I don't know if that was intentional, unconscious, or not, but the script above is very similar to the opening scene of A Fistful of Datas, except they all bug Picard in person.
Some stuff is just too important to put down in writing, after all. I have several coworkers who practice the advice of AG Eliot Spitzer (speaking facetiously about criminal behavior, but if the shoe fits...) and "Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail."
I had to read the story twice before realizing it wasn't a hoax.
While charging for reliably sending e-mail may be a good way to fight spam, putting the onus on the sender to pay isn't that great an idea.
I run an opt-in, non-profit, ad-free announcement list, for example. I just checked and there are 521 AOL and Yahoo addresses subscribed. I'm not going to pay $5 a day to reach those people!
I don't know how AOL filters work, but ideally a user could whitelist an address. But the pay-for-bypass method seems designed around reaching users that *don't* specify they want the "priority" spam.
Just how many boxes of this checklist does this plan grossly violate?
I disagree. Subsidizing evil's still evil. Many are claiming Google's shunning of the government's request has nothing to do with protecting privacy, but rather trade secrets, which could be reverse engineered from making such massive lists (potentially) public. As with the censored Chinese Google News, when it comes to removing content, from Google News sources to multiple DMCA complaints to the now infamous Google Print caving in to publishers legal threats, the company has been consistent: they do what's best for stockholder value. I don't see how their slogan can be "do no evil" for much longer.
As for your foreign policy analogies, I'm a bigger fan of Containment than Brinkmanship, but that's just because I saw the former work with the USSR and what the latter is accomplishing today.
>Why, then, do you assume that humans do but machines won't?
I suppose for the same reason I'm not a fan of the "living Earth" hypothesis (beyond the "42" sense, of course). But, to answer your question, as Captain Phillipa Louvois said, I must admit, "I don't know."
>But ultimately I think that the evidence suggests that there is an exact one to one correspondance between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. As such, the only difference between a bunch of neurons zapping at each other and a mind thinking abstract concepts is simply a matter of flavor: our brain interprets data which comes from the outside quite differently from how it interprets data from the inside.
I agree with your assertions, but not your conclusions. You're confusing the primacy of matter with its apparent exclusivity, and you are falsely equating identity with sameness. Matter and primary qualities are of course required to produce and can even be identified with mental states. But that doesn't equate the two.
My point was that subjective states can't be scientifically verified, just correlated to neural stuff. So your argument about this hypothetical perfect Turing machine is valid, but it sure doesn't negate that people have more feelings than a Chinese room would.
Am I the only one here with internal experiences? Eveyone else seems to readily equate the mind with a machine.
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in mystical powers or anything. I accept the need for physical verificationism and the primacy of matter, and am a fan of Ockham's razor.[1] But there are some phenomenological properties of my experiences that sure ain't physical.
Per my fellow responder above, not quoting the source when you closely copy another work's working like this is totally unacceptable and is a serious instance of academic dishonesty. Just because blogs like Slashdot and Plastic do it doesn't make it right. Here is another definition of plagairism, including "weakly paraphrasing another's writing style and passing it off as your own prose," even if you include parenthetical references.
Web 2.0 says no friggin way
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Anyone with a comment-enabled blog knows that e-mail spam is small worry compared to comment spam, Splogs and the like. Wikis and the like are vulnerable to spambots as well.
I'm in my early thirties. I do most of my work online or with computers, but to read long stuff I still need to print it out. But hey, give me a break, I didn't even grow up with a remote control. Yet the generations after me WILL learn online MORE easily than in a traditional classroom setting. There's so many tech bonuses to an online classroom that blow away 1-on-1 instruction. So I see online education gaining ground over traditional brick-and-mortar universities, not merely because of the current retail mindset in higher education (let's face it, the current "get your degree online!" ads are little different from the 70s "get your degree by mail!" days), but because learning will become more efficient and productive online. But expect this to happen at least as slowly as e-books and the mythical "paperless office" -- not any time soon.
Back to the submitter's question, the problem now is that the people doing the hiring DON'T learn well online, so they discredit online degrees. Until that changes, be aware that an online degree can be a stigma to certain managers, but perhaps you (a) wouldn't want to work for such people anyway, and (b) would actually get the reverse effect with a hiring manager that appreciated your future-minded learning style.
I'm probably in the minority, being a librarian a with a good opinion of Wikipedia. Many (mostly older) librarians, for example, relish their roles as gatekeepers to information. I suppose it comes from the old warden-style approach to protecting books, or some sort of warped view of taking "information is power" as a need to hoard and protect its distribution.
There is this sometimes misguided need to teach "information literacy," with exaggerated assumptions about "kids believing everything they read online." Recent library conferences have covered this alongside how students learn and use technology -- often with the same sort of bemused condescension that 19th century anthropologists exhibited toward alien cultures. It's unnerving. But teaching others to evaluate information themselves, rather than thinking it's our job to do it for them, is on the right track. History as shown a path towards direct and open access to information, and I see wiki publishing as a direct extension of this trend.
Librarians, in general, seem stuck on the "omg you can vandalize Wikipedia so it's worthless" argument. Jimbo even got asked, at the last ALA conference, essentially, "What's to stop me from distrupting information in Wikipedia?," by a librarian. And this is the profession so disturbed by book bannings? I just don't see libraries staying relevant if we don't acknowledge the value of blogs, wikis, and other new information formats (and we're notquitethere yet).
Of course, those story links are nitpicks themselves. Library stuff (if it exists on your topic) is of better quality than what you'll find via Google. As for Wikipedia, content zealots -- both snobs and censors -- threaten the open encyclopedia's mission at least as much as the cranks. But there's no need to exaggerate the problems of Wikipedia. Sure, it can get messy, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
As another frontiersman was warned, "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
So anyway, all of these comments are a bit of a hyperbolism. As a piece on peak libraries I started shows (oh yeah, that's a library science Wiki btw), I'm something of a provocateur at times. It's just that, after spending my early career trying to educate everyone that librarians are "with it", I've discovered that there's just as much of a need to convince librarians to get with the times.
DOWNLOADING music from the Internet is not illegal. Plenty of music available online is not just free but also easily available, legal and -- most important -- worth hearing.
That fact may come as a surprise after highly publicized lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, representing major labels, against fans using peer-to-peer programs like Grokster and EDonkey to collect music on the Web. But the fine print of those lawsuits makes clear that fans are being sued not for downloading but for unauthorized distribution: leaving music in a shared folder for other peer-to-peer users to take. As copyright holders, the labels have the exclusive legal right to distribute the music recorded for them, even if technology now makes that right nearly impossible to enforce.
So, for all practical purposes, downloading is okay. Also the "fair use etc." you shrug off is exactly why it is legal, or at least could be argued to be so.
We use words like "Fair Use," "Right of First Sale," and "Freedom of Information." We use these words as a backbone of a life spent defending something, you use them as a punchline.
I wouldn't say we're 95% there yet. My doctor, for one, asks me in I'm in pain, he doesn't scan for firing c-fibers.
Furthermore many reject your belief that is is only a matter of time. There is a so-called explanatory gap that science may never conquer. Just because there's always a physical correlate/identity to mental states doesn't mean they're the same thing.
How a bat "sees" with just sonar and how it can be explained by physics are very different. Speaking of which, Nagel's bat essay and this bibliography have more on this if anyone's interested.
Wow that's a lot -- I can only see a few dozen, and I wrote it. A few are mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but I doubt anyone has caught them all. I'd list them all in the margin here but there's not enough room.
364 days a year I send out a Library Link of the Day, but like CmdrTaco here, on 4/1 I have a bit of fun.
>one could devise a system where you had to "bring back your copy" before anybody else could check it out
One has. netLibrary is built around this concept (Questia is also built on a model of pay-per-click to copyright holders), and all it does is annoy users who don't understand why they can't read an online book just because another patron somewhere in the state is doing so too.
Not to mention the interface sucks and is so crippled by other DRM (you can only view or print a single page at a time, and are locked out of a book if you print too many single pages in succession) that most librarians and library users hate the system.
"The piece (LJ, February 15th 2005) was intended to be satirical, though I am certainly no fan of "blogs," having an old fashioned belief that, if one wishes to air one's views and be taken seriously, one should go through the publishing/editing process." - Michael Gorman
Some comments from librarian bloggers to this piece include
this,
this,
thisthis,
and this... we're not all like Gorman in our views.
> people using pop-up blockers do not want to see their ads
Advertisers don't give a damn about that.
They know that some of those people -- admittedly a minute percentage, but in a game of millions a 0.1% click-and-buy rate can make you rich -- do not maintain the minimal essential commitment of an online citizen and refuse to ever buy something as a result of invasive, unsolicited advertising.
This is also the reason the telemarketing associations oppose the "Do Not Call" lists. They know that a portion of the people on these lists can still be persuaded to buy things from them.
From this comment and those above (especially the one who was asked when they were coming in the next day when they had been given a fligh the next morning), it sounds like Google HR is heavy on the "stress interview" -- an idea of giving questions that are deliberately designed to rattle people to see how they respond.
Seriously. LISNews.com is featuring a rundown of the top library stories of 2004. Much of Slashdot's news crosses over with library science, just as much of IT relates with what librarians do nowadays. So please take a look to see what we're been up to. Librarians need more tech-savvy people familiar with the challenges we're facing.
I actually thought of Rounders too, although for someone who knows how to play holdem it doesn't add all that much.
Minority Report is another movie that would have been on this top 10 list if not for the redundant voiceover. Oh well, ask 10 film school students who the most overrated director is and 8+ of them will respond Spielberg.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if that was intentional, unconscious, or not, but the script above is very similar to the opening scene of A Fistful of Datas, except they all bug Picard in person.
Some stuff is just too important to put down in writing, after all. I have several coworkers who practice the advice of AG Eliot Spitzer (speaking facetiously about criminal behavior, but if the shoe fits...) and "Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail."
See Antispam group rejects e-mail payment plan for more reactions.
I had to read the story twice before realizing it wasn't a hoax.
While charging for reliably sending e-mail may be a good way to fight spam, putting the onus on the sender to pay isn't that great an idea.
I run an opt-in, non-profit, ad-free announcement list, for example. I just checked and there are 521 AOL and Yahoo addresses subscribed. I'm not going to pay $5 a day to reach those people!
I don't know how AOL filters work, but ideally a user could whitelist an address. But the pay-for-bypass method seems designed around reaching users that *don't* specify they want the "priority" spam.
Just how many boxes of this checklist does this plan grossly violate?
I disagree. Subsidizing evil's still evil. Many are claiming Google's shunning of the government's request has nothing to do with protecting privacy, but rather trade secrets, which could be reverse engineered from making such massive lists (potentially) public. As with the censored Chinese Google News, when it comes to removing content, from Google News sources to multiple DMCA complaints to the now infamous Google Print caving in to publishers legal threats, the company has been consistent: they do what's best for stockholder value. I don't see how their slogan can be "do no evil" for much longer.
As for your foreign policy analogies, I'm a bigger fan of Containment than Brinkmanship, but that's just because I saw the former work with the USSR and what the latter is accomplishing today.
>Why, then, do you assume that humans do but machines won't?
I suppose for the same reason I'm not a fan of the "living Earth" hypothesis (beyond the "42" sense, of course). But, to answer your question, as Captain Phillipa Louvois said, I must admit, "I don't know."
>But ultimately I think that the evidence suggests that there is an exact one to one correspondance between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. As such, the only difference between a bunch of neurons zapping at each other and a mind thinking abstract concepts is simply a matter of flavor: our brain interprets data which comes from the outside quite differently from how it interprets data from the inside.
I agree with your assertions, but not your conclusions. You're confusing the primacy of matter with its apparent exclusivity, and you are falsely equating identity with sameness. Matter and primary qualities are of course required to produce and can even be identified with mental states. But that doesn't equate the two.
My point was that subjective states can't be scientifically verified, just correlated to neural stuff. So your argument about this hypothetical perfect Turing machine is valid, but it sure doesn't negate that people have more feelings than a Chinese room would.
Am I the only one here with internal experiences? Eveyone else seems to readily equate the mind with a machine.
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in mystical powers or anything. I accept the need for physical verificationism and the primacy of matter, and am a fan of Ockham's razor.[1] But there are some phenomenological properties of my experiences that sure ain't physical.
Per my fellow responder above, not quoting the source when you closely copy another work's working like this is totally unacceptable and is a serious instance of academic dishonesty. Just because blogs like Slashdot and Plastic do it doesn't make it right. Here is another definition of plagairism, including "weakly paraphrasing another's writing style and passing it off as your own prose," even if you include parenthetical references.
Anyone with a comment-enabled blog knows that e-mail spam is small worry compared to comment spam, Splogs and the like. Wikis and the like are vulnerable to spambots as well.
I'm in my early thirties. I do most of my work online or with computers, but to read long stuff I still need to print it out. But hey, give me a break, I didn't even grow up with a remote control. Yet the generations after me WILL learn online MORE easily than in a traditional classroom setting. There's so many tech bonuses to an online classroom that blow away 1-on-1 instruction. So I see online education gaining ground over traditional brick-and-mortar universities, not merely because of the current retail mindset in higher education (let's face it, the current "get your degree online!" ads are little different from the 70s "get your degree by mail!" days), but because learning will become more efficient and productive online. But expect this to happen at least as slowly as e-books and the mythical "paperless office" -- not any time soon.
Back to the submitter's question, the problem now is that the people doing the hiring DON'T learn well online, so they discredit online degrees. Until that changes, be aware that an online degree can be a stigma to certain managers, but perhaps you (a) wouldn't want to work for such people anyway, and (b) would actually get the reverse effect with a hiring manager that appreciated your future-minded learning style.
I'm probably in the minority, being a librarian a with a good opinion of Wikipedia. Many (mostly older) librarians, for example, relish their roles as gatekeepers to information. I suppose it comes from the old warden-style approach to protecting books, or some sort of warped view of taking "information is power" as a need to hoard and protect its distribution.
There is this sometimes misguided need to teach "information literacy," with exaggerated assumptions about "kids believing everything they read online." Recent library conferences have covered this alongside how students learn and use technology -- often with the same sort of bemused condescension that 19th century anthropologists exhibited toward alien cultures. It's unnerving. But teaching others to evaluate information themselves, rather than thinking it's our job to do it for them, is on the right track. History as shown a path towards direct and open access to information, and I see wiki publishing as a direct extension of this trend.
Librarians, in general, seem stuck on the "omg you can vandalize Wikipedia so it's worthless" argument. Jimbo even got asked, at the last ALA conference, essentially, "What's to stop me from distrupting information in Wikipedia?," by a librarian. And this is the profession so disturbed by book bannings? I just don't see libraries staying relevant if we don't acknowledge the value of blogs, wikis, and other new information formats (and we're not quite there yet).
Of course, those story links are nitpicks themselves. Library stuff (if it exists on your topic) is of better quality than what you'll find via Google. As for Wikipedia, content zealots -- both snobs and censors -- threaten the open encyclopedia's mission at least as much as the cranks. But there's no need to exaggerate the problems of Wikipedia. Sure, it can get messy, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
As another frontiersman was warned, "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
So anyway, all of these comments are a bit of a hyperbolism. As a piece on peak libraries I started shows (oh yeah, that's a library science Wiki btw), I'm something of a provocateur at times. It's just that, after spending my early career trying to educate everyone that librarians are "with it", I've discovered that there's just as much of a need to convince librarians to get with the times.
- Oh wait, they did remove sources from Google News because newspapers complained....
- Oh wait, they did remove search results because of DMCA takedown notices....
On second thought, maybe it's not that shocking. Maybe that's why I predicted this in June and April....So, for all practical purposes, downloading is okay. Also the "fair use etc." you shrug off is exactly why it is legal, or at least could be argued to be so.
We use words like "Fair Use," "Right of First Sale," and "Freedom of Information." We use these words as a backbone of a life spent defending something, you use them as a punchline.
I wouldn't say we're 95% there yet. My doctor, for one, asks me in I'm in pain, he doesn't scan for firing c-fibers.
Furthermore many reject your belief that is is only a matter of time. There is a so-called explanatory gap that science may never conquer. Just because there's always a physical correlate/identity to mental states doesn't mean they're the same thing.
How a bat "sees" with just sonar and how it can be explained by physics are very different. Speaking of which, Nagel's bat essay and this bibliography have more on this if anyone's interested.
Wow that's a lot -- I can only see a few dozen, and I wrote it. A few are mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but I doubt anyone has caught them all. I'd list them all in the margin here but there's not enough room.
364 days a year I send out a Library Link of the Day, but like CmdrTaco here, on 4/1 I have a bit of fun.
>one could devise a system where you had to "bring back your copy" before anybody else could check it out
One has. netLibrary is built around this concept (Questia is also built on a model of pay-per-click to copyright holders), and all it does is annoy users who don't understand why they can't read an online book just because another patron somewhere in the state is doing so too.
Not to mention the interface sucks and is so crippled by other DRM (you can only view or print a single page at a time, and are locked out of a book if you print too many single pages in succession) that most librarians and library users hate the system.
"The piece (LJ, February 15th 2005) was intended to be satirical, though I am certainly no fan of "blogs," having an old fashioned belief that, if one wishes to air one's views and be taken seriously, one should go through the publishing/editing process." - Michael Gorman
Some comments from librarian bloggers to this piece include this, this, this this, and this ... we're not all like Gorman in our views.
> people using pop-up blockers do not want to see their ads
Advertisers don't give a damn about that.
They know that some of those people -- admittedly a minute percentage, but in a game of millions a 0.1% click-and-buy rate can make you rich -- do not maintain the minimal essential commitment of an online citizen and refuse to ever buy something as a result of invasive, unsolicited advertising.
This is also the reason the telemarketing associations oppose the "Do Not Call" lists. They know that a portion of the people on these lists can still be persuaded to buy things from them.
From this comment and those above (especially the one who was asked when they were coming in the next day when they had been given a fligh the next morning), it sounds like Google HR is heavy on the "stress interview" -- an idea of giving questions that are deliberately designed to rattle people to see how they respond.
As The Straight Dope explains, this tactic isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Seriously. LISNews.com is featuring a rundown of the top library stories of 2004. Much of Slashdot's news crosses over with library science, just as much of IT relates with what librarians do nowadays. So please take a look to see what we're been up to. Librarians need more tech-savvy people familiar with the challenges we're facing.
not a coincidence that my last accepted story was about just that.
Reminds me of the "I'm sorry this letter is so long... I didn't have time to write a shorter one." quote.
In middle school we had an assignment to write an 8-page paper. After we handed it in, our next assignment was to make the same paper 5 pages.
I was reading yesterday, from before the 2000 election:
"My vote for Nader will send the people of this country a strong message: George Bush is a bad president."
How true that came to be (along with "Our Long Era of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over").
Sigh....
Man, why you bringing up old stuff?
I actually thought of Rounders too, although for someone who knows how to play holdem it doesn't add all that much.
Minority Report is another movie that would have been on this top 10 list if not for the redundant voiceover. Oh well, ask 10 film school students who the most overrated director is and 8+ of them will respond Spielberg.