Although flat-out astroturfing is usually obvious to the clued-in, there are more subtle forms of influence that may be tainting more online commentary than we might suspect. In the case of this blogger, he was not only accepting advertising but had received a free copy of the software that he was praising (~ $300), yet he seemed to honestly think there was no problem. And the software publisher, if his email to me is to be believed, actually doesn't think that he's paying for reviews.
Agreed; they have a right to censor anything they want, and even to lie about it, as they do routinely. But Google's empire (YouTube, News, etc.) is so pervasive that their policies influence what people think they know about the world, so I think it's helpful to make their censorship practices better known.
Google already has a well established record of removing content that is critical of Islam, either in response to demands from Islamic organizations or the Pakistani government. The censorship applies to Google sites (like YouTube) served to the US, not merely to Islamic countries. In these cases Google falsely claims that the content has been removed due to a "terms of use violation" and refuses to discuss the real reasons for the censorship.
You don't need a flash for fireworks either. So why am I surrounded by people taking flash pictures of the sky whenever I go to a fireworks show? So far I have been able to resist grabbing them by their collars and screaming at them, but I'm not sure how long I can hold out.
Sorry you found my writing hard to understand. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that the parenthetical expression refers to the term that directly precedes it.
Daylight savings saves (hence the name) billions every year in electricity costs.
Even if that were true, couldn't you save the same amount by changing when you do things rather than by changing the clock? Wouldn't that avoid all these software and other technical problems while providing the same benefit?
If students don't want to attend school then there is something wrong with the school. Fix the school so that the students want to go there; then you don't need a fancy biometric scanner.
No. The remaining doors are not equally likely to conceal the prize because we have additional information. If you initially randomly select two doors, each has a probability of 1/2; but the two doors we are left with were not randomly selected. Also, the other guys are not repackaging the gambler's fallacy; nobody is claiming that the future is being magically influenced by the results of previous random outcomes.
I appreciate the review, but I could not figure out the intended meaning of several of your sentences.
It explains how to use gears or geo.js to work around IE's lack of support and also explains how to opt out of this sort of service
Who is opting out? The user? Out of what, providing geolocation information?
I guess this is a feature for advertisers (not like they aren't doing it already, anyway).
What feature? Geolocation? What are they doing already, anyway? Why is geolocation for advertisers? It seems pretty useful on my iPhone with no advertising involved.
until those who ship their code cement it (after reading this book, my money's on Google), we'll have to wait.
What code? Are you talking about new versions of browsers? What does "cement it" mean here? Most of HTML5 is already supported in any decent browser. Your money's on Google to do what?
Just wait until you need to generate HTML help, Text file documentation, a web page manual, and a printed PDF of the same core documentation.
There are alternatives. tbook is another xml application that succeeds very well at this. Its author explains in detail why he didn't just use docbook: the main reason is that it forces you to write deeply nested tags to express simple things.
Keep using it? After all, the server is open source; several people and organizations have installed it themselves. You can continue to use it independently of Google, and if you want to, develop the server and clients into something that suits you even better.
I use Ubuntu, so, according to some here, I already enjoy the benefit of this hinting algorithm. But is this why PDFs viewed in xpdf look so bad, with fuzzy type, but in acroread look fine? Is acroread using this algorithm, but xpdf is not?
Multi-column (even with basic support), and full support of font-face, is going to go finally enable real layout.
No, it's not. Not until browsers implement a real hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm like that found in TeX. Until then, web typography will continue to look like the crude output of a word processor, no matter how many pretty fonts you make your readers download.
I just tried it on this font-face demonstration site and it didn't work. Do you have an example of a url that I can load in mobile safari that will show me font-face working?
You can use xhtml syntax in html5 documents. To make your xhtml file into an html5 file, just change the doctype, and you're done.
Some of the problems with xhtml documents, besides draconian error handling (which some see as an obstacle, although I don't) are: must serve with xml mimetype, which is not handled by IE, so you must break standards by serving to IE as html (which of course requires you to sniff for browser type); can not use document.write, which means it's awkward to include Google advertisements on your page (must use an iframe).
html5 lets you use xhtml syntax in a more easily deployable document, and even lets you deploy as real xhtml, with the xml mimetype, just like xhtml 1 or xhtml2. If you use the xhtml version of html5 you can use inline SVG and mathml, which is very nice. So what is the problem?
Exactly. Also, the Times may feel that it has a special responsibility, as it is used by lexicographers as a source of usage examples. In others words, it's not merely a case of waiting until a word appears in dictionaries; it's a matter of helping to decide if a word should appear in dictionaries. In regard to "tweet", they've very clearly made the right decision.
They make perfect sense to me. You even give a good example yourself: the HDTV.
If you hold a display closer to your eyes it needs to have a higher resolution (smaller pixels) so that you can not resolve a single pixel.
In other words, you can see little things better if you hold them closer (down to some minimum eyeball focussing distance).
Protection of classified materials is done through a mechanism separate from copyright
I was supplying a counterexample to the idea that something "publicly funded" implies that it should be in the "public domain". My counterexample stands; I don't see how your comments are relevant to this point.
You appear to work for a contractor. Your work was supported by tax dollars but not performed by employees of the federal government.
No, I am a federal employee. If all the authors on a paper are federal employees and the paper describes federally funded work then there is no U.S. copyright on the paper as it is supplied to the journal, but the journal may add elements that are subject to copyright; in addition, if some of the authors are contractors (quite often the case with my papers) then the copyright question is unclear. In any case, the papers are still not in the "public domain". Note that this is a separate issue from free public access; I send a pdf to anyone who asks.
All of your examples, such as flash cards, seem to involve copying chunks of the book and republishing them in some form. Perhaps it's regrettable that people can't profit from these activities because of the copyright; I tend to have more sympathy with business plans that involve making your own stuff rather than rehashing other people's work. I was thinking more of the typical scientific or engineering work that uses the handbook as a source of mathematical information; how does the copyright hinder these legitimate uses at all? (It can't, of course, because the mathematical facts are not copyrighted. Indeed, any information in the handbook that was of critical importance to a particular piece of research or engineering would, naturally, be checked against another source and/or derived anew.)
Slashdot Mirror
You may have a point.
Although flat-out astroturfing is usually obvious to the clued-in, there are more subtle forms of influence that may be tainting more online commentary than we might suspect. In the case of this blogger, he was not only accepting advertising but had received a free copy of the software that he was praising (~ $300), yet he seemed to honestly think there was no problem. And the software publisher, if his email to me is to be believed, actually doesn't think that he's paying for reviews.
Scott Adams (the author of Dilbert) thinks that this is the best movie he has ever seen . That almost makes me curious enough to watch it.
No, they are banning videos that just talk about the issues.
Agreed; they have a right to censor anything they want, and even to lie about it, as they do routinely. But Google's empire (YouTube, News, etc.) is so pervasive that their policies influence what people think they know about the world, so I think it's helpful to make their censorship practices better known.
Google already has a well established record of removing content that is critical of Islam, either in response to demands from Islamic organizations or the Pakistani government. The censorship applies to Google sites (like YouTube) served to the US, not merely to Islamic countries. In these cases Google falsely claims that the content has been removed due to a "terms of use violation" and refuses to discuss the real reasons for the censorship.
You don't need a flash for fireworks either. So why am I surrounded by people taking flash pictures of the sky whenever I go to a fireworks show? So far I have been able to resist grabbing them by their collars and screaming at them, but I'm not sure how long I can hold out.
Sorry you found my writing hard to understand. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that the parenthetical expression refers to the term that directly precedes it.
Even if that were true, couldn't you save the same amount by changing when you do things rather than by changing the clock? Wouldn't that avoid all these software and other technical problems while providing the same benefit?
If students don't want to attend school then there is something wrong with the school. Fix the school so that the students want to go there; then you don't need a fancy biometric scanner.
No. The remaining doors are not equally likely to conceal the prize because we have additional information. If you initially randomly select two doors, each has a probability of 1/2; but the two doors we are left with were not randomly selected. Also, the other guys are not repackaging the gambler's fallacy; nobody is claiming that the future is being magically influenced by the results of previous random outcomes.
That is only true if both doors are equally likely to conceal the prize. If you assume this, you are begging the question.
Can you explain why you believe this?
I appreciate the review, but I could not figure out the intended meaning of several of your sentences.
Who is opting out? The user? Out of what, providing geolocation information?
What feature? Geolocation? What are they doing already, anyway? Why is geolocation for advertisers? It seems pretty useful on my iPhone with no advertising involved.
What code? Are you talking about new versions of browsers? What does "cement it" mean here? Most of HTML5 is already supported in any decent browser. Your money's on Google to do what?
There are alternatives. tbook is another xml application that succeeds very well at this. Its author explains in detail why he didn't just use docbook: the main reason is that it forces you to write deeply nested tags to express simple things.
Keep using it? After all, the server is open source; several people and organizations have installed it themselves. You can continue to use it independently of Google, and if you want to, develop the server and clients into something that suits you even better.
I use Ubuntu, so, according to some here, I already enjoy the benefit of this hinting algorithm. But is this why PDFs viewed in xpdf look so bad, with fuzzy type, but in acroread look fine? Is acroread using this algorithm, but xpdf is not?
Too bad, I was hoping you were right.
No, it's not. Not until browsers implement a real hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm like that found in TeX. Until then, web typography will continue to look like the crude output of a word processor, no matter how many pretty fonts you make your readers download.
I just tried it on this font-face demonstration site and it didn't work. Do you have an example of a url that I can load in mobile safari that will show me font-face working?
You can use xhtml syntax in html5 documents. To make your xhtml file into an html5 file, just change the doctype, and you're done. Some of the problems with xhtml documents, besides draconian error handling (which some see as an obstacle, although I don't) are: must serve with xml mimetype, which is not handled by IE, so you must break standards by serving to IE as html (which of course requires you to sniff for browser type); can not use document.write, which means it's awkward to include Google advertisements on your page (must use an iframe). html5 lets you use xhtml syntax in a more easily deployable document, and even lets you deploy as real xhtml, with the xml mimetype, just like xhtml 1 or xhtml2. If you use the xhtml version of html5 you can use inline SVG and mathml, which is very nice. So what is the problem?
Exactly. Also, the Times may feel that it has a special responsibility, as it is used by lexicographers as a source of usage examples. In others words, it's not merely a case of waiting until a word appears in dictionaries; it's a matter of helping to decide if a word should appear in dictionaries. In regard to "tweet", they've very clearly made the right decision.
They make perfect sense to me. You even give a good example yourself: the HDTV. If you hold a display closer to your eyes it needs to have a higher resolution (smaller pixels) so that you can not resolve a single pixel. In other words, you can see little things better if you hold them closer (down to some minimum eyeball focussing distance).
View the source for super-secret fun joke.
I was supplying a counterexample to the idea that something "publicly funded" implies that it should be in the "public domain". My counterexample stands; I don't see how your comments are relevant to this point.
No, I am a federal employee. If all the authors on a paper are federal employees and the paper describes federally funded work then there is no U.S. copyright on the paper as it is supplied to the journal, but the journal may add elements that are subject to copyright; in addition, if some of the authors are contractors (quite often the case with my papers) then the copyright question is unclear. In any case, the papers are still not in the "public domain". Note that this is a separate issue from free public access; I send a pdf to anyone who asks.
All of your examples, such as flash cards, seem to involve copying chunks of the book and republishing them in some form. Perhaps it's regrettable that people can't profit from these activities because of the copyright; I tend to have more sympathy with business plans that involve making your own stuff rather than rehashing other people's work. I was thinking more of the typical scientific or engineering work that uses the handbook as a source of mathematical information; how does the copyright hinder these legitimate uses at all? (It can't, of course, because the mathematical facts are not copyrighted. Indeed, any information in the handbook that was of critical importance to a particular piece of research or engineering would, naturally, be checked against another source and/or derived anew.)