What stops people already in the largest communities from using content from the big ones to get content from the small ones and then put it on the big ones where there's more to trade for?
JRRT made it very clear during his lifetime that he didn't want anyone else writing in his mythos, going so far as to write his publisher to find some way to prevent a would-be sequel writer.
so I responded to that premise. I also said that I thought Silmarillion was the best of the CT editions based on JRRT's work. There's no excuse for the poor quality of the other CT books, like Unfinished Tales, Translations from the Elvish, except legal rights - not talent or skill.
If CT were interested in quality rather than a gig he deserves only by inheritance, he would either find a better writer (easy) or just publish cleaned up manuscripts and indices. Instead, he acts like a Middle Earth scion who squanders his dynasty's riches through pride. So ends an Age.
As an example of how they forgo more profit to gain more power, ultimately over the market for even more profit, I note that gas prices are mysteriously dropping right before the election that threatens Republican Congressional majorities, though oil prices and other cost drivers are even higher than when they started to rise to unprecedented heights.
The beauty of the BT protocol is that greater popularity means faster downloads, due to more simultaneous sources of content. So I'd expect there to eventually result just the biggest BT network, attracting everyone from slower, smaller networks. Like eBay, or any other increasingly "perfect capital market".
And I'd expect the content available to eventually "diffuse" across these networks, equalizing in availability on all of them, especially the largest.
But BT is now several years old, with many global users, and there are still lots of little networks and very different content available. What's working against those basic borg trends?
"Right now, a consortium of three universities is for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which doesn't have enough in-house expertise in NLP."
If one of these NLP "expert" systems can extract fact or opinion from that sentence, we should delete it.
Just because your situation worked like that doesn't mean they're obligated to do it that way. Or that they're not. Until I hear from someone with firsthand experience (or citation of such) of the actual legal precedents that are surely long established, I don't believe I will speculate on how it is legally specified.
They are already handing it over to the teacher/school which assigned it. As I mentioned in another post in this thread, there's already lots of precedent establishing exactly which rights the school retains, and which the student. I'd like to see someone who knows what is the existing rights retention tell us what we're basing these on.
Meanwhile, I still think the students would complain less if they were compensated for this use of their work, whether they have the right to complain or not.
FWIW, the magic of Shakespeare is the double (and more) entendres of his language, whether originally when first performed, or as he changed the use of words by using them so compellingly. That kind of copying has made the culture stronger.
The papers are written on request by the teacher/school. It's a lot like a "work for hire", which would be owned by the teacher/school, except the writer typically is paying the school.
I'm sure there's already lots of case law on who owns the content produced by students. Schools use that kind of content all the time - from grad students, it's the lifeblood of their system. There's got to already be lots of precedent establishing which rights are retained by the students, and which aren't. Maybe it isn't fair, maybe it should be changed, maybe TII.com is the catalyst for that change. But I doubt it's currently unresolved.
If TurnItIn.com paid students a bounty for every match of a plagairized document against their "original" in the database, they'd stop complaining. If most students aren't cheaters, but the submitters charge for the education they're "enforcing" (or charge a fine to cheaters), then there should be money for the smaller fraction who are used for cheating.
This database is a lot like a registry of music performances, comparing against "cover" versions found in the wild. Except that the right to cover a song can't be bought, it's charged when discovered. The database is enforcing the intellectual property of the "original" authors, protecting them from plagiarism.
No, I mean the government must fix problems that the market can fix, but that the market doesn't fix.
Even the moon isn't being done yet, though the government proved how two generations ago. Cancer is a good example of how the market harvest only the "low hanging fruit", like painkillers and symptom treatments, unless the government organized research for "the greater good" of longterm health at the expense of (neverending) shortterm profits.
The thing about cultivating the low hanging fruit is that most industries can keep less generally beneficial, but higher profit at lowest risk commerce filling the pipeline. The risk is the main controlling factor. Basic science, for example, is a risky investment that rarely pays off in actual profits until after many years, and many failures. Educating poor children is another risk, compared to educating rich children, in paying dividends. Even broadband deployment into poorer or less residential neighborhoods is a risk that telcos/cablecos are refusing to take until forced. Sometimes it's competition that forces them, which is why municipal broadband/wireless efforts are now such a hot issue, over 10 years into America's Internet boom. Economics of competition is simple - in theory. In practice, there's lots of kinks in the pipes that make lots of money working against "progress". But that progress is required by people, especially when there are foreign countries whose governments are forcing investment in that progress, in competition with us.
Government is a monopoly created by the people (even if they don't realize it). So it should maintain the natural monopolies like you mentioned, and police the market to prohibit or control private monopolies. Health insurance (distinct from health "care") is a natural monopoly, too, like the rest of the economic systems that suffer in competition from waste and service of financial goals in conflict with human rights. And of course government is responsible for fixing problems the market isn't fixing, even if it can.
After you deal with corporations which service only the "low hanging fruit" and ignore the rest of the market because its profitability is too low to prioritize, you realize that government is necessary to kick business in the ass all the time, or only the richest have opportunities and security.
How long have you been a libertarian? Have you noticed that people stop being libertarians after several years actually working with capitalists, unless they're writers, academics, politicians, or others who never have a real job?
Do you really think that $6B is enough? Do you think it would have any effect without the government, including the ex/presidents working on it? Don't you think that most of the problems this private system is addressing are problems with the target countries' governments serving private corporate interests instead of their people?
Since lasers can convert energy to photon beams with very high efficiency, it seems they'd be a much better propulsion than rockets. And since lasers don't carry extra reaction mass ejected like a rocket, they get more acceleration for energy. In fact, these lasers need not carry their own fuel, rather pushed by lasers aimed from the center like the usual solar sail, but capturing some of the energy for reemission to augment the thrust.
I saw a presentation in 1990 about Soviet microwave laser tech designed to 90%+ efficiency in transmitting and receiving for the Soviet space platform's earthbound solar energy application. Do you have any citations to any of the Russian versions of this tech, either the old transmission laser or the propulsion laser you saw on TV?
I point out that the site publishing that supporting commentary on this article has been terribly wrong before, has built a reputation for ignoring, even detesting, science, even reality, and the TrollMods go ape. Because TrollMods live under the bridge in Freeperville.
I guess if George Bush can privatize our government into (worse than) uselessness, then Bill Clinton can make a private charity do the public works we need the government to do.
At what point does America need the charity to bail it out? And can we skip all the nasty bits until then?
His invention seems bogus - the crux where resonating the microwaves produce more thrust than just pointing them seems like he's getting both relativity and Newton wrong.
But what about the simple case of conservation of momentum in a regular laser? If I fire a laser in space, lots of photons with tiny, but real mass go flying in one direction, all lined up very consistently along one force vector at near the speed of light. That seems like some momentum transferred in one direction. Won't the laser move in the opposite direction? Accelerating its much greater mass at a smaller rate, but still a cumulative rate?
Lasers can convert stored energy at a very high efficiency. They don't have to heat up or mechanically vibrate much, compared to other transducers. And they direct the energy in on narrow direction so practically all of its force vector is summing in one direction. And microchip laser arrays mean lots of photons can be lased by a relatively small mass of laser.
If that actually works, how about positioning another projectile in the path of the beam? Won't the same amount of momentum that's pushing the laser also push the target in the opposite direction? Two projectiles moving apart away from their starting point, conserving momentum to zero but pushing both away into space. Make both into lasers with "solar" sails to catch each others' beams, and they're moving apart with double the momentum.
This one doesn't harness relativity, just Newton's re/action law, and something like the photoelectric effect. So Einstein gets some credit, but in devices already cheap and proven. If it actually works.
FreeRepublic.com is also the site that applied the theory that invading Iraq to protect Americans would produce nothing but grateful Iraqi crowds throwing flowers and turning as democratic as Ohio and Florida. When they tested that one in the field, it created tens of thousands of dead and maimed Americans, which require more American military, indefinitely.
They're perpetual motion experts over at Freeperville.
A former Diebold consultant has now admitted that he helped Diebold change the SW in eVoting machines in Democratic districts in Georgia 2002. This was the race in which (D) Max Cleland, triple-amputee Vietnam hero incumbent, was beaten in a surprise victory in which (R) Saxby Chamblis reversed Cleland's 5 point lead into a 7 point loss, an "overnight success" of a dozen points.
Georgia officials handed over the election to Diebold:
The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. "We ran the election," says Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced (Georgia Secretary of State Cathy) Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it."
They exploited their illegally unsupervised opportunity:
Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."
Then they covered up their exploit:
"It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."
It worked. We don't know the role of the patch in Georgia's vote tallies, just as we don't even know what was in the patch. We didn't even know about the extent to which Diebold ran the Georgia election until these guys started talking - years after the fact.
Remember, Diebold is the company whose CEO said in 2003 about the following year's reelection of Bush that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
And Diebold is counting the votes again this year.
I agree, basically. Though they're just cheating their school boss, if anyone. If the tests don't cover all that is to be learned, and random sampling reports a representative sample of what was learned, then why shouldn't they? And why shouldn't they do it every year, if it's new students? Why should the teacher's job be hard? Their test is just whether their students learn the subject. For which there are few if any good tests ever applied. They don't even have to cheat - they just have to flatter the school's execs, not piss anyone off, and maybe publish some info once in a while.
Does that make it OK for someone else to cheat in their class? It's not a competition between teacher and student for a grade, it's competition between student and ignorance for knowledge. Unless all you're interested in is grades, in which case cheating should be OK with you.
JRRT died with much work left unfinished. Since then, starting with The Silmarillion, CT has been completing them, even producing finished works that are only a tiny percentage contributed by JRRT. TS is much less JRRT work than is, say, Translations from the Elvish. If all CT did were to compile manuscripts in quality editions, perhaps sponsor critical analyses, even extract timelines, geneologies and other analysis, he would have served the scholastic role you mention. But he did even more, turning "editing" into coauthorship, diluting with his untalented hand one of the 20th Century's greatest writing talents.
I'm not complaining about Tolkienia being "boring". I've got a shelf of Tolkien nonfiction, including two editions of The Tolkien Companion and even a "Middle Earth Quiz book". I'm complaining about Christopher Tolkien passing himself off as a coauthor with JRR solely on the merits of JRR's last will and testament, rather than merit. I read TS, Unfinished Tales and much of the Translations from the Elvish before I realized that I was doing myself, and JRR's legacy, a disservice by treating them the same as "Smith of Wooton Major", The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, "Leaf by Niggle" or other actual "extra stories" by JRR. Now that CT has muddied the waters with his editions of History of Middle Earth, we might never get a truly clean compilation of just JRR's actual work for scholars and enthusiasts to enjoy "uncut".
As I said, some good tests are random samples of the taught knowledge. When "teaching to the test" means teaching only what passes the test, without teaching the other knowledge of the subject that is not tested, there's no difference between teaching and cheating. It's still cheating, because the subject wasn't learned, while the grades say it was.
What the hell are you talking about? You said "Of course, Democrats are more well-known for exploiting paper ballots. in a post containing nothing else.
Now you won't back that up, even though I asked you to clearly. You tried to change the subject of the story to "Democrats exploiting paper ballots", I asked you to back that up, and now you're trying to change the subject back to something else.
You made an incriminating claim, even claiming it was well known. Now you're scrambling to spin away from it. I hate Republicans like you, who try to exploit any system, whether it's online discussions or ballot systems, to make attacks and escape the consequences. Shrugging only clarifies that you're not just a liar, but you don't even care that you're exposed as a liar.
Slashdot Mirror
Which agenda turns responses into trolls spreading only FUD against a whole scientific discipline?
What stops people already in the largest communities from using content from the big ones to get content from the small ones and then put it on the big ones where there's more to trade for?
so I responded to that premise. I also said that I thought Silmarillion was the best of the CT editions based on JRRT's work. There's no excuse for the poor quality of the other CT books, like Unfinished Tales, Translations from the Elvish, except legal rights - not talent or skill.
If CT were interested in quality rather than a gig he deserves only by inheritance, he would either find a better writer (easy) or just publish cleaned up manuscripts and indices. Instead, he acts like a Middle Earth scion who squanders his dynasty's riches through pride. So ends an Age.
As an example of how they forgo more profit to gain more power, ultimately over the market for even more profit, I note that gas prices are mysteriously dropping right before the election that threatens Republican Congressional majorities, though oil prices and other cost drivers are even higher than when they started to rise to unprecedented heights.
The beauty of the BT protocol is that greater popularity means faster downloads, due to more simultaneous sources of content. So I'd expect there to eventually result just the biggest BT network, attracting everyone from slower, smaller networks. Like eBay, or any other increasingly "perfect capital market".
And I'd expect the content available to eventually "diffuse" across these networks, equalizing in availability on all of them, especially the largest.
But BT is now several years old, with many global users, and there are still lots of little networks and very different content available. What's working against those basic borg trends?
"Right now, a consortium of three universities is for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which doesn't have enough in-house expertise in NLP."
If one of these NLP "expert" systems can extract fact or opinion from that sentence, we should delete it.
Just because your situation worked like that doesn't mean they're obligated to do it that way. Or that they're not. Until I hear from someone with firsthand experience (or citation of such) of the actual legal precedents that are surely long established, I don't believe I will speculate on how it is legally specified.
They are already handing it over to the teacher/school which assigned it. As I mentioned in another post in this thread, there's already lots of precedent establishing exactly which rights the school retains, and which the student. I'd like to see someone who knows what is the existing rights retention tell us what we're basing these on.
Meanwhile, I still think the students would complain less if they were compensated for this use of their work, whether they have the right to complain or not.
FWIW, the magic of Shakespeare is the double (and more) entendres of his language, whether originally when first performed, or as he changed the use of words by using them so compellingly. That kind of copying has made the culture stronger.
The papers are written on request by the teacher/school. It's a lot like a "work for hire", which would be owned by the teacher/school, except the writer typically is paying the school.
I'm sure there's already lots of case law on who owns the content produced by students. Schools use that kind of content all the time - from grad students, it's the lifeblood of their system. There's got to already be lots of precedent establishing which rights are retained by the students, and which aren't. Maybe it isn't fair, maybe it should be changed, maybe TII.com is the catalyst for that change. But I doubt it's currently unresolved.
If TurnItIn.com paid students a bounty for every match of a plagairized document against their "original" in the database, they'd stop complaining. If most students aren't cheaters, but the submitters charge for the education they're "enforcing" (or charge a fine to cheaters), then there should be money for the smaller fraction who are used for cheating.
This database is a lot like a registry of music performances, comparing against "cover" versions found in the wild. Except that the right to cover a song can't be bought, it's charged when discovered. The database is enforcing the intellectual property of the "original" authors, protecting them from plagiarism.
No, I mean the government must fix problems that the market can fix, but that the market doesn't fix.
Even the moon isn't being done yet, though the government proved how two generations ago. Cancer is a good example of how the market harvest only the "low hanging fruit", like painkillers and symptom treatments, unless the government organized research for "the greater good" of longterm health at the expense of (neverending) shortterm profits.
The thing about cultivating the low hanging fruit is that most industries can keep less generally beneficial, but higher profit at lowest risk commerce filling the pipeline. The risk is the main controlling factor. Basic science, for example, is a risky investment that rarely pays off in actual profits until after many years, and many failures. Educating poor children is another risk, compared to educating rich children, in paying dividends. Even broadband deployment into poorer or less residential neighborhoods is a risk that telcos/cablecos are refusing to take until forced. Sometimes it's competition that forces them, which is why municipal broadband/wireless efforts are now such a hot issue, over 10 years into America's Internet boom. Economics of competition is simple - in theory. In practice, there's lots of kinks in the pipes that make lots of money working against "progress". But that progress is required by people, especially when there are foreign countries whose governments are forcing investment in that progress, in competition with us.
Government is a monopoly created by the people (even if they don't realize it). So it should maintain the natural monopolies like you mentioned, and police the market to prohibit or control private monopolies. Health insurance (distinct from health "care") is a natural monopoly, too, like the rest of the economic systems that suffer in competition from waste and service of financial goals in conflict with human rights. And of course government is responsible for fixing problems the market isn't fixing, even if it can.
After you deal with corporations which service only the "low hanging fruit" and ignore the rest of the market because its profitability is too low to prioritize, you realize that government is necessary to kick business in the ass all the time, or only the richest have opportunities and security.
How long have you been a libertarian? Have you noticed that people stop being libertarians after several years actually working with capitalists, unless they're writers, academics, politicians, or others who never have a real job?
Do you really think that $6B is enough? Do you think it would have any effect without the government, including the ex/presidents working on it? Don't you think that most of the problems this private system is addressing are problems with the target countries' governments serving private corporate interests instead of their people?
Since lasers can convert energy to photon beams with very high efficiency, it seems they'd be a much better propulsion than rockets. And since lasers don't carry extra reaction mass ejected like a rocket, they get more acceleration for energy. In fact, these lasers need not carry their own fuel, rather pushed by lasers aimed from the center like the usual solar sail, but capturing some of the energy for reemission to augment the thrust.
I saw a presentation in 1990 about Soviet microwave laser tech designed to 90%+ efficiency in transmitting and receiving for the Soviet space platform's earthbound solar energy application. Do you have any citations to any of the Russian versions of this tech, either the old transmission laser or the propulsion laser you saw on TV?
Moderation -1
100% Troll
I point out that the site publishing that supporting commentary on this article has been terribly wrong before, has built a reputation for ignoring, even detesting, science, even reality, and the TrollMods go ape. Because TrollMods live under the bridge in Freeperville.
I guess if George Bush can privatize our government into (worse than) uselessness, then Bill Clinton can make a private charity do the public works we need the government to do.
At what point does America need the charity to bail it out? And can we skip all the nasty bits until then?
His invention seems bogus - the crux where resonating the microwaves produce more thrust than just pointing them seems like he's getting both relativity and Newton wrong.
But what about the simple case of conservation of momentum in a regular laser? If I fire a laser in space, lots of photons with tiny, but real mass go flying in one direction, all lined up very consistently along one force vector at near the speed of light. That seems like some momentum transferred in one direction. Won't the laser move in the opposite direction? Accelerating its much greater mass at a smaller rate, but still a cumulative rate?
Lasers can convert stored energy at a very high efficiency. They don't have to heat up or mechanically vibrate much, compared to other transducers. And they direct the energy in on narrow direction so practically all of its force vector is summing in one direction. And microchip laser arrays mean lots of photons can be lased by a relatively small mass of laser.
If that actually works, how about positioning another projectile in the path of the beam? Won't the same amount of momentum that's pushing the laser also push the target in the opposite direction? Two projectiles moving apart away from their starting point, conserving momentum to zero but pushing both away into space. Make both into lasers with "solar" sails to catch each others' beams, and they're moving apart with double the momentum.
This one doesn't harness relativity, just Newton's re/action law, and something like the photoelectric effect. So Einstein gets some credit, but in devices already cheap and proven. If it actually works.
FreeRepublic.com is also the site that applied the theory that invading Iraq to protect Americans would produce nothing but grateful Iraqi crowds throwing flowers and turning as democratic as Ohio and Florida. When they tested that one in the field, it created tens of thousands of dead and maimed Americans, which require more American military, indefinitely.
They're perpetual motion experts over at Freeperville.
Georgia officials handed over the election to Diebold:
They exploited their illegally unsupervised opportunity:
Then they covered up their exploit:
It worked. We don't know the role of the patch in Georgia's vote tallies, just as we don't even know what was in the patch. We didn't even know about the extent to which Diebold ran the Georgia election until these guys started talking - years after the fact.
Remember, Diebold is the company whose CEO said in 2003 about the following year's reelection of Bush that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
And Diebold is counting the votes again this year.
I agree, basically. Though they're just cheating their school boss, if anyone. If the tests don't cover all that is to be learned, and random sampling reports a representative sample of what was learned, then why shouldn't they? And why shouldn't they do it every year, if it's new students? Why should the teacher's job be hard? Their test is just whether their students learn the subject. For which there are few if any good tests ever applied. They don't even have to cheat - they just have to flatter the school's execs, not piss anyone off, and maybe publish some info once in a while.
Does that make it OK for someone else to cheat in their class? It's not a competition between teacher and student for a grade, it's competition between student and ignorance for knowledge. Unless all you're interested in is grades, in which case cheating should be OK with you.
JRRT died with much work left unfinished. Since then, starting with The Silmarillion, CT has been completing them, even producing finished works that are only a tiny percentage contributed by JRRT. TS is much less JRRT work than is, say, Translations from the Elvish. If all CT did were to compile manuscripts in quality editions, perhaps sponsor critical analyses, even extract timelines, geneologies and other analysis, he would have served the scholastic role you mention. But he did even more, turning "editing" into coauthorship, diluting with his untalented hand one of the 20th Century's greatest writing talents.
I'm not complaining about Tolkienia being "boring". I've got a shelf of Tolkien nonfiction, including two editions of The Tolkien Companion and even a "Middle Earth Quiz book". I'm complaining about Christopher Tolkien passing himself off as a coauthor with JRR solely on the merits of JRR's last will and testament, rather than merit. I read TS, Unfinished Tales and much of the Translations from the Elvish before I realized that I was doing myself, and JRR's legacy, a disservice by treating them the same as "Smith of Wooton Major", The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, "Leaf by Niggle" or other actual "extra stories" by JRR. Now that CT has muddied the waters with his editions of History of Middle Earth, we might never get a truly clean compilation of just JRR's actual work for scholars and enthusiasts to enjoy "uncut".
You're so confused, or worse, that all you can think about is demands that I respond to the same things in the article that you're making an issue.
Which is blinding you to the fact that you made a flat statement, won't back it up, and can't change the subject with me.
What you don't care about is how obvious are your tricks. They fail.
What, people like me who hate liars?
It must suck to be so numb from denial that you can't feel anything but outrage that turns simple logic into your illusion of "ad hominem" logic.
As I said, some good tests are random samples of the taught knowledge. When "teaching to the test" means teaching only what passes the test, without teaching the other knowledge of the subject that is not tested, there's no difference between teaching and cheating. It's still cheating, because the subject wasn't learned, while the grades say it was.
What the hell are you talking about? You said "Of course, Democrats are more well-known for exploiting paper ballots. in a post containing nothing else.
Now you won't back that up, even though I asked you to clearly. You tried to change the subject of the story to "Democrats exploiting paper ballots", I asked you to back that up, and now you're trying to change the subject back to something else.
You made an incriminating claim, even claiming it was well known. Now you're scrambling to spin away from it. I hate Republicans like you, who try to exploit any system, whether it's online discussions or ballot systems, to make attacks and escape the consequences. Shrugging only clarifies that you're not just a liar, but you don't even care that you're exposed as a liar.