I think all of us, including Regal Cinemas and the National Association of Theater Owners, can figure out where a *20 second video clip* for someone's "little brother" fits relative to that line. Zero-tolerance rules are always about excusing bad judgement. It's not even enough footage for a trailer.
It may have been illegal, but anything beyond a stern warning and they deserve whatever boycotts or negative publicity they get thrown at them.
I guess when you're # 2 you try harder. Or something like that.
I think Microsoft is acknowledging that they've been overtaken by open source; I know on my machine the latest versions of KUbuntu have practically made Windows XP obsolete.
I am an amateur linguist and artificial intelligence software developer.
I don't know why linguists get so excited about the old nature vs. nuture debate.
It takes a baby two years to speak, and three years to speak grammatically. So obviously there is some learning going on. And after 50 years of trying to make computers understand language, we can say for sure that a baby isn't going to learn language in three years unless there is some degree of "hard-wiring" in the brain to give them a head start. Even more cool: children can learn to speak grammatical language (Creoles) even when they have parents who don't speak grammatically, and structurally Creoles all have the *same* grammar.
In fact biologists and neurologists honestly don't know how the brain does *any* of its learning. They just know it's way more complicated than they thought.
But still, while computers can't compete with the brain of a two-year old, just getting software to figure out how to break down the sounds that occur in spoken language is very impressive. It is a *MUCH* harder problem than it sounds.
"undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq"
Remember, what Bush calls 'economic reconstruction and political reform' is considered war crimes by the rest of civilization. So, in Little George's delusional fantasies, 'undermining' would likely include *supporting* the existing Iraqi government, promoting actual democracy in Iraq, and/or obstructing the criminal exploitation of the Iraqi oil industry.
Such extreme abuse would, of course, not be tolerated by any court, no matter how partisan, but how are you going to hire a lawyer when your assets are frozen?
Interesting comments on this topic. Some valid criticism, but frankly a lot of thinly disguised outrage at the political incorrectness, rather than the science. Let's remember:
1) This is folk psychology; they're not pretending it's backed up with research. 2) These are hypotheses *assuming* the given scenarios are true. 3) The conclusions are meant to be statistically significant, not universal truths.
As a full accounting for human bahviour, clearly their points are inadequate. As factors that provide limited insight, they have some excellent points. Politically correct or not.
A sensible criticism would be that they don't distinguish between behaviours that are adaptive in hunter-gatherer societies as opposed to industrialized urban civilization.
I'm not suggesting that the article is right about everything, or even that it meets genuine scientific standards, but it seems some people are almost ready to go back to creationism rather than realistically face questions about human nature.
Certainly, your average science fiction galactic colonization doesn't sound terribly realistic. Even something as simple as the fact not every habitable planet will have a day exactly 24 hours long will be tricky to overcome.
On the other hand, if we want to preserve our species, or at least our intellectual and cultural heritage, that can be done by long-term colonization, just not as a unified civilization.
I suspect this lawyer is upset purely because the website is empowering consumers with the means to know whether or not their lawyer is competent and their fees are justified.
So the website is a useful service.
But there are legitimate, serious concerns about how the rankings are calculated. Law is a self-governing profession, and it's not clear that Avvo is using criteria that assess lawyers in terms that would lead to customers making the best decisions. Most external criteria, like fees or convictions, are not necessarily related to job performance.
I'd say he's "won" already - Gateway has already cost itself more in bad publicity than the sale could possibly be worth. Plus it sounds like Gateway's case is really, really weak.
No, this has to come from no less than Field Marshall Obvious.
"Comment like a smart person."
Let's all "program like good programmers" while we're at it, or, even better, "invest like lucky investors", "dance like a professional", "socilize like an extrovert", "copulate like leporids", "wield power like a super-villan", and "fly like Superman".
Besides, nice idea in principle, but based on two grievously flawed assumptions: the programmer is a smart person, or at least knows what one is like, and the next programmer reading it will be a smart person.
I'm surprised at how many people didn't pick up on this rather obvious implication. People, Americans especially, seem ready to start a revolution at government abuse of private data, and pay no attention at all when the private sector does it.
MySpace flat out committed libel. There are probably packs of lawyers out there seeing this as their ticket to early retirement.
I don't want to diminish the scientific achievement of (starting to) identify the regions of the brain involved in altruistic versus non-altruistic behaviour.
But we've known that humans are fundamentally social creatures for a pretty long time. It's been a scientific conclusion for like 50 years. This is only news to the unimaginative homo-centric people who think anything slightly complicated about humans has to be explained in terms of free will or culture.
While Slashdot readers may not be as well informed as they like to think they are, I don't think this is an audience where you can bluff your way through with the demolition techno-babble.
I've read the Jones paper referred to; he's not even trying to persuade the people who already know better.
I was thinking I would try to learn more about these fascinating stories until I came to that one, and their credibilty was totally shot. Not reporting the demolition hoax is one of the rare moments of responsible journalism.
"Free will" is just a fancy name for decision-making that we don't understand. No-one knows what it is, or how it could be measured, or even whether it's meaningful or just a by-product of decision-making interacting with the language faculty.
Readability can be fixed, and presumably will in time. One of Wikipedia's greatest strengths is that it does have more in-depth knowledge (over a dizzying array of subjects) than comparable resources.
If they found something about a different person who had the same name, he might have an outside chance of making a complaint.
But from the sounds of it, he should lay low and be thankful there aren't criminal charges. A Google search is no different from, say, searching newspaper clippings by hand. If reality is prejudicial to his employment, it's not his employer's fault.
Slashdot Mirror
Tomorrow I'm going out and "demanding lower prices" on a car!
Once again greed defeats common sense.
I was just thinking that the pro-piracy people were going a little too far, but I'm not feeling sorry for the broadcasting industry after this.
"Where do you draw the line?"
I think all of us, including Regal Cinemas and the National Association of Theater Owners, can figure out where a *20 second video clip* for someone's "little brother" fits relative to that line. Zero-tolerance rules are always about excusing bad judgement. It's not even enough footage for a trailer.
It may have been illegal, but anything beyond a stern warning and they deserve whatever boycotts or negative publicity they get thrown at them.
I guess when you're # 2 you try harder. Or something like that.
I think Microsoft is acknowledging that they've been overtaken by open source; I know on my machine the latest versions of KUbuntu have practically made Windows XP obsolete.
I think there's a law somewhere that they have to pay back everyone who bought Windows before they can start giving it away for free.
That would be cool if it's true - then people can endorse Windows knowing that the user is getting their money's worth.
I am an amateur linguist and artificial intelligence software developer.
I don't know why linguists get so excited about the old nature vs. nuture debate.
It takes a baby two years to speak, and three years to speak grammatically. So obviously there is some learning going on. And after 50 years of trying to make computers understand language, we can say for sure that a baby isn't going to learn language in three years unless there is some degree of "hard-wiring" in the brain to give them a head start. Even more cool: children can learn to speak grammatical language (Creoles) even when they have parents who don't speak grammatically, and structurally Creoles all have the *same* grammar.
In fact biologists and neurologists honestly don't know how the brain does *any* of its learning. They just know it's way more complicated than they thought.
But still, while computers can't compete with the brain of a two-year old, just getting software to figure out how to break down the sounds that occur in spoken language is very impressive. It is a *MUCH* harder problem than it sounds.
"undermine the Iraqi government"
That's not quite what it says. The wording is:
"undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq"
Remember, what Bush calls 'economic reconstruction and political reform' is considered war crimes by the rest of civilization. So, in Little George's delusional fantasies, 'undermining' would likely include *supporting* the existing Iraqi government, promoting actual democracy in Iraq, and/or obstructing the criminal exploitation of the Iraqi oil industry.
Such extreme abuse would, of course, not be tolerated by any court, no matter how partisan, but how are you going to hire a lawyer when your assets are frozen?
Interesting comments on this topic. Some valid criticism, but frankly a lot of thinly disguised outrage at the political incorrectness, rather than the science. Let's remember:
1) This is folk psychology; they're not pretending it's backed up with research.
2) These are hypotheses *assuming* the given scenarios are true.
3) The conclusions are meant to be statistically significant, not universal truths.
As a full accounting for human bahviour, clearly their points are inadequate. As factors that provide limited insight, they have some excellent points. Politically correct or not.
A sensible criticism would be that they don't distinguish between behaviours that are adaptive in hunter-gatherer societies as opposed to industrialized urban civilization.
I'm not suggesting that the article is right about everything, or even that it meets genuine scientific standards, but it seems some people are almost ready to go back to creationism rather than realistically face questions about human nature.
Funny how all the good evidence for the Roswell crap comes out *after* the corresponding witness has died.
After all that "unready business" we've had to put up with for the last 10 000 years of human civilization...
Certainly, your average science fiction galactic colonization doesn't sound terribly realistic. Even something as simple as the fact not every habitable planet will have a day exactly 24 hours long will be tricky to overcome.
On the other hand, if we want to preserve our species, or at least our intellectual and cultural heritage, that can be done by long-term colonization, just not as a unified civilization.
I suspect this lawyer is upset purely because the website is empowering consumers with the means to know whether or not their lawyer is competent and their fees are justified.
So the website is a useful service.
But there are legitimate, serious concerns about how the rankings are calculated. Law is a self-governing profession, and it's not clear that Avvo is using criteria that assess lawyers in terms that would lead to customers making the best decisions. Most external criteria, like fees or convictions, are not necessarily related to job performance.
I'd say he's "won" already - Gateway has already cost itself more in bad publicity than the sale could possibly be worth. Plus it sounds like Gateway's case is really, really weak.
You'd expect all those canals to be connected to a reservoir or something.
The "security enhancements" in Vista were to protect Microsoft from piracy, not to protect Vista users. Microsoft still doesn't care about them.
No, this has to come from no less than Field Marshall Obvious.
"Comment like a smart person."
Let's all "program like good programmers" while we're at it, or, even better, "invest like lucky investors", "dance like a professional", "socilize like an extrovert", "copulate like leporids", "wield power like a super-villan", and "fly like Superman".
Besides, nice idea in principle, but based on two grievously flawed assumptions: the programmer is a smart person, or at least knows what one is like, and the next programmer reading it will be a smart person.
I'm surprised at how many people didn't pick up on this rather obvious implication. People, Americans especially, seem ready to start a revolution at government abuse of private data, and pay no attention at all when the private sector does it.
MySpace flat out committed libel. There are probably packs of lawyers out there seeing this as their ticket to early retirement.
I don't want to diminish the scientific achievement of (starting to) identify the regions of the brain involved in altruistic versus non-altruistic behaviour.
But we've known that humans are fundamentally social creatures for a pretty long time. It's been a scientific conclusion for like 50 years. This is only news to the unimaginative homo-centric people who think anything slightly complicated about humans has to be explained in terms of free will or culture.
Cute.
While Slashdot readers may not be as well informed as they like to think they are, I don't think this is an audience where you can bluff your way through with the demolition techno-babble.
I've read the Jones paper referred to; he's not even trying to persuade the people who already know better.
I was thinking I would try to learn more about these fascinating stories until I came to that one, and their credibilty was totally shot. Not reporting the demolition hoax is one of the rare moments of responsible journalism.
I want four minutes of my life back.
I realize this is only a thought experiment for fun, but looking out only for your own narrow self-interest can be a bad idea.
"Free will" is just a fancy name for decision-making that we don't understand. No-one knows what it is, or how it could be measured, or even whether it's meaningful or just a by-product of decision-making interacting with the language faculty.
I agree with keeping the hard science.
Readability can be fixed, and presumably will in time. One of Wikipedia's greatest strengths is that it does have more in-depth knowledge (over a dizzying array of subjects) than comparable resources.
If they found something about a different person who had the same name, he might have an outside chance of making a complaint.
But from the sounds of it, he should lay low and be thankful there aren't criminal charges. A Google search is no different from, say, searching newspaper clippings by hand. If reality is prejudicial to his employment, it's not his employer's fault.
That's what Microsoft said when they first plagiarized Delphi and Java to create C#.
Why should I believe them this time?