When you consider the state of materials science and controls technology in 1968, when construction started on the TMI reactor, it's a wonder that anything as complicated as a power plant worked at all, let alone safely.
I think it's tragic that a plant from that era has come to symbolize nuclear power for the entire nation when the technology has advanced so considerably. If we applied that line of reasoning to automobiles, we'd close all the freeways because the Corvair was unsafe.
I would have laughed if you told me, back in the day, that future device makers would go to great lengths to lock out C64 BASIC so that users could use it to build applications that were so powerful that important third parties would be afraid. I know it's Turing-complete, but still.
I have never been much of a believer in Stallman's dystopian visions but I'm getting closer to believing them.
While Doctorow has a point, running an in-house data center is hardly something that lacks recurring costs. Once you get past the hype, the benefit of cloud computing is that it should be possible to leverage technical expertise and management across a much larger user base. The number of people you need who really understand email servers does not go up linearly with the number of users served.
I used to read and reply to complaints email for a large web site.
I think that the verdict is entirely reasonable and that the objections voiced above are not firmly grounded in facts.
The first thing to understand is that, even for an extremely large and popular web site, the volume of plausible complaints is not especially high. Most of the complaints are genuine, at least as far as their origin. Nobody goes around and pretends to be Louis Vitton or Cisco (to cite another example from the discussion above) and sends out C&D notices. There are some cases where C&D notices get sent out that lack legal basis. So, if you're going to run a business that makes real money, you have to have legal counsel to sort through these kinds of claims. This is not any different than bricks and mortar retail. If you're running a hosting company or colo, the complaint volume isn't going to be that great unless you are knowingly allowing dodgy websites or have hosting customers who are deliberately pushing the boundaries. Getting a few plausible complaints a month (spam, DMCA notices, hosting viruses and other malware, subpoenas and other requests from law enforcement) is part of the hosting business. If you're going to be in the business, you have to be prepared to review such complaints and respond to the ones that have sound basis.
The availability of these kinds of remedies in the courts is valuable and slashdotters should support it. Without such remedies, companies can engage in Hollywood accounting, just as spammers and telemarketers do, and leave no effective remedy.
Not necessarily. Trademark law protects identifying sounds against confusing use of the same or similar sounds that might lead customers to mistakenly believe that the product or service thus identified originates from the same source. The chimes and the lion are clear examples of the sound being an identifying feature. Trademark law does not extend to the protection of elements of comedy or entertainment. It is not clear that the duck sounds themselves serve an identifying purpose.
The related problem that the suit may encounter is that trademarks by definition may have no functional purpose since otherwise patent law, with its much more stringent requirements (novelty, duration limits, registration requirements, etc), would apply. One of the landmark cases in trademark law was the Owens-Corning lawsuit over pink fiberglass, where Owens-Corning prevailed in major part because the pink coloration serves no functional purpose. The duck sounds at issue here are functional: they serve to entertain. Without the duck sounds the entertainment event loses some of its essential character, making it clear that the sounds are not mere identification.
Where's the rest of the story? These devices are useless without communications and without sensory capability beyond detecting whether or not they've bumped into something. The locomotion will work on a smooth, hard surface, but beyond that, it's not useful.
To be sure, this class of device has potential, but as built, these are nothing but parlor tricks.
The only application I can think of is will come up if there's a retro resurgence of the Coleco vibrating football games of the 1960s.
It is difficult to imagine that an explosion could be caused by any other components in the device. The battery is supposed to be double fused which limits the amount of power to other components, but if there is a failure within the battery itself, the results can be dramatic.
There was a brief time when companies considered high-quality customer service to be a competitive edge. This lasted from the beginning of large-scale DP in the 1970s until sometime in the early 1990s when most industries started to see customer service as a cost to be reduced.
If you've already made a decision to provide crap customer service (an MBA would call it "minimizing service cost to the extent feasible"), it is cheaper to do this from locations with low labor costs. Most companies still prefer to provide crap customer service, and if you call almost any company selling cable, wireless, credit card, satellite, ISP service, banking, or insurance of any kind this is what you're likely to get.
I presume that iQor is working with clients in high-value segments where high-quality customer service still matters. At this point, such a market is relatively small. There's no doubt it costs more, because you have to be able to retain the good reps, which means you can't put as much pressure on them to meet quotas, and you have to pay them more, and generally put up with things like doctor visits and bathroom breaks that drive down productivity. And you have to hire managers who actually know how to manage and motivate people. Compared to low-wage offshore locations, you end up paying 10x or 20x as much per call (I'm guessing).
The wireless places and the banks and credit cards aren't, at this point, willing to do this. They model how much churn they're going to get, and what it will cost them, and decide that it isn't worth it. So it's a niche, where if you've sold someone a $20,000 injection molding machine or something, you feel more compelled to have someone on the phone who can actually figure out when it's going to ship.
I'm not convinced that that changes anything, because niches by their nature do not scale well.
And I don't think that my cell phone company is going to start having live humans making $30 an hour answer 611 calls on the second ring, either.
The players were assured that the results would remain anonymous and confidential
So the question is, why isn't the players' union suing Major League Baseball for breach of contract? Anonymous and confidential is not the same as identifiable but confidential; if the results actually had been anonymous as promised, this breach never could have happened.
In order to administer the program, which included retests, MLB had to retain some information about the identity of each person tested. A promise that information will remain anonymous is not a promise to destroy all information relating to identity.
You can't win a lawsuit alleging that someone permitted law enforcement to conduct a search in compliance with a valid federal subpoena.
You can't win a lawsuit against a newspaper forcing them to identify anonymous sources.
You can't win a lawsuit against an anonymous source for leaking sensitive information unless you can determine their identity and prove it in a court of law.
do not take these tests. ever. nothing good comes from volunteering to be 'examined' for things that nature deems are perfectly normal. if enough people took a stand as refuseniks, then change would happen. any pre-employment papers that say I have to be tested, I cross those lines out. some employers are ok with you refusing it and those that aren't, well, that's tell about THEIR priorities, isn't it? don't work for them. just say no (lol).
That's a valid strategy if you're willing to constrain your universe of employers to startups and other smaller employers that are not in a highly regulated business. I went for 15 years without having to take a drug test. Then the economy tanked and I had to take a job with one of the companies you read about in the newspaper, and so I got to piss in a plastic cup for them under the supervision of some minimum-wage nursing school dropout. Or welch on my mortgage. It was, frankly, an easy choice to make.
Of course, if you want to live by yourself in a rusted-out pickup camper at the end of some Forest Service road, you can afford to be more principled in these matters.
While the matter at issue involves celebrity figures, the question at hand applies every bit as much to people in industries like technology where drug tests are used.
The salient facts of the matter were that:
1. A group of people took tests, the results of which were guaranteed to be confidential.
2. The government subpoenaed some of the test results.
3. Investigators collected substantially more test data than the subpoena allowed, stretching the "plain sight" doctrine to the breaking point to do so.
4. Investigators leaked the test results to others.
5. The people who took the tests suffered adverse employment consequences, years after the tests were taken.
Exactly that same sort of thing could happen to you. Let's imagine. Five years ago you tested positive for THC when a random test was required the day after you were, uncharacteristically, at a party thrown by an old friend where there was a great deal of smoke in the air (You don't remember inhaling). Your employer sent you through the spanking mill for the next year and there were additional tests and you were forced to endure flash presentations on drug abuse against your will. You figured that was the end of it.
Little did you know that the Anytown Police Department happened to hang onto a list of positives they got from ABC Testing and Compliance Services (where you took the test) as the result of an unrelated investigation into a person you do not know. The list was leaked via a cop's wife to the local Human Resources Disucssion Group that meets every 2nd Wednesday at the Perkins. And guess what? Now you can't get a job in Anytown and you don't know why.
The ruling at issue is a step in the right direction, because it helps plug one of the holes through which some of this data gets out. If you don't care, you should -- unless you have nothing to hide.
I spent several months at a startup where we were going to make $$profit by writing and selling Android applications. The problem is that the phones are, well, awful. The iPhone has set the standard, and things like the G1 are simply uninspiring by comparison. We would try to raise money, and in a room full of tech-savvy investors, most people have iPhones. We would pass around the G1 so they could see our app. Bottom line, they were not interested in investing money in a product that ran on a phone that was ugly.
Consequently I now write SQL for a living and get paid by the hour.
Android has done some great things. The control the user can have, the security model, the interaction between apps are all well thought out. One of these days it's going to be significant. Probably right after Linux is ready for the desktop.
The decline of the landline is not due solely to changing usage patterns and technology but rather due to the anti-customer regulatory and business environment for landline phones.
A poster up thread was perhaps more insightful than he realized when stating that the problem with a landline is that telemarketers keep calling. After the MFJ, incoming toll was highly profitable for local exchanges, and they encouraged incoming toll, and lobbied to protect telemarketers, and fought things like caller ID.
And in the wake of the MFJ, phone service as a business changed from being a benevolent and responsible (if bureaucratic) utility to being a cost-driven race to the bottom. Service suffered. Innovation suffered. Prices for local telephone service went up. In the last few years I've received a disconnect notice for paying my phone bill two weeks late, I've been charged a $60 fee for the company to repair their own facilities (by a CLEC who said it was in their tariff because the ILEC charged them and they had to cover costs), I've had customer service reps hang up on me, and I've had service that was at best no more reliable than that provided 30 years ago.
And for this privilege I pay approximately $45 a week for a basic service bundle including caller ID and long distance. That is slightly more than I pay for my mobile phone. And is it somehow a premium service worthy of a premium price? Most assuredly not.
Technologically, the wired carriers should have an edge. The technologies are identical until the last mile. In the last mile, the wired carrier has essentially unlimited capacity and higher reliability. But that doesn't make up for the poor service and bad public policy upstream.
With drug tests, they typically have a low-dollar hourly person collect a urine sample which is then split into two containers. There is some likelihood of sample contamination affecting both samples.
Then they test one sample using economical methods that are not more than, say, 99% reliable. If there is a positive, they will generally use a gas chromatograph, which as you point out is much more accurate, with false positives in the.01 % area. Then they'll sometimes run a test at another lab on the other side of the split. The problem is that that isn't really an independent test, because of the potential for cross contamination, and because of the possibility of a positive result for reasons unrelated to abuse (try a web search on the two-bagel breakfast, for an example). In many cases there's really no appeal beyond this point and people get sent to mandatory treatment, fired, reassigned, whatever. One in 10,000, one in 100,000, who knows for sure.
Back during the TQM fad they'd make this point by giving everyone a clear plastic box with 10,000 little balls in it. There was a cribbage board like affair in it, with 1,000 holes, such that by inverting and shaking the box, then turning it upright, 1,000 of the balls would settle into the holes more or less at random, but still be visible through the clear box. The balls were color coded -- 10 red balls, 40 black ones, 50 blue ones, and the rest white. The odds of getting no red and no black are lower than 1%, contrary to most people's expectations.
This was used to drive home a point about the difficulty of "testing in quality" (quality tests suffer false negatives and if there are, say, 1000 such individual measurements on a piece of machinery it's nearly impossible to ship a machine without at least one thing wrong unless the tolerances are well controlled at the point of manufacture). The same idea works any time you want to illustrate the effects of low-incidence events on a large population.
I've always wondered how much injustice is perpetrated by drug screening on large populations, since false positives do occur and statistically must occur twice in a row at least some of the time, which is the threshold considered conclusive proof of abuse by most employers and the courts.
Independent professional photographers have a mindset that they are being paid for the end use. If you want a portrait of your wife to hang on the wall, they want to sell you a portrait of your wife to hang on the wall, and they will charge a fee based on the size and the framing and other add-ons. If you want a portrait of someone to include in your employer's annual report, they want you to pay for that, based on the size and the quantity, even though the actual production won't be done by them. If you want a stock photo of two adults holding hands while walking down a path by a lake, they traditionally wanted you to pay for size, type of use, and quantity, though now there's so much royalty-free stock that's out there that this model is starting to wane.
But in real life that started to change a long time ago. Most commercial photographers working low-end to average corporate gigs (product photography and PR) are willing to sell all rights (possibly holding back a nonexclusive license to use their own work in portfolios and the like) in exchange for a reasonably generous day rate. Magazine and news photographers are generally employees operating on a work-for-hire basis. The low end wedding and portrait photographers charge a shooting fee only; the media is their deliverable and it comes with all rights. That leaves the higher end portrait and corporate photographers as the last bastion of the old, royalty-based model.
The whole point of Wikipedia is to be freely redistributable. A Wikipedia that contains sufficient material licensed on a "Wikipedia only" basis, as many photographers would like, does not serve this goal any more than binary-only drivers and code (or source licensed for non-commercial use only) serve GNU/Linux. A major misunderstanding regarding Wikipedia is that the Wikipedia's mission is to have a popular web site. It's not; it's to create free content, and this goal is not something that Wikipedians are willing to negotiate away in exchange for pretty pictures. It is the undefined nature of the possible end uses for the content that professional photographers don't like.
Fact is, that in most parts of the U.S., land is abundant and cheap compared to the problems posed by recycling problematic and impure materials like electronics. Recycling is a pollution prone process at best, more so when chemical separation steps are involved. The zen-like aesthetic appeal of a closed system of recycling doesn't match reality. Goods like these can, at best, be "downcycled" into products of considerably lower utility and value
In the post-RoHS, post-CRT era, electronics are no more problematic a waste than those Rubbermaid laundry baskets people buy.
TFA doesn't consider the problems of compulsion and access.
The approach of "open source sensing" may have some validity in public places, but for the most part the interesting things that governments and other powerful entities do are either done in privacy or are already covered by news media of various kinds. There's no way to get access that would allow a discussion between police and prosecuting attorneys over the real reasons for a bust, there's no way to get access to the side discussions and dealmaking that a protected by deliberative privilege and not covered by open meeting laws.
And private people can't compel searches the way the government can. The TSA and customs get people to run their possessions through a scanner and remove outer articles of clothing, while the public has no equivalent ability to compel compliance upon the government or other powerful entities.
And besides, even if the playing field itself were level, I don't believe that a comprehensive ability to see what the government does would further individual rights. The loss of privacy due to constant surveillance is very real and cannot be overcome or compensated for by observing the actions of the government.
A more relevant questions is: How does the dairy farmer make money using a lower quality, higher cost feed? Profit margins are thin in that business, and a 10% change in feed costs is enough to bankrupt an operation. Unless you are selling your milk to a customer that will pay extra for environmentally correct practices (as in TFA), it doesn't work.
The science behind such a change is unconvincing as far as greenhouse gasses are concerned. Dairy cattle on a grass diet produce less milk over their lifetime; I know, I had a neighbor who ran a grazing herd for a while, so that has to be considered. And the indirect measures for methane emissions they use are weakly correlated. Measuring the actual methane output from a cow in a typical farm setting is not technologically feasible.
To be sure, there are other environmental benefits, chiefly involving soil conservation.
There is a common and dangerous misunderstanding that the GPL is a contract. It isn't. No one can be forced to comply in court. However, noncompliance makes the license invalid, which can mean copyright infringement, per the parent.
Of course, a 1.85 million dollar verdict is unlikely....
Provisions prohibiting open source software are not unusual in development and distribution agreements for closed systems. There are similar provisions for all gaming platforms, for example, and for signed drivers for Windows. On the other hand, paid licenses for third-party libraries are fine as long as there is no requirement to release source code.
Something to think about if you believe the playing field is level.
WildBlue provides satellite service throughout most of the U.S. Speeds, low. Latency, high. Gaming, impossible. But at least it works.
I believe that they use low earth orbit satellites, which means that they may not have the technical capability to provide coverage over Iran, at least not all the time. And then there's the matter of getting ground stations smuggled in and installed, and they're large enough (the size of a DirectTV dish) to be difficult to conceal.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's tragic that a plant from that era has come to symbolize nuclear power for the entire nation when the technology has advanced so considerably. If we applied that line of reasoning to automobiles, we'd close all the freeways because the Corvair was unsafe.
I have never been much of a believer in Stallman's dystopian visions but I'm getting closer to believing them.
While Doctorow has a point, running an in-house data center is hardly something that lacks recurring costs. Once you get past the hype, the benefit of cloud computing is that it should be possible to leverage technical expertise and management across a much larger user base. The number of people you need who really understand email servers does not go up linearly with the number of users served.
I think that the verdict is entirely reasonable and that the objections voiced above are not firmly grounded in facts.
The first thing to understand is that, even for an extremely large and popular web site, the volume of plausible complaints is not especially high. Most of the complaints are genuine, at least as far as their origin. Nobody goes around and pretends to be Louis Vitton or Cisco (to cite another example from the discussion above) and sends out C&D notices. There are some cases where C&D notices get sent out that lack legal basis. So, if you're going to run a business that makes real money, you have to have legal counsel to sort through these kinds of claims. This is not any different than bricks and mortar retail. If you're running a hosting company or colo, the complaint volume isn't going to be that great unless you are knowingly allowing dodgy websites or have hosting customers who are deliberately pushing the boundaries. Getting a few plausible complaints a month (spam, DMCA notices, hosting viruses and other malware, subpoenas and other requests from law enforcement) is part of the hosting business. If you're going to be in the business, you have to be prepared to review such complaints and respond to the ones that have sound basis.
The availability of these kinds of remedies in the courts is valuable and slashdotters should support it. Without such remedies, companies can engage in Hollywood accounting, just as spammers and telemarketers do, and leave no effective remedy.
It's funny. It makes people laugh. Since the product being provided is entertainment, the funny bits are the sine qua non.
The related problem that the suit may encounter is that trademarks by definition may have no functional purpose since otherwise patent law, with its much more stringent requirements (novelty, duration limits, registration requirements, etc), would apply. One of the landmark cases in trademark law was the Owens-Corning lawsuit over pink fiberglass, where Owens-Corning prevailed in major part because the pink coloration serves no functional purpose. The duck sounds at issue here are functional: they serve to entertain. Without the duck sounds the entertainment event loses some of its essential character, making it clear that the sounds are not mere identification.
To be sure, this class of device has potential, but as built, these are nothing but parlor tricks.
The only application I can think of is will come up if there's a retro resurgence of the Coleco vibrating football games of the 1960s.
It is difficult to imagine that an explosion could be caused by any other components in the device. The battery is supposed to be double fused which limits the amount of power to other components, but if there is a failure within the battery itself, the results can be dramatic.
If you've already made a decision to provide crap customer service (an MBA would call it "minimizing service cost to the extent feasible"), it is cheaper to do this from locations with low labor costs. Most companies still prefer to provide crap customer service, and if you call almost any company selling cable, wireless, credit card, satellite, ISP service, banking, or insurance of any kind this is what you're likely to get.
I presume that iQor is working with clients in high-value segments where high-quality customer service still matters. At this point, such a market is relatively small. There's no doubt it costs more, because you have to be able to retain the good reps, which means you can't put as much pressure on them to meet quotas, and you have to pay them more, and generally put up with things like doctor visits and bathroom breaks that drive down productivity. And you have to hire managers who actually know how to manage and motivate people. Compared to low-wage offshore locations, you end up paying 10x or 20x as much per call (I'm guessing).
The wireless places and the banks and credit cards aren't, at this point, willing to do this. They model how much churn they're going to get, and what it will cost them, and decide that it isn't worth it. So it's a niche, where if you've sold someone a $20,000 injection molding machine or something, you feel more compelled to have someone on the phone who can actually figure out when it's going to ship.
I'm not convinced that that changes anything, because niches by their nature do not scale well.
And I don't think that my cell phone company is going to start having live humans making $30 an hour answer 611 calls on the second ring, either.
From the article:
So the question is, why isn't the players' union suing Major League Baseball for breach of contract? Anonymous and confidential is not the same as identifiable but confidential; if the results actually had been anonymous as promised, this breach never could have happened.
In order to administer the program, which included retests, MLB had to retain some information about the identity of each person tested. A promise that information will remain anonymous is not a promise to destroy all information relating to identity.
You can't win a lawsuit alleging that someone permitted law enforcement to conduct a search in compliance with a valid federal subpoena.
You can't win a lawsuit against a newspaper forcing them to identify anonymous sources.
You can't win a lawsuit against an anonymous source for leaking sensitive information unless you can determine their identity and prove it in a court of law.
do not take these tests. ever. nothing good comes from volunteering to be 'examined' for things that nature deems are perfectly normal. if enough people took a stand as refuseniks, then change would happen. any pre-employment papers that say I have to be tested, I cross those lines out. some employers are ok with you refusing it and those that aren't, well, that's tell about THEIR priorities, isn't it? don't work for them. just say no (lol).
That's a valid strategy if you're willing to constrain your universe of employers to startups and other smaller employers that are not in a highly regulated business. I went for 15 years without having to take a drug test. Then the economy tanked and I had to take a job with one of the companies you read about in the newspaper, and so I got to piss in a plastic cup for them under the supervision of some minimum-wage nursing school dropout. Or welch on my mortgage. It was, frankly, an easy choice to make.
Of course, if you want to live by yourself in a rusted-out pickup camper at the end of some Forest Service road, you can afford to be more principled in these matters.
The salient facts of the matter were that:
1. A group of people took tests, the results of which were guaranteed to be confidential.
2. The government subpoenaed some of the test results.
3. Investigators collected substantially more test data than the subpoena allowed, stretching the "plain sight" doctrine to the breaking point to do so.
4. Investigators leaked the test results to others.
5. The people who took the tests suffered adverse employment consequences, years after the tests were taken.
Exactly that same sort of thing could happen to you. Let's imagine. Five years ago you tested positive for THC when a random test was required the day after you were, uncharacteristically, at a party thrown by an old friend where there was a great deal of smoke in the air (You don't remember inhaling). Your employer sent you through the spanking mill for the next year and there were additional tests and you were forced to endure flash presentations on drug abuse against your will. You figured that was the end of it.
Little did you know that the Anytown Police Department happened to hang onto a list of positives they got from ABC Testing and Compliance Services (where you took the test) as the result of an unrelated investigation into a person you do not know. The list was leaked via a cop's wife to the local Human Resources Disucssion Group that meets every 2nd Wednesday at the Perkins. And guess what? Now you can't get a job in Anytown and you don't know why.
The ruling at issue is a step in the right direction, because it helps plug one of the holes through which some of this data gets out. If you don't care, you should -- unless you have nothing to hide.
I spent several months at a startup where we were going to make $$profit by writing and selling Android applications. The problem is that the phones are, well, awful. The iPhone has set the standard, and things like the G1 are simply uninspiring by comparison. We would try to raise money, and in a room full of tech-savvy investors, most people have iPhones. We would pass around the G1 so they could see our app. Bottom line, they were not interested in investing money in a product that ran on a phone that was ugly.
Consequently I now write SQL for a living and get paid by the hour.
Android has done some great things. The control the user can have, the security model, the interaction between apps are all well thought out. One of these days it's going to be significant. Probably right after Linux is ready for the desktop.
The decline of the landline is not due solely to changing usage patterns and technology but rather due to the anti-customer regulatory and business environment for landline phones.
A poster up thread was perhaps more insightful than he realized when stating that the problem with a landline is that telemarketers keep calling. After the MFJ, incoming toll was highly profitable for local exchanges, and they encouraged incoming toll, and lobbied to protect telemarketers, and fought things like caller ID.
And in the wake of the MFJ, phone service as a business changed from being a benevolent and responsible (if bureaucratic) utility to being a cost-driven race to the bottom. Service suffered. Innovation suffered. Prices for local telephone service went up. In the last few years I've received a disconnect notice for paying my phone bill two weeks late, I've been charged a $60 fee for the company to repair their own facilities (by a CLEC who said it was in their tariff because the ILEC charged them and they had to cover costs), I've had customer service reps hang up on me, and I've had service that was at best no more reliable than that provided 30 years ago.
And for this privilege I pay approximately $45 a week for a basic service bundle including caller ID and long distance. That is slightly more than I pay for my mobile phone. And is it somehow a premium service worthy of a premium price? Most assuredly not.
Technologically, the wired carriers should have an edge. The technologies are identical until the last mile. In the last mile, the wired carrier has essentially unlimited capacity and higher reliability. But that doesn't make up for the poor service and bad public policy upstream.
With drug tests, they typically have a low-dollar hourly person collect a urine sample which is then split into two containers. There is some likelihood of sample contamination affecting both samples.
Then they test one sample using economical methods that are not more than, say, 99% reliable. If there is a positive, they will generally use a gas chromatograph, which as you point out is much more accurate, with false positives in the .01 % area. Then they'll sometimes run a test at another lab on the other side of the split. The problem is that that isn't really an independent test, because of the potential for cross contamination, and because of the possibility of a positive result for reasons unrelated to abuse (try a web search on the two-bagel breakfast, for an example). In many cases there's really no appeal beyond this point and people get sent to mandatory treatment, fired, reassigned, whatever. One in 10,000, one in 100,000, who knows for sure.
Back during the TQM fad they'd make this point by giving everyone a clear plastic box with 10,000 little balls in it. There was a cribbage board like affair in it, with 1,000 holes, such that by inverting and shaking the box, then turning it upright, 1,000 of the balls would settle into the holes more or less at random, but still be visible through the clear box. The balls were color coded -- 10 red balls, 40 black ones, 50 blue ones, and the rest white. The odds of getting no red and no black are lower than 1%, contrary to most people's expectations.
This was used to drive home a point about the difficulty of "testing in quality" (quality tests suffer false negatives and if there are, say, 1000 such individual measurements on a piece of machinery it's nearly impossible to ship a machine without at least one thing wrong unless the tolerances are well controlled at the point of manufacture). The same idea works any time you want to illustrate the effects of low-incidence events on a large population.
I've always wondered how much injustice is perpetrated by drug screening on large populations, since false positives do occur and statistically must occur twice in a row at least some of the time, which is the threshold considered conclusive proof of abuse by most employers and the courts.
Independent professional photographers have a mindset that they are being paid for the end use. If you want a portrait of your wife to hang on the wall, they want to sell you a portrait of your wife to hang on the wall, and they will charge a fee based on the size and the framing and other add-ons. If you want a portrait of someone to include in your employer's annual report, they want you to pay for that, based on the size and the quantity, even though the actual production won't be done by them. If you want a stock photo of two adults holding hands while walking down a path by a lake, they traditionally wanted you to pay for size, type of use, and quantity, though now there's so much royalty-free stock that's out there that this model is starting to wane.
But in real life that started to change a long time ago. Most commercial photographers working low-end to average corporate gigs (product photography and PR) are willing to sell all rights (possibly holding back a nonexclusive license to use their own work in portfolios and the like) in exchange for a reasonably generous day rate. Magazine and news photographers are generally employees operating on a work-for-hire basis. The low end wedding and portrait photographers charge a shooting fee only; the media is their deliverable and it comes with all rights. That leaves the higher end portrait and corporate photographers as the last bastion of the old, royalty-based model.
The whole point of Wikipedia is to be freely redistributable. A Wikipedia that contains sufficient material licensed on a "Wikipedia only" basis, as many photographers would like, does not serve this goal any more than binary-only drivers and code (or source licensed for non-commercial use only) serve GNU/Linux. A major misunderstanding regarding Wikipedia is that the Wikipedia's mission is to have a popular web site. It's not; it's to create free content, and this goal is not something that Wikipedians are willing to negotiate away in exchange for pretty pictures. It is the undefined nature of the possible end uses for the content that professional photographers don't like.
Fact is, that in most parts of the U.S., land is abundant and cheap compared to the problems posed by recycling problematic and impure materials like electronics. Recycling is a pollution prone process at best, more so when chemical separation steps are involved. The zen-like aesthetic appeal of a closed system of recycling doesn't match reality. Goods like these can, at best, be "downcycled" into products of considerably lower utility and value
In the post-RoHS, post-CRT era, electronics are no more problematic a waste than those Rubbermaid laundry baskets people buy.
TFA doesn't consider the problems of compulsion and access.
The approach of "open source sensing" may have some validity in public places, but for the most part the interesting things that governments and other powerful entities do are either done in privacy or are already covered by news media of various kinds. There's no way to get access that would allow a discussion between police and prosecuting attorneys over the real reasons for a bust, there's no way to get access to the side discussions and dealmaking that a protected by deliberative privilege and not covered by open meeting laws.
And private people can't compel searches the way the government can. The TSA and customs get people to run their possessions through a scanner and remove outer articles of clothing, while the public has no equivalent ability to compel compliance upon the government or other powerful entities.
And besides, even if the playing field itself were level, I don't believe that a comprehensive ability to see what the government does would further individual rights. The loss of privacy due to constant surveillance is very real and cannot be overcome or compensated for by observing the actions of the government.
A more relevant questions is: How does the dairy farmer make money using a lower quality, higher cost feed? Profit margins are thin in that business, and a 10% change in feed costs is enough to bankrupt an operation. Unless you are selling your milk to a customer that will pay extra for environmentally correct practices (as in TFA), it doesn't work.
The science behind such a change is unconvincing as far as greenhouse gasses are concerned. Dairy cattle on a grass diet produce less milk over their lifetime; I know, I had a neighbor who ran a grazing herd for a while, so that has to be considered. And the indirect measures for methane emissions they use are weakly correlated. Measuring the actual methane output from a cow in a typical farm setting is not technologically feasible.
To be sure, there are other environmental benefits, chiefly involving soil conservation.
There is a common and dangerous misunderstanding that the GPL is a contract. It isn't. No one can be forced to comply in court. However, noncompliance makes the license invalid, which can mean copyright infringement, per the parent.
Of course, a 1.85 million dollar verdict is unlikely....
What's the reasoning behind disallowing it? I don't understand.
The platform is closed and Nintendo control the approval process, what's the downside for them?
Their attorneys think about the GPL and the FSF the same way slashdotters think about ASCAP and the RIAA.
Provisions prohibiting open source software are not unusual in development and distribution agreements for closed systems. There are similar provisions for all gaming platforms, for example, and for signed drivers for Windows. On the other hand, paid licenses for third-party libraries are fine as long as there is no requirement to release source code.
Something to think about if you believe the playing field is level.
WildBlue provides satellite service throughout most of the U.S. Speeds, low. Latency, high. Gaming, impossible. But at least it works.
I believe that they use low earth orbit satellites, which means that they may not have the technical capability to provide coverage over Iran, at least not all the time. And then there's the matter of getting ground stations smuggled in and installed, and they're large enough (the size of a DirectTV dish) to be difficult to conceal.