Hubris, maybe? Or lack of perspective? Overly narrow thinking?
These can happen to many intelligent people. Which makes safeguards such as the ICO useful. Although, ideally, it should have been involved even before the implementation. There are rules enforcing it in countries with a similar institution.
You get me on this. I wasn't sure if the situation had been reverted, so I wasn't sure what tense to use in my initial statement.
Yet, still, the fact that it's now government owned doesn't change the fact that its initial privatization is (most likely) what turned British railway network to a wreck.
Yeah, I read about that. My point still stands, though: the privatization of the network brought it to crumble. The fact that the Government ended up taking charge again in order to clean the mess actually consolidates my stand.
(As opposed to other government projects like the Amtrak Monopoly that should have been sold to Conrail or some other profitable rail company years ago.)
What's the point in turning a government monopoly into a corporate monopoly?
You're aware that there can't be two railway networks on a given territory, right?
Opening the trains to competition, okay, but the tracks are a natural monopoly, and should remain under control of the People, through an entity that is accountable to it. A corporate monopoly isn't accountable to the People.
I think the judge's intent, especially in refusing to separate the cases, is to wrestle both parties into playing nice, stopping their tantrums, and actually trying to reach a reasonable compromise.
In other words, emphasizing the "civil" in "civil court".
Which is irrelevant for the novelty of the invention. A mobile device is just another kind of computer, using a different kind of connection. It doesn't matter if the idea has only been implemented on laptops or desktops. Porting it to a mobile device doesn't make it novel.
Now if only the USA had a Loser Pays system like just about every other country in the world. Aside from the patent system, the American rule is what enables patent trolls.
While I agree with your point, your examples are hilarously irrelevant. Almost all of them are instances of English borrowing from French.
It's a consequence of roughly 80% of the English lexicon being of Romance origin, a large part of it through French (which brought also the words based on ancient Greek, lile politics and economy).
As a side note, in your last example, the Icelandic (TH)ú looks a lot like a cognate to the deprecated English "thee", but IANALinguist.
Better examples of English loanwords in French are "week-end", "parking" (for a parking lot), "design" (in its specific meaning of designing shapes), freezer and so on.
And the sad part is an organization like the FDA is actually all about transparency. Transparency is its core purpose, being it by enforcing accuracy on food ingredients lists, or by checking out what a drug actually does. It's all about information, and sharing it, and ensuring it's accurate.
So the only thing such an organization could possibly have to cover up is a regulatory capture. I can't think of anything else.
And for a long time, WP has got a bad reputation among people in the humanities fields. As a result, articles about these fields were seriously lacking, which further confirmed WP's bad reputation. The thing is, computer geeks have an edge about editing the stuff. Sure, MediaWiki's markup system isn't very complicated, but this is speaking from a computer geek's point of view. To many people, including smart people, experts in their respective fields, it can still be intimidating if they are not very computer literate.
And then there's the fact that many of them were shocked by the huge size of articles on matters like, say, Pokémon. It seemed wrong to them, because they thought about it in terms of a physical encyclopedia, in which the space taken by the Pokémon article would necessarily be to the detriment of more serious matters. It took them time to understand that server space is not nearly as scarce as pages in a dead tree book, and that there wasn't a real rivalry issue.
Just for fun: the most absurd criticism of Wikipedia I've ever read was from a French woman who complained in an interview that, reading the French article on Plato, she learned nothing from it. Thing is, she's a doctor in philosophy, and an expert in classic Greek philosophers. If anything, the fact that she didn't learn anything from the WP article was good news. I mean, if the article had contained a single piece of data that she didn't already know, it would most likely have been erroneous.
I don't know when the tide turned, but things are better nowadays, prejudices are fading away as the general population gets more computer-literate, including experts in fields far removed from computer sciences. In fact, it's not just Wikipedia, it's the whole Web, and even the whole Internet. I remember in the beginning of the 2000s, on forums, legal questions could be raised in a conversation, and unfortunately there was no lawyer around to give us factual answers. Nowadays many lawyers have their blogs. I learned a lot, and I really do mean a lot, about French legal system (and some bits about British, American, and various other legal systems – and the underlying principles of legal systems as well) thanks to Eolas, a professional advocate (roughly, an attorney in common law legalese), who holds a blog in which he explain legal matters, often based on news. Over time, he was joined by other lawyers as co-bloggers, some of them advocates (of various specialisations), some of them magistrates. And besides these regulars, he sometimes have guests in various legal professions, including cops. Basically, this blog is the French equivalent to Groklaw.
Unsurprisingly, at about the same time legal experts started blogging, a project started on French Wikipedia to improve articles on legal matters. Said bloggers, including Eolas, were instrumental in this move. What I mean is, as people go more web literate, the online availability of informations in various fields unrelated to traditional geekdom gets better and better, and it impacts Wikipedia like the rest of the Web.
The one thing I find frustrating about Wikipedia is that, as a computer tech, my main field of expertise is very well covered, so I have limited opportunities to contribute. So I just fix spelling and wikilinks, even parentheses, eliminate every exclamation point that isn't part of a quotation (the latter could easily be done by a robot, I don't understand why there isn't one already) and sometimes discuss about correcting the tone of articles. Basically, I'm a wikignome. I can't be much more.
If your online forum is not based on grammar and spelling, maybe that is why people are losing interest.
Not really. It's a fandom forum for stuff that doesn't have that much news anymore. It's been quite vivid for eight years. It's just a classic case of community fatigue.
I may have exaggerated a bit about our strictness. There are some members that do several spelling errors per sentence, but not in a way that makes their post illegible, so they get a pass. When there are too much errors, we give encouragements to care a little more. But when someone comes with a really shitty spelling, no punctuation, or obnoxious abbreviations, we first give warnings before proceeding with gradual punishment.
I'm part of the moderation team of an online forum for a (now dwindling) community. We've always been rather strict about spelling and grammar, but not to the point of requiring perfection. We're far more stern against the absence of punctuation, and walls of text are firmly discouraged.
Some people just have a limited grasp on spelling and we can live with a few mistakes now and then. Some obviously don't give a shit, and we don't take it kindly.
And then there are the cases of severe dysorthography. After debating the issue, we decided to let them in. That decision was met with mixed receptions. One of the oldest forum members threw a fit and left over that. An interesting thing is, over time, I've grown the ability to distinguish, at least in French, between dysorthography and not giving a shit (I guess the other moderators have too, I never asked them), by an intuitive process of which I never bothered to formalize the heuristics.
I also live in a country in which I can shout "I AM AN ATHEIST" on a public place without being ostracised - the worst I would get.is a "so what" look or a "why should I give a fuck" look. Or more likely a "Dude, just quit shouting already, it's annoying."
I live in a country in which the religious believes of candidates is considered a marginal matter when it comes down to elections.
I live in a country in which catholicism is the mainstream religion, and in which even conservative political figures, if they are practicing catholics, abstain from following the rites as a church follower when they are there in any official respect. Like, funerals of fallen soldiers. Devout christians tend to be even more infuriated with this than atheists.
Post like this makes me glad I live in a country in which the Christian fundies involved in this incident would have been arrested for breach of peace before their provocations triggered nasty reactions.
Then there was the case in Dearborn last weekend of "sudden Jihad syndrome" where a muslim tried to rundown 9 Christians protesting a muslim fair thing. He's been charged with attempted murder.
That incident had nothing to do with jihadism and everything to do with Christian fundies playing party poopers. I'm not saying his course of action was legitimate, but provocating and insulting rarely results in constructive outcomes.
Slashdot Mirror
Hubris, maybe? Or lack of perspective? Overly narrow thinking?
These can happen to many intelligent people. Which makes safeguards such as the ICO useful. Although, ideally, it should have been involved even before the implementation. There are rules enforcing it in countries with a similar institution.
You get me on this. I wasn't sure if the situation had been reverted, so I wasn't sure what tense to use in my initial statement.
Yet, still, the fact that it's now government owned doesn't change the fact that its initial privatization is (most likely) what turned British railway network to a wreck.
There was so much competition that nothing would have happened without the government.
O RLY?
And John Scalzi has an interesting piece about this.
Adam Smith basically said the same, by the way.
Yeah, I read about that. My point still stands, though: the privatization of the network brought it to crumble. The fact that the Government ended up taking charge again in order to clean the mess actually consolidates my stand.
Yeah, but in the UK case the network itself has been privatized. That was part of my point.
(As opposed to other government projects like the Amtrak Monopoly that should have been sold to Conrail or some other profitable rail company years ago.)
What's the point in turning a government monopoly into a corporate monopoly?
You're aware that there can't be two railway networks on a given territory, right?
Opening the trains to competition, okay, but the tracks are a natural monopoly, and should remain under control of the People, through an entity that is accountable to it. A corporate monopoly isn't accountable to the People.
I think the judge's intent, especially in refusing to separate the cases, is to wrestle both parties into playing nice, stopping their tantrums, and actually trying to reach a reasonable compromise.
In other words, emphasizing the "civil" in "civil court".
It's "discuss", not "cuss".
Unfortunately, I'm starting to think you're right, and my inability to get a job may be due in part to my reluctance to even slightly bend the facts.
Which is irrelevant for the novelty of the invention. A mobile device is just another kind of computer, using a different kind of connection. It doesn't matter if the idea has only been implemented on laptops or desktops. Porting it to a mobile device doesn't make it novel.
American civil procedures are what makes patent trolling a viable tactics, due to the American Rule.
In any European court, Uniloc would risk ending up paying Notch's attorney fees.
Now if only the USA had a Loser Pays system like just about every other country in the world. Aside from the patent system, the American rule is what enables patent trolls.
While I agree with your point, your examples are hilarously irrelevant. Almost all of them are instances of English borrowing from French.
It's a consequence of roughly 80% of the English lexicon being of Romance origin, a large part of it through French (which brought also the words based on ancient Greek, lile politics and economy).
As a side note, in your last example, the Icelandic (TH)ú looks a lot like a cognate to the deprecated English "thee", but IANALinguist.
Better examples of English loanwords in French are "week-end", "parking" (for a parking lot), "design" (in its specific meaning of designing shapes), freezer and so on.
And the sad part is an organization like the FDA is actually all about transparency. Transparency is its core purpose, being it by enforcing accuracy on food ingredients lists, or by checking out what a drug actually does. It's all about information, and sharing it, and ensuring it's accurate.
So the only thing such an organization could possibly have to cover up is a regulatory capture. I can't think of anything else.
Nope. His pen name comes from the Gaelic word for "knowledge", just like the company named Eolas, but it's the only connection.
And for a long time, WP has got a bad reputation among people in the humanities fields. As a result, articles about these fields were seriously lacking, which further confirmed WP's bad reputation. The thing is, computer geeks have an edge about editing the stuff. Sure, MediaWiki's markup system isn't very complicated, but this is speaking from a computer geek's point of view. To many people, including smart people, experts in their respective fields, it can still be intimidating if they are not very computer literate.
And then there's the fact that many of them were shocked by the huge size of articles on matters like, say, Pokémon. It seemed wrong to them, because they thought about it in terms of a physical encyclopedia, in which the space taken by the Pokémon article would necessarily be to the detriment of more serious matters. It took them time to understand that server space is not nearly as scarce as pages in a dead tree book, and that there wasn't a real rivalry issue.
Just for fun: the most absurd criticism of Wikipedia I've ever read was from a French woman who complained in an interview that, reading the French article on Plato, she learned nothing from it. Thing is, she's a doctor in philosophy, and an expert in classic Greek philosophers. If anything, the fact that she didn't learn anything from the WP article was good news. I mean, if the article had contained a single piece of data that she didn't already know, it would most likely have been erroneous.
I don't know when the tide turned, but things are better nowadays, prejudices are fading away as the general population gets more computer-literate, including experts in fields far removed from computer sciences. In fact, it's not just Wikipedia, it's the whole Web, and even the whole Internet. I remember in the beginning of the 2000s, on forums, legal questions could be raised in a conversation, and unfortunately there was no lawyer around to give us factual answers. Nowadays many lawyers have their blogs. I learned a lot, and I really do mean a lot, about French legal system (and some bits about British, American, and various other legal systems – and the underlying principles of legal systems as well) thanks to Eolas, a professional advocate (roughly, an attorney in common law legalese), who holds a blog in which he explain legal matters, often based on news. Over time, he was joined by other lawyers as co-bloggers, some of them advocates (of various specialisations), some of them magistrates. And besides these regulars, he sometimes have guests in various legal professions, including cops. Basically, this blog is the French equivalent to Groklaw.
Unsurprisingly, at about the same time legal experts started blogging, a project started on French Wikipedia to improve articles on legal matters. Said bloggers, including Eolas, were instrumental in this move. What I mean is, as people go more web literate, the online availability of informations in various fields unrelated to traditional geekdom gets better and better, and it impacts Wikipedia like the rest of the Web.
The one thing I find frustrating about Wikipedia is that, as a computer tech, my main field of expertise is very well covered, so I have limited opportunities to contribute. So I just fix spelling and wikilinks, even parentheses, eliminate every exclamation point that isn't part of a quotation (the latter could easily be done by a robot, I don't understand why there isn't one already) and sometimes discuss about correcting the tone of articles. Basically, I'm a wikignome. I can't be much more.
Duuuh, why bring Hugo Chavez in this discussion? Quite irrelevant.
Jon Stewart beat you to this a long time ago.
If your online forum is not based on grammar and spelling, maybe that is why people are losing interest.
Not really. It's a fandom forum for stuff that doesn't have that much news anymore. It's been quite vivid for eight years. It's just a classic case of community fatigue.
I may have exaggerated a bit about our strictness. There are some members that do several spelling errors per sentence, but not in a way that makes their post illegible, so they get a pass. When there are too much errors, we give encouragements to care a little more. But when someone comes with a really shitty spelling, no punctuation, or obnoxious abbreviations, we first give warnings before proceeding with gradual punishment.
I'm part of the moderation team of an online forum for a (now dwindling) community. We've always been rather strict about spelling and grammar, but not to the point of requiring perfection. We're far more stern against the absence of punctuation, and walls of text are firmly discouraged.
Some people just have a limited grasp on spelling and we can live with a few mistakes now and then. Some obviously don't give a shit, and we don't take it kindly.
And then there are the cases of severe dysorthography. After debating the issue, we decided to let them in. That decision was met with mixed receptions. One of the oldest forum members threw a fit and left over that. An interesting thing is, over time, I've grown the ability to distinguish, at least in French, between dysorthography and not giving a shit (I guess the other moderators have too, I never asked them), by an intuitive process of which I never bothered to formalize the heuristics.
I also live in a country in which I can shout "I AM AN ATHEIST" on a public place without being ostracised - the worst I would get.is a "so what" look or a "why should I give a fuck" look. Or more likely a "Dude, just quit shouting already, it's annoying."
I live in a country in which the religious believes of candidates is considered a marginal matter when it comes down to elections.
I live in a country in which catholicism is the mainstream religion, and in which even conservative political figures, if they are practicing catholics, abstain from following the rites as a church follower when they are there in any official respect. Like, funerals of fallen soldiers. Devout christians tend to be even more infuriated with this than atheists.
In which country are you more free?
Post like this makes me glad I live in a country in which the Christian fundies involved in this incident would have been arrested for breach of peace before their provocations triggered nasty reactions.
Then there was the case in Dearborn last weekend of "sudden Jihad syndrome" where a muslim tried to rundown 9 Christians protesting a muslim fair thing. He's been charged with attempted murder.
That incident had nothing to do with jihadism and everything to do with Christian fundies playing party poopers. I'm not saying his course of action was legitimate, but provocating and insulting rarely results in constructive outcomes.