Morse certainly didn't invent the first electrical telegraph; he just invented the most practical one.
This is, of course, true of a lot of classic inventions. The person who is given popular credit for inventing them isn't necessarily somebody who built the thing from scratch, or even the first person who made one that really worked. It's usually the person who made the final few tweaks that pushed an invention from being an interesting curiosity or a minor but useful device into something that had widespread applicability. In many cases there's something of a tipping point. Until a key technological hurdle is crossed, the device is so impractical that nobody is willing to invest a lot of time, effort, and money into improving it. But when it crosses some threshold of practicality, it starts attracting capital investment that causes it to improve and spread into more and more applications, which draws more investment, and so on.
A classic case is James Watt and the steam engine. Steam engines had been in use long before Watt came along, but they were fuel hogs that were limited to use at coal mines where there was plenty of fuel just sitting around. Watt figured out a way of radically improving their efficiency (by using an external condenser) and thus pushed them from being an isolated curiosity to being a major industrial workhorse.
So don't watch the movie then. My God, since when did we give up the right to choose for the right to insist?
But you can turn that argument around just as easily. It's Hollywood that's doing the insisting in this case; they're insisting that anyone who watches their movies watch them in exactly the form that they're released. Why shouldn't I have the right to choose which parts of the movie I watch and which parts I skip? This is particularly ridiculous because most movies on DVD give you the power to skip some parts in a much grainier fashion, just by hitting the skip ahead button to go to the next chapter. What's so wrong about somebody using a piece of software that automatically skips over parts that they find offensive?
But why should Hollywood care? It's not as though CleanFlicks or whoever are stealing their sales. All of these services require that you have a legitimate copy of the movie before you can do anything, so they've already made their money by the time the screening company has gotten involved.
The thing that seems to be driving this is the filmmakers, who see any attempt to edit their version of the movie as illegitimate tampering with their artistic vision. Unfortunately for them that's a BS argument; the doctrine of first sale says that once I've bought something I have the right to do with it as I please. If I buy their DVD, I'm free to watch it or throw it into the microwave, so long as I don't make an illegal copy of the contents. If I want to watch some parts of it and not others, that's my business, not theirs.
I disagree. The goal of a test is not just to rank students, it's to measure whether they've learned what they're supposed to have learned. There shouldn't be a problem with giving every student in the class an A, provided that they've all demonstrated a good enough grasp of the material. Of course it should also be OK to give every student an F if they've failed to learn anything. (A smart professor will adjust what he's teaching according to the quality of his students; if they're consistently getting everything he should consider expanding the course to cover more material.) Grades should go something like:
A) Student has completely mastered (i.e. displays thorough proficiency at) everything in the course.
B) Student understands all of the material in the course, but has not mastered it all.
C) Student understands the essential material for the course and has mastered some of it.
D) Student understands most of the essential material, but has mastered little of it.
F) Student has failed to understand even essential material.
With a grading system like that, you can look at the grade and grasp whether the student really gets what they were supposed to get. If you curve everything, a grade reflects as much about the rest of the class as it does about the student.
You are most likely wrong. Insurance companies aren't stupid, and they're not going to charge everyone the same rate any more than auto insurance companies charge everyone the same rate regardless of their driving record. They'll give better rates to companies that have good security practices and good track records than ones with bad practices and records. They may even refuse to offer insurance unless the companies follow specified practices; I'd guess that hiring certified administrators would be one required practice. This is similar to the way that insurance companies won't sell you auto insurance if you don't have a driver's license, or some homeowners insurance companies won't sell burglary insurance unless you have a home security system. I'd also expect that a well run insurance company would not offer 100% coverage. They'll probably only offer 80-90% coverage, so that companies still have a strong incentive to protect themselves.
FWIW, there was some discussin of these insurance policies on/. in the past. One article pointed out that insurance companies were charging more if a company used Windows than if it ran Linux or a Unix variant because of Windows's inferior security track record. If they're already smart enough to do that, you can bet that they'll be smart enough not to let companies slack off in their efforts to secure their computers after they've bought the insurance.
Wrong. As the software industry shows, it's quite possible for a company to make money selling originals even when there's a whole industry devoted to making illicit copies. So long as a reasonable percentage of people prefer to buy legitimate versions, the creator can continue to do fine. There just has to be some incentive for people to pay for legitimate versions of whatever- software, music, or movies- rather than illegitimate copies. In the software business that comes in the form of tech support and legal threats against businesses that use illegal copies. In the movie and music business it's likely to be in the form of guaranteed quality of the copy. People who use file sharing networks constantly complain about the large percentage of poor quality files. Legitimate providers could very easily make money by charging a decent amount for the promise that the technical quality of the recording will be high.
This depends on how strictly you want to take the description "selling GPLed software". People are willing to spend decent amounts of money on Linux distribution boxed sets despite the fact that the same disks can be downloaded from the net or purchased for much less from a third party. You can argue that what people are really paying for is the documentation and the update services those distributors offer. Maintaining a coherent distribution where all the software plays nicely together and is patched against the latest bugs and vulnerabilities is tough, and people are willing to pay to get such a thing. That's a close enough approximation of making money by selling GPLed software that it seems pedantic to argue otherwise.
This is a wonderful tool that is being developed. However, I don't think any one tool will succeed in eliminating spam. From a spammer's point of view, if my income depends on messages making it through filters, by damn I will bypass those filters by whatever means I can. These assholes send penis enlargement advertisements to my mother -- If her gender doesn't stop them, neither will an email filter.
I hear this argument and variations on it from time to time, but the more I consider it the more flawed it looks to me. There are really two kinds of filters to consider:
ISP-level filters applied at a network level by a third party.
Personal filters applied at an individual level by the target of the spam.
These two things are not at all equivalent to the spammer because of the psychology of spam. Fundamentally, email readers are likely to fall into two fairly tight categories: suckers who will listen to spam and non-suckers who won't. Anyone who applies his own personal email filter is likely to fall into the non-sucker category, so there's little point in designing a message specifically to bypass those personal filters. The target won't buy your product even if you do get it past his filter. That's not the case with ISP level filters, though, which protect suckers and non-suckers alike. Those are worth bypassing because they're stopping some email that would get to the suckers who would buy your product.
Now it may be the case that the same techniques that are useful for avoiding ISP-level filters will also help get mail past personal filters. That even seems likely, given that many people use ISP-type filters for their personal mail because the ISPs don't do it for them. But it seems to me that there's little percentage in specifically trying to avoid personal level filters that work on a different system from the ISP-level filters because the simple fact that somebody is bothering to use the filter implies that he won't buy from the spammer anyway.
Besides making products that support Linux on a whole, how are they supporting the market share of the linux community?
One thing that they're doing is helping developers to improve the Linux kernel to improve its performance for tasks that their customers consider important. They've contributed their journaling file system, and they're currently working on improvements to Linux scalability to make it possible to run Linux efficiently on SMP and NUMA systems with very large numbers of processors. They're also working on the applications software side; ISTR that they've been a contributor to Apache development.
And, of course, that's just IBM. Other major hardware vendors have contributed to other Free Software projects that they see as strategically useful. Sun, for instance, is a major supporter of GNOME because they see it as a viable replacement for their crusty and outdated CDE desktop. Intel has contributed to GCC and (IIRC) the Linux kernel, specifically to help give them better support for the IA64 architecture. NeXT and now Apple have contributed to GCC; Objective C was built on top of GCC back when it was just the Gnu C Compiler. Those are just some examples, mind you. I'm sure that there are plenty of other hardware makers who have contributed to Free Software because it makes plenty of business sense for them to do so.
I'm not sure if you've read them, but you might try reading something really old instead. Pick up some Jules Verne or Edgar Allen Poe, or some old classics like Frankenstein or Dracula, both of which have been very badly treated by the movies. You could even go back to some much older stuff like Gulliver's Travels, Beowulf (supposedly there's going to be a newly discovered translation by Tolkein published soon), The Illiad, The Epic of Gilgamesh, or the like. Many of the ideas being used by modern writers were first expressed in those classics, and they're very worth a read.
And The Big U, which is even earlier than Zodiac and, IMO, even funnier and more interesting. Both Zodiac and The Big U also seem to be from before Stephenson developed his every so annoying tendency to end his novels without wrapping up loose ends decently.
I think they said the reason for that policy was to prevent journalists from testing software and coming to bad conclusions because they weren't familiar with the subject material.
Which is patently silly. One of the things that I'm most interested in when reading a review is whether the features listed by the manufacturer are actually easy enough to use that I could have a hope of doing what I want to with the software. If the reviewer can't figure out how to use them with the documentation provided, that's a very interesting thing for me to know. Preventing reviewers from revealing that kind of information is just plain wrong.
Don't assume that Sony is a monolith. It's entirely possible that the division of Sony that makes the PS/2 understands the value of fan contributions but that they don't talk to the division that makes the Aibo enough to pass on the idea. Remember that Sony's music division is vigorously attacking mp3 traders as pirates while their computer division is selling some of the very computers and mp3 players that those traders are using. If they can have two divisions that are that badly at odds, it's not surprising that different divisions would have different degrees of clue about other issues, too.
Sure, they were within there legal rights to force the removal of NBC copyrighted material, mostly pictures and logos, but the bad will they generated far out weighed the value of the material defended.
This is not quite correct because you're getting different areas of Intellectual Property law confused. (IMO this shows how right RMS is when he says that thinking about Intellectual Property as a monolithic subject is a bad idea.) The logos are not NBC's property under copyright, they're NBC's property under trademark. A trademark does have to be protected; if the holder lets others use the trademark willy-nilly, it can pass into the public domain. That means that they're forced to go after people who use their logos or risk the loss of those trademarks.
Of course that doesn't mean that the lawyers have to go after the trademark violators full guns to start with. The lawyers could very easily have written Cease and Desist letters that were polite and appologetic while still being firm about removing the offending material. It's quite possible to make your point without being an asshole about it.
Unless the spammer makes an HTML e-mail and puts the entire ad spiel in a PNG image.
Which will be caught by the spam filter because everyone I correspond with regularly sends mail in plain text. HTML tags are a big notice to my spam filter that something is spam. Of course that isn't true of everyone- which just goes to show why trying to bypass Bayesian filters by coming up with a hypothetical "normal" email is unlikely to work.
You can't discuss your mortgage with your banker without mentioning mortgages in some way.
And this is, I'll admit, a place where the Bayesian filter is imperfect. I'd guess that there are enough other features of my Banker's email that a good Bayesian filter could probably tell the difference between him talking to me about mortgages and a random mortgage spam, but I'm not certain. I think that a reasonable whitelist would probably help in cases like that and the other case of my (hypothetical) daughter wanting to know about Nigeria. I certainly don't mean to suggest that Bayesian filters are perfect, just that they're not quite so easy to fool as some people seem to think.
In any case, the success of Bayesian Filtering is because it is rare: Do you think that spammers couldn't dedicate some time and create a "norm" email if these filters were widespread?
But how could they? A "norm" email might help a bit, but it can only do so much. That's because a Bayesian filter works on an individual basis, rather than a collective basis. So for them to get their mail past my filter it's not enough for them to make a mail that looks like an ordinary mail. It has to look like my ordinary mail, which is going to be a trick since they don't know what my mail looks like.
To add to the problem, you can't really make an effective commercial email without mentioning your product and where to get it. You can't sell me a mortgage without mentioning mortgages in some way. You can't ask me to help get your mail out of Nigeria without mentioning Nigeria. You can't sell me penis enlargment without mentioning penises in some way. Since none of those things is a regular part of my email conversations, anything mentioning them will be caught by my Bayesian spam filter.
Additionally, a good Bayesian spam filter can look at the headers as well as the contents of the mail it's filtering. Try as you might, you just can't hide the email address of the open relay you're taking advantage of, or the servers between it and my computer, so my filter will notice those things, too.
Open Source is good for the consultant, good for the book author of "professional" books, good for hardware manufacturers, etc. But licenses like the GPL are not good for the developers who actually write the code.
That's interesting, because it seems to contradict the behavior of the people writing the code. There was, after all, and initial developer who decided to license the code under the GPL. He obviously thought that the GPL was good for him and what he was doing, or he would have chosen a different license. Then there were the other developers who contributed to the project, who obviously decided that the GPL was good, or they wouldn't have spent their time on it. If the GPL is really so terrible, then why are people writing GPLed code?
Try reading what he said. He didn't say that he had forbidden his daughter from reading the books, just that he had declined to give them to her. Just as the daugher has a right to choose which books she wants to read, the father has a right (and obligation, IMO) to exercise his judgment about which books he wants to give her. My niece is about that age, and I support her right to read Mein Kampf if that's what she really wants to do. But when it came time to buy her a Christmas present, I decided that I had better things to spend my money on and bought her Cardcaptor Sakura instead.
The rule is "recursive" or "transitive", but not "viral".
I think that "hereditary" is probably closer to what you mean. If your code is descended from GPLed code, it too must be GPLed. That is, IMO, much closer to the actual situation. Of course that doesn't sound as bad, so if you're Microsoft (or a BSD license woofer, for that matter) you'll use viral to make it sound unpleasant.
Re:That's because Linux admins are self-taught
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Linux Is Cheaper
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The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
That's not the standard explanation that most Unix experts will usually give you. They'll say that the primary advantage of Unix (and by extension Linux) is that it was really designed to be administered by a full time admin from the ground up. So Unix and Linux have extensive built in facilities for remote administration, scripting everything, etc. OTOH, Windows was really designed to be administered by the user using desktop, GUI tools. All of its remote administration, scripting, etc. tools were grafted on late in its lifespan, so they lack the maturity and utility of their Unix equivalents.
This will ensure that no one gets unsolicited email. Ever.
That's great, but what about people who want to receive some categories of unsolicited email? If you only listen to people on your whitelist, how will you find out about that classmate who you lost track of and is now sending you an email because he finally found your address? How will my boss handle the emails that she gets from prospective clients asking about the services that we provide? How will my previous boss receive questions about the scientific articles he's published?
The plain fact is that there are lots of kinds of unsolicited mail that people really do want to receive. They just want to be able to receive them without getting a ton of ads at the same time. The real answer is to figure out a way of smacking the people who are spamming the world with ads, not to cut off the legitimate unsolicited mail.
This is why we are unable to apply any cognitive function to what we smell.
Not really true. It's quite possible to apply cognative power to what you smell. I don't think that people think as much about their sense of smell as they do about some other senses, but you can think about it with practice. A good example of this is in cooking; a lot of what we think of as our sense of taste is actually part of our sense of smell. So when you taste something and think "this would be better with a bit more sage in it" you're thinking analytically with your sense of smell.
I wouldn't be surprised if dogs have abilities we don't like being able to recall a smell like we could recall sounds or images.
I can do that. Again, I think that it's just something that takes practice and attention. I get that practice partly because I'm interested in smell and partly because it comes in handy in my job; I'm a chemist. I can't remember smells as well as I can remember sights, but I can remember them.
If you want to learn to recognize smells, you have to put as much effort into smelling them as you do into listening to music. Don't just notice a smell and then ignore it. Stop, close your eyes, and focus on the smell for a while. I find that it's frequently helpful to open my mouth a little bit and inhale through both my mouth and nose. Try to come up with words to describe it. This is hard because, as you point out, we lack good words for describing smells, but putting things into words helps you to remember them. I find myself describing smells in terms of how they're the same or different from other smells. If you start doing that regularly any time you smell something interesting, you'll be very surprised at how much more accute your sense of smell becomes.
This is a serious problem in a lot of disciplines, though I've heard of a rather elegant solution to the problem that's now become common (if informal) practice. The solution is that when a student thinks that he's done enough to justify getting a PhD, he starts applying for jobs that require a PhD. When somebody is willing to offer him one, that's proof that an outsider views his accomplishments as being worth a degree and his advisor has to let him write up his dissertation. It serves as a very effective independant outside check on the system.
I can't speak for others, but I always read the papers I cite in mine. That's because I try to limit myself to citing papers that are actually relevant to what I'm talking about and have exerted some kind of influence on the contents of my paper. Now it's becoming clear to me why my papers always seem to have so many fewer references than the other papers I read.
J. Before anyone jumps to a conclusion and complains about US-centricity, I am not based in the US. Many web servers are.
This is easy to see, because you seem to misunderstand the issues with US vs. Australian laws on defamation in this case. Contrary to your complaints about overly broad interpretation of the First Ammendment, it's well accepted that there is no First Ammendment right to defame. The issue in this case is that the Australian law on defamation is much broader than the American one. In the United States, truth is an absolute defense against defamation, so Dow Jones would be safe so long as all of their allegations were accurate. In Australia, OTOH, truth is not an absolute defense; if the statements are made with intent to harm they can be defamation even if they're true. This seems very odd to my (American) eyes, because it seems to me that if the truth is harmful to somebody that's their own damn fault. Nobody should be punished for pointing out an unpleasant truth about somebody else, no matter how much their pointing it out is motivated by spite.
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This is, of course, true of a lot of classic inventions. The person who is given popular credit for inventing them isn't necessarily somebody who built the thing from scratch, or even the first person who made one that really worked. It's usually the person who made the final few tweaks that pushed an invention from being an interesting curiosity or a minor but useful device into something that had widespread applicability. In many cases there's something of a tipping point. Until a key technological hurdle is crossed, the device is so impractical that nobody is willing to invest a lot of time, effort, and money into improving it. But when it crosses some threshold of practicality, it starts attracting capital investment that causes it to improve and spread into more and more applications, which draws more investment, and so on.
A classic case is James Watt and the steam engine. Steam engines had been in use long before Watt came along, but they were fuel hogs that were limited to use at coal mines where there was plenty of fuel just sitting around. Watt figured out a way of radically improving their efficiency (by using an external condenser) and thus pushed them from being an isolated curiosity to being a major industrial workhorse.
But you can turn that argument around just as easily. It's Hollywood that's doing the insisting in this case; they're insisting that anyone who watches their movies watch them in exactly the form that they're released. Why shouldn't I have the right to choose which parts of the movie I watch and which parts I skip? This is particularly ridiculous because most movies on DVD give you the power to skip some parts in a much grainier fashion, just by hitting the skip ahead button to go to the next chapter. What's so wrong about somebody using a piece of software that automatically skips over parts that they find offensive?
But why should Hollywood care? It's not as though CleanFlicks or whoever are stealing their sales. All of these services require that you have a legitimate copy of the movie before you can do anything, so they've already made their money by the time the screening company has gotten involved.
The thing that seems to be driving this is the filmmakers, who see any attempt to edit their version of the movie as illegitimate tampering with their artistic vision. Unfortunately for them that's a BS argument; the doctrine of first sale says that once I've bought something I have the right to do with it as I please. If I buy their DVD, I'm free to watch it or throw it into the microwave, so long as I don't make an illegal copy of the contents. If I want to watch some parts of it and not others, that's my business, not theirs.
I disagree. The goal of a test is not just to rank students, it's to measure whether they've learned what they're supposed to have learned. There shouldn't be a problem with giving every student in the class an A, provided that they've all demonstrated a good enough grasp of the material. Of course it should also be OK to give every student an F if they've failed to learn anything. (A smart professor will adjust what he's teaching according to the quality of his students; if they're consistently getting everything he should consider expanding the course to cover more material.) Grades should go something like:
A) Student has completely mastered (i.e. displays thorough proficiency at) everything in the course.
B) Student understands all of the material in the course, but has not mastered it all.
C) Student understands the essential material for the course and has mastered some of it.
D) Student understands most of the essential material, but has mastered little of it.
F) Student has failed to understand even essential material.
With a grading system like that, you can look at the grade and grasp whether the student really gets what they were supposed to get. If you curve everything, a grade reflects as much about the rest of the class as it does about the student.
You are most likely wrong. Insurance companies aren't stupid, and they're not going to charge everyone the same rate any more than auto insurance companies charge everyone the same rate regardless of their driving record. They'll give better rates to companies that have good security practices and good track records than ones with bad practices and records. They may even refuse to offer insurance unless the companies follow specified practices; I'd guess that hiring certified administrators would be one required practice. This is similar to the way that insurance companies won't sell you auto insurance if you don't have a driver's license, or some homeowners insurance companies won't sell burglary insurance unless you have a home security system. I'd also expect that a well run insurance company would not offer 100% coverage. They'll probably only offer 80-90% coverage, so that companies still have a strong incentive to protect themselves.
FWIW, there was some discussin of these insurance policies on /. in the past. One article pointed out that insurance companies were charging more if a company used Windows than if it ran Linux or a Unix variant because of Windows's inferior security track record. If they're already smart enough to do that, you can bet that they'll be smart enough not to let companies slack off in their efforts to secure their computers after they've bought the insurance.
Wrong. As the software industry shows, it's quite possible for a company to make money selling originals even when there's a whole industry devoted to making illicit copies. So long as a reasonable percentage of people prefer to buy legitimate versions, the creator can continue to do fine. There just has to be some incentive for people to pay for legitimate versions of whatever- software, music, or movies- rather than illegitimate copies. In the software business that comes in the form of tech support and legal threats against businesses that use illegal copies. In the movie and music business it's likely to be in the form of guaranteed quality of the copy. People who use file sharing networks constantly complain about the large percentage of poor quality files. Legitimate providers could very easily make money by charging a decent amount for the promise that the technical quality of the recording will be high.
This depends on how strictly you want to take the description "selling GPLed software". People are willing to spend decent amounts of money on Linux distribution boxed sets despite the fact that the same disks can be downloaded from the net or purchased for much less from a third party. You can argue that what people are really paying for is the documentation and the update services those distributors offer. Maintaining a coherent distribution where all the software plays nicely together and is patched against the latest bugs and vulnerabilities is tough, and people are willing to pay to get such a thing. That's a close enough approximation of making money by selling GPLed software that it seems pedantic to argue otherwise.
I hear this argument and variations on it from time to time, but the more I consider it the more flawed it looks to me. There are really two kinds of filters to consider:
These two things are not at all equivalent to the spammer because of the psychology of spam. Fundamentally, email readers are likely to fall into two fairly tight categories: suckers who will listen to spam and non-suckers who won't. Anyone who applies his own personal email filter is likely to fall into the non-sucker category, so there's little point in designing a message specifically to bypass those personal filters. The target won't buy your product even if you do get it past his filter. That's not the case with ISP level filters, though, which protect suckers and non-suckers alike. Those are worth bypassing because they're stopping some email that would get to the suckers who would buy your product.
Now it may be the case that the same techniques that are useful for avoiding ISP-level filters will also help get mail past personal filters. That even seems likely, given that many people use ISP-type filters for their personal mail because the ISPs don't do it for them. But it seems to me that there's little percentage in specifically trying to avoid personal level filters that work on a different system from the ISP-level filters because the simple fact that somebody is bothering to use the filter implies that he won't buy from the spammer anyway.
One thing that they're doing is helping developers to improve the Linux kernel to improve its performance for tasks that their customers consider important. They've contributed their journaling file system, and they're currently working on improvements to Linux scalability to make it possible to run Linux efficiently on SMP and NUMA systems with very large numbers of processors. They're also working on the applications software side; ISTR that they've been a contributor to Apache development.
And, of course, that's just IBM. Other major hardware vendors have contributed to other Free Software projects that they see as strategically useful. Sun, for instance, is a major supporter of GNOME because they see it as a viable replacement for their crusty and outdated CDE desktop. Intel has contributed to GCC and (IIRC) the Linux kernel, specifically to help give them better support for the IA64 architecture. NeXT and now Apple have contributed to GCC; Objective C was built on top of GCC back when it was just the Gnu C Compiler. Those are just some examples, mind you. I'm sure that there are plenty of other hardware makers who have contributed to Free Software because it makes plenty of business sense for them to do so.
I'm not sure if you've read them, but you might try reading something really old instead. Pick up some Jules Verne or Edgar Allen Poe, or some old classics like Frankenstein or Dracula, both of which have been very badly treated by the movies. You could even go back to some much older stuff like Gulliver's Travels, Beowulf (supposedly there's going to be a newly discovered translation by Tolkein published soon), The Illiad, The Epic of Gilgamesh, or the like. Many of the ideas being used by modern writers were first expressed in those classics, and they're very worth a read.
And The Big U, which is even earlier than Zodiac and, IMO, even funnier and more interesting. Both Zodiac and The Big U also seem to be from before Stephenson developed his every so annoying tendency to end his novels without wrapping up loose ends decently.
Which is patently silly. One of the things that I'm most interested in when reading a review is whether the features listed by the manufacturer are actually easy enough to use that I could have a hope of doing what I want to with the software. If the reviewer can't figure out how to use them with the documentation provided, that's a very interesting thing for me to know. Preventing reviewers from revealing that kind of information is just plain wrong.
Don't assume that Sony is a monolith. It's entirely possible that the division of Sony that makes the PS/2 understands the value of fan contributions but that they don't talk to the division that makes the Aibo enough to pass on the idea. Remember that Sony's music division is vigorously attacking mp3 traders as pirates while their computer division is selling some of the very computers and mp3 players that those traders are using. If they can have two divisions that are that badly at odds, it's not surprising that different divisions would have different degrees of clue about other issues, too.
This is not quite correct because you're getting different areas of Intellectual Property law confused. (IMO this shows how right RMS is when he says that thinking about Intellectual Property as a monolithic subject is a bad idea.) The logos are not NBC's property under copyright, they're NBC's property under trademark. A trademark does have to be protected; if the holder lets others use the trademark willy-nilly, it can pass into the public domain. That means that they're forced to go after people who use their logos or risk the loss of those trademarks.
Of course that doesn't mean that the lawyers have to go after the trademark violators full guns to start with. The lawyers could very easily have written Cease and Desist letters that were polite and appologetic while still being firm about removing the offending material. It's quite possible to make your point without being an asshole about it.
Which will be caught by the spam filter because everyone I correspond with regularly sends mail in plain text. HTML tags are a big notice to my spam filter that something is spam. Of course that isn't true of everyone- which just goes to show why trying to bypass Bayesian filters by coming up with a hypothetical "normal" email is unlikely to work.
And this is, I'll admit, a place where the Bayesian filter is imperfect. I'd guess that there are enough other features of my Banker's email that a good Bayesian filter could probably tell the difference between him talking to me about mortgages and a random mortgage spam, but I'm not certain. I think that a reasonable whitelist would probably help in cases like that and the other case of my (hypothetical) daughter wanting to know about Nigeria. I certainly don't mean to suggest that Bayesian filters are perfect, just that they're not quite so easy to fool as some people seem to think.
But how could they? A "norm" email might help a bit, but it can only do so much. That's because a Bayesian filter works on an individual basis, rather than a collective basis. So for them to get their mail past my filter it's not enough for them to make a mail that looks like an ordinary mail. It has to look like my ordinary mail, which is going to be a trick since they don't know what my mail looks like.
To add to the problem, you can't really make an effective commercial email without mentioning your product and where to get it. You can't sell me a mortgage without mentioning mortgages in some way. You can't ask me to help get your mail out of Nigeria without mentioning Nigeria. You can't sell me penis enlargment without mentioning penises in some way. Since none of those things is a regular part of my email conversations, anything mentioning them will be caught by my Bayesian spam filter.
Additionally, a good Bayesian spam filter can look at the headers as well as the contents of the mail it's filtering. Try as you might, you just can't hide the email address of the open relay you're taking advantage of, or the servers between it and my computer, so my filter will notice those things, too.
That's interesting, because it seems to contradict the behavior of the people writing the code. There was, after all, and initial developer who decided to license the code under the GPL. He obviously thought that the GPL was good for him and what he was doing, or he would have chosen a different license. Then there were the other developers who contributed to the project, who obviously decided that the GPL was good, or they wouldn't have spent their time on it. If the GPL is really so terrible, then why are people writing GPLed code?
Try reading what he said. He didn't say that he had forbidden his daughter from reading the books, just that he had declined to give them to her. Just as the daugher has a right to choose which books she wants to read, the father has a right (and obligation, IMO) to exercise his judgment about which books he wants to give her. My niece is about that age, and I support her right to read Mein Kampf if that's what she really wants to do. But when it came time to buy her a Christmas present, I decided that I had better things to spend my money on and bought her Cardcaptor Sakura instead.
I think that "hereditary" is probably closer to what you mean. If your code is descended from GPLed code, it too must be GPLed. That is, IMO, much closer to the actual situation. Of course that doesn't sound as bad, so if you're Microsoft (or a BSD license woofer, for that matter) you'll use viral to make it sound unpleasant.
That's not the standard explanation that most Unix experts will usually give you. They'll say that the primary advantage of Unix (and by extension Linux) is that it was really designed to be administered by a full time admin from the ground up. So Unix and Linux have extensive built in facilities for remote administration, scripting everything, etc. OTOH, Windows was really designed to be administered by the user using desktop, GUI tools. All of its remote administration, scripting, etc. tools were grafted on late in its lifespan, so they lack the maturity and utility of their Unix equivalents.
That's great, but what about people who want to receive some categories of unsolicited email? If you only listen to people on your whitelist, how will you find out about that classmate who you lost track of and is now sending you an email because he finally found your address? How will my boss handle the emails that she gets from prospective clients asking about the services that we provide? How will my previous boss receive questions about the scientific articles he's published?
The plain fact is that there are lots of kinds of unsolicited mail that people really do want to receive. They just want to be able to receive them without getting a ton of ads at the same time. The real answer is to figure out a way of smacking the people who are spamming the world with ads, not to cut off the legitimate unsolicited mail.
I can do that. Again, I think that it's just something that takes practice and attention. I get that practice partly because I'm interested in smell and partly because it comes in handy in my job; I'm a chemist. I can't remember smells as well as I can remember sights, but I can remember them.
If you want to learn to recognize smells, you have to put as much effort into smelling them as you do into listening to music. Don't just notice a smell and then ignore it. Stop, close your eyes, and focus on the smell for a while. I find that it's frequently helpful to open my mouth a little bit and inhale through both my mouth and nose. Try to come up with words to describe it. This is hard because, as you point out, we lack good words for describing smells, but putting things into words helps you to remember them. I find myself describing smells in terms of how they're the same or different from other smells. If you start doing that regularly any time you smell something interesting, you'll be very surprised at how much more accute your sense of smell becomes.
This is a serious problem in a lot of disciplines, though I've heard of a rather elegant solution to the problem that's now become common (if informal) practice. The solution is that when a student thinks that he's done enough to justify getting a PhD, he starts applying for jobs that require a PhD. When somebody is willing to offer him one, that's proof that an outsider views his accomplishments as being worth a degree and his advisor has to let him write up his dissertation. It serves as a very effective independant outside check on the system.
I can't speak for others, but I always read the papers I cite in mine. That's because I try to limit myself to citing papers that are actually relevant to what I'm talking about and have exerted some kind of influence on the contents of my paper. Now it's becoming clear to me why my papers always seem to have so many fewer references than the other papers I read.
This is easy to see, because you seem to misunderstand the issues with US vs. Australian laws on defamation in this case. Contrary to your complaints about overly broad interpretation of the First Ammendment, it's well accepted that there is no First Ammendment right to defame. The issue in this case is that the Australian law on defamation is much broader than the American one. In the United States, truth is an absolute defense against defamation, so Dow Jones would be safe so long as all of their allegations were accurate. In Australia, OTOH, truth is not an absolute defense; if the statements are made with intent to harm they can be defamation even if they're true. This seems very odd to my (American) eyes, because it seems to me that if the truth is harmful to somebody that's their own damn fault. Nobody should be punished for pointing out an unpleasant truth about somebody else, no matter how much their pointing it out is motivated by spite.