Any solution that allows games to be sold and places the responsibility to monitor them on parents is a good solution for game-players. (After all, how often will these buttons actually be used?)
Sure, game-players might prefer a solution that magically makes the public stop thinking that violent and sexually explicit games are a problem. Good luck with that.
Slashdot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 8:55 p.m. Eastern time, February 9, 2009. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
It seems pretty clear from the MS quote that Google took a license to some patents (ones that cover MS ActiveSync). What's not clear from the announcement is whether Google is actually using any MS-written software in it's product.
... law enforcement focuses on small, petty crimes, like turnstile jumping, graffiti, and shoplifting, they implicitly reduce serious crime, like burglarly, arson, murder...
Every heard the maxim, "Let the punishment fit the crime"? The notion that we should punish people (and this DNA collection is punishment, make no mistake) for a misdemeanor (even when it won't help prove that misdemeanor) because they might, might have done something worse for which we have neither proof, nor even cause for suspicion, fundamentally undermines the principle that people are innocent until convicted.
In reality, law enforcement uses the vast host of minor crimes like drug possession because they are easy to prove and can thus be used as leverage against anyone law enforcement feels like using leverage against. These collections will be just one more kind of leverage.
When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA.
I was fingerprinted for my job long ago. Much as I hate the notion, I can't see any meaningful difference between fingerprinting and DNA collection. A full, population-wide database is coming. It's just a matter of when.
Other things being equal, poor people will always have it worse, than the rich.
Which is sort of the definition of 'rich' and 'poor'. So long as we're using money to allocate land (good luck changing that!), rich people will acquire land with good characteristics, including lack of malaria.
Isn't the point here that we should eliminate/reduce malaria for other people because it is the right thing to do?
If the mods are without honor, and should be stripped of their karma, and should lose their titles, and should face discommendation, and should be sent to work the mines on Rura Penthe, it may be time to find a new empire to serve.
We all know/.'s opinion of Bill and his company, but let's take a moment to acknowledge that the Gates Foundation is a somewhat different animal. It has a track record of spending money on un-glamorous causes where there is big bang for the buck (e.g., malaria). Here, we see it checking the performance data and dropping a program that just wasn't working. Love 'em or hate 'em, that's the smart thing to do.
In addition to having to pay the lawyers before you get paid, don't forget risk. Valid claim or not, you could lose. You would be laying out $50,000 with, say, 25% odds of getting nothing. Scary stuff.
If you want schools to pay attention to Computer Science as a subject, there is one and only one place to start:
Make basic proficiency a student graduation requirement
Everything else (competent, well-paid teachers, etc.) will follow from there. Schools don't recruit teachers for their proficiency in optional subjects.
No upward moderation is merited by a comment that merely says, "me too", without adding any new information. Moderators can mod up the original comment based on the reputation of the me-tooer if they want to, but that doesn't mean that the/. population needs to see the same quotation twice.
It so happens that in this case, the me-tooer was a fine, upstanding/.er who rightly me-tooed a fine, insightful post. We still should not be modding up a me-too.
Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it.
That doesn't even make sense. Since when is reading extra books/notes/etc. cheating? If I want to do extra outside reading, that's called s.t.u.d.y.i.n.g.!
Cheating takes more or less two forms: (1) plagiarism by passing off another's paper, etc. as your own and (2) bringing forbidden materials into a test. This measure won't prevent either.
What is this teacher saying in her current lectures that future students won't also be told? Is she reusing test questions?! Does she think students don't have softcopies of their papers? Is she not checking against reuse?
To use slightly more words, how is the teacher going to get the physical notes from you if you refuse? Assault?
If she has a copyright claim (which she doesn't), that'll take winning a court case. If she has a right to this under a university rule (which she doesn't), she'll need to institute some kind of university hearing to get them. Odds are that she won't go to the trouble of trying either route. If she does anything at all, it's most likely to involved grading you down. In that case, you can proceed in the university's hearing process against her to get the grade reviewed.
Some one's got to stand up to her. She's violating academic norms and depriving her students of tools they may need to continue their studies in higher classes.
That copyright analysis is questionable, since the teacher's lecture may merely be a public performance of material that she had previously committed to a tangible medium of expression (her notes/papers/books), thus creating copyright and making the notes a derivative work. That's irrelevant anyway.
A better analysis would be that teaching a class grants the students a license to record the material taught as notes. Or, if you like, you could say that the students paid for a set of notes in their tuition. Plus, there's a fair use issue given the academic setting. To the extent that the teacher had any copyright, it can't be enforced against the student.
Very interesting. A lot of FOSS uses the GPL as a tool to prevent closed-source, copyright-dependent companies from freeriding on the FOSS and contributing nothing. Of course, the GPL can't really be enforced against a state actor.
So, what to do about a state that takes GPL software, modifies it, redistributes it, maybe even charges for it?
Sadly, we're not talking science here. We're talking about public opinion and/or politician opinion. That's what passes laws.
When people get hurt, the public rightly wants to know, "Why?" If someone tells them that the culprit* is video games, they're inclined to believe it because (a) video games are easy to ban, (b) video games are something they didn't like in the first place, (c) blaming video games means that the problem isn't their fault, etc.
Forget logic and rhetoric: if we want to sway public opinion, we are going to have to offer a more convincing answer to "Why."
(*Poverty, ignorance, and abuse, unlike video games or witchcraft, are unappealing culprits because they are hard to solve and we are not blameless in them. To sell this truth will take hard work and TFA is a good start.)
The foundation for the work of Messrs. Maslov and Redner was laid by Hari Seldon, who discovered that "while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events." The recent paper by Messrs. Maslov and Redner represents the smallest corpus to which Seldon's theory has been successfully applied to date.
Further applications of these techniques to this same corpus will likely fall afoul of Seldon's second axiom: "the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of" the analysis.
"Son, we live in a world that has [trolls], and those [trolls] have to be [slain] by men with [swords]. . . . I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand at post. Either way, I don't give a damn . .." about/. comments.
This (opposition to the broadcast) is very, very simple. They're about to get shellacked and they don't want anyone to see it any more than absolutely necessary. Much less do they want it spliced up and replayed on YouTube for eternity.
Heck, there'll probably be a montage on The Daily Show in 24 hours.
When corporations get involved with government, it gets ugly. . . . So regardless of my feelings on Google's position, my thought is they should shut up.
Very well put. Pretty much perfectly put, in fact.
I, for one would like to see Prop 8 reversed, but I simultaneously would prefer that Google-the-company would stay out of social issues. The googlers are more than welcome to weigh in on those in their own capacities.
Slashdot Mirror
Any solution that allows games to be sold and places the responsibility to monitor them on parents is a good solution for game-players. (After all, how often will these buttons actually be used?)
Sure, game-players might prefer a solution that magically makes the public stop thinking that violent and sexually explicit games are a problem. Good luck with that.
Slashdot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 8:55 p.m. Eastern time, February 9, 2009. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
And Slashdot fights back.
It seems pretty clear from the MS quote that Google took a license to some patents (ones that cover MS ActiveSync). What's not clear from the announcement is whether Google is actually using any MS-written software in it's product.
Anyone know?
Of particular interest are eastern Idaho, western Nebraska, southern Utah, northeastern Indiana, and northern lower Michigan. What are those -- the most populated areas that the major carriers are underserving?
... law enforcement focuses on small, petty crimes, like turnstile jumping, graffiti, and shoplifting, they implicitly reduce serious crime, like burglarly, arson, murder ...
Every heard the maxim, "Let the punishment fit the crime"? The notion that we should punish people (and this DNA collection is punishment, make no mistake) for a misdemeanor (even when it won't help prove that misdemeanor) because they might, might have done something worse for which we have neither proof, nor even cause for suspicion, fundamentally undermines the principle that people are innocent until convicted.
In reality, law enforcement uses the vast host of minor crimes like drug possession because they are easy to prove and can thus be used as leverage against anyone law enforcement feels like using leverage against. These collections will be just one more kind of leverage.
When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA.
I was fingerprinted for my job long ago. Much as I hate the notion, I can't see any meaningful difference between fingerprinting and DNA collection. A full, population-wide database is coming. It's just a matter of when.
Other things being equal, poor people will always have it worse, than the rich.
Which is sort of the definition of 'rich' and 'poor'. So long as we're using money to allocate land (good luck changing that!), rich people will acquire land with good characteristics, including lack of malaria.
Isn't the point here that we should eliminate/reduce malaria for other people because it is the right thing to do?
More than a few. He drove them all into Lake Washington years ago.
If the mods are without honor, and should be stripped of their karma, and should lose their titles, and should face discommendation, and should be sent to work the mines on Rura Penthe, it may be time to find a new empire to serve.
We all know /.'s opinion of Bill and his company, but let's take a moment to acknowledge that the Gates Foundation is a somewhat different animal. It has a track record of spending money on un-glamorous causes where there is big bang for the buck (e.g., malaria). Here, we see it checking the performance data and dropping a program that just wasn't working. Love 'em or hate 'em, that's the smart thing to do.
In addition to having to pay the lawyers before you get paid, don't forget risk. Valid claim or not, you could lose. You would be laying out $50,000 with, say, 25% odds of getting nothing. Scary stuff.
If you want schools to pay attention to Computer Science as a subject, there is one and only one place to start:
Make basic proficiency a student graduation requirement
Everything else (competent, well-paid teachers, etc.) will follow from there. Schools don't recruit teachers for their proficiency in optional subjects.
No upward moderation is merited by a comment that merely says, "me too", without adding any new information. Moderators can mod up the original comment based on the reputation of the me-tooer if they want to, but that doesn't mean that the /. population needs to see the same quotation twice.
It so happens that in this case, the me-tooer was a fine, upstanding /.er who rightly me-tooed a fine, insightful post. We still should not be modding up a me-too.
Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it.
That doesn't even make sense. Since when is reading extra books/notes/etc. cheating? If I want to do extra outside reading, that's called s.t.u.d.y.i.n.g.!
Cheating takes more or less two forms: (1) plagiarism by passing off another's paper, etc. as your own and (2) bringing forbidden materials into a test. This measure won't prevent either.
What is this teacher saying in her current lectures that future students won't also be told? Is she reusing test questions?! Does she think students don't have softcopies of their papers? Is she not checking against reuse?
To use slightly more words, how is the teacher going to get the physical notes from you if you refuse? Assault?
If she has a copyright claim (which she doesn't), that'll take winning a court case. If she has a right to this under a university rule (which she doesn't), she'll need to institute some kind of university hearing to get them. Odds are that she won't go to the trouble of trying either route. If she does anything at all, it's most likely to involved grading you down. In that case, you can proceed in the university's hearing process against her to get the grade reviewed.
Some one's got to stand up to her. She's violating academic norms and depriving her students of tools they may need to continue their studies in higher classes.
That copyright analysis is questionable, since the teacher's lecture may merely be a public performance of material that she had previously committed to a tangible medium of expression (her notes/papers/books), thus creating copyright and making the notes a derivative work. That's irrelevant anyway.
A better analysis would be that teaching a class grants the students a license to record the material taught as notes. Or, if you like, you could say that the students paid for a set of notes in their tuition. Plus, there's a fair use issue given the academic setting. To the extent that the teacher had any copyright, it can't be enforced against the student.
Very interesting. A lot of FOSS uses the GPL as a tool to prevent closed-source, copyright-dependent companies from freeriding on the FOSS and contributing nothing. Of course, the GPL can't really be enforced against a state actor.
So, what to do about a state that takes GPL software, modifies it, redistributes it, maybe even charges for it?
Now they try to legally blackmail the defense lawyer.
Oh, just be calm. He threw a punch. They threw a punch. Neither blow has landed yet.
Just let these guys duke it out. This is how it goes in the litigation ring.
Sadly, we're not talking science here. We're talking about public opinion and/or politician opinion. That's what passes laws.
When people get hurt, the public rightly wants to know, "Why?" If someone tells them that the culprit* is video games, they're inclined to believe it because (a) video games are easy to ban, (b) video games are something they didn't like in the first place, (c) blaming video games means that the problem isn't their fault, etc.
Forget logic and rhetoric: if we want to sway public opinion, we are going to have to offer a more convincing answer to "Why."
(*Poverty, ignorance, and abuse, unlike video games or witchcraft, are unappealing culprits because they are hard to solve and we are not blameless in them. To sell this truth will take hard work and TFA is a good start.)
The foundation for the work of Messrs. Maslov and Redner was laid by Hari Seldon, who discovered that "while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events." The recent paper by Messrs. Maslov and Redner represents the smallest corpus to which Seldon's theory has been successfully applied to date.
Further applications of these techniques to this same corpus will likely fall afoul of Seldon's second axiom: "the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of" the analysis.
I used to do that, but it's a weak procedure.
It's also a week procedure, which may have more to do with it's lack of popularity.
. . . these patent trolls are way out of hand.
More chopping, less talking, please.
"Son, we live in a world that has [trolls], and those [trolls] have to be [slain] by men with [swords]. . . . I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand at post. Either way, I don't give a damn . . ." about /. comments.
This (opposition to the broadcast) is very, very simple. They're about to get shellacked and they don't want anyone to see it any more than absolutely necessary. Much less do they want it spliced up and replayed on YouTube for eternity.
Heck, there'll probably be a montage on The Daily Show in 24 hours.
When corporations get involved with government, it gets ugly. . . . So regardless of my feelings on Google's position, my thought is they should shut up.
Very well put. Pretty much perfectly put, in fact.
I, for one would like to see Prop 8 reversed, but I simultaneously would prefer that Google-the-company would stay out of social issues. The googlers are more than welcome to weigh in on those in their own capacities.
I'm going to buy some popcorn and watch.
Watch for the judge to be extra courteous and helpful to whomever she is about to drop the HAMMER on.
(It helps to show the appeals court that every chance was given to a litigant and that there was still no alternative but to rule against them.)