At the very least, the Microsoft ads will grate on the anti-MS zealots every time they load Slashdot. If I were an MS advertising exec (I'm not) that would make me smile.
Anti-MS zealots won't be using Internet Explorer and so, in most cases, won't even see the ads.
Are there any other browsers left which don't make blocking ads simple? It is certainly very unusual for me to see ads on the net (browsing with Firefox+adblocker) and I certainly never see them on sites I visit repeatedly!
It's way too late to warn these people about the files. Their current identity is toast. So is their credit for the next seven or so years.
Nevertheless, e-mailing the files back to them might help them to learn.
Bank and card numbers can be changed before they do any damage if done soon enough. As for the transactions, their best bet would probably be to but up lots of falsified files to reduce the signal to noise for anyone trying to read them.
I think you have to go on the evidence you have at the time; if Dr Kelly says something in a Select Committee you are happy to dismiss it because his bosses were there to influence him. Kelly was a brave man so why didn't he back up the statements made to Gilligan to the Committee? Maybe he was screwed by Gilligan and his "dodgy PDA". Maybe Gilligan screwed Kelly and then got the BBC to back him up. Maybe Gilligan was at fault and the BBC failed to keep an eye on him and respond when first criticised.
In a court of law, the right of an individual not to testify against themselves is well established. Dr. Kelly did not, however, have the ability to refuse to testify to the select committee. You say that he was a brave man - he may have been, I don't know. Regardless, the way in which civil servants are treated by the government should not depend on whether or not they are brave.
Same for Iraq - you have to go on the evidence you have. If the Iraqis had made it clear that they had WMDs then, at some point, they will also be believed. I, for one, didn't want to wait for Saddam to use his chemical weapons again, and he has used them before don't forget.
I am well aware that Saddam Hussein had previously used chemical weapons. Hardly a word was muttered in complaint by the NATO leaders who had sold him the weapons. The best available intelligence at the time of the invasion was that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. The US and UK had made their "best intelligence" available to the UN weapons inspectors and they still found nothing. There was no reason to believe that Iraq had WMDs except for those who wanted to believe it in order to justify an invasion that they had long desired.
I'm not sure what evidence you use to say that the Today programme presenters are "skilled interviewers"
My ears.
And when do they spend half an hour with an interviewee?
When the interviewee is a prominent (ex-) government figure with something important to say about a hot topic and there is no other pressing news. Recent examples include an interview with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a former prime minister.
You couldn't look to any of the media for any objective evidence on this matter - the pro-BBC press backed the BBC and the anti-BBC press sniped away at them (i.e. the Times etc.) - so you have to look at the evidence gathered in the Hutton report.
You certainly can look to the media for objective evidence, but it is necessary to learn how to differentiate fact from opinion and how to draw your own conclusions from the available evidence. But as I have mentioned repeatedly, I have read the Hutton report.
Other things...
PR is not my favourite electoral system - but this is probably not the area to talk about it (I know, I started the whole conversation - sorry). I'll only a couple of things to indicate my POV: I would never look engineering for guide on how to run my society; I don't want agility in politics (or we would have hanging back by now); maybe Germany needed PR "imposed" but the UK does not - kind of suggests that we are doing OK. Nes pas?;)
N'est pas. If Germany had won WWII would you argue that a dictatorship was the preferred form of government? Anyway, our political system was suspended during the war; the prime minister was changed, there were no elections and a government of national unity was installed. You really can't argue that the allies won because of our first-past-the-post electoral system. I also would fight against any re-introduction to bring back hanging, but what does that have to do with the electoral system - I certainly don't think PR would make it any more likely than the current system.
Why don't we intervene in other countries? We do - just not with a war. The UK is involved in Sudan, needs to stay out of Zimbabwe because the UK only winds-up the president there, etc. War is only the l
I recall that he claimed to doubt that [Dr. Kelly] himself was the source for Gilligan's main claim.
This was when he was being interviewed by the Commons Select Committee. Listening to every word of this public interview, of course, were his boss and director of HR who had just warned him that any further revelations would lead to disciplinary action - I think it is understandable that he may have had some doubts.
he was in fact only thrown to a Commons Committee
He was only interviewed (in public) by the Select Committee because the government had already revealed his name to the press. If you recall the events following Andrew Gilligan's broadcasts, the government went into over-drive to investigate the source of the claims. Dr. John Reid, the health secretary appeared on the Today programme talking about "rogue elements" in the security forces and all sorts of internal inquiries were taking place at the MoD. In light of this, Dr. Kelly (who had spoken under condition of anonymity to Gilligan) quite rightly realised that the investigation would at some point focus on him and so told his boss that he had spoken to Gilligan but didn't believe he was the source - quite understandable really. However, Alastair Campbell was so determined to get back at the BBC that when he heard of what Dr. Kelly had said, he saw it only as an opportunity to "fuck the BBC".
Blair and Campbell were thrown to the media on this issue
Blair and Campbell were trying to manipulate the media as they always have done. It works on TV when there is only a limited amount of time to speak and everything has to be done in a very gentlemanly manner, but on the radio where an interviewer can spend half an hour insisting that the politician answer a question, that kind of manipulation doesn't work so well. They were suffering at the hands of skilled interviewers because they didn't have a good case.
Dr Kelly probably would have done better to stick around and accept the undoubted adoration he would have received.
Adoration is probably less important to most people on the verge of retirement than the question of whether or not they will get their pension.
I don't think Blair was there all along pulling the trigger
I do. Blair and Cambell's fingers were quite clearly on the trigger.
I'm not sure, but I think that following a story in the very media that was 'on trial' is not the most objective way to examine this situation. Neither is having the utmost respect for an organisation without drawing a distinction between the organisation itself and the large number of people working within it. The BBC was certainly not to blame but some of its journalists were to blame. Dyke didn't need to resign - I agree - but his staff should have done right by him and examined the early criticisms of their reporting.
On the contrary, listening to the Today programme in the weeks running up to the whole thing is essential in order to understand the context of the affair. Besides, I also read the reports of the arguments in the rest of the press as well as reading Hutton's report itself.
Your frustration with the UK political system is clear, well it ain't perfect (I still can't get a Labour candidate where I live) but it's the best we're going to get. Trotting out the usual proportional-representation argument ("A political system where successive governments have massive majorities in the house of commons despite getting substantially less than 50 per cent of the vote is a system in need of reform") looks good on paper, but it this very same system that keeps extreme parties out of parliament and skews in favour of the incumbent unless a massive swing to another party exists. This ain't pretty (or precise) but it does keep our country stable; and I, for one, like stability.
Any engineer will tell you that stability is the inverse of responsiveness (sometimes called "agility"). We may have a stable political system, but it is not
I'm not saying the BBC is a bad organisation - it's just that it is very powerful but not accountable. It's great it challenges the govt., but it goes too far, and that's really the job of the opposition (or the Lib Dems).
Well, the BBC is governed by a board of governors (apppointed by MPs) and guided by a Royal Charter which is renewed every 7 years and in which the government of the day gets to set its agenda, as well as determining its funding source (so if you don't like paying the licence fee, it is the politicians you need to be angry with, not the broadcasters themselves).
Besides which, bear in mind that it challenges the opposition parties just as thoroughly. Remember, also, that the reports took place on the Today programme - a 2 hour, early morning, hard news programme which has a reputation for tough interviewing but which MPs and ministers are queuing up to get on to try and express their point of view.
The government did seem to be taking a battering on the programme in the weeks before the whole affair blew up, but that was only because they were trying to defend such a very weak position in the face of skilled interviewers. Alastair Campbell only seized on the Gilligan's report as a way to relieve the pressure on the government.
After the fact, it seems that the population were fairly evenly split on the issue of the invasion of Iraq. With that many people opposed to the government's actions, it would have been irresponsible of the BBC not to challenge the government's policy.
You cannot - absolutely cannot - "have enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists" without taking these facts - and other criticisms of the BBC - into account.
Just disconnect your network cable and give it to your boss telling him that you can't work with the internet distracting you. Problem solved. Unfortunately(!), I don't have the discipline to do even this.
Oh I must take issue with you there... the BBC made a big thing of the death of Dr Kelly - even trotting out their usual supporters to wring their hands and cry foul on the Govt. - overshadowing reports of troop deaths just to get one over on the govt.
The BBC made a very big thing of Dr. Kelly's death. As well they should have. A senior (and he was senior, whatever some officials like to think) civil servant took his own life, ultimately because he felt the need to speak out against the way the government was spinning intelligence. Moreover, the government decided to throw him to the media because they thought it would help the unelected Alistair Campbell in his battle with the Today programme. That is an important story.
Good old Glenda, and a nice reporter on one of Blair's foreign trips, accused Blair of having blood on his hands - nicely ignoring the fact that Kelly killed himself (and so was responsible for his own death) and that the Blair had a hell of a lot more blood on his hands from the soldiers and civilians (from all sides) that have died because of the war in Iraq.
Neither Glenda nor the journalist had any connection to the BBC. Nevertheless, the fact that Blair has more blood on his hands than just Dr. Kelly's does not excuse him from the responsibility that he must bear for his death. If the government (and its spin doctors) had acted differently, Dr. Kelly would still be alive. The prime minister is the head of the government and has a duty to ensure that innocent people are not trampled on in the name of political expediency. Blair does have Dr. Kelly's blood on his hands.
You cannot - absolutely cannot - "have enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists" without taking these facts - and other criticisms of the BBC - into account.
I followed the entire episode very, very closely: at first when I heard the allegations and arguments on the Today programme, then in the rest of the media as the story spread. I kept abreast of the evidence made available by the Hutton enquiry and I read the full report on the day it came out. I am aware of all the criticisms contained within the report (there aren't actually very many). After all this, I can definitely say that I have an enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists.
You cannot have more faith in an establishment organisation the people didn't vote for (i.e. the BBC) and less in one that the people did vote for (the government). If you really do then democracy is, for you, at an end.
You may not like it, but I do have far more faith in the BBC than in the government. The UK political system is rotten to its core and needs sweeping reform. A system where a prime minister has presidential powers (through the "Royal Prerogative") without any of the checks and balances that most republics have is not a healthy system. A political system where successive governments have massive majorities in the house of commons despite getting substantially less than 50 per cent of the vote is a system in need of reform. A political system where MPs are tasked with holding the government to account while at the same time relying on the patronage of their party leader, who also leads the government, is a system which does not hold the government to account. Possibly the greatest achievement of the BBC is that they manage to hold successive governments (of whatever hue) to account far more effectively than the people who are actually elected to do that job.
If anyone is responsible for the death of Dr Kelly then it is he himself.
It is a truism that suicide victims are responsible for their own deaths. Nevertheless, his employer had a duty of care which it negected so that Alistair Campbell could carry on his misguided attack of the BBC.
If anyone is responsible for the actions of the govt., then it is ourselves, the electorate - we are all responsible for the war, and deaths, in Iraq and everything else.
We all know the BBC never makes anything up [link to CNN article about the Hutton report]...
Have you actually read the Hutton report. Aside from the fact that it is a complete whitewash by a member of the establishment hand-picked by Tony Blair to clear him of any wrongdoing, it doesn't actually accuse the BBC of making anything up. At the end of the entire episode, I still have enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists, and no respect whatsoever for the government or their lackey Hutton.
There's an idea - the patent has to be written in such a way so that the _patent examiner(s)_ can recreate the invention. That takes care of obfuscated patents & stupid patent examiners in one definition!
Based on the movie, just ammend the Asimov laws with #4: "Don't try to save humanity from itself". Maybe bump it up to #2 or #1.
Asimov's 3 laws of robotics would work pretty well. So well in fact, that the movie quickly dispensed with them and moved straight to the scenario where the rules have broken down rather than exploring the limitations of the rules themselves. Asimov did introduce the zeroeth law (protecting humanity) but not that quickly. I enjoyed the film as a film, but it didn't even come close to doing justice to Asimov's plots.
It used to be that when you patented something, you had to supply enough information for anyone to produce an instance of the patented invention. From the US PTO:
The specification must be in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art or science to which the invention pertains to make and use the same.
Why don't they enforce this?
It's the phrase "skilled in the art" that does it. Anyone who is already skilled in the art of creating ethical robots with an AI controlled by 10 nonsensical ramblings should be able to create said device with the aid of this patent.
What a fantastic idea. He can guarantee (for example) that a robot "will strive for a personal sense of idealism through aid of the personal ideals (glory, honor, dignity, and integrity) while renouncing the corresponding vices (infamy, dishonor, foolishness, and capriciousness)".
Now, if he could just briefly define all those terms, set up some rigourous boundaries that make it easy to determine when whether something is honourable or dishonourable, and maybe a filter to determine whether or not a course of action is foolish.
Then perhaps he could run this patent through the filter.
Soon they'll want to implant RFID tags (or something similar) in your left molar. Everyone will be able to be traced from a simpe computer terminal. Great for parents who's kids are kidnapped, or hikers lost in the mountains, bad for everyone else.
No, RFID won't be effective for satellite monitoring. This GPS implant might, however.
A sentence or two about what the whole issue is about would help greatly.
The link in the summary is to the judgement.
As with most court judgements, the issue is explained in the judgement itself.
The first section of the document explains the background very clearly. If you can't be bothered to follow the link, why should the submitter be bothered to rehash the judge's words?
Napster... technology was equally available for non-infringing uses
The difference between Napster and Grokster, as explained in the Judge's opinion, is that Napster had a centralised index and were therefore in a "supervisory" role with the ability to prevent copyright infringement on a per-file basis. There is no centralised index for Grokster and the authors of the software do not therefore have a supervisory role. The software developers are unable to prevent individual acts of copyright infringement and therefore they do not have a duty to do so.
(The judge explains it better, but he used a lot more words to do it)
Read the PDF, it is surprisingly clearly written and demonstrates that judges do sometimes understand technology!
Couldn't this be a sign that attacking Linux on patents might therefore simply not be worth it based on the money & time that would be involved?
Unfortunately, I think it is more likely that this is a sign that companies like Microsoft don't want to attack the competition with patents until they have succeeded in getting US-style patent law in force around the world.
At the moment, it is very difficult to convince politicians how harmful software patents can be because most of the damage is theoretical. If Microsoft were to start suffocating Linux with patent threats prematurely, it would be much harder for them to get software patents introduced in Europe and Asia, thus reducing the effectiveness of their eventual attack.
Does the author of an accepted article pay for the reviewing costs if a Journal is crapflooded, or is the payment made before review?
The main costs associated with peer review relate to the infrastructure required to manage the review process. The cost of reviewing additional papers is not particularly high, especially when you consider that the reviewers and editors are working for free (as they already do in the closed-access system).
In addition, how do you tell the difference between author-pays and vanity publishing?
By the fact that the journal is peer-reviewed. Vanity publishers don't send manuscripts out to anonymous reviewers before deciding whether to publish.
I'd just note that there are very few author-pays journals in the physical sciences.
Which is undoubtedly due to the fact that there are relatively few open-access journals in the physical sciences at present and that many of those are supported by other means and don't need to charge authors.
Yes, but the articles in the journals _are_ freely available, just not
not available for free
Ah, so that would be a new definition of the word free then? In the context of this discussion, "free" implies "zero cost" - the whole point is that journals are too expensive and that the expense cannot be justified considering that the government funded the research and writing of the paper in the first place.
Just write to the author of the article you want, and I'm sure they'll be happy to provide you with a copy.
Most authors are indeed happy to provide you with a copy - if they can. However, part of getting a paper included in a journal is the transfer of copyright to the journal. The author can often not legally give you a copy. They may have been given some copies by the publisher which they can give out. Or, depending on the publisher, they may be allowed to distribute electronic copies under strict terms and conditions. Or they may not.
It is certainly not true to say that all journal articles are freely available, no matter what definition of the word free is used.
That's silly. That's like saying that because software can be copied at small cost, that it must be.
No, it is like saying that because software can be copied at near-zero cost, government-funded software (which has been cleared for release to the general public) must be freely available. Something with which I think many people would agree.
To extend your metaphor: the way that the journals see it is that they've taken your method and written a program. Now you want the program for free, because you developed the method. See the point?
No, I don't see your point. Journal publishers do not do anything remotely close to taking a method and then writing a program. Their function is more akin to taking a pre-written program and then providing a means of distribution, a bit like Sourceforge.
That's silly. That's like saying that because software can be copied at small cost, that it must be.
No, it's more like saying that because software can be copied at near zero cost, government-funded software (which has been cleared for release to the general public) must be freely available. Something with which I think many people would agree.
To extend your metaphor: the way that the journals see it is that they've taken your method and written a program. Now you want the program for free, because you developed the method. See the point?
No, I don't see your point. Journal publishers do not do anything remotely close to taking a method and then writing a program. Their function is more akin to taking a pre-written program and then providing a means of distribution, a bit like Sourceforge.
Slashdot Mirror
swillden: Examples?
Randomly corrupting Word documents?
Anti-MS zealots won't be using Internet Explorer and so, in most cases, won't even see the ads.
Are there any other browsers left which don't make blocking ads simple? It is certainly very unusual for me to see ads on the net (browsing with Firefox+adblocker) and I certainly never see them on sites I visit repeatedly!
Nevertheless, e-mailing the files back to them might help them to learn. Bank and card numbers can be changed before they do any damage if done soon enough. As for the transactions, their best bet would probably be to but up lots of falsified files to reduce the signal to noise for anyone trying to read them.
Well, if they threaten you, the EFF now know what to say to make them stop.
In a court of law, the right of an individual not to testify against themselves is well established. Dr. Kelly did not, however, have the ability to refuse to testify to the select committee. You say that he was a brave man - he may have been, I don't know. Regardless, the way in which civil servants are treated by the government should not depend on whether or not they are brave.
Same for Iraq - you have to go on the evidence you have. If the Iraqis had made it clear that they had WMDs then, at some point, they will also be believed. I, for one, didn't want to wait for Saddam to use his chemical weapons again, and he has used them before don't forget.
I am well aware that Saddam Hussein had previously used chemical weapons. Hardly a word was muttered in complaint by the NATO leaders who had sold him the weapons. The best available intelligence at the time of the invasion was that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. The US and UK had made their "best intelligence" available to the UN weapons inspectors and they still found nothing. There was no reason to believe that Iraq had WMDs except for those who wanted to believe it in order to justify an invasion that they had long desired.
I'm not sure what evidence you use to say that the Today programme presenters are "skilled interviewers"
My ears.
And when do they spend half an hour with an interviewee?
When the interviewee is a prominent (ex-) government figure with something important to say about a hot topic and there is no other pressing news. Recent examples include an interview with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a former prime minister.
You couldn't look to any of the media for any objective evidence on this matter - the pro-BBC press backed the BBC and the anti-BBC press sniped away at them (i.e. the Times etc.) - so you have to look at the evidence gathered in the Hutton report.
You certainly can look to the media for objective evidence, but it is necessary to learn how to differentiate fact from opinion and how to draw your own conclusions from the available evidence. But as I have mentioned repeatedly, I have read the Hutton report.
Other things ...
PR is not my favourite electoral system - but this is probably not the area to talk about it (I know, I started the whole conversation - sorry). I'll only a couple of things to indicate my POV: I would never look engineering for guide on how to run my society; I don't want agility in politics (or we would have hanging back by now); maybe Germany needed PR "imposed" but the UK does not - kind of suggests that we are doing OK. Nes pas? ;)
N'est pas. If Germany had won WWII would you argue that a dictatorship was the preferred form of government? Anyway, our political system was suspended during the war; the prime minister was changed, there were no elections and a government of national unity was installed. You really can't argue that the allies won because of our first-past-the-post electoral system. I also would fight against any re-introduction to bring back hanging, but what does that have to do with the electoral system - I certainly don't think PR would make it any more likely than the current system.
Why don't we intervene in other countries? We do - just not with a war. The UK is involved in Sudan, needs to stay out of Zimbabwe because the UK only winds-up the president there, etc. War is only the l
This was when he was being interviewed by the Commons Select Committee. Listening to every word of this public interview, of course, were his boss and director of HR who had just warned him that any further revelations would lead to disciplinary action - I think it is understandable that he may have had some doubts.
he was in fact only thrown to a Commons Committee
He was only interviewed (in public) by the Select Committee because the government had already revealed his name to the press. If you recall the events following Andrew Gilligan's broadcasts, the government went into over-drive to investigate the source of the claims. Dr. John Reid, the health secretary appeared on the Today programme talking about "rogue elements" in the security forces and all sorts of internal inquiries were taking place at the MoD. In light of this, Dr. Kelly (who had spoken under condition of anonymity to Gilligan) quite rightly realised that the investigation would at some point focus on him and so told his boss that he had spoken to Gilligan but didn't believe he was the source - quite understandable really. However, Alastair Campbell was so determined to get back at the BBC that when he heard of what Dr. Kelly had said, he saw it only as an opportunity to "fuck the BBC".
Blair and Campbell were thrown to the media on this issue
Blair and Campbell were trying to manipulate the media as they always have done. It works on TV when there is only a limited amount of time to speak and everything has to be done in a very gentlemanly manner, but on the radio where an interviewer can spend half an hour insisting that the politician answer a question, that kind of manipulation doesn't work so well. They were suffering at the hands of skilled interviewers because they didn't have a good case.
Dr Kelly probably would have done better to stick around and accept the undoubted adoration he would have received.
Adoration is probably less important to most people on the verge of retirement than the question of whether or not they will get their pension.
I don't think Blair was there all along pulling the trigger
I do. Blair and Cambell's fingers were quite clearly on the trigger.
I'm not sure, but I think that following a story in the very media that was 'on trial' is not the most objective way to examine this situation. Neither is having the utmost respect for an organisation without drawing a distinction between the organisation itself and the large number of people working within it. The BBC was certainly not to blame but some of its journalists were to blame. Dyke didn't need to resign - I agree - but his staff should have done right by him and examined the early criticisms of their reporting.
On the contrary, listening to the Today programme in the weeks running up to the whole thing is essential in order to understand the context of the affair. Besides, I also read the reports of the arguments in the rest of the press as well as reading Hutton's report itself.
Your frustration with the UK political system is clear, well it ain't perfect (I still can't get a Labour candidate where I live) but it's the best we're going to get. Trotting out the usual proportional-representation argument ("A political system where successive governments have massive majorities in the house of commons despite getting substantially less than 50 per cent of the vote is a system in need of reform") looks good on paper, but it this very same system that keeps extreme parties out of parliament and skews in favour of the incumbent unless a massive swing to another party exists. This ain't pretty (or precise) but it does keep our country stable; and I, for one, like stability.
Any engineer will tell you that stability is the inverse of responsiveness (sometimes called "agility"). We may have a stable political system, but it is not
Well, the BBC is governed by a board of governors (apppointed by MPs) and guided by a Royal Charter which is renewed every 7 years and in which the government of the day gets to set its agenda, as well as determining its funding source (so if you don't like paying the licence fee, it is the politicians you need to be angry with, not the broadcasters themselves).
Besides which, bear in mind that it challenges the opposition parties just as thoroughly. Remember, also, that the reports took place on the Today programme - a 2 hour, early morning, hard news programme which has a reputation for tough interviewing but which MPs and ministers are queuing up to get on to try and express their point of view.
The government did seem to be taking a battering on the programme in the weeks before the whole affair blew up, but that was only because they were trying to defend such a very weak position in the face of skilled interviewers. Alastair Campbell only seized on the Gilligan's report as a way to relieve the pressure on the government.
After the fact, it seems that the population were fairly evenly split on the issue of the invasion of Iraq. With that many people opposed to the government's actions, it would have been irresponsible of the BBC not to challenge the government's policy.
Sorry to reply again, but here is a link in which it is reported that Lord Hutton thinks the BBC over-reacted to the criticisms in his report.
Just disconnect your network cable and give it to your boss telling him that you can't work with the internet distracting you. Problem solved. Unfortunately(!), I don't have the discipline to do even this.
The BBC made a very big thing of Dr. Kelly's death. As well they should have. A senior (and he was senior, whatever some officials like to think) civil servant took his own life, ultimately because he felt the need to speak out against the way the government was spinning intelligence. Moreover, the government decided to throw him to the media because they thought it would help the unelected Alistair Campbell in his battle with the Today programme. That is an important story.
Good old Glenda, and a nice reporter on one of Blair's foreign trips, accused Blair of having blood on his hands - nicely ignoring the fact that Kelly killed himself (and so was responsible for his own death) and that the Blair had a hell of a lot more blood on his hands from the soldiers and civilians (from all sides) that have died because of the war in Iraq.
Neither Glenda nor the journalist had any connection to the BBC. Nevertheless, the fact that Blair has more blood on his hands than just Dr. Kelly's does not excuse him from the responsibility that he must bear for his death. If the government (and its spin doctors) had acted differently, Dr. Kelly would still be alive. The prime minister is the head of the government and has a duty to ensure that innocent people are not trampled on in the name of political expediency. Blair does have Dr. Kelly's blood on his hands.
You cannot - absolutely cannot - "have enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists" without taking these facts - and other criticisms of the BBC - into account.
I followed the entire episode very, very closely: at first when I heard the allegations and arguments on the Today programme, then in the rest of the media as the story spread. I kept abreast of the evidence made available by the Hutton enquiry and I read the full report on the day it came out. I am aware of all the criticisms contained within the report (there aren't actually very many). After all this, I can definitely say that I have an enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists.
You cannot have more faith in an establishment organisation the people didn't vote for (i.e. the BBC) and less in one that the people did vote for (the government). If you really do then democracy is, for you, at an end.
You may not like it, but I do have far more faith in the BBC than in the government. The UK political system is rotten to its core and needs sweeping reform. A system where a prime minister has presidential powers (through the "Royal Prerogative") without any of the checks and balances that most republics have is not a healthy system. A political system where successive governments have massive majorities in the house of commons despite getting substantially less than 50 per cent of the vote is a system in need of reform. A political system where MPs are tasked with holding the government to account while at the same time relying on the patronage of their party leader, who also leads the government, is a system which does not hold the government to account. Possibly the greatest achievement of the BBC is that they manage to hold successive governments (of whatever hue) to account far more effectively than the people who are actually elected to do that job.
If anyone is responsible for the death of Dr Kelly then it is he himself.
It is a truism that suicide victims are responsible for their own deaths. Nevertheless, his employer had a duty of care which it negected so that Alistair Campbell could carry on his misguided attack of the BBC.
If anyone is responsible for the actions of the govt., then it is ourselves, the electorate - we are all responsible for the war, and deaths, in Iraq and everything else.
Have you actually read the Hutton report. Aside from the fact that it is a complete whitewash by a member of the establishment hand-picked by Tony Blair to clear him of any wrongdoing, it doesn't actually accuse the BBC of making anything up. At the end of the entire episode, I still have enormous amount of respect for the BBC and their journalists, and no respect whatsoever for the government or their lackey Hutton.
Then again, I suppose the BBC did make up the spaghetti tree hoax
You sir, are a genius.
Ternary mathematics (10 base 3 == 3 base 10)
Asimov's 3 laws of robotics would work pretty well. So well in fact, that the movie quickly dispensed with them and moved straight to the scenario where the rules have broken down rather than exploring the limitations of the rules themselves. Asimov did introduce the zeroeth law (protecting humanity) but not that quickly. I enjoyed the film as a film, but it didn't even come close to doing justice to Asimov's plots.
It's the phrase "skilled in the art" that does it. Anyone who is already skilled in the art of creating ethical robots with an AI controlled by 10 nonsensical ramblings should be able to create said device with the aid of this patent.
Now, if he could just briefly define all those terms, set up some rigourous boundaries that make it easy to determine when whether something is honourable or dishonourable, and maybe a filter to determine whether or not a course of action is foolish.
Then perhaps he could run this patent through the filter.
No, RFID won't be effective for satellite monitoring. This GPS implant might, however.
The link in the summary is to the judgement. As with most court judgements, the issue is explained in the judgement itself. The first section of the document explains the background very clearly. If you can't be bothered to follow the link, why should the submitter be bothered to rehash the judge's words?
The difference between Napster and Grokster, as explained in the Judge's opinion, is that Napster had a centralised index and were therefore in a "supervisory" role with the ability to prevent copyright infringement on a per-file basis. There is no centralised index for Grokster and the authors of the software do not therefore have a supervisory role. The software developers are unable to prevent individual acts of copyright infringement and therefore they do not have a duty to do so.
(The judge explains it better, but he used a lot more words to do it)
Read the PDF, it is surprisingly clearly written and demonstrates that judges do sometimes understand technology!
Unfortunately, I think it is more likely that this is a sign that companies like Microsoft don't want to attack the competition with patents until they have succeeded in getting US-style patent law in force around the world.
At the moment, it is very difficult to convince politicians how harmful software patents can be because most of the damage is theoretical. If Microsoft were to start suffocating Linux with patent threats prematurely, it would be much harder for them to get software patents introduced in Europe and Asia, thus reducing the effectiveness of their eventual attack.
Actually, the word can also be used as a sentence modifier to slightly emphasize a statement. It is described near the bottom of this page, actually.
The main costs associated with peer review relate to the infrastructure required to manage the review process. The cost of reviewing additional papers is not particularly high, especially when you consider that the reviewers and editors are working for free (as they already do in the closed-access system).
In addition, how do you tell the difference between author-pays and vanity publishing?
By the fact that the journal is peer-reviewed. Vanity publishers don't send manuscripts out to anonymous reviewers before deciding whether to publish.
I'd just note that there are very few author-pays journals in the physical sciences.
Which is undoubtedly due to the fact that there are relatively few open-access journals in the physical sciences at present and that many of those are supported by other means and don't need to charge authors.
Ah, so that would be a new definition of the word free then? In the context of this discussion, "free" implies "zero cost" - the whole point is that journals are too expensive and that the expense cannot be justified considering that the government funded the research and writing of the paper in the first place.
Just write to the author of the article you want, and I'm sure they'll be happy to provide you with a copy.
Most authors are indeed happy to provide you with a copy - if they can. However, part of getting a paper included in a journal is the transfer of copyright to the journal. The author can often not legally give you a copy. They may have been given some copies by the publisher which they can give out. Or, depending on the publisher, they may be allowed to distribute electronic copies under strict terms and conditions. Or they may not. It is certainly not true to say that all journal articles are freely available, no matter what definition of the word free is used.
No, it is like saying that because software can be copied at near-zero cost, government-funded software (which has been cleared for release to the general public) must be freely available. Something with which I think many people would agree.
To extend your metaphor: the way that the journals see it is that they've taken your method and written a program. Now you want the program for free, because you developed the method. See the point?
No, I don't see your point. Journal publishers do not do anything remotely close to taking a method and then writing a program. Their function is more akin to taking a pre-written program and then providing a means of distribution, a bit like Sourceforge.
No, it's more like saying that because software can be copied at near zero cost, government-funded software (which has been cleared for release to the general public) must be freely available. Something with which I think many people would agree.
To extend your metaphor: the way that the journals see it is that they've taken your method and written a program. Now you want the program for free, because you developed the method. See the point?
No, I don't see your point. Journal publishers do not do anything remotely close to taking a method and then writing a program. Their function is more akin to taking a pre-written program and then providing a means of distribution, a bit like Sourceforge.