No, it's vital. Correlation does not lead to causation on its own, but there MUST be correlation if there is to be a claim of causation. If you want to claim that X causes Y, you must be able to show that where there's X, there's Y.
The correlation/causation ranting has obfuscated this simple fact, leading to people buying into the raving of people like He Who Must Not Be Named, who is unable to show even a tiny fraction of percentage correlation between the tens (hundreds?) of millions of video game players and actual acts of real-world violence committed, yet has convinced many people that some form of causative link exists.
isn't really nice when you're doing it with money and a research staff/equipment that don't belong to you.
Studies like the one performed is probably one of the fastest and least expensive ways to collect a number of environmental factors (the original paper reported a "top five") for further study to determine if there is a causative link. Otherwise, what you have scientists do? Open up a dictionary and start at "a" and test everything one at a time with a much more rigorous and expensive test for causation?
doesn't mean that their argument isn't ridiculous.
Gotta agree here. Even if you're trying to claim that individual packets can't be a significant portion of a copyrighted work, nobody joins a swarm and sends just one packet.
I have to admit I was disappointed too. We recently had our colocation facility fall down on the job (turns out they have no alternate way to contact everyone should their internet fail) and I was hoping to get some insight into setting up hot sites, how a site should determine whether it can see the internet or not (clearly I can't just ping google anymore), and other things that would be useful from a technical perspective.
Instead I get "white box" and "black box" monitoring, and I have yet to figure out how to get anything but LCD panels out of google for these terms.
No, a 13 year old child would NEVER do such a thing, would she?
I'm sorry, but by the time they're 13 they've certainly had enough ibuprofen to know that it won't get them high or double their quiz scores. So no, I don't think that a 13 year old is going to become some sort of ibuprofen pusher, giving out the first hit for free.
Why shouldn't your logic work for unicorns? After all, this mysterious "illicit" ibuprofen didn't exist either. Failing to prove that it didn't exist (an impossible task, but I guess they don't teach that in schools anymore) is what resulted in the strip search. All of a sudden when it's pointed out how absurd it is, you're expecting the principal to show some rational thought?
Would you give up your right to sue if your kid was hurt in some fashion by drugs while at school?
Sure, if she was hurt by Ibuprofen.
how you intend for the school to achieve its mission of protecting students from hurting themselves
Oh man, that's a toughie. Oh, I know!! How about achieving its mission by protecting students from things that are actually harmful. Sadly, that requires putting actual thought into the situation. For instance, if I suspected that the kid was selling ecstasy tablets disguised as ibuprofen, having obtained such a fake tablet from another kid, this would be grounds for an investigation that might escalate to a strip search. Or if a kid reported that another kid was going to try to kill themselves by ODing on Ibuprofen, this would be grounds for an investigation that would probably escalate to a trip to the counselor.
But a kid who you think might have real ibuprofen, with no other known threat? Yeah, that's totally dangerous.
I don't know why you say it is obvious she wasn't selling them.
It's called motive, something that would be present for marijuana or ritalin, but is absolutely lacking for ibuprofen.
By your logic, if some kid told the principal that so-and-so had a unicorn and bringing pets to school was against the rules, the principal is well within his or her power to order so-and-so to be stripped to make sure she's not hiding the unicorn in her panties. After all, it's not the principal's job to prove that unicorns exist or that it might be possible that a unicorn be hidden in her underwear, it's the girl's job to prove that there is no such unicorn and she's lucky that she didn't get a cavity search.
Why wasn't the case brought up when she was 13?
Because, believe it or not, it takes time to go through all the court cases and appeals and more court cases and more appeals before your lawyer (or the government's lawyer) writes a letter to the supreme court asking them to review your case where it sits for a while before the court reads through them to decide whether or not it's going to take the case, and then it sits and waits for the court to go through all the cases that came in first. A google search for the girl's name turned up court documents from 2004, and I didn't even look to see if that was from the original trial or not.
The most recurring complaint I've seen with the slashdot mod system is from people complaining that it enforces groupthink. In otherwords, it's perfect for a corporate environment.
For the most part, I actually have to agree. It took me a while to get used to it, but I can reach just about any site I regularly visit with just a couple of letters.
sl completes to slashdot.org qz completes to slashdot.org/~Qzukk/comments fi completes to slashdot.org/firehose.pl?section=75&color=black and so on.
The best part is that just like in input autocomplete lists, you can hit the delete key to remove the items you don't want coming up anymore.
The latest seamonkey alpha uses the same completion logic without taking up so much screen space.
a limited liability corporation building a 1.21 gigawatt nuclear reactor in downtown Manhattan is gonna have a little difficulty getting capital.:-)
Why? If the members' liabilities are actually limited, what does some guy in California (or China) care what happens to Manhattan, as long as he gets his money back before it does?
They do it because the incentive of being the safest and most marketable reactor
And since when has marketing been anything but a boatload of lies?
They'll market their reactor as the safest, and when it blows up, they'll have pulled their cash out of the corporation and run for the hills, leaving behind a husk of a limited liability corp and the taxpayers holding the bag of a really, really expensive Superfund site.
Not to say that the current regulations have done that great of a job. America is now decades behind modern reactor technology thanks to them. I'd love to be able to trust corporations without government interference, but when they barely manage to clear the hurdles of regulation what makes people think they're going to bother to jump when the hurdles are removed?
but is it really that hard to grasp that new technologies allow us to reach deeper (and sideways) for oil that was previously out of reach?
Not at all. After all, there MUST be pirate treasure buried in my backyard. The problem is that nobody's invented good enough metal detection technology to enable me to find it.
I've been on the jury of one criminal trial, and based on the result, I cannot possibly believe that the founding fathers and/or the current justice system participants actually expect jurors to pretend to be ignorant. I understand that as a jury we're not supposed to fabricate our own evidence or take into account information outside of the scope of the individual crime for which the person is being charged. (For instance, as soon as we got in the jury room one of the jury members who knew the law pointed out that this isn't the first time the guy had been convicted of assault, since the charge was felony assault with a deadly weapon and first non-injury assaults are misdemeanors. We agreed to ignore this, after all, as the stock spam says: "past performance is not indicative of future results".)
But seriously... After several of the jury members checked their brains at the door with their cellphones, our deliberation process ended up headbangingly stupid, with the following list of "reasonable" doubts:
1) Knives aren't deadly weapons (I don't remember the exact legal gibberish now, something about a tool designed to or capable of causing a certain level of injury which actually included stuff like permanent disfigurement in addition to death, but it took almost an hour of arguing before we all settled on agreeing that they were deadly weapons. At one point this included "Maybe the knife is made of rubber?", "Nobody thought that a rubber knife was important enough to mention?", "It isn't the defense's job to prove he was innocent!")
2) The prosecution did not prove that the person was not insane (the "knowingly" that was part of the assault charge definition). "Maybe the CIA had him on mind control drugs?" "Now you're just being an asshole".
and its corollary
3) A man who tells his estranged wife that he's going to kill her could be acting in the "heat of passion" when after making the threat, he goes home, then comes back in the morning with the aforementioned maybe deadly knife and breaks down her door and threatens again to kill her with a (rubber?) knife. (We spent the rest of the day here.)
After we delivered a jury verdict we were supposed to wait for the verdict to be read adn the court process finished up. so that we could be debriefed by the judge. I asked if this was supposed to be "grief counseling" and everyone else (including the judge) thought it was a pretty good joke.
If the legal system wants ignorant people to listen to cases, I suggest they send out their jury duty notices to the local maternity wards, where they can find dozens of completely fresh blank slates if the court is willing to take breaks for naps and diaper changes.
You only need to follow two rules on the freeway to cover everything but the "something unexpected"
1: Don't drive faster than the car in front of you. 2: Don't change lanes when a car is in the lane beside you.
If everyone followed those two rules, the only accidents would be ones caused by trailers flipping over or axles breaking loose and shooting out the side of the truck or cars with blowouts ending up in every lane at the same time (all three of which I've observed but fortunately managed to not be involved in). Sadly, a significant number of people refuse to follow 1 and 2.
What we need is vehicles equiped with laser beams to eliminate them.
I like it, but I'd settle for instituting (and enforcing) a minimum speed everywhere there's a frontage/service road the slowmobiles could be using. If the frontage road has a 50 MPH limit, that becomes the minimum for the freeway.
Lasse Gjertsen used his own video samples when he edited together his own video of himself playing the piano and drums one note at a time, and he probably wasn't the first to do it either when he did so in 2006.
Pretty much the only "revolutionary" thing in this article is trying to sell this as the "future" of music. Except that this particular future came and went years ago and is now being chopped up, processed, and turned into seizure-inducing videos by the Japanese.
Drunk driving's not exactly what I'd call a small infraction. But let me ask you this: when was the last time you changed lanes within 200 feet of an intersection? Yeah, even that intersection 100 feet from the freeway exit ramp, that one counts too. Ignorance and the stoned chimps who lay out the roads are no excuse!
Or what about the exit ramp itself, the one from the 65mph freeway to the 50mph service road, with the little yellow square on it that tells you to exit at 45mph. Do you hold up all the traffic to slow down before getting on the exit ramp?
A file system should take my data buffer, and after saying "Ok, I got it"
There's your problem, you didn't even bother to ask if it got it, you just threw a ton of data into the file descriptor and closed it, now didn't you. And you want me on thedailywtf?
But lets back up here, because there's more than just people too lazy to call fsync() in order to ask the file system to write the data to the disk and say "Ok, I got it".
All that stuff about creating a backup copy and doing this and that, has to happen inside the file system.
The filesystem does exactly what you tell it to do. If you don't want it to make a zero byte file, then DON'T USE O_TRUNC OR *truncate() TO EMPTY YOUR FILE. Make a new file, fill it up, rename it over the other file. Don't assume that in just a few instructions, you're going to be filling it back up with new data, because those instructions may never arrive.
You don't like it? Try and convince people that (open file, erase all the data in it, do some stuff, write some data, do some more stuff, write some more data, write data to disk, close file) should be an uninterruptable atomic operation. You want a versioning filesystem? Take your pick.
those writes better damn well happen before the calls that say data is written return.
A successful return from write() does not make any guarantee that data has been committed to disk. In fact, on some buggy implementations, it does not even guarantee that space has successfully been reserved for the data. The only way to be sure is to call fsync(2) after you are done writing all your data.
Not checking the return value of close() is a common but nevertheless serious programming error. It is quite possible that errors on a previous write(2) operation are first reported at the final close(). Not checking the return value when closing the file may lead to silent loss of data. This can especially be observed with NFS and with disk quota.
A successful close does not guarantee that the data has been successfully saved to disk, as the kernel defers writes. It is not common for a filesystem to flush the buffers when the stream is closed. If you need to be sure that the data is physically stored use fsync(2).
The manpages agree with what you are saying, the problem is that the application developers who forgot to/don't want to use fsync() don't, because the *sync() functions are the only ones that say anything has been written, and they do in fact stop and wait until the data really is written.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's vital. Correlation does not lead to causation on its own, but there MUST be correlation if there is to be a claim of causation. If you want to claim that X causes Y, you must be able to show that where there's X, there's Y.
The correlation/causation ranting has obfuscated this simple fact, leading to people buying into the raving of people like He Who Must Not Be Named, who is unable to show even a tiny fraction of percentage correlation between the tens (hundreds?) of millions of video game players and actual acts of real-world violence committed, yet has convinced many people that some form of causative link exists.
Studies like the one performed is probably one of the fastest and least expensive ways to collect a number of environmental factors (the original paper reported a "top five") for further study to determine if there is a causative link. Otherwise, what you have scientists do? Open up a dictionary and start at "a" and test everything one at a time with a much more rigorous and expensive test for causation?
Water is a chemical.
And its one we understand how to die by, so we can use it safely without killing ourselves. Can you say the same for the rest of them?
"What you don't know, can't hurt you" has never been true. "What you do know, you can mitigate" is the creed we should be living by.
publish on Teats!
I think that idea has already been patented by goldenpalace.com
doesn't mean that their argument isn't ridiculous.
Gotta agree here. Even if you're trying to claim that individual packets can't be a significant portion of a copyrighted work, nobody joins a swarm and sends just one packet.
I'm sure there's a torrent somewhere...
I have to admit I was disappointed too. We recently had our colocation facility fall down on the job (turns out they have no alternate way to contact everyone should their internet fail) and I was hoping to get some insight into setting up hot sites, how a site should determine whether it can see the internet or not (clearly I can't just ping google anymore), and other things that would be useful from a technical perspective.
Instead I get "white box" and "black box" monitoring, and I have yet to figure out how to get anything but LCD panels out of google for these terms.
No, a 13 year old child would NEVER do such a thing, would she?
I'm sorry, but by the time they're 13 they've certainly had enough ibuprofen to know that it won't get them high or double their quiz scores. So no, I don't think that a 13 year old is going to become some sort of ibuprofen pusher, giving out the first hit for free.
Why shouldn't your logic work for unicorns? After all, this mysterious "illicit" ibuprofen didn't exist either. Failing to prove that it didn't exist (an impossible task, but I guess they don't teach that in schools anymore) is what resulted in the strip search. All of a sudden when it's pointed out how absurd it is, you're expecting the principal to show some rational thought?
Would you give up your right to sue if your kid was hurt in some fashion by drugs while at school?
Sure, if she was hurt by Ibuprofen.
how you intend for the school to achieve its mission of protecting students from hurting themselves
Oh man, that's a toughie. Oh, I know!! How about achieving its mission by protecting students from things that are actually harmful. Sadly, that requires putting actual thought into the situation. For instance, if I suspected that the kid was selling ecstasy tablets disguised as ibuprofen, having obtained such a fake tablet from another kid, this would be grounds for an investigation that might escalate to a strip search. Or if a kid reported that another kid was going to try to kill themselves by ODing on Ibuprofen, this would be grounds for an investigation that would probably escalate to a trip to the counselor.
But a kid who you think might have real ibuprofen, with no other known threat? Yeah, that's totally dangerous.
I don't know why you say it is obvious she wasn't selling them.
It's called motive, something that would be present for marijuana or ritalin, but is absolutely lacking for ibuprofen.
By your logic, if some kid told the principal that so-and-so had a unicorn and bringing pets to school was against the rules, the principal is well within his or her power to order so-and-so to be stripped to make sure she's not hiding the unicorn in her panties. After all, it's not the principal's job to prove that unicorns exist or that it might be possible that a unicorn be hidden in her underwear, it's the girl's job to prove that there is no such unicorn and she's lucky that she didn't get a cavity search.
Why wasn't the case brought up when she was 13?
Because, believe it or not, it takes time to go through all the court cases and appeals and more court cases and more appeals before your lawyer (or the government's lawyer) writes a letter to the supreme court asking them to review your case where it sits for a while before the court reads through them to decide whether or not it's going to take the case, and then it sits and waits for the court to go through all the cases that came in first. A google search for the girl's name turned up court documents from 2004, and I didn't even look to see if that was from the original trial or not.
The most recurring complaint I've seen with the slashdot mod system is from people complaining that it enforces groupthink. In otherwords, it's perfect for a corporate environment.
For the most part, I actually have to agree. It took me a while to get used to it, but I can reach just about any site I regularly visit with just a couple of letters.
sl completes to slashdot.org
qz completes to slashdot.org/~Qzukk/comments
fi completes to slashdot.org/firehose.pl?section=75&color=black
and so on.
The best part is that just like in input autocomplete lists, you can hit the delete key to remove the items you don't want coming up anymore.
The latest seamonkey alpha uses the same completion logic without taking up so much screen space.
Do you dig in various banks balance sheets before you create a checking account?
If FDIC and the SEC did not exist, do you think that the banks would allow me to see their real balance sheets, or would they just tell me "The company expects its capital ratios at quarter-end to remain significantly above the levels for well-capitalized institutions and continues to be confident that it has sufficient liquidity and capital to support its operations while it returns to profitability"? (...wait, that's what they said WITH the regulators breathing down their necks. Another regulatory hurdle... would they have even bothered to try without them?)
a limited liability corporation building a 1.21 gigawatt nuclear reactor in downtown Manhattan is gonna have a little difficulty getting capital. :-)
Why? If the members' liabilities are actually limited, what does some guy in California (or China) care what happens to Manhattan, as long as he gets his money back before it does?
They do it because the incentive of being the safest and most marketable reactor
And since when has marketing been anything but a boatload of lies?
They'll market their reactor as the safest, and when it blows up, they'll have pulled their cash out of the corporation and run for the hills, leaving behind a husk of a limited liability corp and the taxpayers holding the bag of a really, really expensive Superfund site.
Not to say that the current regulations have done that great of a job. America is now decades behind modern reactor technology thanks to them. I'd love to be able to trust corporations without government interference, but when they barely manage to clear the hurdles of regulation what makes people think they're going to bother to jump when the hurdles are removed?
but is it really that hard to grasp that new technologies allow us to reach deeper (and sideways) for oil that was previously out of reach?
Not at all. After all, there MUST be pirate treasure buried in my backyard. The problem is that nobody's invented good enough metal detection technology to enable me to find it.
I've been on the jury of one criminal trial, and based on the result, I cannot possibly believe that the founding fathers and/or the current justice system participants actually expect jurors to pretend to be ignorant. I understand that as a jury we're not supposed to fabricate our own evidence or take into account information outside of the scope of the individual crime for which the person is being charged. (For instance, as soon as we got in the jury room one of the jury members who knew the law pointed out that this isn't the first time the guy had been convicted of assault, since the charge was felony assault with a deadly weapon and first non-injury assaults are misdemeanors. We agreed to ignore this, after all, as the stock spam says: "past performance is not indicative of future results".)
But seriously... After several of the jury members checked their brains at the door with their cellphones, our deliberation process ended up headbangingly stupid, with the following list of "reasonable" doubts:
1) Knives aren't deadly weapons (I don't remember the exact legal gibberish now, something about a tool designed to or capable of causing a certain level of injury which actually included stuff like permanent disfigurement in addition to death, but it took almost an hour of arguing before we all settled on agreeing that they were deadly weapons. At one point this included "Maybe the knife is made of rubber?", "Nobody thought that a rubber knife was important enough to mention?", "It isn't the defense's job to prove he was innocent!")
2) The prosecution did not prove that the person was not insane (the "knowingly" that was part of the assault charge definition). "Maybe the CIA had him on mind control drugs?" "Now you're just being an asshole".
and its corollary
3) A man who tells his estranged wife that he's going to kill her could be acting in the "heat of passion" when after making the threat, he goes home, then comes back in the morning with the aforementioned maybe deadly knife and breaks down her door and threatens again to kill her with a (rubber?) knife. (We spent the rest of the day here.)
After we delivered a jury verdict we were supposed to wait for the verdict to be read adn the court process finished up. so that we could be debriefed by the judge. I asked if this was supposed to be "grief counseling" and everyone else (including the judge) thought it was a pretty good joke.
If the legal system wants ignorant people to listen to cases, I suggest they send out their jury duty notices to the local maternity wards, where they can find dozens of completely fresh blank slates if the court is willing to take breaks for naps and diaper changes.
If you don't cover those basics
You only need to follow two rules on the freeway to cover everything but the "something unexpected"
1: Don't drive faster than the car in front of you.
2: Don't change lanes when a car is in the lane beside you.
If everyone followed those two rules, the only accidents would be ones caused by trailers flipping over or axles breaking loose and shooting out the side of the truck or cars with blowouts ending up in every lane at the same time (all three of which I've observed but fortunately managed to not be involved in). Sadly, a significant number of people refuse to follow 1 and 2.
What we need is vehicles equiped with laser beams to eliminate them.
I like it, but I'd settle for instituting (and enforcing) a minimum speed everywhere there's a frontage/service road the slowmobiles could be using. If the frontage road has a 50 MPH limit, that becomes the minimum for the freeway.
Which power of Congress authorizes that?
The one that drives libertarians batshit insane: the power "To establish post offices and post roads"
It only took you 90 words to say what he did in 11.
Obviously he had the time to clearly document his thoughts, while the other guy needed to make his post and make his post NOW!
That graph needs to be updated to reflect the recent activity by Somali pirates and the consequent winter storms throughout the US.
Lasse Gjertsen used his own video samples when he edited together his own video of himself playing the piano and drums one note at a time, and he probably wasn't the first to do it either when he did so in 2006.
Pretty much the only "revolutionary" thing in this article is trying to sell this as the "future" of music. Except that this particular future came and went years ago and is now being chopped up, processed, and turned into seizure-inducing videos by the Japanese.
Screensaver operation was impaired by changing the picture.
Did the picture fail to save the screen?
Drunk driving's not exactly what I'd call a small infraction. But let me ask you this: when was the last time you changed lanes within 200 feet of an intersection? Yeah, even that intersection 100 feet from the freeway exit ramp, that one counts too. Ignorance and the stoned chimps who lay out the roads are no excuse!
Or what about the exit ramp itself, the one from the 65mph freeway to the 50mph service road, with the little yellow square on it that tells you to exit at 45mph. Do you hold up all the traffic to slow down before getting on the exit ramp?
A file system should take my data buffer, and after saying "Ok, I got it"
There's your problem, you didn't even bother to ask if it got it, you just threw a ton of data into the file descriptor and closed it, now didn't you. And you want me on thedailywtf?
But lets back up here, because there's more than just people too lazy to call fsync() in order to ask the file system to write the data to the disk and say "Ok, I got it".
All that stuff about creating a backup copy and doing this and that, has to happen inside the file system.
The filesystem does exactly what you tell it to do. If you don't want it to make a zero byte file, then DON'T USE O_TRUNC OR *truncate() TO EMPTY YOUR FILE. Make a new file, fill it up, rename it over the other file. Don't assume that in just a few instructions, you're going to be filling it back up with new data, because those instructions may never arrive.
You don't like it? Try and convince people that (open file, erase all the data in it, do some stuff, write some data, do some more stuff, write some more data, write data to disk, close file) should be an uninterruptable atomic operation. You want a versioning filesystem? Take your pick.
those writes better damn well happen before the calls that say data is written return.
The manpages agree with what you are saying, the problem is that the application developers who forgot to/don't want to use fsync() don't, because the *sync() functions are the only ones that say anything has been written, and they do in fact stop and wait until the data really is written.