From TFA: "An open letter from the Free Software Foundation asked if Canonical intended to make all the software in Edge free -- with emphasis on device drivers. The response: Of course, as far as that's commercially realistic."
Surely, nobody in this crowd, or at the FSF, is the slightest bit fooled by this.
Having lived in Indonesia under Suharto for a year when I was 7 years old, I would say that the US is far less paranoid and repressive.
One freedom that Americans have compared to Indonesians is freedom of religion. In Indonesia, there are six state religions. If you are not Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, or Confucianist, you are a blasphemer, and could be legally tried for your religious status. My family was Buddhist in Indonesia, but shockingly converted to what is effectively atheism when returning to the US (it was only much later that I actually explored Buddhism in any depth). Now that is not to say that in practice this is enormously well enforced -- but the doctrine of religious freedom that is present in the historical context of the foundation of the US is replaced with the idea of monotheism in Indonesia, and some of the minority religious groups continue to face persecution.
There are many, many other problems with the Indonesian legal system from 1997 that I could bring up, that were are entirely non-issues in the US (well, for freedom of religion, perhaps only in some parts of the US -- but even so). But you asked for one, so there it is.
So are we saying that if the court permits us to ignore ads, FOX will shut down? Get me some of that!
More seriously, TV broadcasting is not going away. If people want it, and ads cease to pay for it, people in the aggregate will be willing to pay increased subscription costs. The net effect of this on the availability of products for an individual consumer, is zero. Not that I would be at all personally disappointed if cable TV ceased to exist, the last time I had a TV was in 2007.
If you think Inception is complicated, try Memento.
Inception is not that complicated (in spite of its intentional metaphysical ambiguity). I enjoyed it a lot though.
The last time I or anyone in my family purchased a stock machine from a vendor rather than from a technician who could build the machine to our specs was in 1996. And that was a small independent vendor who went out of business a year later.
most people use windows because every program works on windows. if every program worked on linux, a lot more ppl would use linux.
I am writing custom software for neuroscience visualization. It only works on *nix, primarily because it is still in alpha and I have not bothered to port it to other platforms yet.
So no, "every program" does not work on Windows. Would you like a full list of programs that do not run on Windows?
Worse, Mint has more than MATE, it also has Cinnamon, KDE, and XFCE. You're a Windows user and know nothing about Linux: which one do you choose?
Cinnamon.
My LUG recommends Cinnamon whenever dealing with newbies (although personally I prefer MATE and will probably never use any other desktop in my life). We strongly discourage the use of Ubuntu.
That isn't an entirely in-context answer to your question about someone who knows nothing and isn't talking to us, but it is an answer that we have an organization have thought about and have a simple, clear recommendation for.
One perk of having a job, however, is precisely giving you a way to pass the day.
This lesson is the same as in Candide, where in spite of adventures of tumult, death, and agony, it turns out that idleness is just as bad. Another thing that is bad is the self-concept of being unemployed -- I had some very rich friends at college who took great effort to avoid showing off how rich they were while at college and after graduating took semi-grunt-work IT positions just so they could think of themselves as productive, working people.
Now none of this excuses Walmart from overworking and underpaying their employees; the vicissitudes of the trapped working class people cannot just be ignored because work is partly its own reward. But there being "no need to work" at all is not an ideal end state. If there were no need to work, I would be a very unhappy person, even moreso than I already am.
And works for hire would probably almost entirely stop, too, since they can A) Just use the code someone else developed and B) Wouldn't have any way to keep their code secret, or charge a fee to cover development costs.
Richard Stallman addresses this argument, that if all code were free, what incentive would there be for software developers to exist. He later made the observation -- rightly, I think but certainly open to argument -- that the majority of software development tends to be done for clients that want custom software. This has certainly been true in my experience as a scientific developer (though I am still young).
It took me 8 hours to set up steam on debian wheezy.
It is fantastic that we have steam on linux. I think what Steam is doing on the whole is fantastic and it will keep getting better. There really has been so much progress in the past 10 years, and in the next 10 there will be even more. But, speaking as a gamer, my free time is still spent on Windows and it will be until linux can just run the games I want without hassle.
What is this shit about how science gives you certainty? Arguable, perhaps, in the context of some disciplines and skill levels. Introductory calculus is known. There are very few discoveries to be made in the context of introductory calculus.
But, it seriously sounds like nobody has ever taken a class that "does" science (which is unknown) as opposed to "teach" science (which is more or less known). If you are looking for such a discipline, try cognitive neuroscience. Which is extremely not well known.
I live in rural Boston, where there are three options at my house for service -- comcast, verizon, or RCN. Much of the state has access only to comcast or verizon. In the relatively small, heavily populated areas where RCN exists, the connection speed is faster, the price is cheaper, the service people if you call their number are considerably better.
All things considered, I am *extremely* happy to have found such an ISP. There is no way I could have possibly done better. They are not "out-pricing" the market more than they have to, because the market is still essentially an oligopoly. But I would sure as hell rather do business with RCN than verizon, and with verizon than comcast.
Then these laws will not affect your research, or that of all the other biologists who have kept pace with technology, huh? They would probably only affect that small percentage of repetitious experimental work that is done by corporations seeking approval for new cosmetics, food additives, clothing treatments, and so on.
There is a cost associated with regulation. Let us say that there is a group of scientists doing work to detect the biological basis of cancer that does not harm the chimpanzees in any way. They now have to go through the additional steps of getting permits for the most trivial of tasks -- such as transporting the animals from one lab to another. This is not necessary regulation, and it is associated with a small cost that will directly (though in small magnitude) diminish the effectiveness of the science.
As such, the above claim is NOT true.
I am not sure to what extent this particular rule would affect animal research in my field, neuroscience. Typically, the monkeys that we work with are not chimpanzees but rhesus monkeys, so it isn't likely to have a big impact directly. But that said, my experience has taught me that people insisting for more human treatment of animals in the laboratory are rarely scientists who understand what work is necessary. Maybe this would not be true in big pharma (where I have never worked), but my experience is that the rules mostly serve as a hindrance to legitimate science, where approval to do the most basic of things generally gets granted but toils on for weeks or months.
hard call to make - use mod points, or participate. I'm doing my dissertation work in an EEG lab at UCSD, and while I don't actively research neurofeedback training (NFT from hereon out), my adviser and other lab members do. The OP gets it wrong - there is no cure for these psychiatric conditions. NFT may alleviate some of the symptoms, but it is likely the underlying etiology of ADHD, PTSD and Autism (which we investigate) is different enough from individual to individual that this may not be therapeutic for everyone.
That's precisely right. My lab does not do neurofeedback at all, so my knowledge might be outdated by about two years because neurofeedback paradigms are not something that I pay attention to. But nonetheless, my sense is that neurofeedback is a really cool paradigm -- but not even close to being ready for clinical prime time.
Like so much else in the brain, we don't really have any idea what neurofeedback means. What we do know, is that subjects are able to modulate their own alpha (10 Hz) power or bold response by viewing real-time neuroimaging measurements.
We also don't have any idea what mindfulness meditation means. We do know that alpha power is associated with mindfulness. We have some decent guesses at the pathways that might implement this circuit, regions that are synchronized in the alpha band. But we don't actually have any idea what's going on.
I don't know of any studies that directly examine whether neurofeedback can modulate mindfulness (or more likely, somatosensory attention tasks). That study should be done, but I suspect it would be difficult to find anything useful.
Even if it were done, it is an open question whether home-built EEG systems have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution to even do this type of neurofeedback paradigm usefully.
You are all ridiculous.
Discarding a subject who can read the words is a form of quality control, not data biasing.
We don't know what the experiment was about, but here's a simple example: imagine the experiment is about implicit priming. So, they flash a word like "nigger" on the screen for 15 milliseconds -- too short for people to read, except perhaps this guy. Then, they show a picture of either a white or black man and ask people to identify whether it is an old or young person. Then, they ask subject to do a thematic apperception test, much like the things where they show pictures of words either congruent or incongruent (like "BLACK" and "GOOD") and compare the results of the different measures of "racist responses."
To ask people "Oh by the way did you actually read those words we flashed for 15 ms" is quality control, to exclude subjects that were consciously aware of their being primed.
However, that course credit for the experiment was denied for happening not to qualify for the experiment, is outrageous. When I was in Psych 1, similar experimental credit requirements applied but if the experiment couldn't use your data for whatever reason, that wasn't your fault. You still got credit for doing the experiment. Indeed, you got credit even if, after the experiment was explained to you, you said "No I decline to participate as is my right as an experimental subject in accordance with these IRB rules."
It is, however, allowable for the experimenter to withhold some portion of compensation if the subject does not satisfactorily complete the experiment. For instance, in the MRI imaging center where I work some experiments permit compensation for participating (say $10) and then additional compensation for completing the experiment (say $100). The reason is, there were these guys just that showed up all the time as volunteer controls that then said "Oh by the way, I am claustrophobic so I can't do your scan" and then got paid anyway because of IRB rules. My feeling is that if you are a genuine participant that tries to do the scan and not one of the same guys who comes in over and over as a volunteer and takes the money, you will get paid in full whether or not you finish the scan.
Moreover, at least some of the executives at HBO are thrilled that Game of Thrones is being so heavily pirated. Surely, they would take the opportunity to offer this content using a next-day streaming model and make some extra cash -- because lots of people would do it -- but in the absence of being legally able to, enough people at HBO understand that the piracy of their show is a measure of its extraordinary popularity that leads to further business opportunities.
The thing is, with metro, its not like Windows 8 users can simply decide they don't want metro and go back to aero instead.
On the other hand, when I upgraded to debian wheezy, I logged in, took a look at GNOME 3 for several seconds. Then I logged out and logged in under GNOME classic for several seconds. Then I opened a terminal and added a repo and typed sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment, and never had to think about GNOME 3 again.
I don't think this list of complaints entirely neutrally sums up the issue.
Chief complaints seem to be
* "its not unix-y"
"It's not unix-y" carries with it other issues, including "its not portable." My understanding is that systemd makes use of some new features in the linux kernel, that among other things won't work on other kernels. Will it work on legacy hardware? And so on.
It may be that for most users and most distros with their respective philosophies, systemd's "not unix-y-ness" presents no great issue. And I think that's fine -- distros that strive to be new and flashy like mint and fedora should use systemd and take advantage of its features. For debian, where supporting lots of different architectures and maintaining the GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/Hurd ports are part of their philosophy, it probably makes sense to pass on systemd, at least for the meantime.
* Its new, and a bit complex
Put another way -- it's not yet all the way ready for primetime. This does not seem to bother distros like ubuntu and fedora from releasing new and buggy features as defaults (e.g. PulseAudio in ubuntu 8.04). And that's great for those distros, that wan't to give users an experience on the bleeding edge in lieu of extra stability. But that's not for everyone either.
* If its screwed up, the system may not boot (then again, ditto with init scripts / fstab / grub.cfg / initrd / any of a zillion other things)
Sure, but again -- for many distros, it is worth taking the time to clean up the rough edges. SysV init scripts could screw up your system dreadfully if you get them wrong, but most of the software that you use probably knows how to deal with them and won't get it wrong.
For the record, there is already a highly featureful and mature operating system that does the "emacs world" thing -- it is called GNU/Emacs, although I hear it lacks a decent text editor.
(With all the troll about GNU/Linux, I felt entitled).
Slashdot Mirror
By this logic, you abstain entirely from GPL'd software. Such as, for instance, "ls" from GNU coreutils.
But good for you, standing up so resolutely for your principles.
From TFA: "An open letter from the Free Software Foundation asked if Canonical intended to make all the software in Edge free -- with emphasis on device drivers. The response: Of course, as far as that's commercially realistic."
Surely, nobody in this crowd, or at the FSF, is the slightest bit fooled by this.
Having lived in Indonesia under Suharto for a year when I was 7 years old, I would say that the US is far less paranoid and repressive. One freedom that Americans have compared to Indonesians is freedom of religion. In Indonesia, there are six state religions. If you are not Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, or Confucianist, you are a blasphemer, and could be legally tried for your religious status. My family was Buddhist in Indonesia, but shockingly converted to what is effectively atheism when returning to the US (it was only much later that I actually explored Buddhism in any depth). Now that is not to say that in practice this is enormously well enforced -- but the doctrine of religious freedom that is present in the historical context of the foundation of the US is replaced with the idea of monotheism in Indonesia, and some of the minority religious groups continue to face persecution. There are many, many other problems with the Indonesian legal system from 1997 that I could bring up, that were are entirely non-issues in the US (well, for freedom of religion, perhaps only in some parts of the US -- but even so). But you asked for one, so there it is.
So are we saying that if the court permits us to ignore ads, FOX will shut down? Get me some of that!
More seriously, TV broadcasting is not going away. If people want it, and ads cease to pay for it, people in the aggregate will be willing to pay increased subscription costs. The net effect of this on the availability of products for an individual consumer, is zero. Not that I would be at all personally disappointed if cable TV ceased to exist, the last time I had a TV was in 2007.
source?
If you think Inception is complicated, try Memento. Inception is not that complicated (in spite of its intentional metaphysical ambiguity). I enjoyed it a lot though.
It so happens that Senator Chafee is quite alive and is the current governor of Rhode Island...
Possibly, but note that chicken from Chick-Fil-A cannot be pirated.
The last time I or anyone in my family purchased a stock machine from a vendor rather than from a technician who could build the machine to our specs was in 1996. And that was a small independent vendor who went out of business a year later.
most people use windows because every program works on windows. if every program worked on linux, a lot more ppl would use linux.
I am writing custom software for neuroscience visualization. It only works on *nix, primarily because it is still in alpha and I have not bothered to port it to other platforms yet. So no, "every program" does not work on Windows. Would you like a full list of programs that do not run on Windows?
Worse, Mint has more than MATE, it also has Cinnamon, KDE, and XFCE. You're a Windows user and know nothing about Linux: which one do you choose?
Cinnamon.
My LUG recommends Cinnamon whenever dealing with newbies (although personally I prefer MATE and will probably never use any other desktop in my life). We strongly discourage the use of Ubuntu. That isn't an entirely in-context answer to your question about someone who knows nothing and isn't talking to us, but it is an answer that we have an organization have thought about and have a simple, clear recommendation for.
One perk of having a job, however, is precisely giving you a way to pass the day.
This lesson is the same as in Candide, where in spite of adventures of tumult, death, and agony, it turns out that idleness is just as bad. Another thing that is bad is the self-concept of being unemployed -- I had some very rich friends at college who took great effort to avoid showing off how rich they were while at college and after graduating took semi-grunt-work IT positions just so they could think of themselves as productive, working people.
Now none of this excuses Walmart from overworking and underpaying their employees; the vicissitudes of the trapped working class people cannot just be ignored because work is partly its own reward. But there being "no need to work" at all is not an ideal end state. If there were no need to work, I would be a very unhappy person, even moreso than I already am.
Well to be fair, anyone who likes Korean-Mexican fusion instead of Beef for Dinner must be a traitor.
And works for hire would probably almost entirely stop, too, since they can A) Just use the code someone else developed and B) Wouldn't have any way to keep their code secret, or charge a fee to cover development costs.
Richard Stallman addresses this argument, that if all code were free, what incentive would there be for software developers to exist. He later made the observation -- rightly, I think but certainly open to argument -- that the majority of software development tends to be done for clients that want custom software. This has certainly been true in my experience as a scientific developer (though I am still young).
It took me 8 hours to set up steam on debian wheezy. It is fantastic that we have steam on linux. I think what Steam is doing on the whole is fantastic and it will keep getting better. There really has been so much progress in the past 10 years, and in the next 10 there will be even more. But, speaking as a gamer, my free time is still spent on Windows and it will be until linux can just run the games I want without hassle.
What is this shit about how science gives you certainty? Arguable, perhaps, in the context of some disciplines and skill levels. Introductory calculus is known. There are very few discoveries to be made in the context of introductory calculus.
But, it seriously sounds like nobody has ever taken a class that "does" science (which is unknown) as opposed to "teach" science (which is more or less known). If you are looking for such a discipline, try cognitive neuroscience. Which is extremely not well known.
I live in rural Boston, where there are three options at my house for service -- comcast, verizon, or RCN. Much of the state has access only to comcast or verizon. In the relatively small, heavily populated areas where RCN exists, the connection speed is faster, the price is cheaper, the service people if you call their number are considerably better.
All things considered, I am *extremely* happy to have found such an ISP. There is no way I could have possibly done better. They are not "out-pricing" the market more than they have to, because the market is still essentially an oligopoly. But I would sure as hell rather do business with RCN than verizon, and with verizon than comcast.
Good for you!
Then these laws will not affect your research, or that of all the other biologists who have kept pace with technology, huh? They would probably only affect that small percentage of repetitious experimental work that is done by corporations seeking approval for new cosmetics, food additives, clothing treatments, and so on.
There is a cost associated with regulation. Let us say that there is a group of scientists doing work to detect the biological basis of cancer that does not harm the chimpanzees in any way. They now have to go through the additional steps of getting permits for the most trivial of tasks -- such as transporting the animals from one lab to another. This is not necessary regulation, and it is associated with a small cost that will directly (though in small magnitude) diminish the effectiveness of the science.
As such, the above claim is NOT true.
I am not sure to what extent this particular rule would affect animal research in my field, neuroscience. Typically, the monkeys that we work with are not chimpanzees but rhesus monkeys, so it isn't likely to have a big impact directly. But that said, my experience has taught me that people insisting for more human treatment of animals in the laboratory are rarely scientists who understand what work is necessary. Maybe this would not be true in big pharma (where I have never worked), but my experience is that the rules mostly serve as a hindrance to legitimate science, where approval to do the most basic of things generally gets granted but toils on for weeks or months.
hard call to make - use mod points, or participate. I'm doing my dissertation work in an EEG lab at UCSD, and while I don't actively research neurofeedback training (NFT from hereon out), my adviser and other lab members do. The OP gets it wrong - there is no cure for these psychiatric conditions. NFT may alleviate some of the symptoms, but it is likely the underlying etiology of ADHD, PTSD and Autism (which we investigate) is different enough from individual to individual that this may not be therapeutic for everyone.
That's precisely right. My lab does not do neurofeedback at all, so my knowledge might be outdated by about two years because neurofeedback paradigms are not something that I pay attention to. But nonetheless, my sense is that neurofeedback is a really cool paradigm -- but not even close to being ready for clinical prime time.
Like so much else in the brain, we don't really have any idea what neurofeedback means. What we do know, is that subjects are able to modulate their own alpha (10 Hz) power or bold response by viewing real-time neuroimaging measurements.
We also don't have any idea what mindfulness meditation means. We do know that alpha power is associated with mindfulness. We have some decent guesses at the pathways that might implement this circuit, regions that are synchronized in the alpha band. But we don't actually have any idea what's going on.
I don't know of any studies that directly examine whether neurofeedback can modulate mindfulness (or more likely, somatosensory attention tasks). That study should be done, but I suspect it would be difficult to find anything useful.
Even if it were done, it is an open question whether home-built EEG systems have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution to even do this type of neurofeedback paradigm usefully.
You are all ridiculous. Discarding a subject who can read the words is a form of quality control, not data biasing. We don't know what the experiment was about, but here's a simple example: imagine the experiment is about implicit priming. So, they flash a word like "nigger" on the screen for 15 milliseconds -- too short for people to read, except perhaps this guy. Then, they show a picture of either a white or black man and ask people to identify whether it is an old or young person. Then, they ask subject to do a thematic apperception test, much like the things where they show pictures of words either congruent or incongruent (like "BLACK" and "GOOD") and compare the results of the different measures of "racist responses." To ask people "Oh by the way did you actually read those words we flashed for 15 ms" is quality control, to exclude subjects that were consciously aware of their being primed. However, that course credit for the experiment was denied for happening not to qualify for the experiment, is outrageous. When I was in Psych 1, similar experimental credit requirements applied but if the experiment couldn't use your data for whatever reason, that wasn't your fault. You still got credit for doing the experiment. Indeed, you got credit even if, after the experiment was explained to you, you said "No I decline to participate as is my right as an experimental subject in accordance with these IRB rules." It is, however, allowable for the experimenter to withhold some portion of compensation if the subject does not satisfactorily complete the experiment. For instance, in the MRI imaging center where I work some experiments permit compensation for participating (say $10) and then additional compensation for completing the experiment (say $100). The reason is, there were these guys just that showed up all the time as volunteer controls that then said "Oh by the way, I am claustrophobic so I can't do your scan" and then got paid anyway because of IRB rules. My feeling is that if you are a genuine participant that tries to do the scan and not one of the same guys who comes in over and over as a volunteer and takes the money, you will get paid in full whether or not you finish the scan.
Moreover, at least some of the executives at HBO are thrilled that Game of Thrones is being so heavily pirated. Surely, they would take the opportunity to offer this content using a next-day streaming model and make some extra cash -- because lots of people would do it -- but in the absence of being legally able to, enough people at HBO understand that the piracy of their show is a measure of its extraordinary popularity that leads to further business opportunities.
Your argument assumes the market is sufficiently competitive to be free.
The thing is, with metro, its not like Windows 8 users can simply decide they don't want metro and go back to aero instead. On the other hand, when I upgraded to debian wheezy, I logged in, took a look at GNOME 3 for several seconds. Then I logged out and logged in under GNOME classic for several seconds. Then I opened a terminal and added a repo and typed sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment, and never had to think about GNOME 3 again.
Chief complaints seem to be * "its not unix-y"
"It's not unix-y" carries with it other issues, including "its not portable." My understanding is that systemd makes use of some new features in the linux kernel, that among other things won't work on other kernels. Will it work on legacy hardware? And so on. It may be that for most users and most distros with their respective philosophies, systemd's "not unix-y-ness" presents no great issue. And I think that's fine -- distros that strive to be new and flashy like mint and fedora should use systemd and take advantage of its features. For debian, where supporting lots of different architectures and maintaining the GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/Hurd ports are part of their philosophy, it probably makes sense to pass on systemd, at least for the meantime.
* Its new, and a bit complex
Put another way -- it's not yet all the way ready for primetime. This does not seem to bother distros like ubuntu and fedora from releasing new and buggy features as defaults (e.g. PulseAudio in ubuntu 8.04). And that's great for those distros, that wan't to give users an experience on the bleeding edge in lieu of extra stability. But that's not for everyone either.
* If its screwed up, the system may not boot (then again, ditto with init scripts / fstab / grub.cfg / initrd / any of a zillion other things)
Sure, but again -- for many distros, it is worth taking the time to clean up the rough edges. SysV init scripts could screw up your system dreadfully if you get them wrong, but most of the software that you use probably knows how to deal with them and won't get it wrong.
For the record, there is already a highly featureful and mature operating system that does the "emacs world" thing -- it is called GNU/Emacs, although I hear it lacks a decent text editor. (With all the troll about GNU/Linux, I felt entitled).