Thats fine if it is marked so that people either know what has changed or at the very least that what they are reading will change.
If the article has a line close to the header saying "this article is being updated as we follow the story" or something like that, then nobody would reasonably expect to be able to go back to it later and find the same static content.
The issue is being predictable. If I'm told a story will likely change I will save a copy if there is something in it I want to preserve.
Similarly, if CNN just says on their pages "our stories are regularly changed without notice when new information becomes available" I would just not rely on anything on the CNN site for reference.
The web is close to print media in some ways and close to broadcast media in other ways, and that causes confusion to readers. The least the news site operators could do is to inform their readers on how they are handling updates so that readers can make informed choices about what level of trust to place in a particular source.
However even though it could have been better, Slashdot DID mark the article with an "Update:". (The part that could have been better is that it's not clear what the article originally said).
Or.... Slashdot could just do as several people has suggested that the news media should do: clearly mark changes and archive the old versions.
If updated comments had an easily visible line saying "UPDATED - [link to previous version, and timestamp of update]", then it would not be a big issue that it had changed. People could clearly see that the comment had been changed and that the change had been done after several of the replies had been posted, and if something didn't make sense they could go and have a look at the original version.
That is the core issue: Whether you tell your readers about updates or not. Whether you are updating stories in place or not is a cosmetic issue that doesn't really matter if you make it clear that updates have been made and either archive old versions or post a changelog.
It is a problem because it in a sense is "rewriting history". You can point people to a news story saying something important, only to discover that when they get there the story is dramatically different. That something important might be something the editor or journalist or advertizer doesn't want disseminated by the public. Any updates, however small, without proper notice, makes the media unsuitable to reference without also ensuring to take a copy first.
With newspapers this traditionally hasn't been an issue, since old copies are normally archived, and getting access to previous versions of a story normally wouldn't be a problem.
For TV this has always been a problem, but it isn't an issue since a TV broadcast isn't persistent - you have to make a copy (a recording) to have something to refer to in the first place.
The internet falls somewhere in between. The nature of many sites give the impression that the news reports are persistent when in fact they often are not.
This is not only a problem when referring to an article, but also when using articles as background material for other work. Without a changelog the original article and an updated article may look superficially the same, but one may contain grave errors that you'd only notice on a detailed reading.
If you go back to check on something, having a reference to a changelog should make it obvious to you that you need to check whether the change affects your use of the
material.
In effect, updating an article in a way that make it seem static to users seriously reduce the value of that article for many purposes.
As others has noted, it also seriously reduce the incentive to ensure the reporting is correct. If you can gloss over your errors and blatantly wrong reporting by updating the article with practically noone noticing, you can push the publish button so much earlier, and do your proof reading and fact checking after you've beat the competition.
Personally I've frequently found gross errors on news sites I read that has silently been corrected
when I've pointed them out - in one case an article had completely confused two different people involved in two completely different trials, resulting in an article that had nothing to with reality. In that case the article was just pulled, but no errata was published.
A reader that went back to their site later would indeed not find the story any more, but on the other hand they would find no indication that the article previously there was complete and utter junk. They might keep spreading the errors in talking to people and writing about the article because the site did not have enough respect for their readers to inform them of the error.
This was from the online edition of a news paper that in its paper edition always publish erratas when errors are brought to their attention.
Actually, the idea that 1984 promotes communism is not that strange. Orwell always belonged to the left, even to the extent of fighting for a Marxist group during the Spanish civil war. However he came out strongly opposed to Stalinism.
From "Spilling the Spanish Beans" (september 1937)
"The logical end is a régime in which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism. It will not be the same Fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco's Fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different."
Orwell likens regimes like the USSR to a fascist regime with a different ideological mythology, run by people at least in name claiming to be communists.
1984 and Animal Farm are anti-fascist. They are also anti-USSR. But they are not anti-socialism, and only anti-communism to the extent that communist ideology and symbolism has been used (or abused, depending on your view) to legitimise a regime that for all intents and purposes share the traits of a fascist regime.
If anything, 1984 and also Animal Farm makes a strong point about societies divided by class, whether by default (the farmers in Animal Farm) or by a coup d'etat shrouded in symbolism drawn from socialist and communist ideology (the pigs in Animal Farm, or the ruling party in 1984).
This is really the core of why some people considers 1984 as a work promoting communism: It underscores Orwells position that class divide was bad regardless of what name was put on the regime
it is found in. This is something even Marx argued
That is also what made many stalinists join the choir and complain about Orwell being anti-communist: He pointed out that class divide is class divide whether it is between the working class and the bourgeoisie or between the working class and a party claiming to work for the interests of the working class.
Socialism and "real" Marxist communism has at it's core the goal of abolishing the class divide, and with it the classes, and a major part of the stalinists hold on the left was that they pretended that what had happened in the USSR was somehow better than the class divide in capitalist countries.
Clearly the USSR and the stalinist "Communist" parties didn't do anything to get rid of the class divide, and Orwell was one of the extremely few well known socialists that had the guts to not only criticize the right but also criticize dangerous tendencies on the left.
To finish with another quote from Orwell himself:
"Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country. [...] And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement." [CEJL vol. 3 p. 458]
(Note: The USSR claimed to be socialist, not communist, but with the goal of developing into a communist society)
The speed is not the UK censors fault, but the movie studios. Some movies do premiere in the UK at the same time as the US releases. However making thousands of prints of a movie is extremely expensive, and so the studios tend to focus on the US market first, and then make prints available elsewhere.
Digital distribution is set to change that over the coming years though, in addition to revolutionize the ability of the theaters to adapt what they are showing to what people want to see much quicker and cheaper than today.
Ehh... The article states that speaking to a computer overwhelms the humans short-term memory. It's not the computer that's the problem.
Whether his theories are valid is a completely different issue, though, and as many other posters here I think he's generalizing way to much, and that while visualisation may be the right way to go for interacting with complex models, I certainly don't want to be bothered with some fancy visual module to ask a home automation system to turn on the oven or other simple tasks.
I think you miss the point of the poster you replied to.
What he's referring to is likely that there are significant groups in the deaf community that are heavily opposed to "fixing" deafness with implants or similar, and believe it should be left as is, and that to accept implants implies that being deaf isn't "normal". Some deaf groups even consider implants a treat to particular cultural elements of the deaf community.
While I'm sure there are many blind people that would not personally want to use implants like these for whatever reason, the poster you replied to was implying that there is no strong element in the blind community that opposes such implants in principle.
It's more likely IT professionals were left out because there is no easy way of setting the criteria for who is part of that group. The groups they have chosen all have very clear legal requirements on what you need to do to be able to use particular titles or designations, for IT professionals there is no equivalent standard.
In the US it might be the case that a suffix other than.com might be an issue. However, the rest of the world is used to dealing with losts of different TLDs...
Try Evolution. It works great for mail via the IMAP server in Exchange and handles Outlook meeting invites reasonably well. Ximian in addition has a closed source addon called Ximian Connector which apparently gives you full access to the rest of the Exchange features.
The we agree - the error messages are horrible. The problem is that they are horrible because they try to show in detail what is wrong. A typical example would be how typedefs appear in their full expanded glory instead of referenced by the typedef'd name. Sometimes this is useful, but more often it is not.
I'm sure compiler developers will start producing more sensible error messages at some point...
Huh? That would be absolutely horrible. When you use a const iterator (as the poster you replied to suggested), you most certainly want it to give you a const object. Thats the entire purpose of using const iterators after all: to have the compiler warn you if you try to mutate any objects.
Writing const correct programs can be a pain sometimes, but when your core classes are const correct and you try to stick to const values as much as possible it's so much easier to catch stupid errors.
Yeah. Right. You go out and write an audio compression algorithm specification and then implement it to see whether it works, and repeat until you have something reasonable. And the rest of us will keep on doing that kind of development by prototyping and refining the prototype and actually get results instead.
Design comes first when you have a clearly defined tasks for which it is easy to develop a working system once you have comprehensive requirements.
For something where the implementation method isn't well understood, that is going to fail miserably.
I'd second this. My next graphics card will most certainly NOT be an NVIDIA based one. I can live with somewhat lower performance, but not with having
my machine crashing all the time.
You got it the wrong way around. THEY should be friggin grateful that Linux users put up with their binary drivers. I for one will NOT buy a graphics card with an NVIDIA chipset the next time I upgrade unless they give out specs or open source their drivers.
I've tried practically every release of their driver, and followed practically every tip out there, but fact is my machine still crashes at least a couple of times a day whenever I use the Nvidia drivers vs. never if I use the open source drivers.
Maybe it works for most people, but it doesn't work on my machine, an I'll vote with my money and take my business elsewhere.
I thought I'd never say this, but Lexmark actually seems to be getting quite Linux friendly. They specifically list Linux on several of their websites for a reasonable subset of their printers, and have drivers available for downloads...
It's not more than a year or two ago that I had to return a Lexmark printer because I couldn't get it to work with Linux at all.
What I thought was funny with the comment was that for a lot of people the answer would be "no, why should I care if someone use my paper?". In fact, during the heyday of BBS's, uploading papers to get download credits was common. I've even found a few of my old essays on the net because of sysops that have posted their old BBS file collections.
Do I mind? No. Why should I care? After all I was the one that made them available in the first place.
If I hadn't distributed it in the first place and someone just took it from me and copied it I might have been upset, but I didn't.
Whether you think copying copyrighted material is ok or not, Hillary Rosens copying analogy is not going to do her much good...
I agree entirely. Googles approach of informing people of pages that have been removed is a great example of their integrity, and serves much of the same intent of warning people about what Scientology is up to.
They could perhaps take this a step further and add warnings to all pages with a query on Scientology etc., pointing out (in a clearly labeled section) that because CoS is using a tactic of intimidation etc. to keep material out of Google and elsewhere, it is likely that the links returned in the search give an incomplete picture of the information about Scientology. Then they could (still in a clearly labeled section) give a set of links to CoS critics.
The key point here is: If the material is editorial (Googles opinion, as opposed to the relatively objective result of their ranking algorithm), its ok for them to put it on their site, as long as there's no way people can mix up the editorial content and the search results.
Carnivore in itself may not be a problem. The problem is if the FBI is given the ability to place tools in an ISPs environment without any control over what is placed there. How will the ISP know that FBI is using the version of Carnivore that has been through an independent review?
If the ISP was allowed to review the code, compile it themselves, and install it one of their own boxes, the chance of abuse would be much smaller.
First of all the processor destroys itself, not the data. If a second copy of the private key exists, then you could still access the data by installing a new processor with the same key. However of course, then a possible attack against the system would be to get hold of the second copy of the key.
You could keep a set of processors encoded with the same key available as backups in case the processor in use is destroyed, though.
Also, presumably in real life use noone would have network access to the interface you'd request data from, so unless someone gained physical access to the box at the ISPs offices, they wouldn't be able to trigger any destruction.
To stretch your analogy, is it "statutory rape" to give kids access to the public library? Noone is asking them consent at their way in. Noone is asking them for consent before they are given access to browse the books.
The only thing that might be dubious about this experiment was the surveillance he used to get feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
If the article has a line close to the header saying "this article is being updated as we follow the story" or something like that, then nobody would reasonably expect to be able to go back to it later and find the same static content.
The issue is being predictable. If I'm told a story will likely change I will save a copy if there is something in it I want to preserve.
Similarly, if CNN just says on their pages "our stories are regularly changed without notice when new information becomes available" I would just not rely on anything on the CNN site for reference.
The web is close to print media in some ways and close to broadcast media in other ways, and that causes confusion to readers. The least the news site operators could do is to inform their readers on how they are handling updates so that readers can make informed choices about what level of trust to place in a particular source.
However even though it could have been better, Slashdot DID mark the article with an "Update:". (The part that could have been better is that it's not clear what the article originally said).
If updated comments had an easily visible line saying "UPDATED - [link to previous version, and timestamp of update]", then it would not be a big issue that it had changed. People could clearly see that the comment had been changed and that the change had been done after several of the replies had been posted, and if something didn't make sense they could go and have a look at the original version.
That is the core issue: Whether you tell your readers about updates or not. Whether you are updating stories in place or not is a cosmetic issue that doesn't really matter if you make it clear that updates have been made and either archive old versions or post a changelog.
With newspapers this traditionally hasn't been an issue, since old copies are normally archived, and getting access to previous versions of a story normally wouldn't be a problem.
For TV this has always been a problem, but it isn't an issue since a TV broadcast isn't persistent - you have to make a copy (a recording) to have something to refer to in the first place.
The internet falls somewhere in between. The nature of many sites give the impression that the news reports are persistent when in fact they often are not.
This is not only a problem when referring to an article, but also when using articles as background material for other work. Without a changelog the original article and an updated article may look superficially the same, but one may contain grave errors that you'd only notice on a detailed reading.
If you go back to check on something, having a reference to a changelog should make it obvious to you that you need to check whether the change affects your use of the material.
In effect, updating an article in a way that make it seem static to users seriously reduce the value of that article for many purposes.
As others has noted, it also seriously reduce the incentive to ensure the reporting is correct. If you can gloss over your errors and blatantly wrong reporting by updating the article with practically noone noticing, you can push the publish button so much earlier, and do your proof reading and fact checking after you've beat the competition.
Personally I've frequently found gross errors on news sites I read that has silently been corrected when I've pointed them out - in one case an article had completely confused two different people involved in two completely different trials, resulting in an article that had nothing to with reality. In that case the article was just pulled, but no errata was published.
A reader that went back to their site later would indeed not find the story any more, but on the other hand they would find no indication that the article previously there was complete and utter junk. They might keep spreading the errors in talking to people and writing about the article because the site did not have enough respect for their readers to inform them of the error.
This was from the online edition of a news paper that in its paper edition always publish erratas when errors are brought to their attention.
From "Spilling the Spanish Beans" (september 1937) "The logical end is a régime in which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism. It will not be the same Fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco's Fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different."
Orwell likens regimes like the USSR to a fascist regime with a different ideological mythology, run by people at least in name claiming to be communists.
1984 and Animal Farm are anti-fascist. They are also anti-USSR. But they are not anti-socialism, and only anti-communism to the extent that communist ideology and symbolism has been used (or abused, depending on your view) to legitimise a regime that for all intents and purposes share the traits of a fascist regime.
If anything, 1984 and also Animal Farm makes a strong point about societies divided by class, whether by default (the farmers in Animal Farm) or by a coup d'etat shrouded in symbolism drawn from socialist and communist ideology (the pigs in Animal Farm, or the ruling party in 1984).
This is really the core of why some people considers 1984 as a work promoting communism: It underscores Orwells position that class divide was bad regardless of what name was put on the regime it is found in. This is something even Marx argued
That is also what made many stalinists join the choir and complain about Orwell being anti-communist: He pointed out that class divide is class divide whether it is between the working class and the bourgeoisie or between the working class and a party claiming to work for the interests of the working class.
Socialism and "real" Marxist communism has at it's core the goal of abolishing the class divide, and with it the classes, and a major part of the stalinists hold on the left was that they pretended that what had happened in the USSR was somehow better than the class divide in capitalist countries.
Clearly the USSR and the stalinist "Communist" parties didn't do anything to get rid of the class divide, and Orwell was one of the extremely few well known socialists that had the guts to not only criticize the right but also criticize dangerous tendencies on the left.
To finish with another quote from Orwell himself: "Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country. [...] And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement." [CEJL vol. 3 p. 458]
(Note: The USSR claimed to be socialist, not communist, but with the goal of developing into a communist society)
Digital distribution is set to change that over the coming years though, in addition to revolutionize the ability of the theaters to adapt what they are showing to what people want to see much quicker and cheaper than today.
Whether his theories are valid is a completely different issue, though, and as many other posters here I think he's generalizing way to much, and that while visualisation may be the right way to go for interacting with complex models, I certainly don't want to be bothered with some fancy visual module to ask a home automation system to turn on the oven or other simple tasks.
What he's referring to is likely that there are significant groups in the deaf community that are heavily opposed to "fixing" deafness with implants or similar, and believe it should be left as is, and that to accept implants implies that being deaf isn't "normal". Some deaf groups even consider implants a treat to particular cultural elements of the deaf community.
While I'm sure there are many blind people that would not personally want to use implants like these for whatever reason, the poster you replied to was implying that there is no strong element in the blind community that opposes such implants in principle.
It's more likely IT professionals were left out because there is no easy way of setting the criteria for who is part of that group. The groups they have chosen all have very clear legal requirements on what you need to do to be able to use particular titles or designations, for IT professionals there is no equivalent standard.
No, their logic goes "since it will take us a hell of a lot of work to be able to verify your claim, we have to charge more".
In the US it might be the case that a suffix other than .com might be an issue. However, the rest of the world is used to dealing with losts of different TLDs...
Try Evolution. It works great for mail via the IMAP server in Exchange and handles Outlook meeting invites reasonably well. Ximian in addition has a closed source addon called Ximian Connector which apparently gives you full access to the rest of the Exchange features.
I'm sure compiler developers will start producing more sensible error messages at some point...
Writing const correct programs can be a pain sometimes, but when your core classes are const correct and you try to stick to const values as much as possible it's so much easier to catch stupid errors.
Design comes first when you have a clearly defined tasks for which it is easy to develop a working system once you have comprehensive requirements.
For something where the implementation method isn't well understood, that is going to fail miserably.
No they have not. Try actually looking in the archives next time.
I'd second this. My next graphics card will most certainly NOT be an NVIDIA based one. I can live with somewhat lower performance, but not with having my machine crashing all the time.
I've tried practically every release of their driver, and followed practically every tip out there, but fact is my machine still crashes at least a couple of times a day whenever I use the Nvidia drivers vs. never if I use the open source drivers.
Maybe it works for most people, but it doesn't work on my machine, an I'll vote with my money and take my business elsewhere.
It's not more than a year or two ago that I had to return a Lexmark printer because I couldn't get it to work with Linux at all.
Do I mind? No. Why should I care? After all I was the one that made them available in the first place. If I hadn't distributed it in the first place and someone just took it from me and copied it I might have been upset, but I didn't.
Whether you think copying copyrighted material is ok or not, Hillary Rosens copying analogy is not going to do her much good...
What matters isn't where xenu.net is, but where Google is, and Google is most certainly within the reach of US law.
They could perhaps take this a step further and add warnings to all pages with a query on Scientology etc., pointing out (in a clearly labeled section) that because CoS is using a tactic of intimidation etc. to keep material out of Google and elsewhere, it is likely that the links returned in the search give an incomplete picture of the information about Scientology. Then they could (still in a clearly labeled section) give a set of links to CoS critics.
The key point here is: If the material is editorial (Googles opinion, as opposed to the relatively objective result of their ranking algorithm), its ok for them to put it on their site, as long as there's no way people can mix up the editorial content and the search results.
If the ISP was allowed to review the code, compile it themselves, and install it one of their own boxes, the chance of abuse would be much smaller.
You could keep a set of processors encoded with the same key available as backups in case the processor in use is destroyed, though.
Also, presumably in real life use noone would have network access to the interface you'd request data from, so unless someone gained physical access to the box at the ISPs offices, they wouldn't be able to trigger any destruction.
The only thing that might be dubious about this experiment was the surveillance he used to get feedback.