I keep a bunch of reference manuals, research articles, photos, music etc... This is mostly static stuff, the mtimes generally wouldn't change once the files are placed there. This is the prefect data to use as a decoy. You don't need to demonstrate regular usage. I honestly don't pull up my family photo's, ot the D reference manual, or... *that* often, but I do want to keep them where they're avaialble to me.
Change copyright laws so that non-natural entities (companies,corps, etc) can't own copyrights for longer than 5 years. Copyrights are only naturally awarded to natural creators. So now, if a company has one or more employees working on something, those employees get the copyright, and can hold it for a much longer peroid of time, say 25 years. Companies could license the copyright exclusively from their employees to retain the longer copyright terms, but doing so means the actual creators get payment for it. Companies could put into their employment contracts that employees must give their employers first option on licensing any copyrightable materials created on company time, at reasonable prices. If the employee leaves the company, then they have to renegotiate terms for continued licensing. Alternatively, companies can do whay they do now and claim copyright for all work done by their employees on company time, but then they get the five year limit. This system means the actual creators get financial renumeration for their work, and are given direct incentives to continue creating.
My theory here is that if a company with all it's resources (I'm thinking large company) cannot capitalise on copyrighted material within 5 years, that material probably isn't worth much anyway. Individuals, or small businesses where letting individuals keep copyright is a much easier thing anyway, who don't have the resources, get a longer time peroid to extract financial gain from the material.
The US Department of Health is concerned mainly with management of public health, maintianing the public health care system, and responding to widespread health emergencies. The NIH is a research body primarily involved with research in the health and biosciences, and with distributing funding to other organisations doing research in those fields.
If the case for man-made global warming was so compelling, there would be no need for all these shenanigans. The science should be able to stand on its own. And yet, it clearly does not.
Science is never able to stand on its own when challenging broadly held opinions. It takes 20 to 30 years on average for cutting edge science (i.e. the stuff getting published in per reviewed journals) to filter down into textbooks used to educate children where the ideas will gradually, over the 12 ~15 year course of those childrens' educations, be absorbed and start to form a new boradly accepted social idea. That's 32~45 years before non-radical science gets accepted. If the anthropogenic climate change camp are even half right, we as a species can't afford to wait 45 years, maybe even longer because of such organised resistance.
But on the other hand, the "it's happening and it's all human activity" side is RIFE with corruption, falsified studies, poor models, groupthink, and generally shitty behavior too.
Police can't pull over current vehicles with human drivers. They can't force a driver to pull over. Is is illegal to ignore the police and not pull over. The same applied to autonomous vehicles. The police roll up, flash lights, sound the siren, and you are legally required to pull over. The only thing that's changed is that you are now required to take over manual control and pull over. You could still refuse to, and it would still be illegal, except that the not-so-high-speed chase that ensues would be a hell of a lot safer for everyone as long as the autonomous vehicle remains in control. If the driver takes manual control and start speeding away, no override would stop that anyway.
Mainly they mean mail and web servers. If there are tons of SMTP or HTTP connections initiated to your IP address, your account will get suspended. I imagine DNS would be be monitored too but I confess I'm not 100% certain about the tehcnicalities.
Look at the subject again. I'm trying to make the point that
not everyone can afford busniess accounts, and the point here is that in a P2P internet situation, casual users shouldn't be required to
in order to truly have a P2P internet, everyone needs to be able to run a server, and practically caps either have to be huge or non-existent
uncapped reasonably priced interent are not available everywhere in the world... In south africa, the business ADSL packages are not generally uncapped, they're just prioritized over non business accounts, and shaped differently, but still shaped. Oh yeah, and 512K up, max, ever. If you want more upload, your looking at more than $625 a month...
Performance and capacity would be another reason... I've just today had to recode a python program implementing a recursive algorithm into C. The python version ran out of stack space using actual recursion, so I tried to convert the routine to use and explicit stack. The result may have worked, but the amount of nesting and extra conditions did nothing to make it more readable. If goto had been available, it would have been perfectly clear. I recoded in C, and the routine actual uses less lines than the python version, despite some fairly funky string handling. "goto" has it's place, and not just as a second best last ditch alternative in the absence of certain structured programming syntax/idioms. Sometimes, using "goto" produces better, more legible code.
So as long as you have one method of exercising a right, all others can be removed? Then I can deny you the use of a specific method of communication, and not have that considered a limitation of your right to free speech and/or association. What's to stop me throwing you into solitary confinement. That's not an infringement of the right to free speech, as long as you are allowed to scream your protests... where no one will hear. Sorry, but you not only need to be free from interference in exercising your rights, but also in exercising them effectively, i.e. you have to be allowed to scream where others can hear you. In the modern age, that means the right to publish on the internet. I too am not saying internet access is a right. But I am saying that selective or discriminatory limitation of access to the internet is a violation of the right to free speech.
It doesn't matter if your crimila/government records are sealed, expunged or otherwise made unavailable. Your facebook account, and your friends and ex-friends facebook accounts still exist. And those compromising photos too...
You don't have to be in government to be in politics. You might be making a speech in a campaign to be elected for the first time. Also, politics doesn't involve only the government. There are plenty of political issues about which many non-government affiliated people have opinions, and can make speeches. Such speeches would be deemed political in nature.
Stereotypes are social heuristics. The human brain can't treat every person it meets individually; It's cognitively less expensive to group people together and treat them in a particular way. You're interaction with the coffee barista at your local starbucks is based on stereotypes, and they're interaction with you is equally based on the stereotype of you being a customer. Only when you have sufficient repeat contact with a person can you begin to start differentiating them from the stereotype(s) you lumped them into. Most of the time, these sterotypes work for us, i.e. they facilitate social interaction with strangers. Some of the time though, just like in AI, you use a shitty heuristic. The problem is not dealing with people using sterotypes, it's being too rigid in your application of stereotypes and hampering social interaction.
Re:How is it different from a play?
on
A Copyright Nightmare
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't know about in the U.S., but here in South Africa, political speeches are specifically exempted from copyright, and are automatically placed in the public domain. I can only assume that there are similar measure in most countries, otherwise, how could politicians quote each other without suing each other into oblivion;) Oooooh that's a good idea... if we can fool the *IAA into lobying for all political speeches to be copyrighted, then the politicians will sue each other out of office, clearing the way for someone sensible... hey, we can dream.
Dubya has nominated another caveman for a federal appeals court. Refreshingly, the Democratic Party is organizing opposition.
The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
Some rules might be called for when these acts directly affect other people's interests. For incest, contraception could be mandatory to avoid risk of inbreeding. For prostitution, a license should be required to ensure prostitutes get regular medical check-ups, and they should have training and support in insisting on use of condoms. This will be an advance in public health, compared with the situation today.
For necrophilia, it might be necessary to ask the next of kin for permission if the decedent's will did not authorize it. Necrophilia would be my second choice for what should be done with my corpse, the first being scientific or medical use. Once my dead body is no longer of any use to me, it may as well be of some use to someone. Besides, I often enjoy rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants).
Emphasis mine... This seems to be a pretty standard libertatrian viewpoint really. As far as child porn is concerned, as long as people under the age of 18 (or whatever majority is where you are) can't legally give consent, nothing here has changed.
There was research published this year on the "wisdom of the crowds". The idea being that if you ask enough people a question with a numerical answer, and average their results it gets pretty accurate at over 100 people, unless those people are allowed to communicate. While the research was done specifically on numerical questions/knowledge (quantitative), I suspect the same might be true of non-numeric/qualitative information. Certainly anyone who uses the internet as a news source (qualitative information) needs to especially careful about this, because the one huge advantage 'old media' has over the internet is slower feedback mechanisms, which means a wider and more diverse sample set for each unit of information ("fact").
That makes no sense. Either I want to play game A and game B (and game C... but have a limited budget and can only afford 1, 2 or whatever of them), or I really am only interested in game A. If game A is unavailable, the industry is losing out by me pirating game A, because I will still likely spend my money to obtain games B, C etc to the extent I can afford in the first case (I wanted to play them all); Or I'll not spend my money on the other games because they never interested me in the first place. People don't budget according the game class/entertainment class. They're not going to reserve their budget for 'an FPS game', they'll reserve it for 'THAT FPS GAME' and if I can't get that, then bollocks to that, I'll go watch some movies or buy some dope or whatever.
e.g. I like CRPG's -- I would spend money on skyrim, but it's not available in my country... I'm not going to spend my money on need for speed: the latest regurgitation (tm), nor the latest FPS. I'll also not spend my money on Dragon Age, or other CRPG's unless it was already on my list of interesting things, in which case I'd buy even I pirated game A.
The only time your logic works is gift buying. Buying cousin Johnny a game means the $100 is going to spent on a game regardless of preferences, but again, piracy of the first doesn't stop the money from being spent.
Of course all of this assumes that all the games aren't going to be pirated anyway...
It's the single biggest advantage and disadvantage of the open source software philosophy. If the software doesn't do EXACTLY want you want you can fork it or even rewrite from scratch, both of which are almost always easier than getting the authors of the current software to agree to incorporate your own changes. Consider that getting agreement/consensus is often simply impossible. The UNIX philosophy of "write your software to do one thing and do it well" goes a long way towards mitigating the costs of forking/rewriting. Just because user's want an integrated experience of media management and playback, doesn't mean the underlying software can't be completely modular.
We (the rest of the world) would love it if the U.S. would withdraw to it's isolationist policies of the early 20th century. The world would probably be a much better place, expect for one thing. The U.S. still fucks up the common (as in tragedy of the commons). The U.S. shares our planet, and our atmosphere, and our oceans. If the U.S. could shut itself away and pollute only it's own atmosphere and water supplies, I for one would vote for that.
What you're suggesting is that scientists be actively prohibited from using previously gathered data to perform secondary or even novel experiments. It's not a failure in budgeting. You can't budget for the experimental outcome, because YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS YET, that's why you're performing the fucking experiment in the first place. And because people like you tend to end up in decision making positions regarding scientific funding, budget items like #3 below just never get funding, and often the only way to get funding for #2 is hide money away elsewhere in the budget. Otherwise, put that research on hold until the next grant cycle rolls around
Expereriment to determine if X is true
If X is true then Y is likely, and that costs a bunch less than Testing for Z
If X is not true, then Z is likely and this is really interesting but costs a whole fuck load to test for
They should, in their original budget, have determined that they were able to do something with it before they budgeted money to create it.
They do. They perform their experiment, but why should they then have to toss the data away. Car analogy: You want to drive middleofnowheresville but no road exists yet. For the sake of argument off-roading is not an option, so you need to build a road. It's not ridiculously expensive to do so, but not so cheap you can afford to do every time you need to get there. You do (this is data generation). You drive there (this is data analysis/further experimentation). And then you send some dudes backs along the road to tear it up (this is what you advocate), OR you could leave the road there, because other people can use it too (do different experiments with the data)
A good scientist will design the experiment before collecting the data. If he spots patterns, it's because something interesting happened to another experiment. Then he'll design a new experiment to collect data on the interesting thing.
Flippant response: A good scientist doesn't delete his raw data...
More sober response: Except to do an experiment said scientist might need a sequence. And that sequence needs to be stored somewhere, often in a publicly accessible database as per funding stipulations. And that sequence has literally gigabytes more information than he needs for his experiment, because he's only looking at part of the sequence. Consider also that sequencing a small genome may take a few days in the lab, but annotating can take weeks or even months of human time. And the sequence is just the tip of the iceberg, it doesn't tell us anything because we need to know how the genome is expressed, and how the expressed genes are regulated, and how they are modified after transcription, and how they are modified after translation, and how the proteins that translation forms interact with other proteins and sometimes with the DNA itself. Life is messy, and singling out stuff for targeted experimentation in the biosciences is a lot more difficult than in physics, and even chemistry.
Seriously, this is a non-problem. Don't waste resources keeping and managing the data if you can make more. And I can't imagine how you can't make more data from DNA. The stuff is everywhere.
Sequencing may be getting cheaper, but it's not so cheap that scientists facing funding cuts can afford to throw away data simply to recreate it. Also,
DNA isn't the only thing that's sequenced or used. Protein's are notoriously hard to purify and sequence, RNA can also be difficult to get in sufficient quantities. The only reason DNA is plentiful is because it's so easy to copy using PCR, but those copies are not necessarily perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't have enough vegetable portions... the slice of pizza was missing
I keep a bunch of reference manuals, research articles, photos, music etc... This is mostly static stuff, the mtimes generally wouldn't change once the files are placed there. This is the prefect data to use as a decoy. You don't need to demonstrate regular usage. I honestly don't pull up my family photo's, ot the D reference manual, or ... *that* often, but I do want to keep them where they're avaialble to me.
Change copyright laws so that non-natural entities (companies,corps, etc) can't own copyrights for longer than 5 years. Copyrights are only naturally awarded to natural creators. So now, if a company has one or more employees working on something, those employees get the copyright, and can hold it for a much longer peroid of time, say 25 years. Companies could license the copyright exclusively from their employees to retain the longer copyright terms, but doing so means the actual creators get payment for it. Companies could put into their employment contracts that employees must give their employers first option on licensing any copyrightable materials created on company time, at reasonable prices. If the employee leaves the company, then they have to renegotiate terms for continued licensing. Alternatively, companies can do whay they do now and claim copyright for all work done by their employees on company time, but then they get the five year limit. This system means the actual creators get financial renumeration for their work, and are given direct incentives to continue creating.
My theory here is that if a company with all it's resources (I'm thinking large company) cannot capitalise on copyrighted material within 5 years, that material probably isn't worth much anyway. Individuals, or small businesses where letting individuals keep copyright is a much easier thing anyway, who don't have the resources, get a longer time peroid to extract financial gain from the material.
The US Department of Health is concerned mainly with management of public health, maintianing the public health care system, and responding to widespread health emergencies. The NIH is a research body primarily involved with research in the health and biosciences, and with distributing funding to other organisations doing research in those fields.
So we're all motherfuckers?
If the case for man-made global warming was so compelling, there would be no need for all these shenanigans. The science should be able to stand on its own. And yet, it clearly does not.
Science is never able to stand on its own when challenging broadly held opinions. It takes 20 to 30 years on average for cutting edge science (i.e. the stuff getting published in per reviewed journals) to filter down into textbooks used to educate children where the ideas will gradually, over the 12 ~15 year course of those childrens' educations, be absorbed and start to form a new boradly accepted social idea. That's 32~45 years before non-radical science gets accepted. If the anthropogenic climate change camp are even half right, we as a species can't afford to wait 45 years, maybe even longer because of such organised resistance.
But on the other hand, the "it's happening and it's all human activity" side is RIFE with corruption, falsified studies, poor models, groupthink, and generally shitty behavior too.
Some might call it fighting fire with fire ;)
even though we get to keep your entry for ourselves
Police can't pull over current vehicles with human drivers. They can't force a driver to pull over. Is is illegal to ignore the police and not pull over. The same applied to autonomous vehicles. The police roll up, flash lights, sound the siren, and you are legally required to pull over. The only thing that's changed is that you are now required to take over manual control and pull over. You could still refuse to, and it would still be illegal, except that the not-so-high-speed chase that ensues would be a hell of a lot safer for everyone as long as the autonomous vehicle remains in control. If the driver takes manual control and start speeding away, no override would stop that anyway.
Mainly they mean mail and web servers. If there are tons of SMTP or HTTP connections initiated to your IP address, your account will get suspended. I imagine DNS would be be monitored too but I confess I'm not 100% certain about the tehcnicalities.
Look at the subject again. I'm trying to make the point that
Tell that to my ISP, who won't let me run a 'server' as part of my terms and conditions...
Performance and capacity would be another reason... I've just today had to recode a python program implementing a recursive algorithm into C. The python version ran out of stack space using actual recursion, so I tried to convert the routine to use and explicit stack. The result may have worked, but the amount of nesting and extra conditions did nothing to make it more readable. If goto had been available, it would have been perfectly clear. I recoded in C, and the routine actual uses less lines than the python version, despite some fairly funky string handling. "goto" has it's place, and not just as a second best last ditch alternative in the absence of certain structured programming syntax/idioms. Sometimes, using "goto" produces better, more legible code.
So as long as you have one method of exercising a right, all others can be removed? Then I can deny you the use of a specific method of communication, and not have that considered a limitation of your right to free speech and/or association. What's to stop me throwing you into solitary confinement. That's not an infringement of the right to free speech, as long as you are allowed to scream your protests ... where no one will hear. Sorry, but you not only need to be free from interference in exercising your rights, but also in exercising them effectively, i.e. you have to be allowed to scream where others can hear you. In the modern age, that means the right to publish on the internet. I too am not saying internet access is a right. But I am saying that selective or discriminatory limitation of access to the internet is a violation of the right to free speech.
It doesn't matter if your crimila/government records are sealed, expunged or otherwise made unavailable. Your facebook account, and your friends and ex-friends facebook accounts still exist. And those compromising photos too...
You don't have to be in government to be in politics. You might be making a speech in a campaign to be elected for the first time. Also, politics doesn't involve only the government. There are plenty of political issues about which many non-government affiliated people have opinions, and can make speeches. Such speeches would be deemed political in nature.
Stereotypes are social heuristics. The human brain can't treat every person it meets individually; It's cognitively less expensive to group people together and treat them in a particular way. You're interaction with the coffee barista at your local starbucks is based on stereotypes, and they're interaction with you is equally based on the stereotype of you being a customer. Only when you have sufficient repeat contact with a person can you begin to start differentiating them from the stereotype(s) you lumped them into. Most of the time, these sterotypes work for us, i.e. they facilitate social interaction with strangers. Some of the time though, just like in AI, you use a shitty heuristic. The problem is not dealing with people using sterotypes, it's being too rigid in your application of stereotypes and hampering social interaction.
I don't know about in the U.S., but here in South Africa, political speeches are specifically exempted from copyright, and are automatically placed in the public domain. I can only assume that there are similar measure in most countries, otherwise, how could politicians quote each other without suing each other into oblivion ;) Oooooh that's a good idea... if we can fool the *IAA into lobying for all political speeches to be copyrighted, then the politicians will sue each other out of office, clearing the way for someone sensible... hey, we can dream.
being required to answer work communications after hours was called being 'being on call', and yes you were paid for it... Good for Brazil
From the link re necrophillia
Dubya has nominated another caveman for a federal appeals court. Refreshingly, the Democratic Party is organizing opposition.
The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
Some rules might be called for when these acts directly affect other people's interests. For incest, contraception could be mandatory to avoid risk of inbreeding. For prostitution, a license should be required to ensure prostitutes get regular medical check-ups, and they should have training and support in insisting on use of condoms. This will be an advance in public health, compared with the situation today.
For necrophilia, it might be necessary to ask the next of kin for permission if the decedent's will did not authorize it. Necrophilia would be my second choice for what should be done with my corpse, the first being scientific or medical use. Once my dead body is no longer of any use to me, it may as well be of some use to someone. Besides, I often enjoy rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants).
Emphasis mine... This seems to be a pretty standard libertatrian viewpoint really. As far as child porn is concerned, as long as people under the age of 18 (or whatever majority is where you are) can't legally give consent, nothing here has changed.
There was research published this year on the "wisdom of the crowds". The idea being that if you ask enough people a question with a numerical answer, and average their results it gets pretty accurate at over 100 people, unless those people are allowed to communicate. While the research was done specifically on numerical questions/knowledge (quantitative), I suspect the same might be true of non-numeric/qualitative information. Certainly anyone who uses the internet as a news source (qualitative information) needs to especially careful about this, because the one huge advantage 'old media' has over the internet is slower feedback mechanisms, which means a wider and more diverse sample set for each unit of information ("fact").
That makes no sense. Either I want to play game A and game B (and game C... but have a limited budget and can only afford 1, 2 or whatever of them), or I really am only interested in game A. If game A is unavailable, the industry is losing out by me pirating game A, because I will still likely spend my money to obtain games B, C etc to the extent I can afford in the first case (I wanted to play them all); Or I'll not spend my money on the other games because they never interested me in the first place. People don't budget according the game class/entertainment class. They're not going to reserve their budget for 'an FPS game', they'll reserve it for 'THAT FPS GAME' and if I can't get that, then bollocks to that, I'll go watch some movies or buy some dope or whatever.
e.g. I like CRPG's -- I would spend money on skyrim, but it's not available in my country... I'm not going to spend my money on need for speed: the latest regurgitation (tm), nor the latest FPS. I'll also not spend my money on Dragon Age, or other CRPG's unless it was already on my list of interesting things, in which case I'd buy even I pirated game A.
The only time your logic works is gift buying. Buying cousin Johnny a game means the $100 is going to spent on a game regardless of preferences, but again, piracy of the first doesn't stop the money from being spent.
Of course all of this assumes that all the games aren't going to be pirated anyway...
It's the single biggest advantage and disadvantage of the open source software philosophy. If the software doesn't do EXACTLY want you want you can fork it or even rewrite from scratch, both of which are almost always easier than getting the authors of the current software to agree to incorporate your own changes. Consider that getting agreement/consensus is often simply impossible. The UNIX philosophy of "write your software to do one thing and do it well" goes a long way towards mitigating the costs of forking/rewriting. Just because user's want an integrated experience of media management and playback, doesn't mean the underlying software can't be completely modular.
We (the rest of the world) would love it if the U.S. would withdraw to it's isolationist policies of the early 20th century. The world would probably be a much better place, expect for one thing. The U.S. still fucks up the common (as in tragedy of the commons). The U.S. shares our planet, and our atmosphere, and our oceans. If the U.S. could shut itself away and pollute only it's own atmosphere and water supplies, I for one would vote for that.
What you're suggesting is that scientists be actively prohibited from using previously gathered data to perform secondary or even novel experiments. It's not a failure in budgeting. You can't budget for the experimental outcome, because YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS YET, that's why you're performing the fucking experiment in the first place. And because people like you tend to end up in decision making positions regarding scientific funding, budget items like #3 below just never get funding, and often the only way to get funding for #2 is hide money away elsewhere in the budget. Otherwise, put that research on hold until the next grant cycle rolls around
They should, in their original budget, have determined that they were able to do something with it before they budgeted money to create it.
They do. They perform their experiment, but why should they then have to toss the data away. Car analogy: You want to drive middleofnowheresville but no road exists yet. For the sake of argument off-roading is not an option, so you need to build a road. It's not ridiculously expensive to do so, but not so cheap you can afford to do every time you need to get there. You do (this is data generation). You drive there (this is data analysis/further experimentation). And then you send some dudes backs along the road to tear it up (this is what you advocate), OR you could leave the road there, because other people can use it too (do different experiments with the data)
A good scientist will design the experiment before collecting the data. If he spots patterns, it's because something interesting happened to another experiment. Then he'll design a new experiment to collect data on the interesting thing.
Flippant response: A good scientist doesn't delete his raw data...
More sober response: Except to do an experiment said scientist might need a sequence. And that sequence needs to be stored somewhere, often in a publicly accessible database as per funding stipulations. And that sequence has literally gigabytes more information than he needs for his experiment, because he's only looking at part of the sequence. Consider also that sequencing a small genome may take a few days in the lab, but annotating can take weeks or even months of human time. And the sequence is just the tip of the iceberg, it doesn't tell us anything because we need to know how the genome is expressed, and how the expressed genes are regulated, and how they are modified after transcription, and how they are modified after translation, and how the proteins that translation forms interact with other proteins and sometimes with the DNA itself. Life is messy, and singling out stuff for targeted experimentation in the biosciences is a lot more difficult than in physics, and even chemistry.
Seriously, this is a non-problem. Don't waste resources keeping and managing the data if you can make more. And I can't imagine how you can't make more data from DNA. The stuff is everywhere.
Sequencing may be getting cheaper, but it's not so cheap that scientists facing funding cuts can afford to throw away data simply to recreate it. Also, DNA isn't the only thing that's sequenced or used. Protein's are notoriously hard to purify and sequence, RNA can also be difficult to get in sufficient quantities. The only reason DNA is plentiful is because it's so easy to copy using PCR, but those copies are not necessarily perfect.