The summary seems to suggest that merely paying people will automatically elevate their content to a realm of professionalism and accuracy. That's silly. If anything paying people introduces potential conflicts of interest etc.
This looks like the common mistake where people assume that something is worth more if they paid more for it. Or it may be a flimsy attempt to commercialise sites like Wikipedia, I'm sure many business types salivate at the prospects of "monetizing" such a huge site - well, it's huge *because it's good* - Wikipedia never even had to advertise, users flocked to it because it was useful, and that's testament to the fact that the system "works".
Personally I don't think there is even a problem that needs to be solved. GP is exaggerating badly, as is the summary (I didn't RTA). On the whole, Wikipedia works incredibly well - really, it's 'nothing to see here, move along', focusing on the 0.0001% of problem areas and blowing it out of proportion to suggest an epidemic of problems suggests sensationalism or an ulterior motive to me.
I don't see anything wrong with 1% making 50% of the edits at all, that is a natural distribution for projects of that nature, you see the same pattern in open source development, and it's not a bad thing at all. Actually I would've been surprised if the pattern had been anything else. We don't judge the content based on stats about the nature of the editing process, we judge the content on the content, and it's good, very good. Not perfect, but nothing is.
Gee, I didn't know states existed in complete vacuums, but thanks for filling me in and throwing in stupid childish arrogant insults that feed your own ego, grow up.
This is what happens when people vote for "change", to get the old guy out even when things are actually running alright... Rudd's seat is barely warm yet and we already have (a) government apologising to aboriginals on behalf of people who didn't actually perpetrate any wrong, (b) government wanting to install a 'great firewall' and blocking Internet porn for every citizen/subject by default unless they ask for special permission for it, and (c) now this, trying to get ridiculous expanded surveillance powers.
Seriously, sometimes things really just aren't as broken as voters tend to think they are. I'm wary of people who want to vote for "change".
- Build in a few redundant paths - If it gets bombed, rebuild it - at worst you're what, a few days out - If it's a frequent problem, increase the security a bit
So what? Sh-t happens, always has, to all our systems, doesn't stop us from building them. The "this won't work because it's not a perfect system" brigade is a bit tiring.
I think if they were willing to fork out dough on an expert, they probably wouldn't be in the fix they are... seems to me the main thing they need is a good programmer (experienced in any language) - it's more about the quality of the programmer, not the platform (good programmers can quickly adjust to a new platform, you don't NEED someone with specific experience in a particular language/platform/whatever) - but it sounds like they want a 'cheap' solution, as if there were some 'magic' platform that was 'cheap to maintain' with easy-to-replace maintainers.
opinions would be skewed based on what people think of that platform
You say that like it's a bad thing. We're talking about platforms here, some really are better than others, there is no "platform relativism", since when are we supposed to pretend they're all equal? They're no more equal than all cars are equal, and when I want to buy a car, you bet I ask a few mechanics what they think of different makes.
What part of "Microsoft ensured him that his request would not be a problem" didn't you understand? You say he's an idiot for believing the company? If Microsoft was not able to comply with the request, it's simple, they should not have lied and said they could. So now we blame the victims for "believing" whenever a company lies? Great standards you have there, companies can now do and say whatever they want. It may have been naive on his part, sure, and he'll now learn the unintuitive expectation that companies are always lying (which you and I have already learned through our own ugly experiences) but it doesn't change the fact that MS should not have lied to him.
There is no "rule" for determining whether or not something is incompetence or malice. In my experience it's probably equally often one or the other. The fact that that line is repeated often doesn't lend it any authority at all.
Vista is having a 'rough time' because it's crap. Saying there are "some fears out there" that Vista is the new Me is a bit like saying there are "some fears out there" that there might be a war in Iraq or something... is IS, fact, period, end of story. I was speaking with a salesman the other day at an OEM about this, and several major clients of theirs have had COMPLETE disasters attempting to upgrade hundreds of machines to Vista, ALL of them eventually giving up in frustration and after big $$$ wasted, and spending months re-downgrading to XP. They (the OEM) have endless troubles with Vista, everywhere, for all customers and all systems - he was telling me in strong words how Vista is absolutely the worst operating system they have ever sold (and he's been in the business for at least a decade), and the worst part is, this OEM has always been incredibly pro-Microsoft, in ten odd years of working with them I've never heard any of them say a bad thing about anything from MS before. Speak to anyone in the biz who is actually willing to be honest with you - Vista is a catastrophe.
Thank you, finally, someone got it right. It's NOT "X Windows" or "X Window", "OS X" cannot be referred to as "X", and the "X Window System" is only either that, or "X". I can't believe how many people on/. seem to be confused about this, if you don't even know this, you don't belong on/., really, you should all be handing in your nerd cards..
"Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do."
A botnet developer who hopes to mass a significantly sized network would have no interest in the sub 5% of desktop
Oh please, last year alone around 7,000,000 Macs were sold, and are currently selling at over 2,000,000 per quarter. Would this not make a "significantly sized network"? Of course it would. ALL botnet developers would cream themselves to have a network even a half of one quarter's sales in size, never mind the 'kudos' for being the first to land all those machines - just sitting there, without antivirus software, waiting to be hacked... the largest botnet ever so far is Stormnet, at an estimated size of just over 1,000,000. Before that the largest was about 120,000 only. The Windows world is also now arguably more heterogenous than the Mac OS X world.
Capitalism and Communism are just words we use to describe economic theories
Really? I guess they don't exist then. Come on, don't be silly, "capitalism" describes a SYSTEM with very real characteristics, not a "theory". Likewise for communism. If you think these are "just words" that describe "theories", go live in one of the failed communist states for a while and see how theoretical poverty is and if its "just words" then. As for whether or not open source could exist in a true communist system, that's at least a vaguely interesting question... if the government must own all means of production, then only the government would be 'allowed' to create software (i.e. a programmer would have to wait until the government lets him program, and would tell him what to program), so I would think no, it can't, not in a "true" communist system. In a true communist system the creator would also not be free to determine the license of the software source code.
Yeah, I know I was, and sort of expected replies like that, but frankly, I've heard all the arguments before, and personally I think it's difficult or perhaps even impossible to implement communism without inherently centralising everything and f-cking it up in the ways I listed, and more. Maybe it is possible, but as far as I can see, for all intents and purposes in the real world it's all going to boil down to the same.
Did you really just compare the entire collective global FOSS movement to "making dinner together with your family"!? And you call me weird. Speak to me again when I can make dinner with my family, and suddenly hundreds of millions of people have access to free meals from my kitchen and it starts to seriously compete with all major food chains and entire industries spring up around distributing and 'supporting' the free meals from my kitchen. I think you've lost the plot somewhere... if I can paraphrase someone else's comment I read on slashdot earlier today, saying the FOSS movement to one guy making dinner in the kitchen is a bit like calling World War II a 'frank exchange of opinion'.
Apart from being widely used, free software most definitely competes directly with proprietary software in the free market of software, to pretend that it's not part of that market (and free market system) is an absurd denial of an obvious reality. I never claimed it was a "miracle" (WTF? Where did you read that? Certainly nowhere I wrote it)... the reality is far more mundane, but still interesting, and big.
I see the "working together" part as having very little do with open source per se. I don't know if you misread that into my post, or if you were injecting that yourself, but certainly it was nowhere in my mind --- a single author can create free software all on their own that can benefit everyone on earth.
OSS is supposed to be about innovation and new ideas
Huh? Says who? I've never heard that before. OSS isn't "supposed" to be about anything other than exactly what each contributor wants it to be. The only thing it's "about" is allowing everyone to share the product, whatever that might be, but it most certainly does not have to be original, nor is there any compulsion/pressure to that effect. Heck, that would require an authority of some sort, of which there is none operating specifically for open source.
Yeah, I've also always thought of free software as being an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour, the closest to capitalism you can get. It's a FULLY free "market", anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL, and free market competition can be pushed to the max. I don't see how FOSS is like communism at all actually. Does the government strictly control the creation and supply of software? Does the government provide an income to the limited few software suppliers allowed? Do you get your software license coupons each month and have to stand in line to get software? Does it eliminate value judgments and class? (No, actually, it's highly competitive and the best software "wins".) Does it preclude everyone from ever selling their programming labour? I'm just missing the connection, I guess. FOSS 'creates' wealth for everyone, in the direct form of the benefits you get from using the software, and in the indirect form of lowering the cost of production of other products (e.g. a retailer using Linux as PoS can offer cheaper products).
Classic, common mistake made by people who don't understand anything about economics (or by leech organisations like the BSA with an agenda).
Free software also doesn't "destroy" any markets given that free software is created by the market and is in itself a kind of market: It isn't an artificial distortion, it's natural, it's people doing what people *want* to do, it's a massive voluntary undertaking. You would have to artificially force free software to not exist with a big stick (e.g. legal system), that would practically be the opposite of the spirit of markets.
Did you glance over the "opt out" portion of the idea that would take all of one phone call or the clicking of a check box?
Did I? Gee I don't know let me see what I wrote: Freedom shouldn't be something you have to "ask the nice government people to please allow you to have"
Why the hell should I specifically have to be subjected to putting my name on a "yes I want porn" list, telling a bunch of strangers or quite possibly people I know - how is it the community's business AT ALL anyway? This is idiotic.
I assume you also glanced over the part where I said people should be more worried about protecting their kids at other people's homes where they have no control
Well done, and that's exactly one of the main places I got to see porn as a kid without the Internet, as I very specifically said. If your kids have truly dodgy friends then by all means forbid them going there. Oh you don't even know who your kids friends are? Well then sure, call in the government nanny, that'll solve it all. Get real. If your kids are gonna see porn they'll see it.
It seems YOU ignored absolutely everything I wrote. You can't 100% solve this so-called "problem", yet I maintain it's not truly a "problem to be solved" (LEAST OF ALL by government) given that most everyone I know saw porn as a kid WITHOUT the Internet and still grew up OK.
You try to sound like someone who wants to protect our freedoms and limit government intervention, but in this case you come off as one of those guys that thinks the government's out to screw them
That's the stupidest most nonsensical conclusion I've ever read in my entire life, and it's based entirely on putting words in my mouth that I never said. It isn't about whether or not the government is "out to screw" anyone nor did I even state anywhere it was. You just don't get it. Whether I want to look at porn or not over the Internet has nothing to do with the government and never, ever should. If you can't even understand that, I can't begin to right the basic wrongs in your education, because it is incredibly obvious.
Of course. The solution to those is meta-analysis (using statistical techniques to combine results from many disparate studies), which...is exactly what these authors did. It's not "one small study."
Sorry, but it remains "one small study" until others also do meta-analyses like this on the same or similar data. The 'small' doesn't refer to how much work the study was, that's irrelevant, it doesn't make it any more or less believable.
Oh come on. It says right there in the paper, "Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this study."
Um, I *did* read that, and my whole point (to all but the most naive) is that this statement is completely meaningless (do you really take that at face value?) ALL studies are funded in one way or another. SOMEONE is paying for the bills/food/rent etc. of those researchers, be it via salary or grant or whatever. So no "specific" funding probably means that they draw salaries from the university. Now where do you think the university departments funding comes from? None of us know. I've seen this crap over and over and worked with so many people at universities, I can't tell you how many times I've seen this - department gets sponsored by someone e.g. corporates in one way or another (or even higher up and it filters down), the various levels 'direct' the funding and 'steer' the research, it's all obfuscated away by a tiny bit of accounting - once it's in a general budget you cannot see where it came from. 99% of funded studies it's practically impossible to pin down the source, it ALWAYS looks like "no specific funding" by the time the research is done. Do you really think that biased "bought" studies state as much explicitly? Riiight.
You seem to be assuming that I hold a view on whether or not this study is correct. I DO NOT. That's my whole point, to try counter all the common "zomg this is proof the drug companies are teh evil!!!1!" assumptions being posted that this one study is correct - we cannot form any conclusions from one study, it's at best a basis for further research. We don't know.
The study itself lists the people who collaborated to create it, discloses their funding
I noticed that, and I noticed that it said "The authors received no specific funding for this study" - but what does that even mean? It's impossible that they received no funding, or the authors would've starved to death. Obviously they WERE paid, all researchers are paid in one way or another... the phrase "no 'specific' funding" is also impossible to pin down - they received salaries from their departments, perhaps, but where did those departments get their funding? Could be anywhere.
And whoever modded my post offtopic is obviously firmly in the 'biased' camp.
Interesting... I actually noticed a while back on Google maps that apparently there is a long section of road running right through my house and across many surrounding houses, complete with non-existent bridges where it goes over the nearby highway etc.... none of it ever existed in reality, and at the time I assumed that the data must've come from really old plans that were eventually canned, as you describe.
Make it so the real shareaza program queries their site [shareaza.com] every couple of seconds. As an individual user this won't take much personal bandwidth. But all shareaza users worldwide put together should be enough to kill their server and they won't really be able to do much since it will be coming from so many different IPs.
Great - if they did that, then managed to get their hijacked domain back, they'd have DoS'd themselves:) Like shooting yourself in the foot to kill a fly.
When I was a kid, we didn't even have the Internet and we still got porn. And you know what, we all grew up more or less well-adjusted anyway. This law isn't going to stop most kids from getting porn. Your kids - everyones kids - will see porn. It may be useful to try limit it to a degree, but should otherwise collectively "get over it". There is no "problem" screaming to be solved. If parents want peace of mind let the private sector provide filtering software. Oh, they already do.
Freedom shouldn't be something you have to "ask the nice government people to please allow you to have" - good God. "Government" has f-all to do with my personal life, they're just supposed to do their jobs (most basic infrastructure and protection of everyone's rights and enforcement of laws) and butt the hell out of everything else. It's not the government's job to raise children and never should be.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary seems to suggest that merely paying people will automatically elevate their content to a realm of professionalism and accuracy. That's silly. If anything paying people introduces potential conflicts of interest etc.
This looks like the common mistake where people assume that something is worth more if they paid more for it. Or it may be a flimsy attempt to commercialise sites like Wikipedia, I'm sure many business types salivate at the prospects of "monetizing" such a huge site - well, it's huge *because it's good* - Wikipedia never even had to advertise, users flocked to it because it was useful, and that's testament to the fact that the system "works".
Personally I don't think there is even a problem that needs to be solved. GP is exaggerating badly, as is the summary (I didn't RTA). On the whole, Wikipedia works incredibly well - really, it's 'nothing to see here, move along', focusing on the 0.0001% of problem areas and blowing it out of proportion to suggest an epidemic of problems suggests sensationalism or an ulterior motive to me.
I don't see anything wrong with 1% making 50% of the edits at all, that is a natural distribution for projects of that nature, you see the same pattern in open source development, and it's not a bad thing at all. Actually I would've been surprised if the pattern had been anything else. We don't judge the content based on stats about the nature of the editing process, we judge the content on the content, and it's good, very good. Not perfect, but nothing is.
Gee, I didn't know states existed in complete vacuums, but thanks for filling me in and throwing in stupid childish arrogant insults that feed your own ego, grow up.
This is what happens when people vote for "change", to get the old guy out even when things are actually running alright ... Rudd's seat is barely warm yet and we already have (a) government apologising to aboriginals on behalf of people who didn't actually perpetrate any wrong, (b) government wanting to install a 'great firewall' and blocking Internet porn for every citizen/subject by default unless they ask for special permission for it, and (c) now this, trying to get ridiculous expanded surveillance powers.
Seriously, sometimes things really just aren't as broken as voters tend to think they are. I'm wary of people who want to vote for "change".
Simple:
- Build in a few redundant paths
- If it gets bombed, rebuild it - at worst you're what, a few days out
- If it's a frequent problem, increase the security a bit
So what? Sh-t happens, always has, to all our systems, doesn't stop us from building them. The "this won't work because it's not a perfect system" brigade is a bit tiring.
I think if they were willing to fork out dough on an expert, they probably wouldn't be in the fix they are ... seems to me the main thing they need is a good programmer (experienced in any language) - it's more about the quality of the programmer, not the platform (good programmers can quickly adjust to a new platform, you don't NEED someone with specific experience in a particular language/platform/whatever) - but it sounds like they want a 'cheap' solution, as if there were some 'magic' platform that was 'cheap to maintain' with easy-to-replace maintainers.
opinions would be skewed based on what people think of that platform
You say that like it's a bad thing. We're talking about platforms here, some really are better than others, there is no "platform relativism", since when are we supposed to pretend they're all equal? They're no more equal than all cars are equal, and when I want to buy a car, you bet I ask a few mechanics what they think of different makes.
What part of "Microsoft ensured him that his request would not be a problem" didn't you understand? You say he's an idiot for believing the company? If Microsoft was not able to comply with the request, it's simple, they should not have lied and said they could. So now we blame the victims for "believing" whenever a company lies? Great standards you have there, companies can now do and say whatever they want. It may have been naive on his part, sure, and he'll now learn the unintuitive expectation that companies are always lying (which you and I have already learned through our own ugly experiences) but it doesn't change the fact that MS should not have lied to him.
There is no "rule" for determining whether or not something is incompetence or malice. In my experience it's probably equally often one or the other. The fact that that line is repeated often doesn't lend it any authority at all.
Vista is having a 'rough time' because it's crap. Saying there are "some fears out there" that Vista is the new Me is a bit like saying there are "some fears out there" that there might be a war in Iraq or something ... is IS, fact, period, end of story. I was speaking with a salesman the other day at an OEM about this, and several major clients of theirs have had COMPLETE disasters attempting to upgrade hundreds of machines to Vista, ALL of them eventually giving up in frustration and after big $$$ wasted, and spending months re-downgrading to XP. They (the OEM) have endless troubles with Vista, everywhere, for all customers and all systems - he was telling me in strong words how Vista is absolutely the worst operating system they have ever sold (and he's been in the business for at least a decade), and the worst part is, this OEM has always been incredibly pro-Microsoft, in ten odd years of working with them I've never heard any of them say a bad thing about anything from MS before. Speak to anyone in the biz who is actually willing to be honest with you - Vista is a catastrophe.
Thank you, finally, someone got it right. It's NOT "X Windows" or "X Window", "OS X" cannot be referred to as "X", and the "X Window System" is only either that, or "X". I can't believe how many people on /. seem to be confused about this, if you don't even know this, you don't belong on /., really, you should all be handing in your nerd cards ..
The article has been updated with this:
"Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do."
It's called 'skimming the market', nothing new.
A botnet developer who hopes to mass a significantly sized network would have no interest in the sub 5% of desktop
Oh please, last year alone around 7,000,000 Macs were sold, and are currently selling at over 2,000,000 per quarter. Would this not make a "significantly sized network"? Of course it would. ALL botnet developers would cream themselves to have a network even a half of one quarter's sales in size, never mind the 'kudos' for being the first to land all those machines - just sitting there, without antivirus software, waiting to be hacked ... the largest botnet ever so far is Stormnet, at an estimated size of just over 1,000,000. Before that the largest was about 120,000 only. The Windows world is also now arguably more heterogenous than the Mac OS X world.
Capitalism and Communism are just words we use to describe economic theories
Really? I guess they don't exist then. Come on, don't be silly, "capitalism" describes a SYSTEM with very real characteristics, not a "theory". Likewise for communism. If you think these are "just words" that describe "theories", go live in one of the failed communist states for a while and see how theoretical poverty is and if its "just words" then. As for whether or not open source could exist in a true communist system, that's at least a vaguely interesting question ... if the government must own all means of production, then only the government would be 'allowed' to create software (i.e. a programmer would have to wait until the government lets him program, and would tell him what to program), so I would think no, it can't, not in a "true" communist system. In a true communist system the creator would also not be free to determine the license of the software source code.
Yeah, I know I was, and sort of expected replies like that, but frankly, I've heard all the arguments before, and personally I think it's difficult or perhaps even impossible to implement communism without inherently centralising everything and f-cking it up in the ways I listed, and more. Maybe it is possible, but as far as I can see, for all intents and purposes in the real world it's all going to boil down to the same.
Did you really just compare the entire collective global FOSS movement to "making dinner together with your family"!? And you call me weird. Speak to me again when I can make dinner with my family, and suddenly hundreds of millions of people have access to free meals from my kitchen and it starts to seriously compete with all major food chains and entire industries spring up around distributing and 'supporting' the free meals from my kitchen. I think you've lost the plot somewhere ... if I can paraphrase someone else's comment I read on slashdot earlier today, saying the FOSS movement to one guy making dinner in the kitchen is a bit like calling World War II a 'frank exchange of opinion'.
... the reality is far more mundane, but still interesting, and big.
Apart from being widely used, free software most definitely competes directly with proprietary software in the free market of software, to pretend that it's not part of that market (and free market system) is an absurd denial of an obvious reality. I never claimed it was a "miracle" (WTF? Where did you read that? Certainly nowhere I wrote it)
I see the "working together" part as having very little do with open source per se. I don't know if you misread that into my post, or if you were injecting that yourself, but certainly it was nowhere in my mind --- a single author can create free software all on their own that can benefit everyone on earth.
OSS is supposed to be about innovation and new ideas
Huh? Says who? I've never heard that before. OSS isn't "supposed" to be about anything other than exactly what each contributor wants it to be. The only thing it's "about" is allowing everyone to share the product, whatever that might be, but it most certainly does not have to be original, nor is there any compulsion/pressure to that effect. Heck, that would require an authority of some sort, of which there is none operating specifically for open source.
Yeah, I've also always thought of free software as being an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour, the closest to capitalism you can get. It's a FULLY free "market", anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL, and free market competition can be pushed to the max. I don't see how FOSS is like communism at all actually. Does the government strictly control the creation and supply of software? Does the government provide an income to the limited few software suppliers allowed? Do you get your software license coupons each month and have to stand in line to get software? Does it eliminate value judgments and class? (No, actually, it's highly competitive and the best software "wins".) Does it preclude everyone from ever selling their programming labour? I'm just missing the connection, I guess. FOSS 'creates' wealth for everyone, in the direct form of the benefits you get from using the software, and in the indirect form of lowering the cost of production of other products (e.g. a retailer using Linux as PoS can offer cheaper products).
Classic, common mistake made by people who don't understand anything about economics (or by leech organisations like the BSA with an agenda).
Free software also doesn't "destroy" any markets given that free software is created by the market and is in itself a kind of market: It isn't an artificial distortion, it's natural, it's people doing what people *want* to do, it's a massive voluntary undertaking. You would have to artificially force free software to not exist with a big stick (e.g. legal system), that would practically be the opposite of the spirit of markets.
Did you glance over the "opt out" portion of the idea that would take all of one phone call or the clicking of a check box?
Did I? Gee I don't know let me see what I wrote: Freedom shouldn't be something you have to "ask the nice government people to please allow you to have"
Why the hell should I specifically have to be subjected to putting my name on a "yes I want porn" list, telling a bunch of strangers or quite possibly people I know - how is it the community's business AT ALL anyway? This is idiotic.
I assume you also glanced over the part where I said people should be more worried about protecting their kids at other people's homes where they have no control
Well done, and that's exactly one of the main places I got to see porn as a kid without the Internet, as I very specifically said. If your kids have truly dodgy friends then by all means forbid them going there. Oh you don't even know who your kids friends are? Well then sure, call in the government nanny, that'll solve it all. Get real. If your kids are gonna see porn they'll see it.
It seems YOU ignored absolutely everything I wrote. You can't 100% solve this so-called "problem", yet I maintain it's not truly a "problem to be solved" (LEAST OF ALL by government) given that most everyone I know saw porn as a kid WITHOUT the Internet and still grew up OK.
You try to sound like someone who wants to protect our freedoms and limit government intervention, but in this case you come off as one of those guys that thinks the government's out to screw them
That's the stupidest most nonsensical conclusion I've ever read in my entire life, and it's based entirely on putting words in my mouth that I never said. It isn't about whether or not the government is "out to screw" anyone nor did I even state anywhere it was. You just don't get it. Whether I want to look at porn or not over the Internet has nothing to do with the government and never, ever should. If you can't even understand that, I can't begin to right the basic wrongs in your education, because it is incredibly obvious.
Of course. The solution to those is meta-analysis (using statistical techniques to combine results from many disparate studies), which...is exactly what these authors did. It's not "one small study."
Sorry, but it remains "one small study" until others also do meta-analyses like this on the same or similar data. The 'small' doesn't refer to how much work the study was, that's irrelevant, it doesn't make it any more or less believable.
Oh come on. It says right there in the paper, "Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this study."
Um, I *did* read that, and my whole point (to all but the most naive) is that this statement is completely meaningless (do you really take that at face value?) ALL studies are funded in one way or another. SOMEONE is paying for the bills/food/rent etc. of those researchers, be it via salary or grant or whatever. So no "specific" funding probably means that they draw salaries from the university. Now where do you think the university departments funding comes from? None of us know. I've seen this crap over and over and worked with so many people at universities, I can't tell you how many times I've seen this - department gets sponsored by someone e.g. corporates in one way or another (or even higher up and it filters down), the various levels 'direct' the funding and 'steer' the research, it's all obfuscated away by a tiny bit of accounting - once it's in a general budget you cannot see where it came from. 99% of funded studies it's practically impossible to pin down the source, it ALWAYS looks like "no specific funding" by the time the research is done. Do you really think that biased "bought" studies state as much explicitly? Riiight.
You seem to be assuming that I hold a view on whether or not this study is correct. I DO NOT. That's my whole point, to try counter all the common "zomg this is proof the drug companies are teh evil!!!1!" assumptions being posted that this one study is correct - we cannot form any conclusions from one study, it's at best a basis for further research. We don't know.
The study itself lists the people who collaborated to create it, discloses their funding
I noticed that, and I noticed that it said "The authors received no specific funding for this study" - but what does that even mean? It's impossible that they received no funding, or the authors would've starved to death. Obviously they WERE paid, all researchers are paid in one way or another ... the phrase "no 'specific' funding" is also impossible to pin down - they received salaries from their departments, perhaps, but where did those departments get their funding? Could be anywhere.
And whoever modded my post offtopic is obviously firmly in the 'biased' camp.
Interesting ... I actually noticed a while back on Google maps that apparently there is a long section of road running right through my house and across many surrounding houses, complete with non-existent bridges where it goes over the nearby highway etc. ... none of it ever existed in reality, and at the time I assumed that the data must've come from really old plans that were eventually canned, as you describe.
Make it so the real shareaza program queries their site [shareaza.com] every couple of seconds. As an individual user this won't take much personal bandwidth. But all shareaza users worldwide put together should be enough to kill their server and they won't really be able to do much since it will be coming from so many different IPs.
Great - if they did that, then managed to get their hijacked domain back, they'd have DoS'd themselves :) Like shooting yourself in the foot to kill a fly.
When I was a kid, we didn't even have the Internet and we still got porn. And you know what, we all grew up more or less well-adjusted anyway. This law isn't going to stop most kids from getting porn. Your kids - everyones kids - will see porn. It may be useful to try limit it to a degree, but should otherwise collectively "get over it". There is no "problem" screaming to be solved. If parents want peace of mind let the private sector provide filtering software. Oh, they already do.
Freedom shouldn't be something you have to "ask the nice government people to please allow you to have" - good God. "Government" has f-all to do with my personal life, they're just supposed to do their jobs (most basic infrastructure and protection of everyone's rights and enforcement of laws) and butt the hell out of everything else. It's not the government's job to raise children and never should be.