groklaw can't survive without email, I need to shut it down." What, huh, really?? More likely, Ms. Groklaw just got tired of having to face dopey-but-heated I-ANAL debates all day every day and was too lazy to even spend the time to come up with a rationalization that made sense. So good friggin' riddance. The Internet's aggregate IQ just went up. If you're really interested in intelligent discussions of intellectual-property issues, it's not hard to Google a better-informed IP law blog that is entertaining and that attracts posters who, regardless of whether they're experts in the field, at least have a clue. Patently-O, for example, has its moments. And if losing this silly site breaks you up too much, Glenn Beck can always help you get your fill of start-with-a-conclusion-and-then-cherry-pick-facts-to-support-it debates. I-ANAL, indeed.
EVERYONE should use "Anonymous Coward," for all but the most innocuous postings. It's just common sense. The only argument against doing so is that it might provide a false sense of security if a poster doesn't realize that not revealing some dopey screen name increases his online security from, say, a 2.5 to a 2.9. Still, that 0.4 is better than nothing. The First Amendment has long protected one's right to speak anonymously, noting that requiring, or even an expectation of, identifying a source of controversial speech, can have a chilling effect. It may not be macho to post anonymously, but it's smart and at least nominally effective.
And so is the Mac OS...
Seriously, only an idiot would give a reference, one way or the other, to a former employee, other than to just confirm dates of employment. Liability issues have made such things untenable from a legal perspective. When was the last time you heard of any Fortune 100 firm giving a reference that had real information in? Probably not in the last 20 years.
But other than that, I pretty much agree. The significant contribution of man-made greenhouse gas to climate change has been supported by an incontrovertible body of evidence since the late 1990s -- and even before that, the greenhouse gas model was generally accepted as likely to be true by most of the scientific community worldwide in three fields of science. You're not going to convince people who believe otherwise that their beliefs are just silly, because they're operating on faith, not science. Faith is a bad thing when it's passed off as fact.
Many would argue the converse.
Americans are repulsed and terrified by arithmetic. Forget about math. Won't happen. Readership would be lost. As far as science or math goes, most people in this country would rather be titillated by the mind-boggling physics explanations on shows like "Fringe" ("Time travel should be relatively easy to understand, Olivia. It's just like lassoing a calf, where the cowboy is a particle accelerator, the calf is a magnetic bottle of entangled positrosn, and the lariat operates in a way analogous to the Arrow of Time. Look at it that way, and there's no question that you could kill your grandfather before you were born.")
And wtf, Spolsky has a " very readable introduction to the patent system"? Really?? Come on. OK, I guess maybe it is readable, but that's because it's so condescending & silly. This is particularly true of the cited quote: "Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for." Yeah, OK, I've seen some poorly written software (and other types of) patents, but many were hard to understand because they were auto-translated from another language. I've also seen some brilliantly written software patents, and not just a few. A sweeping, conclusory statement like this one belongs in a dorm room, not in what purports to be a serious discussion of legal issues.
And sure, anybody who doesn't understand what they're reading can propose prior art and may even generate an interim rejection from a harried examiner who wants an applicant to assume the burden of distinguishing the prior art. But making a rejection stick is another story, and I speak from experience as an attorney who has worked long and hard to "shoot down" overly broad patents in reexam proceedings. If a patent comprises a well-written specification, it takes a lot of work. And you've got to know what you're doing. I'm working on one reexam now, e.g., in which I've probably logged 150 hours drafting leakproof arguments to invalidate 70 claims -- and I'm maybe halfway there. I can tell you right off the bat, Joel's silly efforts -- which apparently amount to little more than Googling prior art that sounds like similar to the subject matter of an application -- won't take much work for a knowledgeable patent agent to blow off. "Friggin' mosquitos!"
But wait, it gets worse! Joel's unsupported claim that patents are deliberately written obtusely to make them difficult to overcome?? HOLY SHIT! Think about that for 30 seconds. Patents are legal documents that concern technical subject matter, not technical documents. If you're an engineer, you're probably not going to be able to understand the language, or even understand why the language exists in the form it does, unless you make some effort to understand the character of what you're reading. I mean, imagine an attorney writing that IEEE engineering papers are deliberately written with unnecessary calculus because the authors want them to be hard to understand, so that they'll make it through the peer-review process. That's how dumb Joel's statement is.
Okay, Bob Lablaw, I know my word count already exceeds the attention span of the average reader here, so let me just close with two concrete statements that may have more probative value than a "he said - he said":
i) six months from now, check Joel's PAIR cite and read Microsoft's response to his prior art, and the PTO's analysis of Micosoft's arguments or amendments. Betcha donuts to torii that Joel's stupid prior art is effortlessly "shot down."
ii) If Spolsky thinks that patents are deliberately written to be obfuscatory, heck, I'm willing to spend a few minutes educating him. I'll let him p
Actually, I kinda like it. Definitely the gayest WiFi visualization I've ever seen. If WiFi really covered the landscape in rainbows, you can't tell me it wouldn't be a better world.
If you *really* RTFA critically, the logic piece easy to pick it apart.
Merely citing a handful of studies that support a particular position on an issue, ignoring contrary evidence, is hardly probative. And making conclusory statements based on non-sequitors may impress a /. readership raised on talk radio, but they still don't make sense.
E.g., consider the paragraph: "researchers from the University of Minnesota evaluated 39,000 older women and found that those who took supplemental multivitamins, magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron died at rates higher than those who didn't. They concluded, "Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements." But waitaminnit, haven't several studies over the last decade concluded that ingestion of higher levels of iron by post-menopausal women increases the risk of several serious, life-threatening conditions? Throw in that additional fact and it's hard to find the facts, as reported here, justification for the sweeping generalization of the conclusion. Did the study control for the iron supplementation? How could possible negative effects of increasing a person's ingestion of minerals, including several heavy metals, debunk in any way Pauling's claimed empirical effects of vitamin C?
If this article were published in a peer-reviewed journal, it would likely be picked apart in a dozen ways. Its premise may or may not be true -- although it's such a sweeping generalization that the truth is likely somewhere in the middle -- but without more, it's no more worthy of our time than, say, Glenn Beck.
Bottom line? Pauling may have been sensationalistic and agenda-driven, but so is this Atlantic article. There have been at least hundreds of studies performed over the last 50 years that purport to analyze the health effects of dietary supplementation and many of them have found benefits. And others have not. The two studies that found slightly increased risk of death from E supplementation disagreed on many details and I haven't heard of any other research over the last 3 years that found results supporting the popular media's conclusions drawn from those two studies. So representing this as some sort of "the scientific community now agrees..." situation is disingenuous.
So, look, people believe what they want to believe, but what's really annoying is the usual surfeit of self-important morons here on Slashdot who presume to dictate a black-and-white view of the world, throwing a little "STFU! You go off on some rant that literally makes no sense at all," to boot. The book cited by The Atlantic (and consider the context for a moment: What is the subject matter of The Atlantic? It's not scientific research.) appears to be an attempt to push paper by presenting cherry-picked evidence that supports an extraordinarily broad premise. I doubt if many in the medical community would give it a second thought.
Reasonable minds may differ. But don't throw out your vitamins yet.
Seriously, though, just in case there's somebody reading this who really is interested in an objective analysis, this study certainly does have some probative value. How much value, of course, is a function of the design and the scope of the research methodology, and the conclusion should be considered within the context of existing research. These results might be game-changing; but they might be characterize a case that's three standard deviations from the mean; or they might be wrong. And the sources cited here don't provide enough detail to figure that out. Interested parties should investigate further before spouting opinions.
Although asking the right questions, like some are doing here, seems to me to be a logical first step toward putting these findings into perspective. Bravo to you!
D
So in a simple example, if you live in NYC you might be linked through 1 degree of separation to 100 people who live in NYS, 80% of which are in the Metro NYC area. The second degree introduces 100*100 two-degree linkages, but a lot of these people share social settings, know each other, or know the same people, so your 10,000 links boil down to 1500 unique linkages. Furthermore, these 1500 linkages aren't scattered randomly -- 50% are in the Metro area, 20% elsewhere in NYS, 15% on the East Coast, and 15% throughout the rest of the US. 3rd link, the attenuating FX are greater. The potential 100*100*100 linkages, now 1500*100=150,000, may resolve to 4500 unique 3-degree linkages, because so many people in the 2d-degree linkages share common social networks. Some of the 1st-degree linkages who disappeared at the 2d-degree may now be back as redundant 3d degree contacts. And although the geographic distribution is still smearing, the rate of smearing is likely continuing to decrease -- there's still a noticeable bias toward Metro NYC and a lesser one to NYS. Linkages in Australia, Antarctica, Islamabad, if any, are greatly underrepresented in comparison to what they would be under the assumptions of the random-linkage "six degrees" model.
OK, a complicated example, but I hope you at least get the idea. Three degrees of separation yields a pretty big number of linkages, but not nearly as enormous as one might be led to believe by the popular movie-driven model.
One other point: This isn't necessarily a good thing from a security standpoint, because all this means is that the linkages that are found are already preselected by relevance.