Is there any order of precedence specified for when contradictions crop up in such documents? Most recent amendment trumps oldest etc or something like that? Or are all amendments considered equal with it left to the flip of a coin?
It just seems odd that while you can twist a work to mocks/comment on the original work( which is politically fairly worthless) you cannot twist a work to mock/comment on what it was used to promote(which is politically fairly worthwhile).
I was under the impression that for the most part political speech enjoyed a far higher level of protection than most and this seems to fall very clearly into that category.
Morale has been an issue in every major war. Even hardened soldiers can get a boost from the occasional bit of bullshit conversation with the girlfriend/wife, the folks or the kids.
If fighting a more technically advanced and well organised foe this would be more important.
it's a tradeoff, morale vs intelligence leaks and the morale factor can be worth it.
Also I image you could also be mislead just as easily.
An intelligence channel which you know the enemy has access to is orders of magnitude less valuable to them than a channel which you don't know they have access to since once you know about it you can feed false info when it's useful to you.
it's why quite a bit of effort went into convincing the germans that enigma hadn't been broken when it in fact had.
Also troops on the front line who's necks are on the block as it were will tend to pay more attention to the stuff about loose lips sinking ships etc.
Have you never created any piece of software for the hell of it? Work on it for a few days, weeks or perhaps even months and enjoy it but eventually I get sick of it.
Months later when I'm bored with it and it's not fun any more I'm not going to keep going for no reward. If someone wants to pay me to add features they want then great. If someone else wants to become an expert on my code and get paid to extend it then good for them.
If I pay for something I expect to get a guarantee that it will do what it's supposed to and if it fails then the person who has sold it to me should be liable.
If someone gives something to me for free they owe me nothing and there is no reason they should have to pay me if their product isn't good for what I used it for.
If on the other hand I pay for someone to service what I've got for free then I have every right to demand they put their money where their mouth is and guarantee that if they screw up and don't keep it in service that they cover my losses due to their failure.
I wasn't dismissing the importance of the actions of the individuals. I was dismissing the importance of the actions of the individuals in reference to the organisation as a whole.
It isn't the churches fault that some priests abuse kids. it is the churches fault that the church covered for those priests.
I'm also addicted to hanging out with my family, friends and other people: if I don't get to for a long time I start to expereince negative emotions like loneliness.
I'm addicted to spending time with my girlfriend, when we're apart for a long time I start to miss her terribly.
For some reason having a psychological need for human company is socially acceptable and not lumped in with addiction.
By comparison I feel no distress if I'm unable to hang out on message boards and forums like slashdot for an extended period of time. But then I don't feel like this is social interaction, I'm not friends with other slashdoters, it's more like reading an interactive newspaper.
I imagine if a large amount of my social interactions were through online services like myspace etc then my experience when cut off from the net would be far more like being cut off from my friends and girlfriend.
Ah I was focusing on the "Every person that owns or licenses personal information about a resident of the Commonwealth and electronically stores or transmits such information" bit.
The definition of "personal information" is fairly reasonable though.
a Massachusetts resident's first name and last name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements that relate to such resident: (a) Social Security number; (b) driver's license number or state-issued identification card number; or (c) financial account number, or credit or debit card number, with or without any required security code, access code, personal identification number or password, that would permit access to a resident's financial account; provided, however, that "Personal information" shall not include information that is lawfully obtained from publicly available information, or from federal, state or local government records lawfully made available to the general public.
Ya this seems like a massive headache for small buisnesses.
One example I can think of: I know a woman who sells cakes and has her own website.
People email orders to her. Not payment information, just name and delivery address+order.
But a name and address is personally identifiable. Does that mean she has to get some kind of encrypted mailserver of her own? How about if she replies to them? That's sending that name and address in the clear.(just like how it was sent to her of course)
And how about social network sites? There's plenty of personally identifiable information posted on there which by the very nature of the sites is fairly open but does that mean that myspace has to switch everything to HTTPs and store all that info on your public profile in an encrypted database???
This is well meaning and sounds nice but this sounds a lot like one of the ham-fisted attemps at regulation that clueless lawmakers are famous for.
And where does this "natural law" come from? Freshman philosophy class.
As George Carlin put it. "You have no rights"
You have as much right to kill yourself, convince someone else to kill themselves as you have to speak your mind or stab me in the face.
Only in philosophy classes do people even try to remain consistent. In the real world people don't attempt any such thing. Overwhelmingly they simply decide everything case by case based on how it makes them feel rather than based on any coherent framework of what you have a right to and what you do not.
Luckily the justice system tries to avoid basing all it's decisions on what people overwhelmingly reject or accept(mostly) and tries to be reasonably coherent about what what rights people have.
Hell if you decided if something was legal based purely on weather or not people overwhelmingly reject it then it would also be illegal to stand on a soapbox and argue for unpopular things like say the de-criminalization of rape.(just to pick something unpopular you could say, not to actually argue for this)
Unless he somehow coerced people into killing themselves this should come under freedom of speech.I can agree that what he did was utterly morally despicable but that doesn't mean it should be illegal to try to convince people to do things which they have every right to do and which are not in themselves a crime.
So everyone in the western world is guilty a billion times over for the countless utterly treatable/preventable deaths they ignore in the rest of the world?
And those are mostly people who actually want to live.
I've been trying to implement the methods described in comp-sci research papers this year as well and it's remarkable how many of them
1: Try to make what they're doing sound more complex than it really is by describing an algorithm with half a page of mathematical symbols where 3 lines of pseudocode would describe what they're doing far more clearly. 2: Don't include their actual code. 3: Don't include their data.
And from implementing a few and eventually falling back on emailing the authors I've come to the conclusion that
[1] is most common when what they're doing is actually fairly simple and they don't want to admit it.(bonus points if they spend half the paper describing in detail the steps taken by some standard library functions which we really don't need described since it only muddies the waters when trying to distinguish those steps from the important parts of their paper) [2] is most common when their methods actually have some significant shortcomings which are only evident when you have working code to test with. [3] is most common when the tests are the most vaguely described.
Do phd students think nobody see's through this???
The original objection was that if the data is hard to come by then it's unfair to academics who wouldn't get the credit after gathering the data.
Of course simply generating massive amounts of data isn't science but it is a very very very important part of science.
Is an academic who can write that well-written 10 page paper on the meaning of a crystal structure any less mentally capable because he didn't have the funds or facilities to gather the data he's looking at?
If you open up the data then someone will undoubtedly notice things that completely escape the handful who got the data in the first place.
The obvious solution is to give credit where credit is due and respect the ability of some people to perform good experiments.
If economic systems were run the way academics operate then you'd end up with something like this:
Nobody gets paid for raw lumber. Nobody gets paid for seasoned wood. Finished wooden items would be worth a fortune.
And as a result anyone who wanted to make things from wood would have to own an area of forestry, logging equipment, a saw mill, a kiln and finally any tools for the final step.
not really. Your problems with these possible situations are based on the deeply flawed system we have in place now.
Give academics the respect and credit they deserve for collecting vast quantities of high quality data rather than merely for the 2 page paper they write about some interesting statistical anomalies they found in said data and this ceases to be a problem.
The way papers are written, reviewed and published today and the way academics are given credit is based on a system hundreds of years old when it costly to print hundreds of pages of boring figures.
Now data is cheap beyond words. Publishing a few hundred words or a gigabyte is little different when your audience is fairly small and the way academics publish should reflect that but it's too hidebound and dogmatic to do that.
A professor who does nothing but produce a high quality and hard to acquire dataset deserves credit even if he comes to no conclusions at all.
The problem is with the system and with the way academics think. Not with this possible change.
plagiarism- the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
What the hell??? does the system in question just return a true/false value for if it believes something has been plagarized rather than detials of what it believes you've plagarized from???
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of work is useful to experiment on in microgravity?
I know there's some material science stuff but what else?
No need to be a dick.
He didn't attack you.
Is there any order of precedence specified for when contradictions crop up in such documents?
Most recent amendment trumps oldest etc or something like that?
Or are all amendments considered equal with it left to the flip of a coin?
It just seems odd that while you can twist a work to mocks/comment on the original work( which is politically fairly worthless) you cannot twist a work to mock/comment on what it was used to promote(which is politically fairly worthwhile).
I was under the impression that for the most part political speech enjoyed a far higher level of protection than most and this seems to fall very clearly into that category.
tedstriker: @elainedickinson: After I get back I'll meet you in the armoury. The code to get in is 66537, I'll bring the condoms.
Morale has been an issue in every major war.
Even hardened soldiers can get a boost from the occasional bit of bullshit conversation with the girlfriend/wife, the folks or the kids.
If fighting a more technically advanced and well organised foe this would be more important.
it's a tradeoff, morale vs intelligence leaks and the morale factor can be worth it.
Also I image you could also be mislead just as easily.
An intelligence channel which you know the enemy has access to is orders of magnitude less valuable to them than a channel which you don't know they have access to since once you know about it you can feed false info when it's useful to you.
it's why quite a bit of effort went into convincing the germans that enigma hadn't been broken when it in fact had.
Also troops on the front line who's necks are on the block as it were will tend to pay more attention to the stuff about loose lips sinking ships etc.
Have you never created any piece of software for the hell of it?
Work on it for a few days, weeks or perhaps even months and enjoy it but eventually I get sick of it.
Months later when I'm bored with it and it's not fun any more I'm not going to keep going for no reward.
If someone wants to pay me to add features they want then great.
If someone else wants to become an expert on my code and get paid to extend it then good for them.
If I pay for something I expect to get a guarantee that it will do what it's supposed to and if it fails then the person who has sold it to me should be liable.
If someone gives something to me for free they owe me nothing and there is no reason they should have to pay me if their product isn't good for what I used it for.
If on the other hand I pay for someone to service what I've got for free then I have every right to demand they put their money where their mouth is and guarantee that if they screw up and don't keep it in service that they cover my losses due to their failure.
that depends how you pay for your support: if you pay by the hour sure what you say may be true.
If you pay a flat rate for support then it's in their interest to get as few calls from you as possible.
So simple lesson: much as when hiring builders to work on your house, don't pay by the hour, pay for the work getting done.
source code- sheet music/lyrics.
I wasn't dismissing the importance of the actions of the individuals.
I was dismissing the importance of the actions of the individuals in reference to the organisation as a whole.
It isn't the churches fault that some priests abuse kids.
it is the churches fault that the church covered for those priests.
The problem isn't that priests are human and did fail.
The problem is that the hierarchy worked hard to cover for them.
If it had stopped at the priests in question then the church as a whole would be squeeky clean but it did not.
It is the organizations actions, not the actions of the individuals, which show it as rotten to the core.
There are plenty of good people in the church but far far too many of them did nothing and we all know what happens then.
Pff.
I'm also addicted to hanging out with my family, friends and other people: if I don't get to for a long time I start to expereince negative emotions like loneliness.
I'm addicted to spending time with my girlfriend, when we're apart for a long time I start to miss her terribly.
For some reason having a psychological need for human company is socially acceptable and not lumped in with addiction.
By comparison I feel no distress if I'm unable to hang out on message boards and forums like slashdot for an extended period of time.
But then I don't feel like this is social interaction, I'm not friends with other slashdoters, it's more like reading an interactive newspaper.
I imagine if a large amount of my social interactions were through online services like myspace etc then my experience when cut off from the net would be far more like being cut off from my friends and girlfriend.
TFA is a load of bullshit hyperbole.
Ah I was focusing on the
"Every person that owns or licenses personal information about a resident of the Commonwealth and electronically stores or transmits such information"
bit.
The definition of "personal information" is fairly reasonable though .
a Massachusetts resident's first name and last name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements that relate to such resident: (a) Social Security number; (b) driver's license number or state-issued identification card number; or (c) financial account number, or credit or debit card number, with or without any required security code, access code, personal identification number or password, that would permit access to a resident's financial account; provided, however, that "Personal information" shall not include information that is lawfully obtained from publicly available information, or from federal, state or local government records lawfully made available to the general public.
Ya this seems like a massive headache for small buisnesses.
One example I can think of: I know a woman who sells cakes and has her own website.
People email orders to her.
Not payment information, just name and delivery address+order.
But a name and address is personally identifiable. Does that mean she has to get some kind of encrypted mailserver of her own?
How about if she replies to them?
That's sending that name and address in the clear.(just like how it was sent to her of course)
And how about social network sites?
There's plenty of personally identifiable information posted on there which by the very nature of the sites is fairly open but does that mean that myspace has to switch everything to HTTPs and store all that info on your public profile in an encrypted database???
This is well meaning and sounds nice but this sounds a lot like one of the ham-fisted attemps at regulation that clueless lawmakers are famous for.
Dwarf fortress:
The geography/politics/history/characters and some of the creatures are all procedurally generated on the fly.
And that game regularly produces interesting worlds and stories of massive scale.
And where does this "natural law" come from? Freshman philosophy class.
As George Carlin put it.
"You have no rights"
You have as much right to kill yourself, convince someone else to kill themselves as you have to speak your mind or stab me in the face.
Only in philosophy classes do people even try to remain consistent.
In the real world people don't attempt any such thing.
Overwhelmingly they simply decide everything case by case based on how it makes them feel rather than based on any coherent framework of what you have a right to and what you do not.
Luckily the justice system tries to avoid basing all it's decisions on what people overwhelmingly reject or accept(mostly) and tries to be reasonably coherent about what what rights people have.
Hell if you decided if something was legal based purely on weather or not people overwhelmingly reject it then it would also be illegal to stand on a soapbox and argue for unpopular things like say the de-criminalization of rape.(just to pick something unpopular you could say, not to actually argue for this)
Unless he somehow coerced people into killing themselves this should come under freedom of speech.I can agree that what he did was utterly morally despicable but that doesn't mean it should be illegal to try to convince people to do things which they have every right to do and which are not in themselves a crime.
So everyone in the western world is guilty a billion times over for the countless utterly treatable/preventable deaths they ignore in the rest of the world?
And those are mostly people who actually want to live.
I've been trying to implement the methods described in comp-sci research papers this year as well and it's remarkable how many of them
1: Try to make what they're doing sound more complex than it really is by describing an algorithm with half a page of mathematical symbols where 3 lines of pseudocode would describe what they're doing far more clearly.
2: Don't include their actual code.
3: Don't include their data.
And from implementing a few and eventually falling back on emailing the authors I've come to the conclusion that
[1] is most common when what they're doing is actually fairly simple and they don't want to admit it.(bonus points if they spend half the paper describing in detail the steps taken by some standard library functions which we really don't need described since it only muddies the waters when trying to distinguish those steps from the important parts of their paper)
[2] is most common when their methods actually have some significant shortcomings which are only evident when you have working code to test with.
[3] is most common when the tests are the most vaguely described.
Do phd students think nobody see's through this???
The original objection was that if the data is hard to come by then it's unfair to academics who wouldn't get the credit after gathering the data.
Of course simply generating massive amounts of data isn't science but it is a very very very important part of science.
Is an academic who can write that well-written 10 page paper on the meaning of a crystal structure any less mentally capable because he didn't have the funds or facilities to gather the data he's looking at?
If you open up the data then someone will undoubtedly notice things that completely escape the handful who got the data in the first place.
The obvious solution is to give credit where credit is due and respect the ability of some people to perform good experiments.
If economic systems were run the way academics operate then you'd end up with something like this:
Nobody gets paid for raw lumber.
Nobody gets paid for seasoned wood.
Finished wooden items would be worth a fortune.
And as a result anyone who wanted to make things from wood would have to own an area of forestry, logging equipment, a saw mill, a kiln and finally any tools for the final step.
not really.
Your problems with these possible situations are based on the deeply flawed system we have in place now.
Give academics the respect and credit they deserve for collecting vast quantities of high quality data rather than merely for the 2 page paper they write about some interesting statistical anomalies they found in said data and this ceases to be a problem.
The way papers are written, reviewed and published today and the way academics are given credit is based on a system hundreds of years old when it costly to print hundreds of pages of boring figures.
Now data is cheap beyond words. Publishing a few hundred words or a gigabyte is little different when your audience is fairly small and the way academics publish should reflect that but it's too hidebound and dogmatic to do that.
A professor who does nothing but produce a high quality and hard to acquire dataset deserves credit even if he comes to no conclusions at all.
The problem is with the system and with the way academics think.
Not with this possible change.
Fix your system.
plagiarism- the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
No.
His argument that games are not art literally uses "If it's art then it isn't a game" as one of it's premises
"Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game"
He's just some random old fogie who hasn't got a clue what he's talking about and failed basic logic.
What the hell???
does the system in question just return a true/false value for if it believes something has been plagarized rather than detials of what it believes you've plagarized from???