I agree with the idea that it's their choice, but would it be right for the tobacco companies to be able to sue findings that could potentially hurt their industry out of the public eye? Lawyers are already supposed to tell the truth but once money becomes involved there are a lot of people willing to sell out. There are no mechanisms for determining truth which are entirely accurate. Lie detectors in court would just introduce acting classes as a senior year requirement in law school.
There are already mechanisms for getting rid of fraudulent data, this provision seems to be more about getting rid of inconvenient data.
Re:Final Framers of Truth
on
Data Quality Act
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The only problem with this philosophy is: who has more lawyers available to them to define the truth, citizens or companies? What will prevent Philip Morris using their lawyers to strike out any claims that links cigarettes to anything except a glamorous lifestyle? How long until the automotive and oil industries funds lawsuits to strike out any correlation between automotive exhaust and environmental or health effects?
Re:wtf happened to the Legos boycott?
on
MindStorms Madness
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Terrorism isn't about the value of human life, its about religious zealotry, centuries of rage, an imbalance of power and perceived injustices. You've got a group of people who believe that upholding their interpretation of their religion is worth more than human life. You've also got a religious war thats been going on for centuries, with one side getting a lot of assistance from outsiders who belong to neither religion. You have an impoverished and downtrodden people who can be warped to believing that suicide is the way to heaven if you take some of the enemy with you. You've also got depots willing to bend religious fervour to further their own agendas. Just for fun throw in a hotly contested strip of desert as well.
I don't know that the U.S. values human life to any great extent per se, but they go about devalueing it less violently.
Most of your gadgetry doesn't need to be on the UPS (though it should have surge protection). A UPS isn't there so you can work through a black or brown out, its there to let you shut down in an orderly manner. Scanners, amplifiers, printers and the like aren't necessary for an orderly shutdown. Even a monitor isn't necessary if you've got a serial port on the UPS and monitoring software on your box.
I've got two computers running off an inexpensive APC UPS. I've only had the computers start the shut down process twice, and the area I'm in has at least a few power outages per year.
Both sides of the fight lie through their teeth. Downloading files of the internet doesn't appreciably harm sales of CDs/DVDs/Movie tickets/..., but it also doesn't help. Just because in the short term there's a spike upwards or downwards on some metric doesn't mean its attributabal to your cause of the day.
Re:Pick your own outcome by picking your questions
on
Pardon, Is This Your File?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Right. That's why I think the 57% number is low. If you've used the web at all you've downloaded copyrighted text, images or software. 43% of the people didn't realize they downloaded things that were covered by copyright or realized the intent of the question.
The statistics are broken up rather oddly, they seem misapplied to me. First of all, it says that more than 50% of web users have downloaded copyrighted works. OK, maybe this is true, maybe it isn't. But then they state that 57% of their 1026 web users didn't pay for copyrighted materials. This would mean that approximately 100% of the people who downloaded off the internet seldom payed for software.
What I think this questionaire looked like:
Have you ever downloaded copyrighted materials off the internet?
Have you ever payed for copyrighted materials you've downloaded off the internet?
Have you ever pirated software?
OK, so now 50% of the people or there abouts answer affirmitavely to question 1 . This splits the sample group into two halfs, those that have downloaded and those who haven't. Some percentage of those that have downloaded copywritten materials then go onto 2 and say that not only have they downloaded copyrighted materials, but they haven't payed for it. What about the people who haven't downloaded copyrighted materials? How do they answer question 2? If they answer yes it implies that they have downloaded copyrighted materials, so many will answer no. This, if you misinterpret statistics properly, leads you to the conclusion that 57% of web users have downloaded copyrighted materials and not payed for them.
This is the same thing I see every day on the various web polls on news sites. The questions are chosen to skew the statistics in some obvious way.
Star Wars is no more science fiction than the Lord of the Rings. It's a fantasy with robots and spaceships instead of trolls and horses. To me science fiction has to include "science" as an important plot point, it can't just be part of the setting. There aren't actually many movies that really are science fiction, most would more accurately be called period pieces where the period happens to be some point in the future or in Star Wars case some futuristic past.
I'm not sure how anybody could've expected to influence yahoo's position. Yahoo can be broken up into many population segments. A useful one to consider is this:
Average yahoo users
Pro-privacy/anti-commercialism yahoo users
Abandoned accounts
Group 1 completely overwhelms group 2, but to further minimize any chance of making anything other than a moral difference, I'll bet group 3 overwhelms group 2 as well. The third group counts as votes in favour of, or at least ambivalent to the concerns of the second group since as far as yahoo concerns its a satisfied customer.
It goes farther than that. Sony made a huge amount of money producing Walkman's in the eighties. They were criticized at the time for this because a popular thing to use these personal casette players for was sharing homemade copies with friends. Their view at the time was that they couldn't control and shouldn't be judged based on what users of their products do. Fast forward about fifteen years and they've got their collective panties in a bunch because people are sharing copies of songs.
Well, the recording industry is falsely advertising that these CDs are Compact Discs (TM) when they're not. A lawyer is going to go after everybody they can, in this case most likely Apple, the record company and the manufacturer. They'd have a case against at least the record company if somebody gets smart and brings an executive from Philips on the stand: "Is this shiny thing a Compact disc?" "No, it doesn't conform to the specifications required in order to claim its a Compact Disc"
I haven't played with it, but I don't think it'll be difficult. Each microphone records its intended signal plus a delayed version of what each other microphone is recording. There will be strong correlation between the undesired sounds going into a particular microphone and the microphone at some other point. You should definately be able to do this adaptively (though there's no guarantee your PC will be able to do it in real time)
I don't think that unions are communism, I just think that they've become corrupt. Disallowing unions would be fascism. I know the good that has been done in the past (my grandfather was an auto-worker until he retired in the 60's, he died before I was born but I know the conditions he worked in).
Still, now, unions don't do anything good. I've seen drunken auto-workers forced back onto the job against the protests of their management. I've seen union-reps fight tooth and nail to keep workers who've obviously got a problem out of substance abuse programs. I also want to be promoted (I'm an electrical engineer, not a programmer) based on my skills, not seniority.
Most of the people I see whining about unionizing technical workers are out of a job or "underpaid" because they've painted themself into a corner. They've spent their time learning the latest and greatest language rather than learning about algorithms, architecture and performance. They know how to bolt together somebody elses intructions but not how to properly implement a complex system on their own.
I've never seen a union actually improve anything to be honest. I payed my way through school partially by working in auto plants and all the union did was get inebriated workers back on the factory floor. The goal of a union, from a union leaders perspective is:
Collect dues
Raise salaries, even if in the longer term it means layoffs
Make sure that workers can work, even when drunk or high, even when operating heavy machinery
Lend a blind eye when violence or harassment against non-union workers (i.e. students, they're forced to pay the dues but don't get representation)
One rather ballsy note from Jobs
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Jobs spoke about including peer-to-peer networking in the next full release of MacOS X and even included sharing MP3 as an example of how it could be used. Speaking technically thats a minor thing, there are many applications that are capable of doing this, such as LimeWire. Not many companies are willing to include this as a feature though, its too risky with both the MPAA and RIAA convinced peer-to-peer is evil.
Apple seems to be taunting them on purpose, consider their "Rip. Mix. Burn." ads. Gateway payed Apple the sincerest form of flattery with their later ad campaign, but still Apple was the first to stick their neck out.
No, your reliability is halved. Consider a fair coin toss. This coin toss represents the state of your data after enough hours have passed that theirs a 50% chance of a hard drive problem. Heads your data is fine, tails your data is destroyed. You've got a 50% chance of having good data after a single coin flip. A striped RAID is like having 2 coins. If either coin comes up tails then your data is dead, so you've got a 25% chance of having good data after flipping the pair of coins. If either hard drive goes south you lose the data.
Sorensen pointed at Apple and Apple in turn pointed at Sorensen. From the sound of things both parties are at "fault". The line from Sorensen has always been that their contract with Apple wouldn't allow them to do it, yet when Macromedia comes by they suddenly feel that they provide the CODEC to them. The only difference that I can see is that Macromedia could provide some financial incentive to violate their contract whereas Linux, or any party selling Linux operating systems couldn't.
Slashdot doesn't stand up to anybody. They've removed Scientology posts, they've removed my personal posts and I'm sure they've removed others. Financially this may be the right thing for them to do of course, but don't attribute any particular backbone to them.
They shouldn't be able to but I think they can. It could be considered a public performance. The companies that have somehow managed to get hold of the rights to long-dead composers work often shake down amateur orchestras, dance studios etc.
The composers have sometimes been dead for hundreds of years but still they manage to have a copyright.
She may have been concerned about revealing discussions of past rapes, but those discussions shouldn't have been on a university computer or via email. She showed concerned but also poor judgement.
You're trusting a whole lot of people with confidential information if you're storing it on somebody elses machine or filesystems. You've got to trust the cleaning staff not to touch the machine, you've got to trust the system administrators not to search through the email and you've got to trust that students aren't going to break in searching for next weeks exam.
I've experienced two of the above things happening: A system administrator searched through my email to find out if there was something going on between myself and a girl at the university. He caught royal shit for it (I kept noticing that it never said I had new mail when I logged in even though I had new (to me) mail). A fellow student broke into a professors office, searched the file cabinets and his laptop for exams (he was never caught - he brought it up over beer years later)
Well, that whould be even more reason not to mess with these kind of things!
There's a big difference between not messing with things and caution. Human history is filled with instances of messing with potentially dangerous things. Alexander Fleming for example noticed that penicillin, a mould that grows on cheese and fruit when it goes bad, inhibited the growth of bacteria in a petrii dish. He tested it out on humans and in general it did good things. To put this in perspective he tested something that killed one type of organism on a human being, a different type of organism.
Jonas Salk developed technologies which led to a vaccine for polio. With a vaccine you're injecting a weakened version of a dangerous virus into a person to combat that same virus. That to me seems terribly dangerous, yet its now one of the most basic elements of modern health care.
Both Fleming and Salk are examples of people cautiously exploring dangerous areas. I don't know that Antinori (the person responsible for this cloning attempt) did proceed cautiously. The United States, the Vatican and other governments share the blame for this however. They've banned research in the area and by doing so they've ensured that only the more cavalier will carry out investigations. Any suffering which does result from this is the fault of both Antinori and the governments who try to ban the research.
I'm not a biologist or doctor, but it seems to me the proper first steps would be the cloning of individual human cells then clusters of human cells and possibly functional organs. After problems were solved through these steps then it would be time to investigate a human clone, in the mean time perhapas diabetics could be cured with cloned pancreas tissue or people with heart disease aided with cloned heart tissue.
We've jumped to the most lucrative possibilities of cloning but skipped over the most therapeutic.
Muscles emit weak electromagnetic fields. Sharks have evolved to have receptors which detect these weak electromagnetic fields. If you can swamp these fields than the shark can't detect prey, sort of the way DEET works against mosquitos I suppose. The DEET interferes with the mosquitos ability to sense CO2 (if I remember right) so they can hover around a potential feast but don't land.
It's not that the electromagnetic field only affects sharks, its more than sharks are among the few creatures that rely on electromagnetic fields as a means of locating prey.
Cell phones are a fairly recent invention. If you're in a position where being contacted is a matter of life and death its youhas meantr responsibility to make sure that you can be contacted. In the past this has meant leaving an itinerary with the persons likely to do the contacting. Parents still do this all the time, they leave contact information with the babysitter:
We're going to dinner at Chez McDonald's.
After that we're going to the 9:00 showing of "Where the Boys Aren't" at Sin City theater.
Personally I'd prefer if people were intelligent and considerate enough to set their pager or phone to vibrate so that in an emergency they would be available. I don't see that this is happening though, either that or there's an awful lot of people having emergency calls at any given theater.
Slashdot Mirror
There are already mechanisms for getting rid of fraudulent data, this provision seems to be more about getting rid of inconvenient data.
The only problem with this philosophy is: who has more lawyers available to them to define the truth, citizens or companies? What will prevent Philip Morris using their lawyers to strike out any claims that links cigarettes to anything except a glamorous lifestyle? How long until the automotive and oil industries funds lawsuits to strike out any correlation between automotive exhaust and environmental or health effects?
What LEGO boycott? I've never heard of it.
I don't know that the U.S. values human life to any great extent per se, but they go about devalueing it less violently.
Most of your gadgetry doesn't need to be on the UPS (though it should have surge protection). A UPS isn't there so you can work through a black or brown out, its there to let you shut down in an orderly manner. Scanners, amplifiers, printers and the like aren't necessary for an orderly shutdown. Even a monitor isn't necessary if you've got a serial port on the UPS and monitoring software on your box.
I've got two computers running off an inexpensive APC UPS. I've only had the computers start the shut down process twice, and the area I'm in has at least a few power outages per year.
Both sides of the fight lie through their teeth. Downloading files of the internet doesn't appreciably harm sales of CDs/DVDs/Movie tickets/..., but it also doesn't help. Just because in the short term there's a spike upwards or downwards on some metric doesn't mean its attributabal to your cause of the day.
Right. That's why I think the 57% number is low. If you've used the web at all you've downloaded copyrighted text, images or software. 43% of the people didn't realize they downloaded things that were covered by copyright or realized the intent of the question.
What I think this questionaire looked like:
OK, so now 50% of the people or there abouts answer affirmitavely to question 1 . This splits the sample group into two halfs, those that have downloaded and those who haven't. Some percentage of those that have downloaded copywritten materials then go onto 2 and say that not only have they downloaded copyrighted materials, but they haven't payed for it. What about the people who haven't downloaded copyrighted materials? How do they answer question 2? If they answer yes it implies that they have downloaded copyrighted materials, so many will answer no. This, if you misinterpret statistics properly, leads you to the conclusion that 57% of web users have downloaded copyrighted materials and not payed for them.
This is the same thing I see every day on the various web polls on news sites. The questions are chosen to skew the statistics in some obvious way.
Star Wars is no more science fiction than the Lord of the Rings. It's a fantasy with robots and spaceships instead of trolls and horses. To me science fiction has to include "science" as an important plot point, it can't just be part of the setting. There aren't actually many movies that really are science fiction, most would more accurately be called period pieces where the period happens to be some point in the future or in Star Wars case some futuristic past.
Group 1 completely overwhelms group 2, but to further minimize any chance of making anything other than a moral difference, I'll bet group 3 overwhelms group 2 as well. The third group counts as votes in favour of, or at least ambivalent to the concerns of the second group since as far as yahoo concerns its a satisfied customer.
It goes farther than that. Sony made a huge amount of money producing Walkman's in the eighties. They were criticized at the time for this because a popular thing to use these personal casette players for was sharing homemade copies with friends. Their view at the time was that they couldn't control and shouldn't be judged based on what users of their products do. Fast forward about fifteen years and they've got their collective panties in a bunch because people are sharing copies of songs.
Well, the recording industry is falsely advertising that these CDs are Compact Discs (TM) when they're not. A lawyer is going to go after everybody they can, in this case most likely Apple, the record company and the manufacturer. They'd have a case against at least the record company if somebody gets smart and brings an executive from Philips on the stand: "Is this shiny thing a Compact disc?" "No, it doesn't conform to the specifications required in order to claim its a Compact Disc"
I haven't played with it, but I don't think it'll be difficult. Each microphone records its intended signal plus a delayed version of what each other microphone is recording. There will be strong correlation between the undesired sounds going into a particular microphone and the microphone at some other point. You should definately be able to do this adaptively (though there's no guarantee your PC will be able to do it in real time)
Still, now, unions don't do anything good. I've seen drunken auto-workers forced back onto the job against the protests of their management. I've seen union-reps fight tooth and nail to keep workers who've obviously got a problem out of substance abuse programs. I also want to be promoted (I'm an electrical engineer, not a programmer) based on my skills, not seniority.
Most of the people I see whining about unionizing technical workers are out of a job or "underpaid" because they've painted themself into a corner. They've spent their time learning the latest and greatest language rather than learning about algorithms, architecture and performance. They know how to bolt together somebody elses intructions but not how to properly implement a complex system on their own.
Apple seems to be taunting them on purpose, consider their "Rip. Mix. Burn." ads. Gateway payed Apple the sincerest form of flattery with their later ad campaign, but still Apple was the first to stick their neck out.
No, your reliability is halved. Consider a fair coin toss. This coin toss represents the state of your data after enough hours have passed that theirs a 50% chance of a hard drive problem. Heads your data is fine, tails your data is destroyed. You've got a 50% chance of having good data after a single coin flip. A striped RAID is like having 2 coins. If either coin comes up tails then your data is dead, so you've got a 25% chance of having good data after flipping the pair of coins. If either hard drive goes south you lose the data.
Sorensen pointed at Apple and Apple in turn pointed at Sorensen. From the sound of things both parties are at "fault". The line from Sorensen has always been that their contract with Apple wouldn't allow them to do it, yet when Macromedia comes by they suddenly feel that they provide the CODEC to them. The only difference that I can see is that Macromedia could provide some financial incentive to violate their contract whereas Linux, or any party selling Linux operating systems couldn't.
Las Angeles was the first undersea earthquake monitor.
Slashdot doesn't stand up to anybody. They've removed Scientology posts, they've removed my personal posts and I'm sure they've removed others. Financially this may be the right thing for them to do of course, but don't attribute any particular backbone to them.
The composers have sometimes been dead for hundreds of years but still they manage to have a copyright.
You're trusting a whole lot of people with confidential information if you're storing it on somebody elses machine or filesystems. You've got to trust the cleaning staff not to touch the machine, you've got to trust the system administrators not to search through the email and you've got to trust that students aren't going to break in searching for next weeks exam.
I've experienced two of the above things happening: A system administrator searched through my email to find out if there was something going on between myself and a girl at the university. He caught royal shit for it (I kept noticing that it never said I had new mail when I logged in even though I had new (to me) mail). A fellow student broke into a professors office, searched the file cabinets and his laptop for exams (he was never caught - he brought it up over beer years later)
Jonas Salk developed technologies which led to a vaccine for polio. With a vaccine you're injecting a weakened version of a dangerous virus into a person to combat that same virus. That to me seems terribly dangerous, yet its now one of the most basic elements of modern health care.
Both Fleming and Salk are examples of people cautiously exploring dangerous areas. I don't know that Antinori (the person responsible for this cloning attempt) did proceed cautiously. The United States, the Vatican and other governments share the blame for this however. They've banned research in the area and by doing so they've ensured that only the more cavalier will carry out investigations. Any suffering which does result from this is the fault of both Antinori and the governments who try to ban the research.
I'm not a biologist or doctor, but it seems to me the proper first steps would be the cloning of individual human cells then clusters of human cells and possibly functional organs. After problems were solved through these steps then it would be time to investigate a human clone, in the mean time perhapas diabetics could be cured with cloned pancreas tissue or people with heart disease aided with cloned heart tissue. We've jumped to the most lucrative possibilities of cloning but skipped over the most therapeutic.
It's not that the electromagnetic field only affects sharks, its more than sharks are among the few creatures that rely on electromagnetic fields as a means of locating prey.
Personally I'd prefer if people were intelligent and considerate enough to set their pager or phone to vibrate so that in an emergency they would be available. I don't see that this is happening though, either that or there's an awful lot of people having emergency calls at any given theater.