Neural nets are often badly misapplied, but they can hardly be called "quackery". In fact, this is precisely the sort of thing that neural nets are supposed to do: take numerous factors and try to categorize the input based on those factors.
We have an entire industry devoted to figuring out which movies will be most successful, how best to advertise them, how many theaters to release a given movie in, etc. Arguably, this entire industry is less talented at picking winners than a small shell script. If you want to look for quackery, hare-brained theories, etc., you would do well to start by looking there.
When it comes to "Napoleon Dynamite", I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out why anyone liked it. I was amused at a couple of points, but mostly it was just dull and painful to watch. If I were building this software, and it kept telling me that this film would rake in the bucks, I'd probably end up deleting it and starting from scratch.
I shouldn't rag on you for liking it, though. God knows I've loved lots of movies that everyone else hated. There's no accounting for taste, especially mine. But I do think that finding those films that drastically outstrip anyone's expectations is an impossible task, because there isn't much that they have in common. There may not be any pattern there to find.
I don't think that simply having the tools to better predict the success of mainstream films is going to suck away capital from smaller films. We could even hope the studios use this tool to make their expectations for big films more reasonable, avoiding costly mistakes and freeing up more money for smaller films.
I have just enough experience with these subjects to conclude that the article hasn't given enough information to make a decision in either direction.
I'll admit that this system doesn't have a whole lot of value when it comes to fostering creativity, and may even stifle it by placing another strike against small-budget films that could defy the odds. But in an industry that frequently makes $100M "oopsies", it may have some value.
This thing is merely a tool. We can't be sure how effective a tool it is, nor can we know what uses it will be put to. Your conclusions seem a bit premature and reactionary.
As a rabid Ubuntu evangelist, I have to say, "Well put."
I lost interest in the article pretty much the moment I figured out they were analyzing the results of a web survey. I mean, really. Where do they get off saying:
"...we have no reason to doubt the veracity of this poll, though the survey admittedly had more exposure in certain communities than others.
Would this be analogous to saying, "If you have to surround your front yard with a fence, you've already failed?" I mean, they should understand that actions have consequences, and if they're not the sort of kids who grasp the seriousness of running into the road, may as well let them run into traffic and start with a new set of kids.
Kids do self-destructive things. Not the ones without consciences. Not the irresponsible ones. Kids. Left to themselves, they'll watch twelve hours of television a day, live entirely on pizza, and spend any money they get within an hour of the getting. If they were capable of consistently making responsible choices, we'd call them "undersized adults" and give them the vote.
Children require rules. Children require parental enforcement. But they also require physical safeguards that constrain their behavior. You can't just tell them to eat lots of veggies; you have to make sure that they frequently have the opportunity to eat healthy foods, and rarely get access to junk food. You can't just tell them "don't visit bad websites." You have to install filters to buffer them from the weird and twisted on the 'Net.*
So if this guy wants to let the computer itself constrain his kids' computer usage, I don't see anything particularly wrong with that. It's hard to make value judgments about "being on the computer" given the wide variety of activities that people do with them. But if the goal is to get the kids to have interests other than the computer, this doesn't sound half bad.
* By the time they're old enough to disable the filters, it's time to let conscience take over anyways.
No, no, no. The simple answer is this: The most usable desktop is one where all text boxes implement EMACS-style commands. For example, Ctrl-W cuts, Ctrl-Y pastes, Alt-W copies, Ctrl-N takes you to the next item or moves the cursor forward, etc.
That, for me, would be the absolute most productive desktop around.
Your problem is that you're taking your own personal preferences about which arbitrary mappings of keys to actions works best for you, and you're assuming that it would work best for everyone. As someone who uses EMACS constantly, anything that maps my EMACSy instincts to other programs just feels "right" to me.
I think we're both speculating about the economics of chip manufacturing. But it doesn't seem like a couple million chips is an impossibly large fraction of AMDs capacity, especially if this project is stretched out over five years or so. Also, it's unlikely that the chips being used are anything AMD isn't manufacturing in fairly large quantities anyways. A special order processor would be prohibitively expensive.
As for the Internet, these things are supposed to come pre-equipped with wireless equipment, and software to form a mesh network between the units. This doesn't get them onto the Internet directly, but it means that the range of any central hub can be greatly extended. According to the faq, they're working on a separate project for Internet connectivity.
The laptops are already AMD/Linux systems, so the last sentence of your post doesn't make sense to me.
=> Rails application started on http://0.0.0.0:3000/ => Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call with --help for options [2005-12-13 21:22:19] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2005-12-13 21:22:19] INFO ruby 1.8.3 (2005-06-23) [i486-linux] [2005-12-13 21:22:19] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=27106 port=3000
[... ctrl-c....]
[2005-12-13 21:22:35] INFO going to shutdown... [2005-12-13 21:22:35] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start done.
Well of course it's worth its shelf space. The thing is about a third of an inch thick!
For those just tuning in, "K&R" is shorthand for Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language," and it really is a great little book. However, part of the brevity and clarity comes from the C programming language itself. Try writing a similar book about C++, and even with the same eye for brevity, you'd end up with a book five or six times as long. Ten times if you threw in the STL.
Some people have claimed that this book should be required reading for programmers. Others have countered that the book should be required for authors of programming books. Let me take it one step further and suggest that it should be required reading for authors of programming languages. If the language you're designing cannot be effectively and similarly summarized given the K&R treatment, then it may be worth it to simplify things.
I've become a huge fan of Python recently. As proponents claim, it's one of a very small handful of languages where you can keep the entire syntax in your head. I'm not claiming that Python is the ideal language, but merely that other programming languages should strive for similar simplicity.
Selling to the public is a brilliant idea. First, it will increase the volume manufactured, and thereby decrease the cost per item. Second, it provides the manufacturers with more feedback about how it works under a wide variety of conditions. Finally, combining this with the open-sourcishness of the software, you end up with a lot more people doing development work for it, greatly expanding the usefulness of the laptops themselves.
I needed to wait a couple of hours for my girlfriend last night, so I took her laptop so I could do a bit of homework while I waited. I didn't take the power cable, because I thought "a couple of hours is all I need".
The bloody thing went from full to empty in about forty-five minutes.
I would so much have preferred to have one of these little babies. You run out of batteries? No problem, just turn the crank a bit. "All around the cobblers bench, the monkey chased the weasel..." You're ready to go again.
If they really are selling them for $200 to the general public, I want I want I want. I get something I can carry to class and take notes on, some kid in Bangladesh gets something he can carry to class and take notes on, and that sexy lime green color makes both of us the envy of our peers.
Are you sure? The specs seem reasonable: I'm interpreting them as "500MHz processor, 1GB flash storage, 1024x768 screen". The relative lack of moving parts makes it much easier to make the whole thing durable. There isn't a hard drive, and I'm guessing passive cooling would be sufficient for the fan. So reliability would be high. They're saying the display portion will only cost $35, and that's usually the most expensive part of any laptop.
Estimating the feasibility of this project by comparing it to a ruggedized laptop that is intended to act as a full desktop replacement seems misguided. My guess: it's going to happen.
I know Jesus loves me. We talked about you over a couple of beers. You wouldn't believe the nasty things he said about you. He's an angry drunk.
Since you've dragged this conversation down to the level of farce (and let's face it, it's all your fault, and probably your original intention), let's recap the conversation so far:
Main Story: so this dued sez tthe eff is teh suck. anyone know if thats true???/
LP: yeah i know all aboit it. they blew goat chunxxx lol!!! if they r defending u, better lube up cuz you goin to prizon. dont no how they got out of law skool
NC: ken u back that up???
LP: like i sed, i workd with tem. they are teh suk. u jus dont want tto face facts
AOCA: i workd with them too and their grate! teh sun shines out their ass! see you can say anything on teh net!
LP: i'm famous and everyone knows me unles tehir stupid. if your to stupid to know it, i dont have time to explane to someon as stupid as you. stupid.
LP: anywayz i alredy told u what u want to know. i got cred, loozer
AOC: o yea. u sed u wer invovled in teh mitnick case and teh wiretapping case. u sed u were qualified n shit. who r u & how wer u involved?
LP: ask teh 9th circit. they know me. just ask tehm
LP: i told u im lew payne. god u r stupid. do i hav to spel it out??
AOC: lots og lew payns on teh interwebs. which one r u? teh pr0n guy?? and how do i kno your him. eh u r probabyl just makin sh1t up.
LP: look me up in the lexis/westlaw, u lazy pile of crap. i dont care what u think
AOC: u cant back up your crap. im repotring u to ur isp for hacking
LP: u just want me to do yor wokr for u lazy basterd
AOC: everoyne here thinks u r full of it. if u werent youd just say what cases u wer on. moron loser troll thing
LP: jesus luvs u, suptid git.
AOC: ahhaha you cant kickban me. ill be here all night.
LP: lozzer. im posting nakid pics of ur mom
AOC: put up or shut up. u wer never on a case with teh eff.
LP: u r jelous becaus i know stuff & ur to lazy to find it out/
AOC: i m not buyin a lexis
LP: i dont care what car u drive. jesus luvs u. YHBT!!!
AOC: u can shuv your hls tropy up ur a**.
LP: its teh internet u can say ass, u big baby
AOC: u r a l4m3r pretending u know kevin mintinick
LP: your a lamer who doesnt know when hes been trolld
AOC: u r waaaaaay kewl how can I be as kewl as u????? i want to know! do i go to kewl skewl do i get a dipplmoa
LP: i gave u ur diploma it has DUMBASS stamped on it. dumbass
Stay tuned, folks. It's not going to get any prettier.
I never said you weren't entitled to offer an opinion. What I said was that, because you were claiming to have firsthand knowledge to support your opinions, it's up to you to provide details, if you want readers to give your opinion any more credibility than anyone else.
Nor did I contradict myself when I said I don't care to find out about those personal experiences. Towards the beginning of the thread, I was curious, and I did indeed detail what you could have done to satisfy that curiosity. Now I honestly don't care. See, there's this thing called "time", and "things" can be different at different "times". My curiosity is one of those "things" that can "change" over "time". As a seasoned adult who has very little "time" left before his creaky body creaks its last creak, I really shouldn't have to belabor the point for you.
I did find it absurd that you wanted me to pay good money for a bunch of photocopies from the Ninth Circuit, without giving me the slightest idea what I'm going to learn from them, or even giving the names of the relevant cases so that I wouldn't have to order every document from
I'm not asking you to "do my research for me," nor do I care whether I ever find out what the EFF did to piss you off. What I do care about is that you're an arrogant twit who wants everyone to hate the EFF based on personal experience which he won't detail, and what I'm asking you to do is stop pretending that your "contribution" thus far is anything more substantial than, "LOL!!!1 EFF IS TEH SUXX0R!!!."
You could have given a brief summary of your interactions with the EFF. You know, the interactions that constitute the factual basis for all the opinion you've been spewing. Instead, you prefer to expend orders of magnitude more effort defending your refusal to relate your own personal experiences.
Let's momentarily set aside your asinine refusal to even say what cases you were involved in and the part you played in those cases (which would establish enough credibility for a serious discussion--not that you've ever shown an interest in one). No original sources I could get from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals could ever give me what I would need to know to discuss your personal experiences. Even if I learned everything that public documents could teach me about the case, it still wouldn't tell me what mistakes YOU thought the EFF made, it still wouldn't tell me what behaviors YOU found unprofessional. This entire thread has been about your opinions, and so long as you won't say why you hold them, the only thing here we can discuss is why you're behaving like such a buffoon.
The longer you keep stonewalling, the more worthless your opinion appears. The longer I keep feeding your trollish behavior, the dumber I look. I don't care, though. At this point, I just want to win. And by "win", I don't mean "getting the information out of you." I mean, "getting the last post." I have the time to waste on this thoroughly pointless exchange. Do you?
This is really how you spend your life? Trolling, living on the last fumes of fame coming off your friendship with Kevin Mitnick, telling people how important your opinion is but fuck 'em if they ask why?
You, a seasoned adult? I'm adding that to the list of claims you never substantiated.
A lot of the attributes you allude to have more to do with personality and temperament than intelligence.
For example, I'm not exactly "disciplined" about money, but I always seem to have enough for my needs, because I have a deep-seated, irrational aversion to spending money. I've been that way for as long as I can remember. I think it means some genetic switch is stuck on "scarcity". The alternative--that I have incredible foresight and discipline--seems really farfetched to me.
"Staying out of trouble" and "avoiding fights" also seems to be primarily driven by temperament, not intelligence.
My guess is that you're referring to these things as kinds of "intelligence" because these differences in temperament lead some people to behave in ways that act to their long-term benefit, while leading others to act self-destructively. But that definition of intelligence seems overly broad to me.
You claim it's not up to you to provide any information to substantiate your opinion, but it apparently irritates you that I don't take your opinion seriously.
You don't have the hipness down, but you've certainly shown the ability to not say anything substantiative. Personally, I think you're just pissed that people didn't immediately recognize you as a Super Internet Celebrity, bow down before your porntastic fame, and accept your (completely unsubstantiated) opinion of the EFF as the final word.
I find your behavior bizarre. If you are who you say you are, and are as intimately familiar with the EFF as you claim, you could easily spend ten minutes writing about the substance of your experiences, and it would be the single most informative post in this entire story. Instead, you go around making these nasty but vague accusations of incompetence and unprofessionalism by the EFF, claim firsthand knowledge that you won't detail, spend a good deal of time hurling juvenile insults at anyone who asks for specifics, and congratulate yourself on being so much more informed than the Slashdot masses.
If I were terribly interested in calibrating the competence and effectiveness of the EFF (nothing in the article or your commentary has caused me any concern), there are a wide variety of sources I could use to research. You haven't given anybody any reason to care about your experiences in particular, and you certainly haven't given me enough to make me want to buy a Lexis/Nexis subscription.
I remember a guy from Basic Training who reminds me of you. Kept claiming that he'd been a sergeant before, and was just re-enlisting. He never convinced me either.
Actually, prior to my post I spent about forty minutes snooping around Slashdot and Google, trying to figure out how easy it would be to do the "research" you claim any reasonable person should be willing to do to validate your claims.
I learned the following things:
You have an e-mail address, lew.payne@gmail.com. Anyone who has a GMail account must be who they claim to be.
"Lew Payne" may have been a friend of Kevin Mitnick's, but didn't get mentioned in Mitnick's Wikipedia entry.
"Lewis Payne" was an associate of John Wilkes Booth. You're probably not him.
A "Lew Payne" is the owner of the website goodbyeguns.org, whose goal is to make private ownership of firearms illegal. He also has a publishing company.
The search "lew payne" + eff returns zero hits.
The search "lew payne" site:eff.org returns zero hits.
Someone with the moniker "Lew Payne" posts to Slashdot.
Finally, when I came back to double-check my info, I found that Lew Payne Publishing hosts adult websites, and was involved somewhat in the sex.com domain name dispute.
Now I presume I'm supposed to make the assumption that you are that Lew Payne (not a coincidence, not an imitator). Then I guess I could spend weeks looking for every legal filing related to Lew Payne Publishing, Inc. Then I could spend my time poring over them, trying to tease out the connection between him and the EFF, and finally figure out what conclusions about the EFF I'm meant to draw from his experiences with them.
I'm not going to do that. If you have specific criticisms of the EFF, it's up to you to explain exactly what experiences led you to those criticisms, in sufficient detail that others can easily verify your claims. You've given me no reason to believe that all the effort you're asking of me is going to lead to anything more than, "Huh. He lost a case and blames the EFF."
If you think your experiences would sway peoples' opinions of the EFF, outline those experiences. But until you put in the effort to explain what makes them relevant, I'm going to assume they're not.
When asked for proof that you have firsthand experience, you simply claim to have been involved in specific cases. That's not proof. They're just additional claims that you haven't backed up.
Is your name on any of the briefs? What specifically was your involvement in the two cases you describe? Are you Kevin Mitnick?
You demand credibility for "being well known" and for "having first-hand experience", but you don't give any personally identifiable information that would allow to figure out who you are, or find out about the "numerous legal battles" you've fought. Your email isn't shown, you don't link to a website, you don't explain your involvement in the cases enough for us to analyze your claims. Unless you give us that, your demands to have your opinion respected are shameless trolling.
First, though the EFF can choose who they defend, the opposition can choose who they prosecute.
Second, the legislation they're trying to fight against is often pernicious, but since it is the law of the land, the only way to fight it is to argue it on constitutional grounds. The courts aren't usually eager to overrule Congress unless they've clearly overreached. So the EFF needs to present a slam-dunk case to a sympathetic judge just to have a chance.
Any decent lawyer could easily rack up a 100% win record, just by taking only the slam-dunk cases. But if the EFF only fights the battles they're certain to win, I don't see how they would be terribly useful.
You've made the canonical mistake of the religious fundamentalist: You've conflated religious devotion with religious fundamentalism. Frankly, there are a lot of people who have deep religious convictions, and also think of "fundies" as a bunch of vicious, ignorant hypocrites. So it's entirely possible for me to believe that a teacher could treat religious subjects with all professional diligence, but still finding fundamentalists obnoxious enough that--when participating with a like-minded student group--a good, cathartic rant might be taken too far.
In other words, not only is it possible for a competent religious studies professor to say what Mirecki said, I'm betting lots of them are looking at him and wishing they'd had the balls to say what he did.
Like the guy at the end of the third article said, the professor's mistake was in letting himself sink down to the level of his opposition.
Slashdot Mirror
Neural nets are often badly misapplied, but they can hardly be called "quackery". In fact, this is precisely the sort of thing that neural nets are supposed to do: take numerous factors and try to categorize the input based on those factors.
We have an entire industry devoted to figuring out which movies will be most successful, how best to advertise them, how many theaters to release a given movie in, etc. Arguably, this entire industry is less talented at picking winners than a small shell script. If you want to look for quackery, hare-brained theories, etc., you would do well to start by looking there.
When it comes to "Napoleon Dynamite", I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out why anyone liked it. I was amused at a couple of points, but mostly it was just dull and painful to watch. If I were building this software, and it kept telling me that this film would rake in the bucks, I'd probably end up deleting it and starting from scratch.
I shouldn't rag on you for liking it, though. God knows I've loved lots of movies that everyone else hated. There's no accounting for taste, especially mine. But I do think that finding those films that drastically outstrip anyone's expectations is an impossible task, because there isn't much that they have in common. There may not be any pattern there to find.
I don't think that simply having the tools to better predict the success of mainstream films is going to suck away capital from smaller films. We could even hope the studios use this tool to make their expectations for big films more reasonable, avoiding costly mistakes and freeing up more money for smaller films.
Okay, maybe that's too much to hope for.
How do you know this guy is a bozo?
How do you know he overtrained his system?
I have just enough experience with these subjects to conclude that the article hasn't given enough information to make a decision in either direction.
I'll admit that this system doesn't have a whole lot of value when it comes to fostering creativity, and may even stifle it by placing another strike against small-budget films that could defy the odds. But in an industry that frequently makes $100M "oopsies", it may have some value.
This thing is merely a tool. We can't be sure how effective a tool it is, nor can we know what uses it will be put to. Your conclusions seem a bit premature and reactionary.
I lost interest in the article pretty much the moment I figured out they were analyzing the results of a web survey. I mean, really. Where do they get off saying:
???
Would this be analogous to saying, "If you have to surround your front yard with a fence, you've already failed?" I mean, they should understand that actions have consequences, and if they're not the sort of kids who grasp the seriousness of running into the road, may as well let them run into traffic and start with a new set of kids.
Kids do self-destructive things. Not the ones without consciences. Not the irresponsible ones. Kids. Left to themselves, they'll watch twelve hours of television a day, live entirely on pizza, and spend any money they get within an hour of the getting. If they were capable of consistently making responsible choices, we'd call them "undersized adults" and give them the vote.
Children require rules. Children require parental enforcement. But they also require physical safeguards that constrain their behavior. You can't just tell them to eat lots of veggies; you have to make sure that they frequently have the opportunity to eat healthy foods, and rarely get access to junk food. You can't just tell them "don't visit bad websites." You have to install filters to buffer them from the weird and twisted on the 'Net.*
So if this guy wants to let the computer itself constrain his kids' computer usage, I don't see anything particularly wrong with that. It's hard to make value judgments about "being on the computer" given the wide variety of activities that people do with them. But if the goal is to get the kids to have interests other than the computer, this doesn't sound half bad.
* By the time they're old enough to disable the filters, it's time to let conscience take over anyways.
No, no, no. The simple answer is this: The most usable desktop is one where all text boxes implement EMACS-style commands. For example, Ctrl-W cuts, Ctrl-Y pastes, Alt-W copies, Ctrl-N takes you to the next item or moves the cursor forward, etc.
That, for me, would be the absolute most productive desktop around.
Your problem is that you're taking your own personal preferences about which arbitrary mappings of keys to actions works best for you, and you're assuming that it would work best for everyone. As someone who uses EMACS constantly, anything that maps my EMACSy instincts to other programs just feels "right" to me.
In conclusion, one does NOT have to agree.
Ubuntu 5.10, with every bizarre repository in the world in my apt/sources.list.
I'm not sure which repository it's coming from, or how to find out.
I think we're both speculating about the economics of chip manufacturing. But it doesn't seem like a couple million chips is an impossibly large fraction of AMDs capacity, especially if this project is stretched out over five years or so. Also, it's unlikely that the chips being used are anything AMD isn't manufacturing in fairly large quantities anyways. A special order processor would be prohibitively expensive.
As for the Internet, these things are supposed to come pre-equipped with wireless equipment, and software to form a mesh network between the units. This doesn't get them onto the Internet directly, but it means that the range of any central hub can be greatly extended. According to the faq, they're working on a separate project for Internet connectivity.
The laptops are already AMD/Linux systems, so the last sentence of your post doesn't make sense to me.
Donuts, and the promise of more donuts in the future.
That's all it takes, I swear!
Next question: Now what do I do?
Well of course it's worth its shelf space. The thing is about a third of an inch thick!
For those just tuning in, "K&R" is shorthand for Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language," and it really is a great little book. However, part of the brevity and clarity comes from the C programming language itself. Try writing a similar book about C++, and even with the same eye for brevity, you'd end up with a book five or six times as long. Ten times if you threw in the STL.
Some people have claimed that this book should be required reading for programmers. Others have countered that the book should be required for authors of programming books. Let me take it one step further and suggest that it should be required reading for authors of programming languages. If the language you're designing cannot be effectively and similarly summarized given the K&R treatment, then it may be worth it to simplify things.
I've become a huge fan of Python recently. As proponents claim, it's one of a very small handful of languages where you can keep the entire syntax in your head. I'm not claiming that Python is the ideal language, but merely that other programming languages should strive for similar simplicity.
Selling to the public is a brilliant idea. First, it will increase the volume manufactured, and thereby decrease the cost per item. Second, it provides the manufacturers with more feedback about how it works under a wide variety of conditions. Finally, combining this with the open-sourcishness of the software, you end up with a lot more people doing development work for it, greatly expanding the usefulness of the laptops themselves.
Hear hear!
I needed to wait a couple of hours for my girlfriend last night, so I took her laptop so I could do a bit of homework while I waited. I didn't take the power cable, because I thought "a couple of hours is all I need".
The bloody thing went from full to empty in about forty-five minutes.
I would so much have preferred to have one of these little babies. You run out of batteries? No problem, just turn the crank a bit. "All around the cobblers bench, the monkey chased the weasel..." You're ready to go again.
If they really are selling them for $200 to the general public, I want I want I want. I get something I can carry to class and take notes on, some kid in Bangladesh gets something he can carry to class and take notes on, and that sexy lime green color makes both of us the envy of our peers.
Are you sure? The specs seem reasonable: I'm interpreting them as "500MHz processor, 1GB flash storage, 1024x768 screen". The relative lack of moving parts makes it much easier to make the whole thing durable. There isn't a hard drive, and I'm guessing passive cooling would be sufficient for the fan. So reliability would be high. They're saying the display portion will only cost $35, and that's usually the most expensive part of any laptop.
Estimating the feasibility of this project by comparing it to a ruggedized laptop that is intended to act as a full desktop replacement seems misguided. My guess: it's going to happen.
Since you've dragged this conversation down to the level of farce (and let's face it, it's all your fault, and probably your original intention), let's recap the conversation so far:
Stay tuned, folks. It's not going to get any prettier.
I never said you weren't entitled to offer an opinion. What I said was that, because you were claiming to have firsthand knowledge to support your opinions, it's up to you to provide details, if you want readers to give your opinion any more credibility than anyone else.
Nor did I contradict myself when I said I don't care to find out about those personal experiences. Towards the beginning of the thread, I was curious, and I did indeed detail what you could have done to satisfy that curiosity. Now I honestly don't care. See, there's this thing called "time", and "things" can be different at different "times". My curiosity is one of those "things" that can "change" over "time". As a seasoned adult who has very little "time" left before his creaky body creaks its last creak, I really shouldn't have to belabor the point for you.
I did find it absurd that you wanted me to pay good money for a bunch of photocopies from the Ninth Circuit, without giving me the slightest idea what I'm going to learn from them, or even giving the names of the relevant cases so that I wouldn't have to order every document from
I'm not asking you to "do my research for me," nor do I care whether I ever find out what the EFF did to piss you off. What I do care about is that you're an arrogant twit who wants everyone to hate the EFF based on personal experience which he won't detail, and what I'm asking you to do is stop pretending that your "contribution" thus far is anything more substantial than, "LOL!!!1 EFF IS TEH SUXX0R!!!."
You could have given a brief summary of your interactions with the EFF. You know, the interactions that constitute the factual basis for all the opinion you've been spewing. Instead, you prefer to expend orders of magnitude more effort defending your refusal to relate your own personal experiences.
Let's momentarily set aside your asinine refusal to even say what cases you were involved in and the part you played in those cases (which would establish enough credibility for a serious discussion--not that you've ever shown an interest in one). No original sources I could get from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals could ever give me what I would need to know to discuss your personal experiences. Even if I learned everything that public documents could teach me about the case, it still wouldn't tell me what mistakes YOU thought the EFF made, it still wouldn't tell me what behaviors YOU found unprofessional. This entire thread has been about your opinions, and so long as you won't say why you hold them, the only thing here we can discuss is why you're behaving like such a buffoon.
The longer you keep stonewalling, the more worthless your opinion appears. The longer I keep feeding your trollish behavior, the dumber I look. I don't care, though. At this point, I just want to win. And by "win", I don't mean "getting the information out of you." I mean, "getting the last post." I have the time to waste on this thoroughly pointless exchange. Do you?
So... my final lesson is that you're a troll?
Wow. I really want my money back.
This is really how you spend your life? Trolling, living on the last fumes of fame coming off your friendship with Kevin Mitnick, telling people how important your opinion is but fuck 'em if they ask why?
You, a seasoned adult? I'm adding that to the list of claims you never substantiated.
A lot of the attributes you allude to have more to do with personality and temperament than intelligence.
For example, I'm not exactly "disciplined" about money, but I always seem to have enough for my needs, because I have a deep-seated, irrational aversion to spending money. I've been that way for as long as I can remember. I think it means some genetic switch is stuck on "scarcity". The alternative--that I have incredible foresight and discipline--seems really farfetched to me.
"Staying out of trouble" and "avoiding fights" also seems to be primarily driven by temperament, not intelligence.
My guess is that you're referring to these things as kinds of "intelligence" because these differences in temperament lead some people to behave in ways that act to their long-term benefit, while leading others to act self-destructively. But that definition of intelligence seems overly broad to me.
You claim it's not up to you to provide any information to substantiate your opinion, but it apparently irritates you that I don't take your opinion seriously.
Get over yourself.
You don't have the hipness down, but you've certainly shown the ability to not say anything substantiative. Personally, I think you're just pissed that people didn't immediately recognize you as a Super Internet Celebrity, bow down before your porntastic fame, and accept your (completely unsubstantiated) opinion of the EFF as the final word.
I find your behavior bizarre. If you are who you say you are, and are as intimately familiar with the EFF as you claim, you could easily spend ten minutes writing about the substance of your experiences, and it would be the single most informative post in this entire story. Instead, you go around making these nasty but vague accusations of incompetence and unprofessionalism by the EFF, claim firsthand knowledge that you won't detail, spend a good deal of time hurling juvenile insults at anyone who asks for specifics, and congratulate yourself on being so much more informed than the Slashdot masses.
If I were terribly interested in calibrating the competence and effectiveness of the EFF (nothing in the article or your commentary has caused me any concern), there are a wide variety of sources I could use to research. You haven't given anybody any reason to care about your experiences in particular, and you certainly haven't given me enough to make me want to buy a Lexis/Nexis subscription.
I remember a guy from Basic Training who reminds me of you. Kept claiming that he'd been a sergeant before, and was just re-enlisting. He never convinced me either.
Actually, prior to my post I spent about forty minutes snooping around Slashdot and Google, trying to figure out how easy it would be to do the "research" you claim any reasonable person should be willing to do to validate your claims.
I learned the following things:
You have an e-mail address, lew.payne@gmail.com. Anyone who has a GMail account must be who they claim to be.
"Lew Payne" may have been a friend of Kevin Mitnick's, but didn't get mentioned in Mitnick's Wikipedia entry.
"Lewis Payne" was an associate of John Wilkes Booth. You're probably not him.
A "Lew Payne" is the owner of the website goodbyeguns.org, whose goal is to make private ownership of firearms illegal. He also has a publishing company.
The search "lew payne" + eff returns zero hits.
The search "lew payne" site:eff.org returns zero hits.
Someone with the moniker "Lew Payne" posts to Slashdot.
Finally, when I came back to double-check my info, I found that Lew Payne Publishing hosts adult websites, and was involved somewhat in the sex.com domain name dispute.
Now I presume I'm supposed to make the assumption that you are that Lew Payne (not a coincidence, not an imitator). Then I guess I could spend weeks looking for every legal filing related to Lew Payne Publishing, Inc. Then I could spend my time poring over them, trying to tease out the connection between him and the EFF, and finally figure out what conclusions about the EFF I'm meant to draw from his experiences with them.
I'm not going to do that. If you have specific criticisms of the EFF, it's up to you to explain exactly what experiences led you to those criticisms, in sufficient detail that others can easily verify your claims. You've given me no reason to believe that all the effort you're asking of me is going to lead to anything more than, "Huh. He lost a case and blames the EFF."
If you think your experiences would sway peoples' opinions of the EFF, outline those experiences. But until you put in the effort to explain what makes them relevant, I'm going to assume they're not.
When asked for proof that you have firsthand experience, you simply claim to have been involved in specific cases. That's not proof. They're just additional claims that you haven't backed up.
Is your name on any of the briefs? What specifically was your involvement in the two cases you describe? Are you Kevin Mitnick?
You demand credibility for "being well known" and for "having first-hand experience", but you don't give any personally identifiable information that would allow to figure out who you are, or find out about the "numerous legal battles" you've fought. Your email isn't shown, you don't link to a website, you don't explain your involvement in the cases enough for us to analyze your claims. Unless you give us that, your demands to have your opinion respected are shameless trolling.
You can have anonymity or credibility. Pick one.
That's utter nonsense.
First, though the EFF can choose who they defend, the opposition can choose who they prosecute.
Second, the legislation they're trying to fight against is often pernicious, but since it is the law of the land, the only way to fight it is to argue it on constitutional grounds. The courts aren't usually eager to overrule Congress unless they've clearly overreached. So the EFF needs to present a slam-dunk case to a sympathetic judge just to have a chance.
Any decent lawyer could easily rack up a 100% win record, just by taking only the slam-dunk cases. But if the EFF only fights the battles they're certain to win, I don't see how they would be terribly useful.
You've made the canonical mistake of the religious fundamentalist: You've conflated religious devotion with religious fundamentalism. Frankly, there are a lot of people who have deep religious convictions, and also think of "fundies" as a bunch of vicious, ignorant hypocrites. So it's entirely possible for me to believe that a teacher could treat religious subjects with all professional diligence, but still finding fundamentalists obnoxious enough that--when participating with a like-minded student group--a good, cathartic rant might be taken too far.
In other words, not only is it possible for a competent religious studies professor to say what Mirecki said, I'm betting lots of them are looking at him and wishing they'd had the balls to say what he did.
Like the guy at the end of the third article said, the professor's mistake was in letting himself sink down to the level of his opposition.