Even if Rovers are wildly succesful from a scientific point of view, sooner or later the (scientific) returns from investment are bound to decrease ; that may happen in a year or tomorrow and only the -scientist- will be able to tell us "ok, it's pointless to continue digging holes in the rocks with the current instruments".
They of course would like to dig holes with Rover forever and maybe find something unexpected : that would be nice, but maybe it would be nicer to divert resource from a project that is consistently showing diminishing new results to a new project with, maybe, more intruments or different instruments.
It's a very hard decision to take and hopefully it will based on a rational, well tought and debated argumentation ; hopefully it will not be only a decision made by people who don't appreciate the returns in knowledge.
Let's assume that Dems use open source because they like it and Reps use closed source because they like it.
The truth is probably the following: they use whatever comes for $0. The Dems and The Reps can use legally opensource for $0 , as the skilled godblessed programmers who make opensource proggie have invested in the the concept of opensource, making a lot of their work avaiable at $0 to the public and demand only respect of their goodwill by respect of opensource way of thinking.
Both the Reps and the Dems have a problem using closedsource (read Microsoft proggie or other proprietary proggie) as it could be seen as a form of non monetary contribution to their parties.
You can also bet your preferred body part that the owner of the closedsource will come back and ask party for favors as they could quickly remember they forgot to enforce their copyright-given rights on the political party.
How many licences of Word did you say you have bought ???? MMhhh let's check shall we...? Oh don't worry, just forget to vote that law ok ? Oh Senator I heard your private law studio has got one less licence then needed..mmhhhhh...let's call the press shall we ?
"I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that " he said.
The position Mike is apparently holding is the following:
1. As long as you don't make a PROFIT off his labour by copying the movie 2. You can copy as much as you want
My guess is , he is referring to -monetary- profit , a.k.a cash. If you give the movie to somebody in exchange of $0 (no money) you're not making any monetary profit, and that's fine with Mike. If you make even $0.5 out of the transaction Mike will oppose you and whoop your ass.
Some could say that, if you wanted to see the movie, you would ordinarily have paid $X > $0 and therefore you stole $X to the copyright owner. This is not true, as "stealing" involves taking something AWAY from somebody possession (for instance if I steal your PC, you no longer have your PC or in other words it's no longer in your possession).
But by making a COPY of a movie, you're not taking away anybody movie so it's not stealing, but it's a violation of copyright law that was created (also) for the purpose of circumventing the limitation (necessary limitations) of the concept of stealing, which requires the physical transfer of a good from somebody possession to somebody else possession.
Now can Michael do that ? It depends if he did sell all the copying rights to the distributor company; if he did, he can't. So, assuming he did, why is the distributor company tolerating Michael statements ?
Probably because he framed the statement well : if you make $$$ out of movie, we'll bust you. If you don't we'll tolerate you _because_ you probably are acting as a _promoter_ of the movie reaching that part of potential audience which is not going to see the movie in theatres nor rent it. And that's not going to cost the company a dime in the balance statement.
Given that the potential (at least in U.S.) audience is more or less 250-300 million viewers the company would like them ALL to see the movie at least once (and of course to pay for it) but nobody can force them to do that. Company makes a bet that the _no money sharing_ will actually make Michael even more popular (increasing the likelyhood that, for the next movie, he'll gross even more $ or the same $ made by F911) or encourage some user to buy the DVD when it reaches the market.
It's a kind of smart advertising that can be enormously effective, as long as you crack down on people making MONEY out of the scheme because obviously the dood who paid for the copy now has less money and is unlikely to spend more money on a original copy.
On the contrary, the Jack Valenti types would like you not to be able to make ANY copy of anything _before_ you pay some money and if possible would like you to pay again if your copy is damaged or pay again if you want to see it again !!! In other words they want total control, but not over content=movie (that's mostly valueless crap anyway and realitively unexpensive to make and copy) but over content distribution channels where ALL the money really is , because a movie is useless if they can't bring it to you and sell it.
Your sharing habit, the internet, the existence of alternative media is their major problem , because it is totally at your advantage and they can't really charge for it or FORCE you to pay, which is bottom line what they want. Conspiracy theory ? Nah basic economics.
Damnnnn spoiled kids, my days we wrote our own operating system by flipping one single on/off switch ! We switched better then a New York traffic light did we ! Ahhhh the good 'ole days.....
You know...I know you're right, but I think you're wrong.
One month ago I had to pass a Marketing exam which basically was about "studying" a couple threehundred pages books on the subject of marketing and answer 50 multiple choice questions.Feh ! I bargained a not satisfactory vote for 3 more months of time wasted into memorizing silly "right answers".
+-80% of the book was well written vapourware with a glassing of rational analysis, but there were some valuable hints in the salesman section.The big point of all the marketing exam was "customer must be satisfied".
Now you say customer feedback is important and I couldn't agree more : after all, the customer is paying so we'd like him to be satisfied and to come back for more. But who's giving the job to the marketeer ? The Company is and according to that M$ guy, M$ was pushing Money as a "portal" to sell advertisement space for advertisers ; in other words the clients were NOT the Money end-users, but the advertisement agents.
So was the marketing team really so shitty ?I don't think so, as they were probably requested to sell Money to ad-agencies and probably concentraded their effort for this purpose, not for the purpose of end-user satisfaction.
This is consistent with the fact that relatively few people actually routinely use Quicken/Money every day, unlike Word. I think M$ choosed not to invest too much geek time on building a superior product and opted to make money on Money by selling ads ; which again is consistant with the end-user financial market, bent on extracting money from the customer rather then helping the customer make more money.
What M$ didn't like is the fact Quicken was and still is taking away customers from this advertising scheme ; marketing isn't to blame if some other company is making a better product, when marketing was asked to sell the product NOT to end user, but to ad-agents.
Btw, marketing is evil:) and sometime utterly useless.
If I understood correclty, the court argues as follows:
1) for interception to happen the communication must be "caught" or "intercepted" WHILE it's on transit on the wire/cable/accessory mechanisms that let the transfer happen.
2) if even for a pico-second the communication is "caught"/copied WHILE in "storage" it's not an interception, because the communication is not on the wire on transit.
Point is the court assumes that, because the communication is passing in RAM and/or hard-disk, then it must be stored (even if for a pico-second)
This could be true (in an abstract sense) if the CPU was processing other data before sending the communication (and therefore the whole communication was refreshed and held "in a loop" inside the RAM in a queue) that doesn't necessarily happen for ALL emails ; it may as well be that, when an email is sent, it is the first element of a queue of data going into the RAM and, therefore, it's not stored in the RAM "in a refresh loop" but goes directly to CPU and back to RAM and back to the network card instantl with no queueing/storing occurring.
If that happens, the communication is still happening in the mechanisms that is part of the "wire" at least logically ; if that happens the RAM is just a medium, exactly like the wire is a medium. In such an instance the sniffer program is sniffing the email "while it's on the wire" and that's a clearly breach of law.
1. Notice people are getting something for free or for very little 2. Claim that a weather network costs billion to make, like the famous military toilet seats and wrenches at $1000/one 3. Claim that "private will do better then govt" 4. Claim that giving people data for nearly free is unfair competition even if data was paid by people. Cry like a wuss with your congressman. 5. Have people believe all that bull 6... ? 7. Massive profits. 7.a Make private tornado chasing illegal, claiming it's more dangerous then...a tornado 7.b Cook the books to claim hired tornado hunters are paid $300k/year, so you must charge for data. 7.c Hire university students as tornado hunters temps and pay them per tornado chased, IF the tornado does touch the terrain and if it goes clockwise in the northern emisphere. 7.d Even MORE massive profits, cost are socialized, profits are privatized. Everybody but a few billion luser win.
I haven't seen F9/11 yet, but I will surely see it and try to look for rethorics/uncorroborated evidence/spinning etc.
What I think is : how many people will do the same for Rush "druggie down the river" Limbaugh drug abuser , Bill "No spin, Shutup !!" O'Reilly and other so called "right wing" spindoctors ? How many people know how to do a rigorous analysis of statement, without paying too much attention to the person making the statement, but concentrating on the statement seeking for truth ? Too few, I think.
The majority of comments in many blogs/forums I have seen in the last two years follow a partisan logic of disproving the statement of others or cast doubt on the subject credibility (a.k.a character assasination) so that the listener/viewer is distracted, in a way that his/her attention is moved from the topic of discussion to the persons making the discussion. From all the discussion that will hopefully follow F911, I hope that at least some people will learn how to deal with people using rethorics, no matter if they come from left, right or from mars.
In other words, I urge interested slashdotters to study rethorics and logical fallacies, so that they will learn to discriminate between O'Reilly-likes and Moore-likes. This requires a great deal of intellectual honesty and ability to analyze without regard for the outcome (that could be positive or negative for your belief, but that could also shatter your beliefs and faith as well as give them solid foundations)
On a tangent: people would already know how to analyze noticed I've embedded two statements about O'Reilly and Limbaugh (not caring to hide them better). Both statements were made to suggest two strong shortcomings of these two commentators. Check why I did by yourself as an exercise, see if their "moral" stances are compatible with their behavior and statements. But don't stop at "googling for facts" and don't stop only at O'Reilly and Moore..learn how to spot inconsistencies without googling or without reading your favourite partisan blog.
The question is : Are IT Certifications Meaningless ?
This is not a good question to being with, but the answer is no. For instance, if company X requires company Y to have somebody with certification Z and enter the contracts also because of presence of Z, then it's meaningful in a business sense.
It doesn't matter that a bunch of other techies say that Z is 1.superficial 2.insufficient 3.barely relevant , even if they're "right" from a technical point of view. Remember that in the "logic" of profit, anything that brings in profit is meaningful.
Now, from a less profit-centered point of view, we could argue that a number of so called certified-persons obtained the certification with fraud , or by simply memorizing a number or recurrent question and answer : this is true for any certification, not necessarily only in the IT business.
The problem with such people becomes manifest when they're asked to do something out of the ordinary or when the problem involves variables that come from sets of variables outside the scope of their certifications. This is predictable and to some extent excusable, as nobody always knows how to handle any combination of variables.
So, who's supposed to do best in such instances ? In my experience, self-propelled "geeks":-) fueled by a natural interest for "tinkering" and for technology in all its manifestations do better then "average" people ; for the simple reason they really really like their job, almost always want to learn and are willing to work overtime to solve a problem they find interesting. In other words, they rrrrrealy are into their work and _not only for money_ even if they obviously ask for money.
Some company noticed that there is a shortage of such people (when the quantity is compared to demand) and attempted to "produce more" of them ; most of times the process of creation, according to such companies, involves memorizing a ton of variables and learn how to set such variables in a way that the "machines" works at the end of the day. Or at best, their students are asked to solve some well-know set of problems.
What they really are producing are not technicians, but (sometimes) well trained monkeys, but marketing always sell them as "specialized technicians". I do not mean monkey as a derogatory term, as they obviously are human and rationally expect to be treated like human beings , but they're trained exactly like I would train a monkey : monkey press ESC key at instance X, monkey set ten variables with 10 clicks. Monkey see, monkey do.
To a degree monkeys are welcome and useful, but they hardly are technicians. They most certainly are not "geeks" , they only share basic dna:-).In my experience, out of 100 monkeys one hardly finds 10 monkeys evolved into geeks, and many don't evolve at all.
Industry wants geeks, because they're flexible.As usually, industry doesn't want to pay proportionally for their skills, but now some industry pretends that geeks are formed en-masse and if possible totally at the expense of society (from public schools, as private are more expensive and usually less cost effective) as they understood many companies in the business of preparing geeks are only selling HOT AIR ; blame marketing, as usual, and blame companies that expect their own hot air not to promote the hiring of more hot air.
1. Claims a single individual sponged talent (?) (he couldn't say stole) from U.S. Government and Corporations attempts to find proof of such an hideous horrible crime (in order to give his bold statement some foundation) only to be refuted by his own expert and apparently disregards expert opinion.
2. Probably thinks even taking inspiration from works of others is an intellectual crime, let alone learning from others for the all-but-good purpose of writing the roots of a free-for-all operating system.
3. Uses ad hominem rethorical attack, hidden behind the statement that operating system is a human disease (an orange=apple kind of equation) disregarding the fact Linux hasn't uprooted Windows et al yet and that this is necessarily an outcome as bad as that of leprosy.
4. Uses the non sequitur : if a thing comes for free (price) then it lowers the value of something else, apparently forgetting (yeah sure) price and value are not always proportional and are two entirely different concepts to begin with.
5. Claims that a single 21 year old can't do what a group of elder experienced people does in years, apparently forgetting that what wasn't coinceived or realized in the past may be conceivable and realizable in the future, regardless of the constrains experienced in the past , and using "age" as a factor that gives less likelyhood to a technical accomplishment ?
I guess the definition of PDA is dead, not the device. I think a more appropriate definition could be "Pocket PC" , the expression used by Micro$oft as far as I know.
My current PDA or PocketPc or ThinginthePocket is capable of playing mp3/ogg, showing compressed videos at a reasonably watchable frame rate, can store entire libraries in thumbnail sized memory and access it or search in a reasonably brief time, can connect to Internet by Wifi or by GPRS, can be used as a phone or as a not-dumb-at-all terminal. My only complain is that the battery doesn't always last long enough for my usage patterns, but it's a relatively minor annoyance.
Obviously, it's overkill for a number of users who just use it to scribble two notes a day or access some spreadsheet.
I guess that, again, the market size will be limited by the number of users, not only by price.My hope is in 15-18 generation who , at least in Europe, is so much used to cellphone and videogames and internet they'll see Pocket Computers as the desiderable upgrade from relatively dumb cellphones with little flexibilty.
Unfortunately the prices seem to be still a little too high for many consumers, when one considers that fine cellphone can be bought for as little as $60-70.
That looks so much like the messages I used to regularly find on Usenet during the "dawn" on Internet I was moved and almost cried in admiration;-). The red shift of Pioneer and external references to Star Trek, god bless !
Oh well, at least I can still find some here and there:)
Good point and maybe it happens just because of a little bug in the code that didn't accurately check that the cash dispenser is empty. Or maybe some dollar got jammed, or something else happend. It's quite an issue for ATM makers I guess.
Same for voting machines : while people will certainly notice ATM didn't spit money, would people check the voting machine accurately punched the hole or wrote the voted party ? I doubt so.
Paper, pen, cross. Easy, dependable and with symbols doesn't even require ability to read or write.
Dude I kind of admire the fact that you're not delusional..but I guess you're taking the behavior of masses like granted because in the past many choosed not to vote at all. Shame on them, in my opinion, as they give too much power to well entreched minorities (which is kind of ironic I guess in a system that was, in theory made to represent a majority.)
Take for instance the guys that were sent to Iraq war ; I guess they have a very strong opinion on the administration policy and thanks democracy, as anybody else, they're allowed to vote.
Indeed too many times people don't react appropriately or lack foresight, but that doesn't mean that if they start feeling the heat or feel that something is utterly wrong they'll not react, maybe the wrong way but they will.
Good for you, but as you see they give you a paper recepit:) which in theory you should use to prove you had $XYZ in your bank account at a certain moment in time (just in case they accidentaly delete your account..or accidentaly charge you). The money still isn't in your hands because if they do something wrong they'll probably resist you (expecially if they made a big error) and in worst case you'll have to bring them in front of a judge to prove that you actually had money ; this doesn't happen without cost and without risks of judge or lawyer being total morons or corrupted ones.
Even if many like machines, because they relieve us of the burden of doing manual work, the relatively few ones that -actually know- how machines really work would rather work manually then let a machine decide the outcome of an election. I certainly do and I'm no luddite, on the contrary I call myself a computer geek;)
The facts are simple and important: computers can count very quickly, but they can be instructed to MIS-count exactly as fast. Computers can even be instructed to turn your YES into a NO and your NO into a YES. It requires only a click to turn 10 million votes from one candidate to another, regardless of what some self-declared "security expert" say about the security of well maintained and programmed computers.
Hand counting of paper votes cannot as easily be corrupted. While with just one click you can tell computers to do anything but you can't corrupt a thousand people without having some of them understand that corruption in voting process is against democracry ; some will refuse to be corrupted, others will go to media and denounce the corruption..maybe nothing happens and the election is rigged...but some people still know and can still talk, and paper votes remain to be counted a dozen times if necessary (with and expecially without the help of a counting machine)
It is also important to check that each and every voter is given his/her voting rights. One can't just trust computers to tell if a voter still have his/her rights or have lost it. With a simple click one could trick a computer into reporting that 10000 ex-inmates are still in prison, or that 100000 people are alive and should have voted, while in reality they're DEAD so they shouldn't be counted as voters to begin with.
Here is an example with CASH MONEY. Do you like your dollar bills ? Do you like to hold your money in your hands, knowing that your money isn't going anywhere unless YOU decide to do something with it ? Indeed it's only a piece of paper, but a very important one. Imagine a world in which paper or metal money doesn't exist anymore..would you trust banks/govts/corporations to have all your money in their hands, stored as numbers in their computers ? What if a black-hat hacker attacks their computers ? What if some corrupted individual working at a bank steals money from their computers, or simply -delete- your money from your account because he doesn't like you ? Why do you think that banks are still using PAPER to keep their records ?
Fire can destroy paper money, you could lose it, anything could happen...so why do we keep money on paper with holograms and other forms of expensive protection ? Because one could falsify money, one could destroy it accidentally..but you can't destroy all the paper money with one click, you can't falsify all the money with one click, you can't take money away from population hands with one click without kick-starting a bloody revolution.
Now back to vote : your vote is not money, but for some people it is more much more important then money. Why ? Because your vote will direct trillions of dollars and a lot of power to some hands, because your vote will elect a politician, giving him/her power to WAGE WAR in your name, to decide were tax money is going to be spent, to decide if a law needs to be changed for better or worse.
Still want your vote and your voting rights to be counted or decided by a stupid computer ? I don't want humans to be taken away from the voting process in the name of "progress" or in the name of "savings". It's stupid, it's dangerous.
No it doesn't contradict the ability ; it shows that you wilfully decided to give up the method for some reason and for some purpose.
You,for instance, have the ability of writing using a computer keyboard at a certain speed : the fact that you decided to use windows cut-n-paste (which can be mistaken as writing) only shows that you're lazy bum:) not that you can't use a keyboard.
Any system that completely relies on the past track record of one human being as the only fuction of self-validation is an inherently unsecure one.
In other words, if you trust the system because the researcher(s) in the past weren't caught doing anything wrong you are going to have a bad wake-up call : people change.
Imagine , for instance, that you were offered 10 million of some strong currency just to change a couple bit out of the data, so that the outcome of the research becomes slightly or completely favourable to some special interest (for instance some big company). Imagine that you worked incredibly hard and decide that it doesn't really matter if a couple bit are false, because you objectively did work more then others.
I hardly expect any human being to utterly reject this proposition out of moral outrage : that's wishful thinking. I don't expect human beings to be completely impervious to corruption, as evidence suggests that a number of circumstances (not necessarily only pure greed) can alter one person judgement.
Full-disclosure of methods, source of data and the data itself, combined with mandatory peer-review and replicability of researcher experiments seems to be a reasonable method that helps reducing the incidence of corruption.
So....should the researcher lose his Phd because he wilfully falsified data ? I think Phd is only the recognition (given by others) that at a certain moment in time you were able to resolve certain problems with a certain set of conditions. No more no less. Expecting Phd to be superhumans is at least as delusional as expecting that the CEO of a company is always consistently working for the interest of shareholders. Pure trust is delusional.
So he can, for sure, retain his Phd. Taking away his Phd is just, imho, a further proof human beings like to "roast" a couple of "witches" when they think the mere existence of one "evildoer" endangers their "respectability".
I never said that one should legalise child pornography because prohibitionism was a failure.
Both production of alcohol or child pornography (or any other production)are two activities that one government/society can either repress or legalize, but not really stop forever because both are fueled by a demand. Unless the demand vanishes, they will be produced,
Given that and agreeing on the fact that it is wise to forbid the production of child pornography (which is already illegal in many countries, afaik) we should ask ourselves if censoring the medium (internet in this case) is going to do any good , if and how it should be done.
Considering that stopping the production of child pron is extremely difficult as it doesn't require but a litte (even if horrible) effort, it is may be wise to at least try to make the distribution more costly. How do we do that ?
If the mean is that of censoring URLs then whoever does the censorship must be absolutely sure it is censoring only child porn and must adhere to one well studied definition of child porn..and even invest real money into this kind of filtering, which I think BT is not going to do.
I guess education and prosecution of production are the ways to go...education being the most important.
More likely, population saw that their "leaders" were drinking alcohol while they preached to not drink alcohol. Also, the part of population who tried alcohol at least once didn't see big a danger coming from casual and moderate consumption..neither did they have any kind of sexual attraction toward alcohol.
You know, it's not about what's reasonable , otherwise reasonable people wouldn't do a lot of unreasonable things, but we have lots of evidence of the contrary ; like, for instance, reasonable people investing their lifesavings in stocks, reasonable people speeding on the highway knowing well that speeding is very very dangerous.
It is more about desires and will you can or can't control, no matter how reasonable you are. That's the problem with child abusers and rapists, they totally don't have control on their otherwise natural desire to have sex, even if some of them is probably well aware then attacking a child is an unreasonable and despicable proposition.
Take, for instance, some catholic priests who were found guilty of sexually abusing childrens; probably a number of them were well respected individuals in their neighboorhood, even people that did good, definitely not your ordinary everyday Joes. Yet so strong is what they call "the tentation" that they can't stand it and some of them abuse the easiest target, childrens of course. But instead of addressing the issue by understanding the issue, most of them blame "devil" for tempting them while the problem is they're unnaturally going against natural, usually sane sexual pulsions.
Slashdot Mirror
How in the hell are they going not to contaminate the lake if they're going to put a drill into it someday ?
Even if Rovers are wildly succesful from a scientific point of view, sooner or later the (scientific) returns from investment are bound to decrease ; that may happen in a year or tomorrow and only the -scientist- will be able to tell us "ok, it's pointless to continue digging holes in the rocks with the current instruments".
They of course would like to dig holes with Rover forever and maybe find something unexpected : that would be nice, but maybe it would be nicer to divert resource from a project that is consistently showing diminishing new results to a new project with, maybe, more intruments or different instruments.
It's a very hard decision to take and hopefully it will based on a rational, well tought and debated argumentation ; hopefully it will not be only a decision made by people who don't appreciate the returns in knowledge.
This is all hot air based phoney-balooney.
Let's assume that Dems use open source because they like it and Reps use closed source because they like it.
The truth is probably the following: they use whatever comes for $0. The Dems and The Reps can use legally opensource for $0 , as the skilled godblessed programmers who make opensource proggie have invested in the the concept of opensource, making a lot of their work avaiable at $0 to the public and demand only respect of their goodwill by respect of opensource way of thinking.
Both the Reps and the Dems have a problem using closedsource (read Microsoft proggie or other proprietary proggie) as it could be seen as a form of non monetary contribution to their parties.
You can also bet your preferred body part that the owner of the closedsource will come back and ask party for favors as they could quickly remember they forgot to enforce their copyright-given rights on the political party.
How many licences of Word did you say you have bought ???? MMhhh let's check shall we...? Oh don't worry, just forget to vote that law ok ? Oh Senator I heard your private law studio has got one less licence then needed..mmhhhhh...let's call the press shall we ?
"I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that " he said.
:
The position Mike is apparently holding is the following
1. As long as you don't make a PROFIT off his labour by copying the movie
2. You can copy as much as you want
My guess is , he is referring to -monetary- profit , a.k.a cash. If you give the movie to somebody in exchange of $0 (no money) you're not making any monetary profit, and that's fine with Mike. If you make even $0.5 out of the transaction Mike will oppose you and whoop your ass.
Some could say that, if you wanted to see the movie, you would ordinarily have paid $X > $0 and therefore you stole $X to the copyright owner. This is not true, as "stealing" involves taking something AWAY from somebody possession (for instance if I steal your PC, you no longer have your PC or in other words it's no longer in your possession).
But by making a COPY of a movie, you're not taking away anybody movie so it's not stealing, but it's a violation of copyright law that was created (also) for the purpose of circumventing the limitation (necessary limitations) of the concept of stealing, which requires the physical transfer of a good from somebody possession to somebody else possession.
Now can Michael do that ? It depends if he did sell all the copying rights to the distributor company; if he did, he can't. So, assuming he did, why is the distributor company tolerating Michael statements ?
Probably because he framed the statement well : if you make $$$ out of movie, we'll bust you. If you don't we'll tolerate you _because_ you probably are acting as a _promoter_ of the movie reaching that part of potential audience which is not going to see the movie in theatres nor rent it. And that's not going to cost the company a dime in the balance statement.
Given that the potential (at least in U.S.) audience is more or less 250-300 million viewers the company would like them ALL to see the movie at least once (and of course to pay for it) but nobody can force them to do that. Company makes a bet that the _no money sharing_ will actually make Michael even more popular (increasing the likelyhood that, for the next movie, he'll gross even more $ or the same $ made by F911) or encourage some user to buy the DVD when it reaches the market.
It's a kind of smart advertising that can be enormously effective, as long as you crack down on people making MONEY out of the scheme because obviously the dood who paid for the copy now has less money and is unlikely to spend more money on a original copy.
On the contrary, the Jack Valenti types would like you not to be able to make ANY copy of anything _before_ you pay some money and if possible would like you to pay again if your copy is damaged or pay again if you want to see it again !!! In other words they want total control, but not over content=movie (that's mostly valueless crap anyway and realitively unexpensive to make and copy) but over content distribution channels where ALL the money really is , because a movie is useless if they can't bring it to you and sell it.
Your sharing habit, the internet, the existence of alternative media is their major problem , because it is totally at your advantage and they can't really charge for it or FORCE you to pay, which is bottom line what they want. Conspiracy theory ? Nah basic economics.
Never mind that they don't even know how was the Altair computer programmed or what is was, yet they think they're geeks cause they have Lin00x.
Aah damn kids funnier then me ! My days Groucho Marx was the man, was he !
Damnnnn spoiled kids, my days we wrote our own operating system by flipping one single on/off switch ! We switched better then a New York traffic light did we ! Ahhhh the good 'ole days.....
You know...I know you're right, but I think you're wrong.
:) and sometime utterly useless.
One month ago I had to pass a Marketing exam which basically was about "studying" a couple threehundred pages books on the subject of marketing and answer 50 multiple choice questions.Feh ! I bargained a not satisfactory vote for 3 more months of time wasted into memorizing silly "right answers".
+-80% of the book was well written vapourware with a glassing of rational analysis, but there were some valuable hints in the salesman section.The big point of all the marketing exam was "customer must be satisfied".
Now you say customer feedback is important and I couldn't agree more : after all, the customer is paying so we'd like him to be satisfied and to come back for more. But who's giving the job to the marketeer ? The Company is and according to that M$ guy, M$ was pushing Money as a "portal" to sell advertisement space for advertisers ; in other words the clients were NOT the Money end-users, but the advertisement agents.
So was the marketing team really so shitty ?I don't think so, as they were probably requested to sell Money to ad-agencies and probably concentraded their effort for this purpose, not for the purpose of end-user satisfaction.
This is consistent with the fact that relatively few people actually routinely use Quicken/Money every day, unlike Word. I think M$ choosed not to invest too much geek time on building a superior product and opted to make money on Money by selling ads ; which again is consistant with the end-user financial market, bent on extracting money from the customer rather then helping the customer make more money.
What M$ didn't like is the fact Quicken was and still is taking away customers from this advertising scheme ; marketing isn't to blame if some other company is making a better product, when marketing was asked to sell the product NOT to end user, but to ad-agents.
Btw, marketing is evil
If I understood correclty, the court argues as follows:
1) for interception to happen the communication must be "caught" or "intercepted" WHILE it's on transit on the wire/cable/accessory mechanisms that let the transfer happen.
2) if even for a pico-second the communication is "caught"/copied WHILE in "storage" it's not an interception, because the communication is not on the wire on transit.
Point is the court assumes that, because the communication is passing in RAM and/or hard-disk, then it must be stored (even if for a pico-second)
This could be true (in an abstract sense) if the CPU was processing other data before sending the communication (and therefore the whole communication was refreshed and held "in a loop" inside the RAM in a queue) that doesn't necessarily happen for ALL emails ; it may as well be that, when an email is sent, it is the first element of a queue of data going into the RAM and, therefore, it's not stored in the RAM "in a refresh loop" but goes directly to CPU and back to RAM and back to the network card instantl with no queueing/storing occurring.
If that happens, the communication is still happening in the mechanisms that is part of the "wire" at least logically ; if that happens the RAM is just a medium, exactly like the wire is a medium. In such an instance the sniffer program is sniffing the email "while it's on the wire" and that's a clearly breach of law.
1. Notice people are getting something for free or for very little ... ?
2. Claim that a weather network costs billion to make, like the famous military toilet seats and wrenches at $1000/one
3. Claim that "private will do better then govt"
4. Claim that giving people data for nearly free is unfair competition even if data was paid by people. Cry like a wuss with your congressman.
5. Have people believe all that bull
6
7. Massive profits.
7.a Make private tornado chasing illegal, claiming it's more dangerous then...a tornado
7.b Cook the books to claim hired tornado hunters are paid $300k/year, so you must charge for data.
7.c Hire university students as tornado hunters temps and pay them per tornado chased, IF the tornado does touch the terrain and if it goes clockwise in the northern emisphere.
7.d Even MORE massive profits, cost are socialized, profits are privatized. Everybody but a few billion luser win.
I haven't seen F9/11 yet, but I will surely see it and try to look for rethorics/uncorroborated evidence/spinning etc.
What I think is : how many people will do the same for Rush "druggie down the river" Limbaugh drug abuser , Bill "No spin, Shutup !!" O'Reilly and other so called "right wing" spindoctors ? How many people know how to do a rigorous analysis of statement, without paying too much attention to the person making the statement, but concentrating on the statement seeking for truth ? Too few, I think.
The majority of comments in many blogs/forums I have seen in the last two years follow a partisan logic of disproving the statement of others or cast doubt on the subject credibility (a.k.a character assasination) so that the listener/viewer is distracted, in a way that his/her attention is moved from the topic of discussion to the persons making the discussion.
From all the discussion that will hopefully follow F911, I hope that at least some people will learn how to deal with people using rethorics, no matter if they come from left, right or from mars.
In other words, I urge interested slashdotters to study rethorics and logical fallacies, so that they will learn to discriminate between O'Reilly-likes and Moore-likes. This requires a great deal of intellectual honesty and ability to analyze without regard for the outcome (that could be positive or negative for your belief, but that could also shatter your beliefs and faith as well as give them solid foundations)
On a tangent: people would already know how to analyze noticed I've embedded two statements about O'Reilly and Limbaugh (not caring to hide them better). Both statements were made to suggest two strong shortcomings of these two commentators. Check why I did by yourself as an exercise, see if their "moral" stances are compatible with their behavior and statements. But don't stop at "googling for facts" and don't stop only at O'Reilly and Moore..learn how to spot inconsistencies without googling or without reading your favourite partisan blog.
Why is 5 the max points when this so clearly deserves a 6 : corporate hypocrisy with-facts buster
The question is : Are IT Certifications Meaningless ?
:-) fueled by a natural interest for "tinkering" and for technology in all its manifestations do better then "average" people ; for the simple reason they really really like their job, almost always want to learn and are willing to work overtime to solve a problem they find interesting.
:-).In my experience, out of 100 monkeys one hardly finds 10 monkeys evolved into geeks, and many don't evolve at all.
This is not a good question to being with, but the answer is no. For instance, if company X requires company Y to have somebody with certification Z and enter the contracts also because of presence of Z, then it's meaningful
in a business sense.
It doesn't matter that a bunch of other techies say that Z is 1.superficial 2.insufficient 3.barely relevant , even if they're "right" from a technical point of view. Remember that in the "logic" of profit, anything that brings in profit is meaningful.
Now, from a less profit-centered point of view, we could argue that a number of so called certified-persons obtained the certification with fraud , or by simply memorizing a number or recurrent question and answer : this is true for any certification, not necessarily only in the IT business.
The problem with such people becomes manifest when they're asked to do something out of the ordinary or when the problem involves variables that come from sets of variables outside the scope of their certifications. This is predictable and to some extent excusable, as nobody always knows how to handle any combination of variables.
So, who's supposed to do best in such instances ? In my experience, self-propelled "geeks"
In other words, they rrrrrealy are into their work and _not only for money_ even if they obviously ask for money.
Some company noticed that there is a shortage of such people (when the quantity is compared to demand) and attempted to "produce more" of them ; most of times the process of creation, according to such companies, involves memorizing a ton of variables and learn how to set such variables in a way that the "machines" works at the end of the day. Or at best, their students are asked to solve some well-know set of problems.
What they really are producing are not technicians, but (sometimes) well trained monkeys, but marketing always sell them as "specialized technicians". I do not mean monkey as a derogatory term, as they obviously are human and rationally expect to be treated like human beings , but they're trained exactly like I would train a monkey : monkey press ESC key at instance X, monkey set ten variables with 10 clicks. Monkey see, monkey do.
To a degree monkeys are welcome and useful, but they hardly are technicians. They most certainly are not "geeks" , they only share basic dna
Industry wants geeks, because they're flexible.As usually, industry doesn't want to pay proportionally for their skills, but now some industry pretends that geeks are formed en-masse and if possible totally at the expense of society (from public schools, as private are more expensive and usually less cost effective) as they understood many companies in the business of preparing geeks are only selling HOT AIR ; blame marketing, as usual, and blame companies that expect their own hot air not to promote the hiring of more hot air.
It's trivia time:
What kind of person does the following ?
1. Claims a single individual sponged talent (?) (he couldn't say stole) from U.S. Government and Corporations
attempts to find proof of such an hideous horrible crime (in order to give his bold statement some foundation)
only to be refuted by his own expert and apparently disregards expert opinion.
2. Probably thinks even taking inspiration from works of others is an intellectual crime, let alone learning from others
for the all-but-good purpose of writing the roots of a free-for-all operating system.
3. Uses ad hominem rethorical attack, hidden behind the statement that operating system is a human disease (an orange=apple
kind of equation) disregarding the fact Linux hasn't uprooted Windows et al yet and that this is necessarily an outcome as
bad as that of leprosy.
4. Uses the non sequitur : if a thing comes for free (price) then it lowers the value of something else, apparently forgetting (yeah sure) price and value are not always proportional and are two entirely different concepts to begin with.
5. Claims that a single 21 year old can't do what a group of elder experienced people does in years, apparently forgetting that
what wasn't coinceived or realized in the past may be conceivable and realizable in the future, regardless of the constrains
experienced in the past , and using "age" as a factor that gives less likelyhood to a technical accomplishment ?
I just bought one :) No, really !
I guess the definition of PDA is dead, not the device. I think a more appropriate definition could be "Pocket PC" , the expression used by Micro$oft as far as I know.
My current PDA or PocketPc or ThinginthePocket
is capable of playing mp3/ogg, showing compressed videos at a reasonably watchable frame rate, can store entire libraries in thumbnail sized memory and access it or search in a reasonably brief time, can connect to Internet by Wifi or by GPRS, can be used as a phone or as a not-dumb-at-all terminal. My only complain is that the battery doesn't always last long enough for my usage patterns, but it's a relatively minor annoyance.
Obviously, it's overkill for a number of users who just use it to scribble two notes a day or access some spreadsheet.
I guess that, again, the market size will be limited by the number of users, not only by price.My hope is in 15-18 generation who , at least in Europe, is so much used to cellphone and videogames and internet they'll see Pocket Computers as the desiderable upgrade from relatively dumb cellphones with little flexibilty.
Unfortunately the prices seem to be still a little too high for many consumers, when one considers that fine cellphone can be bought for as little as $60-70.
That looks so much like the messages I used to regularly find on Usenet during the "dawn" on Internet I was moved and almost cried in admiration ;-). The red shift of Pioneer and external references to Star Trek, god bless !
:)
Oh well, at least I can still find some here and there
Good point and maybe it happens just because of a little bug in the code that didn't accurately check that the cash dispenser is empty. Or maybe some dollar got jammed, or something else happend.
It's quite an issue for ATM makers I guess.
Same for voting machines : while people will certainly notice ATM didn't spit money, would people check the voting machine accurately punched the hole or wrote the voted party ? I doubt so.
Paper, pen, cross. Easy, dependable and with symbols doesn't even require ability to read or write.
Dude I kind of admire the fact that you're not delusional..but I guess you're taking the behavior of masses like granted because in the past many choosed not to vote at all. Shame on them, in my opinion, as they give too much power to well entreched minorities (which is kind of ironic I guess in a system that was, in theory made to represent a majority.)
Take for instance the guys that were sent to Iraq war ; I guess they have a very strong opinion on the administration policy and thanks democracy, as anybody else, they're allowed to vote.
Indeed too many times people don't react appropriately or lack foresight, but that doesn't mean that if they start feeling the heat or feel that something is utterly wrong they'll not react, maybe the wrong way but they will.
I guess it is too much to hope that the source code is publicly available, but really shouldn't it be?
Even if it was, it could be changed quickly by very few corrupted and/or partisan individuals.
Good for you, but as you see they give you a paper recepit :) which in theory you should use to prove you had $XYZ in your bank account at a certain moment in time (just in case they accidentaly delete your account..or accidentaly charge you). The money still isn't in your hands because if they do something wrong they'll probably resist you (expecially if they made a big error) and in worst case you'll have to bring them in front of a judge to prove that you actually had money ; this doesn't happen without cost and without risks of judge or lawyer being total morons or corrupted ones.
Even if many like machines, because they relieve us of the burden of doing manual work, the relatively few ones ;)
..would you trust banks/govts/corporations
that -actually know- how machines really work would rather work manually then let a machine decide the outcome
of an election. I certainly do and I'm no luddite, on the contrary I call myself a computer geek
The facts are simple and important: computers can count very quickly, but they can be instructed to MIS-count exactly
as fast. Computers can even be instructed to turn your YES into a NO and your NO into a YES. It requires only a click
to turn 10 million votes from one candidate to another, regardless of what some self-declared "security expert" say about
the security of well maintained and programmed computers.
Hand counting of paper votes cannot as easily be corrupted. While with just one click you can tell computers to do anything
but you can't corrupt a thousand people without having some of them understand that corruption in voting process is against
democracry ; some will refuse to be corrupted, others will go to media and denounce the corruption..maybe nothing happens
and the election is rigged...but some people still know and can still talk, and paper votes remain to be counted a dozen
times if necessary (with and expecially without the help of a counting machine)
It is also important to check that each and every voter is given his/her voting rights. One can't just trust computers
to tell if a voter still have his/her rights or have lost it. With a simple click one could trick a computer into reporting
that 10000 ex-inmates are still in prison, or that 100000 people are alive and should have voted, while in reality they're
DEAD so they shouldn't be counted as voters to begin with.
Here is an example with CASH MONEY. Do you like your dollar bills ? Do you like to hold your money in your hands, knowing that your
money isn't going anywhere unless YOU decide to do something with it ? Indeed it's only a piece of paper, but a very
important one. Imagine a world in which paper or metal money doesn't exist anymore
to have all your money in their hands, stored as numbers in their computers ? What if a black-hat hacker attacks their computers ?
What if some corrupted individual working at a bank steals money from their computers, or simply -delete- your money from your
account because he doesn't like you ? Why do you think that banks are still using PAPER to keep their records ?
Fire can destroy paper money, you could lose it, anything could happen...so why do we keep money on paper with holograms
and other forms of expensive protection ? Because one could falsify money, one could destroy it accidentally..but you can't
destroy all the paper money with one click, you can't falsify all the money with one click, you can't take money away from
population hands with one click without kick-starting a bloody revolution.
Now back to vote : your vote is not money, but for some people it is more much more important then money. Why ? Because your
vote will direct trillions of dollars and a lot of power to some hands, because your vote will elect a politician, giving
him/her power to WAGE WAR in your name, to decide were tax money is going to be spent, to decide if a law needs to be changed
for better or worse.
Still want your vote and your voting rights to be counted or decided by a stupid computer ? I don't want humans to be taken
away from the voting process in the name of "progress" or in the name of "savings". It's stupid, it's dangerous.
No it doesn't contradict the ability ; it shows that you wilfully decided to give up the method for some reason and for some purpose.
,for instance, have the ability of writing using a computer keyboard at a certain speed : the fact that you decided to use windows cut-n-paste (which can be mistaken as writing) only shows that you're lazy bum :) not that you can't use a keyboard.
You
Parent reply seems reasonable.
Any system that completely relies on the past track record of one human being as the only fuction of self-validation is an inherently unsecure one.
In other words, if you trust the system because the researcher(s) in the past weren't caught doing anything wrong you are going to have a bad wake-up call : people change.
Imagine , for instance, that you were offered 10 million of some strong currency just to change a couple bit out of the data, so that the outcome of the research becomes slightly or completely favourable to some special interest (for instance some big company). Imagine that you worked incredibly hard and decide that it doesn't really matter if a couple bit are false, because you objectively did work more then others.
I hardly expect any human being to utterly reject this proposition out of moral outrage : that's wishful thinking. I don't expect human beings to be completely impervious to corruption, as evidence suggests that a number of circumstances (not necessarily only pure greed) can alter one person judgement.
Full-disclosure of methods, source of data and the data itself, combined with mandatory peer-review and replicability of researcher experiments seems to be a reasonable method that helps reducing the incidence of corruption.
So....should the researcher lose his Phd because he wilfully falsified data ? I think Phd is only the recognition (given by others) that at a certain moment in time you were able to resolve certain problems with a certain set of conditions.
No more no less. Expecting Phd to be superhumans is at least as delusional as expecting that the CEO of a company is always consistently working for the interest of shareholders. Pure trust is delusional.
So he can, for sure, retain his Phd. Taking away his Phd is just, imho, a further proof human beings like to "roast" a couple of "witches" when they think the mere existence of one "evildoer" endangers their "respectability".
I never said that one should legalise child pornography because prohibitionism was a failure.
Both production of alcohol or child pornography (or any other production)are two activities that one government/society can either repress or legalize, but not really stop forever because both are fueled by a demand. Unless the demand vanishes, they will be produced,
Given that and agreeing on the fact that it is wise to forbid the production of child pornography (which is already illegal in many countries, afaik) we should ask ourselves if censoring the medium (internet in this case) is going to do any good , if and how it should be done.
Considering that stopping the production of child pron is extremely difficult as it doesn't require but a litte (even if horrible) effort, it is may be wise to at least try to make the distribution more costly. How do we do that ?
If the mean is that of censoring URLs then whoever does the censorship must be absolutely sure it is censoring only child porn and must adhere to one well studied definition of child porn..and even invest real money into this kind of filtering, which I think BT is not going to do.
I guess education and prosecution of production are the ways to go...education being the most important.
More likely, population saw that their "leaders" were drinking alcohol while they preached to not drink alcohol. Also, the part of population who tried alcohol at least once didn't see big a danger coming from casual and moderate consumption..neither did they have any kind of sexual attraction toward alcohol.
You know, it's not about what's reasonable , otherwise reasonable people wouldn't do a lot of unreasonable things, but we have lots of evidence of the contrary ; like, for instance, reasonable people investing their lifesavings in stocks, reasonable people speeding on the highway knowing well that speeding is very very dangerous.
It is more about desires and will you can or can't control, no matter how reasonable you are. That's the problem with child abusers and rapists, they totally don't have control on their otherwise natural desire to have sex, even if some of them is probably well aware then attacking a child is an unreasonable and despicable proposition.
Take, for instance, some catholic priests who were found guilty of sexually abusing childrens; probably a number of them were well respected individuals in their neighboorhood, even people that did good, definitely not your ordinary everyday Joes. Yet so strong is what they call "the tentation" that they can't stand it and some of them abuse the easiest target, childrens of course. But instead of addressing the issue by understanding the issue, most of them blame "devil" for tempting them while the problem is they're unnaturally going against natural, usually sane sexual pulsions.