Make a rational (i.e., not hysterical) argument against software patents. This would be something like: software patents won't keep other people from copying our stuff, existing patents are a minefield where someone has almost certainly patented something that's part of your new work, and many people think software patents will all be invalidated soon anyway.
Drag your feet and passively resist where you can: this might slow things down or even prevent the patent application from being successful, depending on how much the application process depends on you.
Refuse to cooperate with the patent application: this probably leads to you being fired and your work being patented anyway.
Find another job and quit, telling them you don't want to work for people who support software patents (or give them an ultimatum, if you'd rather keep your current job, except for the patents).
Personally, I'd do #1, and seeing what their reaction is. If they are determined to patent your work, and you have a big problem with that, you should probably think about whether you want to keep working for them, anyway.
This has everything to do with free speech. The only way to prevent non-commercial filesharing is to impose a police state and inspect all electronic communications. That would have a huge chilling effect on political and other protected speech.
But what about those 1 billion people (ok, number out of ass, but you get the point) that are starving to death and live in horrible conditions?
I'm always amazed by this kind of arrogance towards developing nations. This kind of comment is seen any time there's a post about the OLPC project, for example.
Do you really think it would be productive if the government of India spent its entire time trying to directly alleviate hunger and poverty? Don't you think that encouraging industries that provide high-paying jobs is a good part of a long-term strategy to improve people's lives?
More to the point, did it never occur to you as a (presumably) well-educated, technically-inclined person that education, science and technology were part of the solutions to the developing world's problems, not just a distraction?
The thing about the changes needed for web accessibility is that it requires web pages that are more machine-parsable (since screen-readers need to parse web pages better than visual-oriented browsers, where the parsing can be all thrown off as long as the end display works out). So it surprises me to see so much opposition to web accessibility when web pages that are standards-compliant and more machine-parsable should be very desirable.
I, for one, would love to have more of my content in more structured, more standards-compliant formats like RSS and Atom. It would open up more possibilities for autonomous agents, richer interactive clients, less reliance on overwrought Javascript navigation, and would provide better accessibility for the blind at the same time.
$0.17 Musicians' unions - Unions get royalties on CDs? That's interesting. I've never heard that before.
I've heard about stuff like this before (for SAG and the union that represents TV crews) -- the tech unions get royalties from the talent to pay for supporting health care, unemployment, etc. for the tech workers, and to fund the operations of the tech unions.
$1.60 Artists' royalties - Given the information available about industry accounting practices, is anyone else skeptical that the artists are getting this money?
Of course they get this money -- it's just that the millions they borrowed from the label for production, promotion, hookers and blow are deducted first.
It isn't ludicrous -- it's the foundation of science. We don't have to drop every pair of things in the universe to see if they fall at the same rate. Galileo dropped a few things 500 years ago, and people have replicated his findings, and now the question's settled. Every aspect of modern science, engineering and technology depend on this.
In fact, I'd agree with another poster who said that 1,200 was a suspiciously large sample, since a sample of that size often indicates re-using several existing datasets rather than having designed an experiment for the question being addressed.
In my experience, people who are actually familiar with how the human mind works are much less concerned about the variability of human response. And you may well be very familiar with human psychology and hold an informed opinion that human variation is a big problem. But your comment sounds a lot more like the (unfortunately very common) dismissive attitudes many people, even scientists, have towards psychology, discounting whole classes of research because they are so convinced we're impossible to study, so different from other animals, etc.
You're being to simplistic -- the sample size needed for good predictions isn't directly related to the total number of gamers. The size of the sample needed is related to error introduced by the measures used and the phenomenon measured. If you have a robust methodology, you may need only a few subjects. If there are huge errors introduced by your methodology (political polling is a good example of this), you may need thousands of subjects.
I didn't read the article (this is slashdot, after all...), but any good psychologist would include statistics indicating the probability that the results were caused by error or random chance, usually this number should be very low, 5% or lower. See the wikipedia article on P-values for more on this.
But to answer your question: many psychological experiments are done with a much smaller number of subjects (50 or so), and get very low P-values. The effect being tested here may be harder to reliably measure, but the sample size is also pretty large. So there's no reason to think that 1,200 is too low, unless the stats say otherwise.
I think it's OK to delay viewing of feedback until both have commented, as long as you have a short window (maybe 10 days). Some have suggested 30 days, but I think that's much too long.
Another option would be for the window to be very short (2-3 days) but start when the buyer leaves feedback. That would handle long/complicated shipping or other complications, but still not allow the seller to delay bad feedback for very long.
I think it would be much better to have separate buyer/seller feedback. If I'm buying something, I don't care if the seller has lousy buyer feedback. And vice versa. Having the two sets of feedback in one pool is what makes retaliation really serious -- one bad seller retaliating against you can affect your reputation as a seller.
Not showing the feedback until both parties have commented is another good idea. That would help even more.
I was watching this on youtube this morning. And I was thinking that the only thing stopping us from being a great country again is fear and pessimism.
We Democrats have picked safe losers too many times. Kerry and Gore, Mondale, Dukakis, and on and on. I've got a lot of respect for them, and think many of them would have done much better than the Republicans they lost to. But we picked them because they seemed inevitable. Because they weren't too extreme. Because they won a couple of small states early in the campaign and the other guys ran out of steam.
Tomorrow, for the first time in decades, most of the country will actually get to vote on our nominee. And we will have the same choice: do we dare to nominate a real Democrat? Do we have enough hope to nominate the candidate that inspires us, that could lead our country back to greatness?
Obama got my vote a week ago. I'm still a little afraid of the dirty tricks I know are coming from the other side. But I'm hopeful that Obama will be able to rise above the muck, and inspire the country the way he's inspired me.
...and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway
I see two roles for libraries in the future:
There is a vast amount of content that needs to be digitized. And an even vaster amount of digital content that needs to be organized. Libraries are already working on this. I work at a university library, and this has been designated our top priority for some time. And the fact that the Library of Congress just put a bunch of photos on flickr to get help tagging and describing them should give you hope that many librarians are paying attention to recent developments.
Once you've got everything ever created instantly available on your Kindle, it would be good to have a nice place to read some of it, talk about it with your friends, etc. Libraries, especially university libraries, see that as a big part of their reason to exist, too.
So I guess I'm predicting that libraries of the future will be like H. G. Wells' Time Machine: a beautiful utopian book-enjoying experience, where some unsuspecting fool is occasionally dragged down to the grungy basement to help tend the servers.
My own personal opinion is that many of us Americans got so whipped up about France obstructing the march to war in 2002/3 (you can still find Freedom Fries on menus in some places here). And then, to add insult to the injury of the badly botched occupation, it turns out that France was right, and its obstruction was actually very wise.
So now Americans need to save face. And bashing France at every turn is a way for us to do that. And making it seem like the French hate us is even better, because it justifies our behavior.
The reality on the ground is very different of course. I remember going to Normandie around D-Day 2004, and seeing all the American flags flying. I imagine they were mostly new additions because of the anniversary and Bush's visit, but still it would be hard to imagine an American city being decked out with French flags to celebrate an occasion here. A major street in Caen is still named "Avenue du Six Juin". It was instructive to see the American bluster about France forgetting what we'd done for her, compared to the quiet steadfastness on display there.
I haven't upgraded yet, but I agree that it's ridiculous that they've gotten rid of using folders in the dock as hierarchical menus. Luckily, I just found a new app launcher called QuickPick that does this task. It has the added bonus of having a nicer UI for managing the folders, and being a little faster.
I see a lot of people have already recommended Lucene, and I heartily agree.
But, I suggest you look at the various Lucene sub-projects to see if one of them meets your needs. For example, Nutch includes a crawler and parsers for Word/PowerPoint/PDF/HTML/etc. so you wouldn't have to write that part yourself. Solr is a webapp that wraps a Lucene index in a simple web service and comes preconfigured to run inside its own servlet container on a separate port, so that's pretty easy to setup and use.
The case of mass-market computer games is somewhat hard for a system without copyright. But I'm guessing that most of them could be preserved by giving away the software, and charging for services (such as online multiplayer play). At the extreme of this, software developers could only offer online access to their games (Flash/Java/AJAX/whatever are very capable right now, and will probably become more capable over time). This kind of development is accessible to small developers, since decent webhosting can be had for very little these days.
Medical research, on the other hand, is completely unrelated to copyright. They use (well, mostly abuse) patents to protect their business model. I haven't heard anyone argue for abolishing patents or trademarks (though they could use some reform).
The only nations not affected by the Great Depression were the USSR and Nazi Germany. This is the historical record, and what it shows is not what you think it does.
right, the nazis gaining power in germany had nothing to do with the great depression. it must have been their fashion sense and good manners...
sure, wal-mart's got the right to freely associate. just like the workers do. and if companies hadn't used that right to hire children, make people work 15-hour days, fire workers when they got injured, etc., we might not have labor laws that we have today. as the law stands today, the workers' right to freely assemble trumps the company's rights.
i think it should be unconstitutional to force workers to join a union or pay agency fees. maybe if companies weren't so vicious in their union-breaking, we wouldn't have laws that allow mandatory agency fees.
walmart has a right to choose who they hire. and the employees have a right to unionize. but when those two rights conflict, our labor laws have long held that the employee's rights trump the company's rights.
that said, you may notice i haven't said a word to defend unions (merely workers' rights to join them). i've seen exactly the same kind of situation many times. in a large organization, even the non-unionized employees can get away with murder because it gets so difficult to fire anyone. i've seen gross incompetence, i've seen people accomplish literally nothing for years, etc. i think unions did a great job of protecting workers two generations ago, but i haven't seen much good come from them lately.
still, the law says people can join unions, and companies can't fire them, intimidate them, or otherwise try to stop them. and it pisses me off when companies like wal-mart that actually have abusive labor practices (that unions could probably stop) get away with breaking unions, when it's been illegal for decades.
with sane enforcement of our labor laws, this would be prosecuted. shutting down a plant shortly after it unionizes should be proof by itself.
of course, the company will always have an excuse, and it is hard to prove these things. and with our current enforcement, i'm sure this goes usually goes unpunished.
even threatening to shutdown operations because the employees unionize is illegal. actually doing so, when the purpose it only thwart unionization, is definitely illegal.
as I said before, some unions have unreasonable expectations. and i can imagine a scenario where a union forms and demands wages and benefits that would make it impossible for the business to operate. and that business would be within its rights to shut down.
but that's not what wal-mart is doing. they pull every trick in the book to prevent unionization, legal or otherwise. and shutting down a location to break a union is illegal. NRLA is pretty clear on this.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'd do #1, and seeing what their reaction is. If they are determined to patent your work, and you have a big problem with that, you should probably think about whether you want to keep working for them, anyway.
-Esme
That guy appears to be the one who discovered the vulnerabilities and reported them to Apple.
Do you really think Slashdot shouldn't link to primary sources?
-Esme
This has everything to do with free speech. The only way to prevent non-commercial filesharing is to impose a police state and inspect all electronic communications. That would have a huge chilling effect on political and other protected speech.
-Esme
I'm always amazed by this kind of arrogance towards developing nations. This kind of comment is seen any time there's a post about the OLPC project, for example.
Do you really think it would be productive if the government of India spent its entire time trying to directly alleviate hunger and poverty? Don't you think that encouraging industries that provide high-paying jobs is a good part of a long-term strategy to improve people's lives?
More to the point, did it never occur to you as a (presumably) well-educated, technically-inclined person that education, science and technology were part of the solutions to the developing world's problems, not just a distraction?
-Esme
The thing about the changes needed for web accessibility is that it requires web pages that are more machine-parsable (since screen-readers need to parse web pages better than visual-oriented browsers, where the parsing can be all thrown off as long as the end display works out). So it surprises me to see so much opposition to web accessibility when web pages that are standards-compliant and more machine-parsable should be very desirable.
I, for one, would love to have more of my content in more structured, more standards-compliant formats like RSS and Atom. It would open up more possibilities for autonomous agents, richer interactive clients, less reliance on overwrought Javascript navigation, and would provide better accessibility for the blind at the same time.
I've heard about stuff like this before (for SAG and the union that represents TV crews) -- the tech unions get royalties from the talent to pay for supporting health care, unemployment, etc. for the tech workers, and to fund the operations of the tech unions.
Of course they get this money -- it's just that the millions they borrowed from the label for production, promotion, hookers and blow are deducted first.
-Esme
You have to love the "monster" more human than his creator...
It isn't ludicrous -- it's the foundation of science. We don't have to drop every pair of things in the universe to see if they fall at the same rate. Galileo dropped a few things 500 years ago, and people have replicated his findings, and now the question's settled. Every aspect of modern science, engineering and technology depend on this.
In fact, I'd agree with another poster who said that 1,200 was a suspiciously large sample, since a sample of that size often indicates re-using several existing datasets rather than having designed an experiment for the question being addressed.
In my experience, people who are actually familiar with how the human mind works are much less concerned about the variability of human response. And you may well be very familiar with human psychology and hold an informed opinion that human variation is a big problem. But your comment sounds a lot more like the (unfortunately very common) dismissive attitudes many people, even scientists, have towards psychology, discounting whole classes of research because they are so convinced we're impossible to study, so different from other animals, etc.
-Esme
You're being to simplistic -- the sample size needed for good predictions isn't directly related to the total number of gamers. The size of the sample needed is related to error introduced by the measures used and the phenomenon measured. If you have a robust methodology, you may need only a few subjects. If there are huge errors introduced by your methodology (political polling is a good example of this), you may need thousands of subjects.
I didn't read the article (this is slashdot, after all...), but any good psychologist would include statistics indicating the probability that the results were caused by error or random chance, usually this number should be very low, 5% or lower. See the wikipedia article on P-values for more on this.
But to answer your question: many psychological experiments are done with a much smaller number of subjects (50 or so), and get very low P-values. The effect being tested here may be harder to reliably measure, but the sample size is also pretty large. So there's no reason to think that 1,200 is too low, unless the stats say otherwise.
-Esme
I think it's OK to delay viewing of feedback until both have commented, as long as you have a short window (maybe 10 days). Some have suggested 30 days, but I think that's much too long.
Another option would be for the window to be very short (2-3 days) but start when the buyer leaves feedback. That would handle long/complicated shipping or other complications, but still not allow the seller to delay bad feedback for very long.
-Esme
I think it would be much better to have separate buyer/seller feedback. If I'm buying something, I don't care if the seller has lousy buyer feedback. And vice versa. Having the two sets of feedback in one pool is what makes retaliation really serious -- one bad seller retaliating against you can affect your reputation as a seller.
Not showing the feedback until both parties have commented is another good idea. That would help even more.
-Esme
It spells out "gnaa" if you view it using a monospace font.
-Esme
I was watching this on youtube this morning. And I was thinking that the only thing stopping us from being a great country again is fear and pessimism.
We Democrats have picked safe losers too many times. Kerry and Gore, Mondale, Dukakis, and on and on. I've got a lot of respect for them, and think many of them would have done much better than the Republicans they lost to. But we picked them because they seemed inevitable. Because they weren't too extreme. Because they won a couple of small states early in the campaign and the other guys ran out of steam.
Tomorrow, for the first time in decades, most of the country will actually get to vote on our nominee. And we will have the same choice: do we dare to nominate a real Democrat? Do we have enough hope to nominate the candidate that inspires us, that could lead our country back to greatness?
Obama got my vote a week ago. I'm still a little afraid of the dirty tricks I know are coming from the other side. But I'm hopeful that Obama will be able to rise above the muck, and inspire the country the way he's inspired me.
-Esme
I see two roles for libraries in the future:
So I guess I'm predicting that libraries of the future will be like H. G. Wells' Time Machine: a beautiful utopian book-enjoying experience, where some unsuspecting fool is occasionally dragged down to the grungy basement to help tend the servers.
-Esme
So now Americans need to save face. And bashing France at every turn is a way for us to do that. And making it seem like the French hate us is even better, because it justifies our behavior.
The reality on the ground is very different of course. I remember going to Normandie around D-Day 2004, and seeing all the American flags flying. I imagine they were mostly new additions because of the anniversary and Bush's visit, but still it would be hard to imagine an American city being decked out with French flags to celebrate an occasion here. A major street in Caen is still named "Avenue du Six Juin". It was instructive to see the American bluster about France forgetting what we'd done for her, compared to the quiet steadfastness on display there.
-Esme
Clearly, this being Slashdot, he should have invented a girlfriend to attribute the women's pants experience to. -Esme
I haven't upgraded yet, but I agree that it's ridiculous that they've gotten rid of using folders in the dock as hierarchical menus. Luckily, I just found a new app launcher called QuickPick that does this task. It has the added bonus of having a nicer UI for managing the folders, and being a little faster.
I see a lot of people have already recommended Lucene, and I heartily agree.
But, I suggest you look at the various Lucene sub-projects to see if one of them meets your needs. For example, Nutch includes a crawler and parsers for Word/PowerPoint/PDF/HTML/etc. so you wouldn't have to write that part yourself. Solr is a webapp that wraps a Lucene index in a simple web service and comes preconfigured to run inside its own servlet container on a separate port, so that's pretty easy to setup and use.
-Esme
The case of mass-market computer games is somewhat hard for a system without copyright. But I'm guessing that most of them could be preserved by giving away the software, and charging for services (such as online multiplayer play). At the extreme of this, software developers could only offer online access to their games (Flash/Java/AJAX/whatever are very capable right now, and will probably become more capable over time). This kind of development is accessible to small developers, since decent webhosting can be had for very little these days.
Medical research, on the other hand, is completely unrelated to copyright. They use (well, mostly abuse) patents to protect their business model. I haven't heard anyone argue for abolishing patents or trademarks (though they could use some reform).
-Esme
right, the nazis gaining power in germany had nothing to do with the great depression. it must have been their fashion sense and good manners...
-esme
...and nearly twelve billion years to setup the runtime environment.
sure, wal-mart's got the right to freely associate. just like the workers do. and if companies hadn't used that right to hire children, make people work 15-hour days, fire workers when they got injured, etc., we might not have labor laws that we have today. as the law stands today, the workers' right to freely assemble trumps the company's rights.
i think it should be unconstitutional to force workers to join a union or pay agency fees. maybe if companies weren't so vicious in their union-breaking, we wouldn't have laws that allow mandatory agency fees.
-esme
walmart has a right to choose who they hire. and the employees have a right to unionize. but when those two rights conflict, our labor laws have long held that the employee's rights trump the company's rights.
that said, you may notice i haven't said a word to defend unions (merely workers' rights to join them). i've seen exactly the same kind of situation many times. in a large organization, even the non-unionized employees can get away with murder because it gets so difficult to fire anyone. i've seen gross incompetence, i've seen people accomplish literally nothing for years, etc. i think unions did a great job of protecting workers two generations ago, but i haven't seen much good come from them lately.
still, the law says people can join unions, and companies can't fire them, intimidate them, or otherwise try to stop them. and it pisses me off when companies like wal-mart that actually have abusive labor practices (that unions could probably stop) get away with breaking unions, when it's been illegal for decades.
-esme
with sane enforcement of our labor laws, this would be prosecuted. shutting down a plant shortly after it unionizes should be proof by itself.
of course, the company will always have an excuse, and it is hard to prove these things. and with our current enforcement, i'm sure this goes usually goes unpunished.
-esme
even threatening to shutdown operations because the employees unionize is illegal. actually doing so, when the purpose it only thwart unionization, is definitely illegal.
as I said before, some unions have unreasonable expectations. and i can imagine a scenario where a union forms and demands wages and benefits that would make it impossible for the business to operate. and that business would be within its rights to shut down.
but that's not what wal-mart is doing. they pull every trick in the book to prevent unionization, legal or otherwise. and shutting down a location to break a union is illegal. NRLA is pretty clear on this.
-esme