You could lose the comma, but that would in fact change the nuance of what I was trying to say. That is, there's a bit of sarcasm going there... I'm perfectly aware that Slashdot has editors. They just don't seem to do the editing bit of their job.
Engadget has an interview with Jack Valenti, the outgoing president of the MPAA and the object of hatred for many hacker after he took he on DVD Jon, who is retiring tomorrow after more than three decades on the job.
Wow, I didn't think "DVD Jon" had even been alive for 30 years, much less working in this field!
Oh, wait. The poster meant that Jack Valenti is retiring after three decades. Hmmm, rather an unfortunate syntactic structure there, isn't it? Wouldn't it be great if Slashdot had editors, who could catch the most egregious bad grammar?
Let's not even get into "he took he"...
Language matter. Words mean something. Diction counts. Try learning some.
communicators - hell mobile phones are far better than communicators
When a cell phone can punch a signal up to orbit without the benefit of relay stations, then it will be better than the communicators. Until then, no dice -- it depends on too large an infrastructure.
People don't seem to appreciate the inverse-square law effect for radio transmission...
No one has been able to convince me yet that it's somehow more valuable to slug through Nietzsche word by word, one of the most misunderstood philosophers of all time, without at least first getting some idea of what he was saying first.
But you're conflating two things here. I wouldn't argue against pre-reading some things (although that can bias your own reading) but I think you should in the end read the original as well. What's more, you say you never cracked the original books, but then say "without at least first getting some idea" -- which implies a second, i.e., actually reading the text.
I don't doubt you can get by, or even do well, grade-wise by just processing secondary sources. But your actual learning is in fact diluted, I believe.
Maybe. I'm doubtful. I got a BS and MS in Physics, and completed all but the thesis for a PhD in same, without ever once memorizing a fact or equation. Now, I can still recite most of the equations I had to use. Whhy? Because I used them so many damn times they became stuck in my brain anyway.
(If that counts as "memorization", then I agree with the parent post.)
However, as she points out, most students can't write nearly as well as this paper was written, so in fact using an individually written paper could actually be more dangerous to the student in this case.
Unless, of course, you do this from the very beginning of the course...:)
Re:it's not really cheating
on
Cheating Made Easy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Blockquoth the poster:
Reading other people's analysis isn't cheating (according to me).
It isn't cheating according to any reasonable definition of plagiarism, either -- if you give the sources. Include a complete "works referenced" list and you're not cheating, you're doing research. Of course, if your "other people" turn out just to be, say, your classmates, then your work will naturally suffer...
I suspect that lots of cheaters (and criminals, spies, politicians, etc.) think they're too clever to get caught. Or perhaps don't ever think about the consequences at all.
My eight years of high school teaching tell me this: As a rule, humans don't learn from the misfortune of others. Harsh penalties don't, per se, seem to have the deterrent effect you would expect -- and I say this as a fan of a serious disciplinary system. Where harsh penalties work, it seems, is where they reflect an honest community sense of outrage -- where people truly believe the infraction is significant and therefore have no sympathy for violators. In those cases, that attitude gets communicated to the kids, too.
I think it's the same for why some schools with an open honor code (U.Va.), which should lead to tremendous abuse, seem not to suffer it. (OK, maybe U.Va. is a bad example recently but historically, it has been renowned as a cheat-free school.)
I'll offer here the same suggestion that gets me dirty looks from my English Department peers:
Stop assigning "standard" books and topics.
I mean, come on. "The Great Gatsby and the American Dream"? Could you be any more cliche? How about exerting a little more originality on the part of the teacher, either in material or topic? Find things for which there won't be lots of pre-written papers.
Also, follow through with lots of revisions. One of our truly excellent English teachers had an infinite-rewrite policy. Sure, you could probably buy the first paper -- but then you were stuck with it as you went through multiple rewrites. Evnetually you learned the book anyway, by gum!
So if 9/10 terrorists are muslim males, doesn't it make sense that more scrutiny should be placed on them, rather than seniors with heart conditions?
No. All you do is create a false sense of security, because the terrorists will recruit and use people who don't fit your profile. (And you can't keep a profile secret, since if it works, you're hassling exactly the people you're trying to keep it secret from.) Then the guards wave through some elderly woman who happens to be carrying a bomb.
The falseness of your analogy is this: The prostrate cancer isn't watching the medical profession and designing ways to compromise its diagnoses. Evolution happens a lot faster in the human world.
Look, I've got nothing against old people and Ted Kennedy, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with searching them. Random searches will only work if they are, well, random. As soon as you define a criterion, you define a loophole. That's OK if the criteria are actually relevant: This guy is carrying three bricks of C4; let's not let him on the plane. It's a disaster when the criteria are in fact orthogonal to the behavior you fear: This guy is Middle Eastern -- he must be stopped. This woman is WASP -- she must be OK.
Why else do you think "Al-Qaida said to recruit in Latin America"? Getting recruits who don't "fit the mold" would be a coup, especially if we fall victim to a profiling mentality.
I haven't watched (or subscribed to) cable TV for the last 7-8 months and my life hasn't been better.
Wait. Why should I stop watching TV if my life isn't going to get any better for doing it?
Oh, wait. You mean "my life has never been better [than the last 7-8 months]", in other words, your life now is better than at any other point in your history. I get it.
Language matters. Words mean something. Diction counts.
Well, in some fields, especially science, sponsored research is frequently the only research we can get.
First, that's not particularly true. Ever heard of DOE? NSF? NIH? For all the libertarians out there, one use government has is to conduct unbiased research. Can it be slanted? Yes. Is it, generally? No -- because there's no margin in it.
Second, in science -- unlike, say, product placement or psuedo-social legality studies -- there's a vibrant adverserial community who will review, validate, and/or shred your conclusions if they're poorly based. Science has no particular truth detector, but it's got a well-function BS detector. Sometimes it gets overwhelmed and sometimes radical new ideas don't get the play they deserve -- but the system is pretty good at self-correction.
In fact, I would expect that this MPAA study is eventually contradicted by a solidly-based, actually valid study. Alas it won't get the kind of press this did.
Doesn't that sort of system lend itself most readily to selective enforcement and abuse by any authority with the funds available to mount a prosecution?
Obviously selective prosecution is a danger in the legal system and has led to real abuses -- which is why DAs, for example, are watched pretty closely by citizens' groups. But you can't really eliminate it: There are finite resources and they need to be allocated. In civil cases, someone has to suffer damages to activate the law -- and it makes sense, IMHO, to say that only people who find the damages intolerable launch the suits. That is, if you do something which technically damages me but I don't care, why should the court system (or I) waste resources on following up?
This does, however, allow the legal system to drift out of touch with popular expectation, leading to outrage and confusion if the law is eventually enforced "out of the blue".
Notice that the first guideline references "nonprofit educational purposes." -- to wit, the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
That's one of the four things courts are to consider in deciding whether a use is fair use. The other three -- nature of the work; amount and substantiality of the copied portion; and effect on the potential market -- influence and can trump the first. For example, it is not legal for a teacher to photocopy an entire article or story for use in a class -- although many teachers (and indeed most people) would think that it was legal.
9. Since I'm planning to use my work for nonprofit educational purposes, I don't need permission.
Not necessarily. The key factor is not the user, but the nature of the material, how it is being used, and whether the new use adversely affects the value of the original work. Since even a nonprofit educational use can undermine the value of a copyrighted work, such organizations are not immune from copyright infringement suits.
I can't provide a reference for a school being prosecuted, though I suspect it has happened. That doesn't matter. My earlier point is that certain infringements are not, customarily, prosecuted -- but that doesn't render them "legal". Corporations don't pursue schools because (a) it is impractical, in general and (b) the damages won could probably never outweight the bad PR generated.
But that doesn't mean it's legal. Almost everyone, however, thinks that it's OK to copy for educational purposes -- end of story. Hence my statement that people hardly understand the IP regime and so cannot realistically be considered to "support" it.
Don't blame corporations for doing what they're programmed in their very DNA to do: turn a profit.
Last I checked, corporations were run by human beings. (Isn't that always the trope rolled out to counter attacks on "corporatism"?). And humans have this amazing thing called "a mind" that allows them to -- believe it or not -- choose. Specifically, they can choose not to follow the siren call of their "prgrammed DNA"; they actually be ethical.
I certainly do blame corporations for bastardizing the Olympics. I also blame the IOC for allowing, nay, encouraging it to happen. Guess what? There's more than enough blame to cover them both.
Oh. I see now. You don't actually understand IP law either. Whether or not your friends lose sleep over "Happy Birthday" (and my point was, they probably don't), it's still protected and they most likely don't know that. Also, though you might think school photocopies is "actually the classic example of the application of fair use doctrine", it is in fact an infringement and not legal unless the copyright holder explicitly says so. It is typically overlooked as impractical to enforce -- it is not allowed and is not a Fair Use as defined by the courts.
And that, by the way, was my point. Your "general population" neither understands nor approves of the actual state of intellectual property. They have a fuzzy, common-myth view of it and they go along with that, because they assume it "makes sense". When presented with the examples I offered earlier, every person I have talked to has commented "Well, that's not right" or somethng similar, indicating in fact a lack of support for the intellectual property laws as they actually exist (and are enforced).
he Brits and the French have a lot of worries with regards to unexploded ordnance (UXO), which we don't have to deal with here in the US.
There is, however, a considerable amount of UXO in the coastal waters of the US, remnants of U-boats brought down. Any good navigational chart of New York Harbor, for instance, has many sites marked as "unexploded ordinance" or "sunken U-boat". To be fair, I believe the total tonnage is still way lower than the Brits or French (or, I suspect, Germans) have to worry about.
the collecting of premiums and paying claims is just supporting their stock market habit.
This is true of all insurance, including malpractice. There's increasing evidence that the "runaway malpractice crisis" in America is actually a simple cyclical effect, as the market fluctuates. But pretty soon we're probably going to institute "tort reform" that will strip patients and consumers of redress in court, while doing nothing to actually rein in costs. But at least we'll stick it to all those blasted trial lawyers... well, except the appropriately housebroken corporate ones. (No one seems to ever notice that there are lawyers on both sides.)
You're welcome. Most people who bash the civilian space program aren't actually interested in hearing what benefits it's brought or how little actual money, in the end, is spent. And they love lumping it with the Department of Defense, ignoring that the DoD has its own very active space program.
I've noticed there's always a progression:
It consumes too much of the federal budget. When that's refuted,
It doesn't produce anything. When that's refuted,
It used to make sense but it doesn't produce anything anymore. When that's refuted,
It doesn't affect me in my daily life. When that's refuted,
The spinoffs (like microwave ovens or ski wear) are too penny-ante, consumer-ish and not worth the money -- not the great nobility of helping humankind. When that's refuted,
The spinoffs (like heart monitors or more reliable chips) are too esoteric and removed from daily life.
What they never admit is
I just don't like it and why can't I be an astronaut too?
Legislation won't help. Technology hasn't been able to help that much yet. Basically, advertising is here to stay, and you can do one of two things, make yourself invisible so you can't be advertised to, or accept it.
That's unnecessarily defeatist. Spam will always exist as long as it's profitable, as you say. Laws and tech can both raise the cost of spam or, equivalently, decrease its effectiveness. Imagine if all email programs came with a default-on advanced spam filter, and you had to go through hoops and hurdles to turn it off. How many people would choose to receive spam, even among those who (in my opinion, assininely) click through on the spam they receive?
Slashdot Mirror
You could lose the comma, but that would in fact change the nuance of what I was trying to say. That is, there's a bit of sarcasm going there... I'm perfectly aware that Slashdot has editors. They just don't seem to do the editing bit of their job.
Wow, I didn't think "DVD Jon" had even been alive for 30 years, much less working in this field!
Oh, wait. The poster meant that Jack Valenti is retiring after three decades. Hmmm, rather an unfortunate syntactic structure there, isn't it? Wouldn't it be great if Slashdot had editors, who could catch the most egregious bad grammar?
Let's not even get into "he took he"...
Language matter. Words mean something. Diction counts. Try learning some.
But isn't that equivalent to inviting the Boston strangler over for tea? Shame on you, Jack!
It's about how someone will steal the election... It's not our fault that everyone immediately jumps to the Republicans as the theives.
When a cell phone can punch a signal up to orbit without the benefit of relay stations, then it will be better than the communicators. Until then, no dice -- it depends on too large an infrastructure.
People don't seem to appreciate the inverse-square law effect for radio transmission...
Maybe it has to do with being from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program? Or maybe they just haven't gotten around to it yet?
But you're conflating two things here. I wouldn't argue against pre-reading some things (although that can bias your own reading) but I think you should in the end read the original as well. What's more, you say you never cracked the original books, but then say "without at least first getting some idea" -- which implies a second, i.e., actually reading the text.
I don't doubt you can get by, or even do well, grade-wise by just processing secondary sources. But your actual learning is in fact diluted, I believe.
Maybe. I'm doubtful. I got a BS and MS in Physics, and completed all but the thesis for a PhD in same, without ever once memorizing a fact or equation. Now, I can still recite most of the equations I had to use. Whhy? Because I used them so many damn times they became stuck in my brain anyway.
(If that counts as "memorization", then I agree with the parent post.)
Unless, of course, you do this from the very beginning of the course...
It isn't cheating according to any reasonable definition of plagiarism, either -- if you give the sources. Include a complete "works referenced" list and you're not cheating, you're doing research. Of course, if your "other people" turn out just to be, say, your classmates, then your work will naturally suffer...
My eight years of high school teaching tell me this: As a rule, humans don't learn from the misfortune of others. Harsh penalties don't, per se, seem to have the deterrent effect you would expect -- and I say this as a fan of a serious disciplinary system. Where harsh penalties work, it seems, is where they reflect an honest community sense of outrage -- where people truly believe the infraction is significant and therefore have no sympathy for violators. In those cases, that attitude gets communicated to the kids, too.
I think it's the same for why some schools with an open honor code (U.Va.), which should lead to tremendous abuse, seem not to suffer it. (OK, maybe U.Va. is a bad example recently but historically, it has been renowned as a cheat-free school.)
I mean, come on. "The Great Gatsby and the American Dream"? Could you be any more cliche? How about exerting a little more originality on the part of the teacher, either in material or topic? Find things for which there won't be lots of pre-written papers.
Also, follow through with lots of revisions. One of our truly excellent English teachers had an infinite-rewrite policy. Sure, you could probably buy the first paper -- but then you were stuck with it as you went through multiple rewrites. Evnetually you learned the book anyway, by gum!
No. All you do is create a false sense of security, because the terrorists will recruit and use people who don't fit your profile. (And you can't keep a profile secret, since if it works, you're hassling exactly the people you're trying to keep it secret from.) Then the guards wave through some elderly woman who happens to be carrying a bomb.
The falseness of your analogy is this: The prostrate cancer isn't watching the medical profession and designing ways to compromise its diagnoses. Evolution happens a lot faster in the human world.
Look, I've got nothing against old people and Ted Kennedy, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with searching them. Random searches will only work if they are, well, random. As soon as you define a criterion, you define a loophole. That's OK if the criteria are actually relevant: This guy is carrying three bricks of C4; let's not let him on the plane. It's a disaster when the criteria are in fact orthogonal to the behavior you fear: This guy is Middle Eastern -- he must be stopped. This woman is WASP -- she must be OK.
Why else do you think "Al-Qaida said to recruit in Latin America"? Getting recruits who don't "fit the mold" would be a coup, especially if we fall victim to a profiling mentality.
Wait. Why should I stop watching TV if my life isn't going to get any better for doing it?
Oh, wait. You mean "my life has never been better [than the last 7-8 months]", in other words, your life now is better than at any other point in your history. I get it.
Language matters. Words mean something. Diction counts.
First, that's not particularly true. Ever heard of DOE? NSF? NIH? For all the libertarians out there, one use government has is to conduct unbiased research. Can it be slanted? Yes. Is it, generally? No -- because there's no margin in it.
Second, in science -- unlike, say, product placement or psuedo-social legality studies -- there's a vibrant adverserial community who will review, validate, and/or shred your conclusions if they're poorly based. Science has no particular truth detector, but it's got a well-function BS detector. Sometimes it gets overwhelmed and sometimes radical new ideas don't get the play they deserve -- but the system is pretty good at self-correction.
In fact, I would expect that this MPAA study is eventually contradicted by a solidly-based, actually valid study. Alas it won't get the kind of press this did.
Obviously selective prosecution is a danger in the legal system and has led to real abuses -- which is why DAs, for example, are watched pretty closely by citizens' groups. But you can't really eliminate it: There are finite resources and they need to be allocated. In civil cases, someone has to suffer damages to activate the law -- and it makes sense, IMHO, to say that only people who find the damages intolerable launch the suits. That is, if you do something which technically damages me but I don't care, why should the court system (or I) waste resources on following up?
This does, however, allow the legal system to drift out of touch with popular expectation, leading to outrage and confusion if the law is eventually enforced "out of the blue".
That's one of the four things courts are to consider in deciding whether a use is fair use. The other three -- nature of the work; amount and substantiality of the copied portion; and effect on the potential market -- influence and can trump the first. For example, it is not legal for a teacher to photocopy an entire article or story for use in a class -- although many teachers (and indeed most people) would think that it was legal.
From TEN COMMON COPYRIGHT PERMISSION MYTHS by Attorney Lloyd J. Jassin:
I can't provide a reference for a school being prosecuted, though I suspect it has happened. That doesn't matter. My earlier point is that certain infringements are not, customarily, prosecuted -- but that doesn't render them "legal". Corporations don't pursue schools because (a) it is impractical, in general and (b) the damages won could probably never outweight the bad PR generated.
But that doesn't mean it's legal. Almost everyone, however, thinks that it's OK to copy for educational purposes -- end of story. Hence my statement that people hardly understand the IP regime and so cannot realistically be considered to "support" it.
Last I checked, corporations were run by human beings. (Isn't that always the trope rolled out to counter attacks on "corporatism"?). And humans have this amazing thing called "a mind" that allows them to -- believe it or not -- choose. Specifically, they can choose not to follow the siren call of their "prgrammed DNA"; they actually be ethical.
I certainly do blame corporations for bastardizing the Olympics. I also blame the IOC for allowing, nay, encouraging it to happen. Guess what? There's more than enough blame to cover them both.
Oh. I see now. You don't actually understand IP law either. Whether or not your friends lose sleep over "Happy Birthday" (and my point was, they probably don't), it's still protected and they most likely don't know that. Also, though you might think school photocopies is "actually the classic example of the application of fair use doctrine", it is in fact an infringement and not legal unless the copyright holder explicitly says so. It is typically overlooked as impractical to enforce -- it is not allowed and is not a Fair Use as defined by the courts.
And that, by the way, was my point. Your "general population" neither understands nor approves of the actual state of intellectual property. They have a fuzzy, common-myth view of it and they go along with that, because they assume it "makes sense". When presented with the examples I offered earlier, every person I have talked to has commented "Well, that's not right" or somethng similar, indicating in fact a lack of support for the intellectual property laws as they actually exist (and are enforced).
There is, however, a considerable amount of UXO in the coastal waters of the US, remnants of U-boats brought down. Any good navigational chart of New York Harbor, for instance, has many sites marked as "unexploded ordinance" or "sunken U-boat". To be fair, I believe the total tonnage is still way lower than the Brits or French (or, I suspect, Germans) have to worry about.
This is true of all insurance, including malpractice. There's increasing evidence that the "runaway malpractice crisis" in America is actually a simple cyclical effect, as the market fluctuates. But pretty soon we're probably going to institute "tort reform" that will strip patients and consumers of redress in court, while doing nothing to actually rein in costs. But at least we'll stick it to all those blasted trial lawyers... well, except the appropriately housebroken corporate ones. (No one seems to ever notice that there are lawyers on both sides.)
I've noticed there's always a progression:
It consumes too much of the federal budget. When that's refuted,
It doesn't produce anything. When that's refuted,
It used to make sense but it doesn't produce anything anymore. When that's refuted,
It doesn't affect me in my daily life. When that's refuted,
The spinoffs (like microwave ovens or ski wear) are too penny-ante, consumer-ish and not worth the money -- not the great nobility of helping humankind. When that's refuted,
The spinoffs (like heart monitors or more reliable chips) are too esoteric and removed from daily life.
What they never admit is
I just don't like it and why can't I be an astronaut too?
No, no, no. The act is surprisingly honestly named. Now, you CAN spam (in the sense of, are able to), and it's protected.
That's unnecessarily defeatist. Spam will always exist as long as it's profitable, as you say. Laws and tech can both raise the cost of spam or, equivalently, decrease its effectiveness. Imagine if all email programs came with a default-on advanced spam filter, and you had to go through hoops and hurdles to turn it off. How many people would choose to receive spam, even among those who (in my opinion, assininely) click through on the spam they receive?