The author fails to realize that this is just about the single most user favored DRM scheme around. Napster? It's free untill you stop paying them, which could include Napster going down, or even some company pulling the right for Napster to allow distrobution. I'm not sure about moving music purchased from Napster to ANY portable music player (I'm sure it can be done, just not sure if it's legal.) iTunes specifically allows multiple copies of your track to be made, particularilly to iPods, but also to burned CD. Any DRM scheme proposed by the RIAA or the likes would be draconian in comparison, probably not even allowing you to transfer them to a new computer if you upgrade.
And what do his alternatives have in common?
1)Ripping your own CDs
2)Ripping your friends' CDs
3)Downloading from Peer to Peer sites
4)Purchasing CD, ripping then returning said CD?
I guess what they would have in common is that they are all against the law and the RIAA is aggressively bringing suit to people who do these things. Even if the RIAA is wrong, they have much deeper pockets to cover legal costs than any individual. It would take an entire consumer protection agency to actually protect the rights of music lovers in the courtroom, and that agency would be subject to eventual coersion, corruption and simply being shoved to the wayside by the massive lobbying the RIAA and related groups are capable of doing.
Sorry to say it, but it seems Apple is one of the only groups that is capable of and willing to stand up to the legal and tactical bullying of the RIAA on issues such as the $1 price point. Microsoft would be strong enough to do this but I highly doubt they would want to do that to their image as their primary market is the business world. Apple has tried to go for the hip and edgy image for at least as long as the Macintosh has been around and would only strengthen their image if it appeared they were fighting for consumer's rights on this issue in particular. (Apple probably doesn't actually care about the user's rights, but has enough invested to make a good show of it anyways.)
D'oh. Forgot to preview. Slashdot should force a preview for every comment (like myspace and just about every other website I've seen does) so this happens less.
From another article on the topic, the hiring firm had decided after the verbal agreement to lower the pay. If anyone would be liable for breach of contract, it would be the hiring firm. And then he would be seriously in violation of breach of confidentiality by doing this... if I knew of a lawyer that did this I would do everything in my power to never hire him. And I don't believe that responding "Bla bla bla" is really that bad as the extremely unprofessional threat the lawyer made: "You need to realize that this is a very small legal community, especially the criminal defense bar. Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?". To me this sounds like a very thinly veiled threat that he is going to try to get her disbarred for 1)not accepting the job after he had changed the terms of the contract by lowering her pay and then 2)making a rebuttal to his statement that her actions were unprofessional.
Now, maybe she should have thought a little bit more carefully in dealing with this creep, but you think a seasoned lawyer would be the one showing some modicum of professionalism. Instead, he acted like a whiny little brat, used semi-vulgar language, made threats and then forwarded a conversation on to others that may have had a small expectancy of privacy.
For a little clarification, Chloramphenicol is still used widely in veterinary applications. There are just extra precautions taken to prevent ingestion (even absorption through the skin.) and it generally is not sent home with owners to administer to pets.
And 21 people is indeed a small trial, but this is probably just a stepping stone to larger trials. And some diseases are worth the risk of possible side effects.
Not exactly: One of the hypotheses from the article posits that the apparant rapid decline in more educated patients is due to the fact that the disease has progressed further before they showed symptoms, so it appears that their mind is degrading faster because they are actually in a later stage of alzheimers. Basically, the more educated people are able to function pretty adequately with a small amount of damage while people with less education are impaired by a small amount of damage.
Average age of patient diagnosis vs amount of formal education could make for an interesting supporting dataset.
Never had coding nightmares, but then again I'm not a programmer.
I HAVE experienced Tetris nightmares, though. A feeling that something terribly bad would happen if I didn't get the pieces in JUST right. Except in my dreams Tetris wasn't so geometrically simple: fluid pieces with fractal motion (Don't know any better way of describing it, patterns within subpatterns within patterns of motions. Colors swirling... so one.) But after these dreams I would often get a serious bump in my Tetris ability. My highest score was somewhere just below 300 lines... My roomates swore that I was levitating just a little bit while playing that game.
It is so highly unlikely that one turbine would have any significant effect on the ocean currents as to cause any noticeable environmental change. But then Bermuda will eventually need more power, and so will Cuba, Florida, Tennesse, New York, Ireland, France, Spain, Morocco, Mauritania, Brazil, Venezuela and Maybe back to Puerto Rico... eventually this could work out to a whole lot of turbines with the ability to sap a significant amount of energy out of the gulf stream. A single automobile causes virtually no incremental environmental damage., but an entire traffic jam's worth of automobiles does.
Habits are something you do without really thinking about it, almost reflexive. Addictions are something you do so much that other important areas of your life suffer. Some people even use habit and addiction interchangeably.
Hmm... while looking up addiction on Wikipedia I came across an interesting experiment which basically shows that the animal based research on drug addiction we have is flawed. Basically, the animals used in most drug addiction studies are not in a natural environment; they are put in tiny cages with no social interaction. This would be like locking people in a small room (say an isolation ward of a prison cell) and giving them access to drugs... of course they are going to take a lot of them. If you put the rats in a more normal environment, they show almost no tendancy to become addicted to the various drugs given. So, according to the results of the experiment, drug addiction is not so much the result of exposure to the drug itself as it is a symptom of being depressed or otherwise messed up from your environment.
Basically, this would mean that people are only prone to addictions (chemical or psychological) if the rest of their life is not fulfulling. Even if this is true, drug use or any addictive behavior would potentially cause a feedback loop where excess drug use would cause a decline in quality of life, which would lead to depression, which would lead to more addictive behaviour.
Well, I should go out in the bitter cold for a cigarette now.
I wasn't saying that the converse would PROVE evolution, I was saying that no change would DISprove evolution. There are tenets of evolution that could potentially be falsified in laboratory or field study conditions, thus disproving evolution. I do not know of any such experiments that falsified evolution, but I have heard of many situations in which evolution was not disproved. These experiments and studies bolster the likelihood that evolution is a sound theory, and sometimes will refine the understand mechanics behind evolution, but they do not outright prove evolution.
The experiment you suggest would indeed be a subset of the concept I was talking about, where removal of some organism suited for a particular niche would be the environmental change. Some animal changing to fill the niche (and changing genetically, not simply behaviorally) would indeed support the theory of evolution, and no animal changing to fill the niche would indeed falsify the theory of evolution. However the question would be how long does it take for an organism to change enough to fit this niche? This would probably take a long enough time to not be feasible as a scientific study. Although an experiment could possibly be designed in such a fashion using very rapidly reproducing organisms (I.E. bacteria, possibly insects or rodents.)
However, other scenarious could disprove evolution as well. Bacteria never gaining resistance to antibiotics would be an example. And again, bacterial resistance as we know it does not in and of itself PROVE evolution, as there could be other explanations (Lamarkian heredity, the hand of god... err... the noodly appendage of the FSM... etc.) But organisms changing in such a manner as predicted by the theory of evolution does strengthen the theory. Especially if you are able to quantize how long it will take for the changes to take place, but I don't know if evolutionary theory is that precise yet.
I've seen much of the same behaviour in small breed dog owners. I even saw a special on chickens where there was a lady who had a chicken for a pet that she fawned over in much the same manner. I think this is unrelated to toxiplasmosis and more related to strange attractions to animals of that size. Probably misdirected child-rearing behavior, but I'm an animal care professional, not a human psychologist. Human psychology does play a huge role in how pets are cared for, though. Most evidentally is in hoarders (crazy cat ladys living in filthy conditions with hundreds of cats) which has been linked to a form of obsessive compulsion disorder... the compulsion is to "rescue" the cats from whatever fate may befall them in the outside world, but the reality is they can not give them the basic care needed (or even give it to themselves.) One of the more common attributes is that these people will remember the smallest detail about the actual "rescue" (when they took the animal in) but will have practically no idea of the cat's personality quirks, medical needs, or many other things you would expect any pet owner or animal caretaker to know. Not all hoarders fall into this particular class, but the worst offenders generally do.
Honestly, I would not put Bush anywhere near Hitler. I do, however, believe that comparisons between the policies of Bush and McCarthy would prove valid or at least interesting.
Natural evolution would be falsified if you changed the environment of an ecosystem and the individual oranisms as well as the composite of the entire ecosystem stayed the same. We have many many examples of changing some factor of the local environment leading to changes in the organisms.
They will probably find another related job which does not require datacenter access for those employees who refuse the chip. However, any future employees would need to get the chip to get the job. Firing existing employees for refusal to get implanted would, IMO, be much more draconian and lawsuit-prone than not hiring someone for said refusal. Although this could get them in trouble for violating various disabilities acts if a person refuses due to a medical or psychological condition; I could see the implant contraindicated for people suffering from extreme hemophilia: The needles used for implants are huge, about 12gauge. For comparison that is about as big as the wire used in a standard chain link fence. And I'd imagine this would put undue stress on a potential employee with a clinically diagnosed phobia of needles.
Assuming the chips and readers are compatible, you could easilly use an existing chip with your next employer. If not, well I would sure hate to be a consultant or temp. This technology really doesn't seem that it will be any more capable of allowing an employer to monitor employees than a current RFID badge or key card is. The biggest advantage is probably that the employee no longer has to worry about leaving their keys somewhere and being locked out. I suppose it would make physical theft of badges a bit more noticeable, and detection of an intrusion or potential intrusion seems to be the main benefit of any physical security system I have seen. Even an unpickable lock wouldn't prevent someone from cutting a hole in a wall to gain access, but that leaves a pretty big indicator that security was breached. On the downside, a duplicated RFID chip would be more difficult to notice than on a badge as the person trying to break in would have to also duplicate the badge to a decent extent if there is a chance that someone else will see them using it. while an implanted RFID chip wouldn't actually even have to be implanted as the location of the implant is covered with clothing in most situations where this chip would be required.
I think what Bloomberg is saying is you better damn well be sure that you are aware enough of what's going on in your surroundings to not be caught playing solitaire on work time by THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK. What I love is the whole sympathy ploy the article is pushing "employee for six years" "father of a toddler" etc etc etc. And like "but everyone else does it" is really anything approaching an excuse.
If you believe that, I have a business proposition for you.
1)Write scathing reviews of products
2)Send a message to the manufacturers of said products telling them that if they send you money you will continue to write similar reviews which help bolster brand recognition among your readerbase.
3)Sit back and try to figure out how to make money off these cease & decist letters the companies send you.
The article lacks details that would tell how much significance this study carries. 1)Was the second group aware of the ratings the first group gave? If they weren't aware of the ratings, then popularity would be the only thing they could go on. 2)Were members of the first group able to communicate with each other? The article says the members were pulled from a teen interest web site, so is this a community website of sorts? In that case members of the first group could have told their friends which songs were good and which weren't. 3)Was the second group aware of whether or not the first group could or couldn't talk about the bands, telling others which titles are good and bad? 4)How did they know that the bands were unknown to the population studied?
One should really call it String Hypothesis or String Postulate.
In cases like this, untested ideas about the function of the universe, I personally like the term "model." You can use it to posit the inner workings of the universe and why things happen, but untill the technology is there and the experiments have been run it is not fully a scientific theory. But I believe it does fall within the bounds of model. And the nice thing about this is that with a model, you can make some assumptions that may or may not be true to simply explore how the world would work supposing this is true.
My favorite correlary is light. We have a model of light behaving as a wave, and that model has been proven to be wrong under certain cirumstances. We have a model of light behaving as a particle, and that model can also be proven wrong under certain circumstances. However, the fact that each model is not completely correct does not mean that they are useless. The basis of the model can be used to make further predictions about the way the world works, or even to produce technology through engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd put it square in the FUD camp, myself.
The author fails to realize that this is just about the single most user favored DRM scheme around. Napster? It's free untill you stop paying them, which could include Napster going down, or even some company pulling the right for Napster to allow distrobution. I'm not sure about moving music purchased from Napster to ANY portable music player (I'm sure it can be done, just not sure if it's legal.) iTunes specifically allows multiple copies of your track to be made, particularilly to iPods, but also to burned CD. Any DRM scheme proposed by the RIAA or the likes would be draconian in comparison, probably not even allowing you to transfer them to a new computer if you upgrade.
And what do his alternatives have in common?
1)Ripping your own CDs 2)Ripping your friends' CDs 3)Downloading from Peer to Peer sites
4)Purchasing CD, ripping then returning said CD?
I guess what they would have in common is that they are all against the law and the RIAA is aggressively bringing suit to people who do these things. Even if the RIAA is wrong, they have much deeper pockets to cover legal costs than any individual. It would take an entire consumer protection agency to actually protect the rights of music lovers in the courtroom, and that agency would be subject to eventual coersion, corruption and simply being shoved to the wayside by the massive lobbying the RIAA and related groups are capable of doing.
Sorry to say it, but it seems Apple is one of the only groups that is capable of and willing to stand up to the legal and tactical bullying of the RIAA on issues such as the $1 price point. Microsoft would be strong enough to do this but I highly doubt they would want to do that to their image as their primary market is the business world. Apple has tried to go for the hip and edgy image for at least as long as the Macintosh has been around and would only strengthen their image if it appeared they were fighting for consumer's rights on this issue in particular. (Apple probably doesn't actually care about the user's rights, but has enough invested to make a good show of it anyways.)
You can convince him of this by letting him convince you that a non-paid employee incurs less debt.
Next PSP generation will be able to make phone calls, I'm sure!
I think you mispelled Nokia N-Gage.
D'oh. Forgot to preview. Slashdot should force a preview for every comment (like myspace and just about every other website I've seen does) so this happens less.
What this article failed to mention that many others did (such as this one) that the firm that she applied at reduced the salary after she had agreed to work there. I think that the way she worded it was a fairly professional response in this situation. I think that the hiring lawyer telling her to call him on his personal cellphone to talk about it may be quite unprofessional. What it sounds like happened is once she made her decision to not take the job, she emailed him and left a message at the firm, which sounds fairly reasonable to me. For all we know, she may have intended to leave an official letter during business hours and this was just a heads up that she will not accept the new terms. If you look at all the other scheister moves this guy pulls (including forwarding the correspondences on to his friends... extremely unprofessional, if not opening himself up to a defamation suit by failing to include certain details of the encounter) she probably felt that working for him at all would be a career limiting move. I know I would avoid working with this guy in any professional manner, much less working for him.
From another article on the topic, the hiring firm had decided after the verbal agreement to lower the pay. If anyone would be liable for breach of contract, it would be the hiring firm. And then he would be seriously in violation of breach of confidentiality by doing this... if I knew of a lawyer that did this I would do everything in my power to never hire him. And I don't believe that responding "Bla bla bla" is really that bad as the extremely unprofessional threat the lawyer made: "You need to realize that this is a very small legal community, especially the criminal defense bar. Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?". To me this sounds like a very thinly veiled threat that he is going to try to get her disbarred for 1)not accepting the job after he had changed the terms of the contract by lowering her pay and then 2)making a rebuttal to his statement that her actions were unprofessional.
Now, maybe she should have thought a little bit more carefully in dealing with this creep, but you think a seasoned lawyer would be the one showing some modicum of professionalism. Instead, he acted like a whiny little brat, used semi-vulgar language, made threats and then forwarded a conversation on to others that may have had a small expectancy of privacy.
Sorry, didn't mean to make it sound like I was discounting your post. I was just trying to roll with the topic a little, put in a casual side note.
For a little clarification, Chloramphenicol is still used widely in veterinary applications. There are just extra precautions taken to prevent ingestion (even absorption through the skin.) and it generally is not sent home with owners to administer to pets.
And 21 people is indeed a small trial, but this is probably just a stepping stone to larger trials. And some diseases are worth the risk of possible side effects.
I remember seeing that on a poster with a picture of a monkey as a kid. The poster was in a closet in my parents' attic.
Not exactly: One of the hypotheses from the article posits that the apparant rapid decline in more educated patients is due to the fact that the disease has progressed further before they showed symptoms, so it appears that their mind is degrading faster because they are actually in a later stage of alzheimers. Basically, the more educated people are able to function pretty adequately with a small amount of damage while people with less education are impaired by a small amount of damage.
Average age of patient diagnosis vs amount of formal education could make for an interesting supporting dataset.
Never had coding nightmares, but then again I'm not a programmer.
I HAVE experienced Tetris nightmares, though. A feeling that something terribly bad would happen if I didn't get the pieces in JUST right. Except in my dreams Tetris wasn't so geometrically simple: fluid pieces with fractal motion (Don't know any better way of describing it, patterns within subpatterns within patterns of motions. Colors swirling... so one.) But after these dreams I would often get a serious bump in my Tetris ability. My highest score was somewhere just below 300 lines... My roomates swore that I was levitating just a little bit while playing that game.
It is so highly unlikely that one turbine would have any significant effect on the ocean currents as to cause any noticeable environmental change. But then Bermuda will eventually need more power, and so will Cuba, Florida, Tennesse, New York, Ireland, France, Spain, Morocco, Mauritania, Brazil, Venezuela and Maybe back to Puerto Rico... eventually this could work out to a whole lot of turbines with the ability to sap a significant amount of energy out of the gulf stream. A single automobile causes virtually no incremental environmental damage., but an entire traffic jam's worth of automobiles does.
What you'll notice in a generation or two when the climate changes is a breakdown of the gulf-stream, causing the turbine to no longer work.
Habits are something you do without really thinking about it, almost reflexive. Addictions are something you do so much that other important areas of your life suffer. Some people even use habit and addiction interchangeably.
Hmm... while looking up addiction on Wikipedia I came across an interesting experiment which basically shows that the animal based research on drug addiction we have is flawed. Basically, the animals used in most drug addiction studies are not in a natural environment; they are put in tiny cages with no social interaction. This would be like locking people in a small room (say an isolation ward of a prison cell) and giving them access to drugs... of course they are going to take a lot of them. If you put the rats in a more normal environment, they show almost no tendancy to become addicted to the various drugs given. So, according to the results of the experiment, drug addiction is not so much the result of exposure to the drug itself as it is a symptom of being depressed or otherwise messed up from your environment.
Basically, this would mean that people are only prone to addictions (chemical or psychological) if the rest of their life is not fulfulling. Even if this is true, drug use or any addictive behavior would potentially cause a feedback loop where excess drug use would cause a decline in quality of life, which would lead to depression, which would lead to more addictive behaviour.
Well, I should go out in the bitter cold for a cigarette now.
I wasn't saying that the converse would PROVE evolution, I was saying that no change would DISprove evolution. There are tenets of evolution that could potentially be falsified in laboratory or field study conditions, thus disproving evolution. I do not know of any such experiments that falsified evolution, but I have heard of many situations in which evolution was not disproved. These experiments and studies bolster the likelihood that evolution is a sound theory, and sometimes will refine the understand mechanics behind evolution, but they do not outright prove evolution.
The experiment you suggest would indeed be a subset of the concept I was talking about, where removal of some organism suited for a particular niche would be the environmental change. Some animal changing to fill the niche (and changing genetically, not simply behaviorally) would indeed support the theory of evolution, and no animal changing to fill the niche would indeed falsify the theory of evolution. However the question would be how long does it take for an organism to change enough to fit this niche? This would probably take a long enough time to not be feasible as a scientific study. Although an experiment could possibly be designed in such a fashion using very rapidly reproducing organisms (I.E. bacteria, possibly insects or rodents.)
However, other scenarious could disprove evolution as well. Bacteria never gaining resistance to antibiotics would be an example. And again, bacterial resistance as we know it does not in and of itself PROVE evolution, as there could be other explanations (Lamarkian heredity, the hand of god... err... the noodly appendage of the FSM... etc.) But organisms changing in such a manner as predicted by the theory of evolution does strengthen the theory. Especially if you are able to quantize how long it will take for the changes to take place, but I don't know if evolutionary theory is that precise yet.
I've seen much of the same behaviour in small breed dog owners. I even saw a special on chickens where there was a lady who had a chicken for a pet that she fawned over in much the same manner. I think this is unrelated to toxiplasmosis and more related to strange attractions to animals of that size. Probably misdirected child-rearing behavior, but I'm an animal care professional, not a human psychologist. Human psychology does play a huge role in how pets are cared for, though. Most evidentally is in hoarders (crazy cat ladys living in filthy conditions with hundreds of cats) which has been linked to a form of obsessive compulsion disorder... the compulsion is to "rescue" the cats from whatever fate may befall them in the outside world, but the reality is they can not give them the basic care needed (or even give it to themselves.) One of the more common attributes is that these people will remember the smallest detail about the actual "rescue" (when they took the animal in) but will have practically no idea of the cat's personality quirks, medical needs, or many other things you would expect any pet owner or animal caretaker to know. Not all hoarders fall into this particular class, but the worst offenders generally do.
Honestly, I would not put Bush anywhere near Hitler. I do, however, believe that comparisons between the policies of Bush and McCarthy would prove valid or at least interesting.
Natural evolution would be falsified if you changed the environment of an ecosystem and the individual oranisms as well as the composite of the entire ecosystem stayed the same. We have many many examples of changing some factor of the local environment leading to changes in the organisms.
They will probably find another related job which does not require datacenter access for those employees who refuse the chip. However, any future employees would need to get the chip to get the job. Firing existing employees for refusal to get implanted would, IMO, be much more draconian and lawsuit-prone than not hiring someone for said refusal. Although this could get them in trouble for violating various disabilities acts if a person refuses due to a medical or psychological condition; I could see the implant contraindicated for people suffering from extreme hemophilia: The needles used for implants are huge, about 12gauge. For comparison that is about as big as the wire used in a standard chain link fence. And I'd imagine this would put undue stress on a potential employee with a clinically diagnosed phobia of needles.
Assuming the chips and readers are compatible, you could easilly use an existing chip with your next employer. If not, well I would sure hate to be a consultant or temp. This technology really doesn't seem that it will be any more capable of allowing an employer to monitor employees than a current RFID badge or key card is. The biggest advantage is probably that the employee no longer has to worry about leaving their keys somewhere and being locked out. I suppose it would make physical theft of badges a bit more noticeable, and detection of an intrusion or potential intrusion seems to be the main benefit of any physical security system I have seen. Even an unpickable lock wouldn't prevent someone from cutting a hole in a wall to gain access, but that leaves a pretty big indicator that security was breached. On the downside, a duplicated RFID chip would be more difficult to notice than on a badge as the person trying to break in would have to also duplicate the badge to a decent extent if there is a chance that someone else will see them using it. while an implanted RFID chip wouldn't actually even have to be implanted as the location of the implant is covered with clothing in most situations where this chip would be required.
I think what Bloomberg is saying is you better damn well be sure that you are aware enough of what's going on in your surroundings to not be caught playing solitaire on work time by THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK. What I love is the whole sympathy ploy the article is pushing "employee for six years" "father of a toddler" etc etc etc. And like "but everyone else does it" is really anything approaching an excuse.
If you believe that, I have a business proposition for you.
1)Write scathing reviews of products
2)Send a message to the manufacturers of said products telling them that if they send you money you will continue to write similar reviews which help bolster brand recognition among your readerbase.
3)Sit back and try to figure out how to make money off these cease & decist letters the companies send you.
The Forbes story is only mentioning the number of video iPods sold. The Apple release seems to be total iPod sales.
The article lacks details that would tell how much significance this study carries. 1)Was the second group aware of the ratings the first group gave? If they weren't aware of the ratings, then popularity would be the only thing they could go on. 2)Were members of the first group able to communicate with each other? The article says the members were pulled from a teen interest web site, so is this a community website of sorts? In that case members of the first group could have told their friends which songs were good and which weren't. 3)Was the second group aware of whether or not the first group could or couldn't talk about the bands, telling others which titles are good and bad? 4)How did they know that the bands were unknown to the population studied?
One should really call it String Hypothesis or String Postulate.
In cases like this, untested ideas about the function of the universe, I personally like the term "model." You can use it to posit the inner workings of the universe and why things happen, but untill the technology is there and the experiments have been run it is not fully a scientific theory. But I believe it does fall within the bounds of model. And the nice thing about this is that with a model, you can make some assumptions that may or may not be true to simply explore how the world would work supposing this is true.
My favorite correlary is light. We have a model of light behaving as a wave, and that model has been proven to be wrong under certain cirumstances. We have a model of light behaving as a particle, and that model can also be proven wrong under certain circumstances. However, the fact that each model is not completely correct does not mean that they are useless. The basis of the model can be used to make further predictions about the way the world works, or even to produce technology through engineering.