When your market share drops from 19% to 14% in one quarter, that is not incredible growth. Research In Motion issued a warning stating that its smartphone sales would hit the low end of its projected 13.5 to 14.5 million in unit sales this quarter.
I remember hearing about six months back (possibly even more), that the biggest problem facing RIM wasn't so much that their growth was in decline... but that their growth relative to the rest of the smart phone market was slowing.
Even then, the number of iPhones and Android phones was growing rapidly -- which meant that RIM could keep up good growth numbers, and then get completely eclipsed by everyone else as they just get passed. RIM may have established the real market for this kind of phone, but they're quickly becoming a smaller player.
If they don't leapfrog their competition with their next product, they will be marginalized quickly.
I'd almost expect the latter. Tech people want an Android, most of the rest want an iPhone. RIM originally had the business market locked up, but I think they're losing that market to all of the other players.
They're valuable as long as they remain popular and advertisers pay for access to their users. Where don't you see the value in that? It's just a very volatile and competitive market. Myspace didn't lose value because of a bubble, it lost value because it lost users
I'm not entirely convinced of that... advertisers are willing to pay the money because they have also bought into the hype. They're part of the bubble. In fact, they probably make the most money except for the 3-4 guys who become overnight billionaires.
Nowadays, it seems like you could put "social" in front of anything, and everyone will flock to it as the new hotness, and throw cash at you. In a lot of ways, it's reminiscent of the.COM bubble -- if you added.COM to your company name, and had something resembling an idea, you could get VC money thrown at you as everyone speculated that you'd make them rich. Next thing you know, you're liquidating 100 Herman Miller chairs in your bankruptcy clear out.
I'm not saying these things don't have some degree of 'value' -- I'm saying that the 'value' is very intangible and fleeting, and it can evaporate as quickly as it came. Precisely like when AOL bought Time Warner with stocks that were eventually worthless.
The more it gets over-valued, the more it becomes a ponzi scheme -- nobody wants to be the last one holding it when it crashes, and in the meantime, it gets traded for literally years worth of projected revenue. Everybody knows it's not worth 100 years (or whatever) of revenue in the long term... but in the short term, as long as people still pay those prices and it keeps going up, you can make some cash.
To me, that pretty much defines a bubble. You know it's unsustainable, but as long as you can get in and out before that actually happens, you're golden. This isn't anything more than betting on fads. Which, isn't any different than anything else... I just find it much more glaring with tech stuff.
What I find most interesting about this summary is just how overvalued some of these companies became, and that someone actually was willing to pay that much:
reportedly trying to sell MySpace for $100 million, a fraction of the $580 million it originally paid for the social network in 2005. Parties interested in acquiring MySpace include private equity firm THL Partners, Redscout Ventures and Criterion Capital, owner of social network Bebo (the company AOL bought for $850 million and then sold for $10 million)
I mean... bought for $580M and sold for $100M... bought for $850M and sold for $10M... those are really big differences in the valuations of these things.
This further reaffirms my belief that the 'market' has long ago given up on actual fundamentals of 'value', and mostly follow hype and become totally irrational. It's all funny money and speculation. I always though financial people were supposed to know better.
I can't wait until we 'learn' that neither Facebook nor Zynga are actually worth what people say they are now.
Are those targeted to people who are so brainwashed by the propaganda of religious schizophrenia abuse organizations ("churches") that they censor themselves for no logical reason, and don't even know why, by any chance?
As Miles Davis said... It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.
If I thought swearing would have helped me make my point any better, I fucking well would have.
Profanity is like any other aspect of the English language -- it has its uses, but doesn't need to be overused.
The incentive and willingness to spend huge amount of money on sending people to the moon, "just to be the first" is gone,
I don't think people went to the moon "just to be the first".
I seem to recall that one of the motivating factors of the space race was not falling behind the Soviets. Since rocket technology and missile technology are largely the same thing... there was a perception that America could be losing a military advantage in not pursuing space technology.
Since the end of the Cold War, it doesn't seem to be perceived with as much importance. Tough to say if a China space station might impel the US back to caring about this or not.
I know a lot of us would like to see space being pursued a little more, but who knows what will happen. Space is a costly place to go.
I'm not saying they shouldn't correct it, but explaining it to an editor is the kind of thing a butthole would do. Do you honestly think they didn't already know the difference?
Didn't know... didn't fix it... didn't care... same difference. The net effect is that the editor didn't edit, and one of the countless pedants on Slashdot pointed out that it was wrong.
Your account ID is high enough that you might not actually realize that pedantry and being a grammar-nazi is a sport around here. Pointing out something that only a butthole would... well, yeah.
If you're going to get worked up every time it happens, you might die of stress-induced factors by the end of the week. You can pretty much count on it, every day, in most stories. It's been like that for a long time, and you pissing and moaning about it won't actually help.
Really? Thank you so fucking much. Nobody knew that at all. It certainly couldn't have just been a slip, it had to come from ignorance.
Except, in theory we have these people called editors whose job it is to actually, you know, edit the submissions for some semblance of grammatical and spelling goodness.
In theory, these people even get paid for this task, which is intended to actually cause them to do it instead of blindly clicking.
But, hey, snark all you want... why should Slashdot be any different from the mainstream media, where spelling and identifying which homonym to use is also going by the way side.
What's the difference? Wow. Learn what "communism" is supposed to be. For most people, it is the picture of utopia.
Well, there was pretty much always been the concept of the Vanguard.
These are the guys who ram communism down everyone's throats and act as the visionaries to make sure everyone complies with their ideals. The initial implementation pretty much requires force in order to make everyone realize the glorious days to come -- Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot are examples of this. Look at how they're remembered.
Of course, the reason it's never really worked as advertised is that you replace one set of dictators with another -- you also end up creating a new "middle" class who is comfortable and doesn't want to play, as well as a new ruling class who abuse their privileges.
Communism in the abstract is the nice, happy, utopian situation you describe... but in order to bring it about, it requires vicious people willing to "break a few eggs". Only after it's become the norm do all of these benefits materialize (which so far, is never). Essentially, the Chinese government are the caretakers of that 'vision'.
Communism is generally implemented by a bunch of people deciding on behalf of everyone else to forcibly put it in place. It hasn't resulted in the goals yet, because it never really seems to get out of its enforcement of ideology stage.
I am not able to understand this. They already own USA. Then why are they stealing from something they already own?
Well, if you own a bunch of US debt, and steal a bunch of cash... you get paid twice. Greed is a pretty easy motive to grasp.
And, as has been pointed out, this may not be the same people who own the debt... when you're willing to do this kind of large-scale fraud, you're certainly not playing by any "rules" of good conduct.
No, the problem is that ISPs are not treated like a phone company. They're not regulated as common-carriers.
Sorry, yes. Exactly correct... I meant that to the end user, the ISP is treated the same as the phone company. It's infrastructure, or at least, that's how people think of it.
Heck, in a lot of cases, your ISP probably is the same as your phone company -- or at least your cable. In my case, it's all 3, plus my cell phones.
To my mind, ISPs shouldn't be able to process traffic based on anything other than packet headers. Their job is to take a packet I create and deliver it to its intended destination
Wrong. This is not true at all. You can play games without ever providing a credit card. On the other hand, they do require your name, birthdate, and mailing address.
And people wonder why so many on-line accounts are set up with completely bogus information.
Why should I be providing all of this information to play *(&^%*&^ video games? This is precisely why I don't give most companies this information -- because I don't trust them with it. Not to keep it safe, not to use it as they say, and not to provide it to someone else.
When have users ever cares or understood what they are doing? This is the entire premise of the Apple machine. They assume you don't; look how popular that has become.
Well, maybe not fucking around with things like the registry is a really good thing. Every time I see an MS article that starts off with regedit, it's pretty easy to see why the users don't want to care or understand how to do the really arcane shit. That was a crappy system when they introduced it, and it's not really any better now.
If the option came down to a "hand-holding" Apple experience, an annoying and frustrating Windows experience, or an arcane voo-doo experience with Linux... I'm betting the overwhelming majority of users are going to opt for the simplest possible experience. I'd opt for it, and I've worked in the industry for 15 years or so.
Users just don't care or understand about things like CA's or trying to keep their ISP from being able to launch a MITM attack against them -- for the same reasons that users of the telephone system don't need to know about the PBX and other infrastructure technologies. They treat it like their car -- "skinny pedal go fast".
Like it or not, the ISP is treated like a phone company -- as long as they're free to fuck with your packet streams, it's happening at a level that most users will never understand. The internet has become ubiquitous, and at a certain point, even people with some technical know-how either don't know or acre about all of the details of what's happening at that level.
The humanities have a place, and are even important to a civilized society, but we've reached saturation on new useful areas to study in much of the humanities and hence are at this position.
Well, I think I will avoid the age-old "science good/humanities bad" debate as it's a little too "either/or" for my tastes.
I don't think it's limited to sciences (or humanities) to overspecialize into an area so much that you exist in a purely academic bubble, with no bearing on anything whatsoever. If you're not learning skills you can use in other contexts, you may be making yourself useless to anybody except the guy you work for now.
Until the "traditional model" of academia dies, graduate schools will be turning out students prepared to compete for a handful of academic jobs, and unprepared to do anything else. That's just not right.
This is (at least) the second article in the last few weeks which points out that some PhD candidates (no matter the field) are ill-suited for anything but working for the person they studied under for their PhD.
Please do provide links to some double blinds studies showing that.
Heck, Randi will give you a million dollars if you can do this crap in front of the foundation.
I wouldn't waste too much time on this... a 7 digit ID, with two postings ever about chiropractic (in this thread), and a profile which says:
I'm a 41 year old Chiropractor, have been making people healthy and saving lives with Chiropractic since 1993. Really like technology blogs and always try to find ways to incorporate technology into the care of my patients while helping them avoid going to Mainstream Medicine which is controlled by Big Pharma.
He's either a systematic troll, or he's a crackpot chiropractor who really believes that getting people to avoid going to real doctors is a good idea.
He's not going to provide any evidence... if he's real, he's been soaked in the kool-aid for a long time. Just as likely it's a purpose built account to rile people up.
While there may be such a thing as a reputable chiropractor, that guy wasn't one of them.
I saw an interview with a former chiropractor once... he basically said he left because increasingly he didn't believe in the mumbo-jumbo of the device they used (which I have no idea what it was called). Something "mometer" that measured nerve activity in the spine or something.
He said it was vague, and that depending on how you hold it and what you do with it, you could make the resulting graph more or less show anything you like. And you could use that to "prove" to the client (I refuse to say patient) that they really needed your services.
As you say, there may be some reputable ones... and there may actually be some science behind it. But, I've yet to see an actual MD who didn't scoff at it for being pseudo-science (at best) or fraud (at worst).
I've also never known one single person who went to a Chiropractor who wasn't more or less told they needed to come back for weekly/monthly 'adjustments', and whose pain wasn't back just as bad (if not worse) by the time that was scheduled. The ones who stopped going altogether eventually found themselves to be pain free for longer periods of time. It's hard not to wonder if they aren't causing more harm than good.
I'm with you... it's a little too hand-wavy and vague for my liking. I know some people who swear by chiropractors... but I know far more people who think they're complete frauds. More than a few call themselves "doctor", and since they're not MDs, I find that a bit deceptive.
I think you're confused. Perhaps you're thinking of the anti-circumvention clause which clearly doesn't apply in this case.
Not confused, maybe interpreting it differently...
He outlined his objections, that Dropship reveals their proprietary client-server protocol and that it could be used for piracy.
Revealing their "proprietary client-server protocol" is part of the issue here, and we have explicit rights to reverse engineer a protocol. I'm not sure on what basis Dropbox can really keep their protocol secret.
The second half of the "could be used for piracy" is the only tenuous link to the DMCA. And, as the article said, the whole DMCA part is a red herring. Basically it says that since you might use the posted technique to perform copyright violations, the whole thing needs to go.
Even if the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause applied, it still doesn't change the fact that you cannot copyright an algorithm.
Yes, this is me agreeing with you that you can't copyright an algorithm, as I initially did... and pointing out that in terms of interoperability, even if you could copyright one, there are explicit exemptions that allow you to reverse engineer to be able to work with it. There isn't even anything to do with "circumvention" in this case -- they didn't bypass passwords or DRM.
What you're describing certainly happens, but is a gross violation of the principles of the legal system.
Depressing, isn't it? And yet, it seems to be becoming the norm in terms of how this is done. Send a DMCA notice, regardless of merit, and it is expected to be acted upon without any evidence. Merely an assertion. Who needs the principles of the legal system when you can screech loud enough about copyright infringement to go straight to enforcement on the say-so of a lawyer?
The post I responded to seemed to be implying that it was reasonable to assume that a work infringed on a copyright until it was proven non-infringing.
Which is the exact same logic the *AA's use, and apparently the basis for the "three strikes" laws being enacted in many countries.
It's not reasonable, but that seems to be how it's being done.:(
Thankfully, copyright does not apply to algorithms
And, the DMCA has an explicit exception for interoperability and such, which I think this would be covered under.
the US has a legal system based on the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty.
Unless one is suspected of copyright infringement, kiddie porn or terrorism, then it's straight on to the presumption of guilt and you needing to prove you didn't do it.
Sadly, it seems like those three can pretty much bypass any court oversight.
A Ph.D graduate has demonstrated that he or she knows how to conduct original research, in depth, under formal supervision. In other words, it's a stepping stone. In very rare cases, the research may reveal material of such compelling interest that the student carries on to make the topic a life study. But normally, the student moves on to something else.
By the time you have a Master's degree, you've demonstrated much of that... maybe not as in-depth, but essentially do research under supervision. And, some question at the PhD level just how "original" it is -- if it's merely deeply exploring a facet of what your supervisor was already doing, is it original? Or merely more in depth. And, if it has no useful applications or insights why spend so much resources on it?
So, it's a stepping stone they spend, what, 5 years getting and then "move onto something else" -- seems like a waste of 5 years if you ask me. And, as TFA points out... if they graduate with no jobs available to them, it seems like it's not really helping them get anywhere except working as an underpaid post-doc.
Other than the professors who have these candidates working under them to continue their research, is the amount of money spent on educating them actually paying off in the long run? Or, as the article suggests, do we spend lots of resources in making a bunch of people who have in-depth knowledge of something nobody cares about so they can graduate and then "move onto something else".
I've known people who have withdrawn from PhD programs --- precisely because they felt that it was 5 more years or exhaustively researching what was effectively minutia. And, except for the very faint hope of becoming a professor, was providing precisely no more benefits in terms of finding a career afterwards. In fact, it was actually hurting their career prospects.
It's hard to read articles talking about grad students being nothing more than lab techs and not come to the conclusion that some of the people in a PhD program are not learning anything that prepares them for a real job. From the outside, it certainly does seem like it can be a horrible dead-end which only preps these people to work in specific bits of academia, or be unemployed.
Again, not saying this is all PhD students -- but it's hard to escape the observation that a good chunk of these students are graduating without a skillset which is useful to anybody except the professor who they trained under.
He should be stripped of his degrees and if he ever got a government grant should be jailed for fraud.
And this is why people who lack critical reasoning skills should not be allowed to have their opinions count.
Frankly, we think people are over reacting to the comments made by Dr. Lazar Greenfield. There is growing evidence that human semen has the potential to produce profound effects on women. We have replicated the effects showing female college students having sex without condoms are less depressed as measured by objective scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. We've also examined the data as a function of whether the students were using hormonal contraceptives, whether they were in committed relationships, and how long these relationships have lasted. The anti-depressant properties of semen exposure do not vary as function of any of these conditions. It is not a question of whether females are sexually active, since students having sex with condoms show the same level of depression as those who are not having sex at all. We have also received numerous semen testimonials from other women who attest to the anti-depressant effects of semen exposure and these accounts often include the use of control trials (i.e., comparisons generated by switching from condoms to unprotected sex, or vice a versa).
Apparently, the right not to be offended has trumped the freedom of speech and right to make a joke.
A light hearted, tongue-in-cheek column leads to a respected surgeon from resigning his post because a bunch of outside protestors objects to his op-ed piece.
Who are these groups who protested, and why do they carry enough clout to pressure the American College of Surgeons?
Once your data is in the cloud, you don't really control it anymore. And, some of the TOS for these things more or less say "we get to keep it and use it if we want to".
The fact that these fold an go under is hardly surprising... and I bet the legal status of your data is a little bit murky if the assets get sold off to someone else.
The cloud has always seemed a little bit sketchy in some places... both because it's poorly defined, and what's to say your data doesn't end up in a country with rather liberal "all your data are belong to us" laws?
Slashdot Mirror
I remember hearing about six months back (possibly even more), that the biggest problem facing RIM wasn't so much that their growth was in decline ... but that their growth relative to the rest of the smart phone market was slowing.
Even then, the number of iPhones and Android phones was growing rapidly -- which meant that RIM could keep up good growth numbers, and then get completely eclipsed by everyone else as they just get passed. RIM may have established the real market for this kind of phone, but they're quickly becoming a smaller player.
I'd almost expect the latter. Tech people want an Android, most of the rest want an iPhone. RIM originally had the business market locked up, but I think they're losing that market to all of the other players.
I think that's when HP bought them. ;-)
So it sounds like:
1. Make popular, leading edge product
2. Suffer market decline and get bought out by HP (or another big player)
3. Profit!
OK ... I'm not suggesting what you've said is wrong, but I'd love some clarification.
Tulip bulbs?? Really? Why? I'm stumped on both of your examples.
I have no doubt people have always been irrational. That part is a given. :-P
I'm not entirely convinced of that ... advertisers are willing to pay the money because they have also bought into the hype. They're part of the bubble. In fact, they probably make the most money except for the 3-4 guys who become overnight billionaires.
Nowadays, it seems like you could put "social" in front of anything, and everyone will flock to it as the new hotness, and throw cash at you. In a lot of ways, it's reminiscent of the .COM bubble -- if you added .COM to your company name, and had something resembling an idea, you could get VC money thrown at you as everyone speculated that you'd make them rich. Next thing you know, you're liquidating 100 Herman Miller chairs in your bankruptcy clear out.
I'm not saying these things don't have some degree of 'value' -- I'm saying that the 'value' is very intangible and fleeting, and it can evaporate as quickly as it came. Precisely like when AOL bought Time Warner with stocks that were eventually worthless.
The more it gets over-valued, the more it becomes a ponzi scheme -- nobody wants to be the last one holding it when it crashes, and in the meantime, it gets traded for literally years worth of projected revenue. Everybody knows it's not worth 100 years (or whatever) of revenue in the long term ... but in the short term, as long as people still pay those prices and it keeps going up, you can make some cash.
To me, that pretty much defines a bubble. You know it's unsustainable, but as long as you can get in and out before that actually happens, you're golden. This isn't anything more than betting on fads. Which, isn't any different than anything else ... I just find it much more glaring with tech stuff.
What I find most interesting about this summary is just how overvalued some of these companies became, and that someone actually was willing to pay that much:
I mean ... bought for $580M and sold for $100M ... bought for $850M and sold for $10M ... those are really big differences in the valuations of these things.
This further reaffirms my belief that the 'market' has long ago given up on actual fundamentals of 'value', and mostly follow hype and become totally irrational. It's all funny money and speculation. I always though financial people were supposed to know better.
I can't wait until we 'learn' that neither Facebook nor Zynga are actually worth what people say they are now.
As Miles Davis said ... It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.
If I thought swearing would have helped me make my point any better, I fucking well would have.
Profanity is like any other aspect of the English language -- it has its uses, but doesn't need to be overused.
I don't think people went to the moon "just to be the first".
I seem to recall that one of the motivating factors of the space race was not falling behind the Soviets. Since rocket technology and missile technology are largely the same thing ... there was a perception that America could be losing a military advantage in not pursuing space technology.
Since the end of the Cold War, it doesn't seem to be perceived with as much importance. Tough to say if a China space station might impel the US back to caring about this or not.
I know a lot of us would like to see space being pursued a little more, but who knows what will happen. Space is a costly place to go.
While that completely violates Hanlon's Razor ... I like your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. ;-)
I think you've found your new sig. ;-)
Didn't know ... didn't fix it ... didn't care ... same difference. The net effect is that the editor didn't edit, and one of the countless pedants on Slashdot pointed out that it was wrong.
Your account ID is high enough that you might not actually realize that pedantry and being a grammar-nazi is a sport around here. Pointing out something that only a butthole would ... well, yeah.
If you're going to get worked up every time it happens, you might die of stress-induced factors by the end of the week. You can pretty much count on it, every day, in most stories. It's been like that for a long time, and you pissing and moaning about it won't actually help.
Except, in theory we have these people called editors whose job it is to actually, you know, edit the submissions for some semblance of grammatical and spelling goodness.
In theory, these people even get paid for this task, which is intended to actually cause them to do it instead of blindly clicking.
But, hey, snark all you want ... why should Slashdot be any different from the mainstream media, where spelling and identifying which homonym to use is also going by the way side.
Well, there was pretty much always been the concept of the Vanguard.
These are the guys who ram communism down everyone's throats and act as the visionaries to make sure everyone complies with their ideals. The initial implementation pretty much requires force in order to make everyone realize the glorious days to come -- Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot are examples of this. Look at how they're remembered.
Of course, the reason it's never really worked as advertised is that you replace one set of dictators with another -- you also end up creating a new "middle" class who is comfortable and doesn't want to play, as well as a new ruling class who abuse their privileges.
Communism in the abstract is the nice, happy, utopian situation you describe ... but in order to bring it about, it requires vicious people willing to "break a few eggs". Only after it's become the norm do all of these benefits materialize (which so far, is never). Essentially, the Chinese government are the caretakers of that 'vision'.
Communism is generally implemented by a bunch of people deciding on behalf of everyone else to forcibly put it in place. It hasn't resulted in the goals yet, because it never really seems to get out of its enforcement of ideology stage.
Well, if you own a bunch of US debt, and steal a bunch of cash ... you get paid twice. Greed is a pretty easy motive to grasp.
And, as has been pointed out, this may not be the same people who own the debt ... when you're willing to do this kind of large-scale fraud, you're certainly not playing by any "rules" of good conduct.
Sorry, yes. Exactly correct ... I meant that to the end user, the ISP is treated the same as the phone company. It's infrastructure, or at least, that's how people think of it.
Heck, in a lot of cases, your ISP probably is the same as your phone company -- or at least your cable. In my case, it's all 3, plus my cell phones.
I couldn't agree more.
And people wonder why so many on-line accounts are set up with completely bogus information.
Why should I be providing all of this information to play *(&^%*&^ video games? This is precisely why I don't give most companies this information -- because I don't trust them with it. Not to keep it safe, not to use it as they say, and not to provide it to someone else.
Well, maybe not fucking around with things like the registry is a really good thing. Every time I see an MS article that starts off with regedit, it's pretty easy to see why the users don't want to care or understand how to do the really arcane shit. That was a crappy system when they introduced it, and it's not really any better now.
If the option came down to a "hand-holding" Apple experience, an annoying and frustrating Windows experience, or an arcane voo-doo experience with Linux ... I'm betting the overwhelming majority of users are going to opt for the simplest possible experience. I'd opt for it, and I've worked in the industry for 15 years or so.
Users just don't care or understand about things like CA's or trying to keep their ISP from being able to launch a MITM attack against them -- for the same reasons that users of the telephone system don't need to know about the PBX and other infrastructure technologies. They treat it like their car -- "skinny pedal go fast".
Like it or not, the ISP is treated like a phone company -- as long as they're free to fuck with your packet streams, it's happening at a level that most users will never understand. The internet has become ubiquitous, and at a certain point, even people with some technical know-how either don't know or acre about all of the details of what's happening at that level.
Well, I think I will avoid the age-old "science good/humanities bad" debate as it's a little too "either/or" for my tastes.
Having read the Slashdot article a few weeks back in which some PhDs are essentially exceedingly well trained lab assistants whose skillset is useless outside of academia.
I don't think it's limited to sciences (or humanities) to overspecialize into an area so much that you exist in a purely academic bubble, with no bearing on anything whatsoever. If you're not learning skills you can use in other contexts, you may be making yourself useless to anybody except the guy you work for now.
This is (at least) the second article in the last few weeks which points out that some PhD candidates (no matter the field) are ill-suited for anything but working for the person they studied under for their PhD.
I wouldn't waste too much time on this ... a 7 digit ID, with two postings ever about chiropractic (in this thread), and a profile which says:
He's either a systematic troll, or he's a crackpot chiropractor who really believes that getting people to avoid going to real doctors is a good idea.
He's not going to provide any evidence ... if he's real, he's been soaked in the kool-aid for a long time. Just as likely it's a purpose built account to rile people up.
I saw an interview with a former chiropractor once ... he basically said he left because increasingly he didn't believe in the mumbo-jumbo of the device they used (which I have no idea what it was called). Something "mometer" that measured nerve activity in the spine or something.
He said it was vague, and that depending on how you hold it and what you do with it, you could make the resulting graph more or less show anything you like. And you could use that to "prove" to the client (I refuse to say patient) that they really needed your services.
As you say, there may be some reputable ones ... and there may actually be some science behind it. But, I've yet to see an actual MD who didn't scoff at it for being pseudo-science (at best) or fraud (at worst).
I've also never known one single person who went to a Chiropractor who wasn't more or less told they needed to come back for weekly/monthly 'adjustments', and whose pain wasn't back just as bad (if not worse) by the time that was scheduled. The ones who stopped going altogether eventually found themselves to be pain free for longer periods of time. It's hard not to wonder if they aren't causing more harm than good.
I'm with you ... it's a little too hand-wavy and vague for my liking. I know some people who swear by chiropractors ... but I know far more people who think they're complete frauds. More than a few call themselves "doctor", and since they're not MDs, I find that a bit deceptive.
Not confused, maybe interpreting it differently ...
Revealing their "proprietary client-server protocol" is part of the issue here, and we have explicit rights to reverse engineer a protocol. I'm not sure on what basis Dropbox can really keep their protocol secret.
The second half of the "could be used for piracy" is the only tenuous link to the DMCA. And, as the article said, the whole DMCA part is a red herring. Basically it says that since you might use the posted technique to perform copyright violations, the whole thing needs to go.
Yes, this is me agreeing with you that you can't copyright an algorithm, as I initially did ... and pointing out that in terms of interoperability, even if you could copyright one, there are explicit exemptions that allow you to reverse engineer to be able to work with it. There isn't even anything to do with "circumvention" in this case -- they didn't bypass passwords or DRM.
Depressing, isn't it? And yet, it seems to be becoming the norm in terms of how this is done. Send a DMCA notice, regardless of merit, and it is expected to be acted upon without any evidence. Merely an assertion. Who needs the principles of the legal system when you can screech loud enough about copyright infringement to go straight to enforcement on the say-so of a lawyer?
Which is the exact same logic the *AA's use, and apparently the basis for the "three strikes" laws being enacted in many countries.
It's not reasonable, but that seems to be how it's being done. :(
And, the DMCA has an explicit exception for interoperability and such, which I think this would be covered under.
Unless one is suspected of copyright infringement, kiddie porn or terrorism, then it's straight on to the presumption of guilt and you needing to prove you didn't do it.
Sadly, it seems like those three can pretty much bypass any court oversight.
By the time you have a Master's degree, you've demonstrated much of that ... maybe not as in-depth, but essentially do research under supervision. And, some question at the PhD level just how "original" it is -- if it's merely deeply exploring a facet of what your supervisor was already doing, is it original? Or merely more in depth. And, if it has no useful applications or insights why spend so much resources on it?
So, it's a stepping stone they spend, what, 5 years getting and then "move onto something else" -- seems like a waste of 5 years if you ask me. And, as TFA points out ... if they graduate with no jobs available to them, it seems like it's not really helping them get anywhere except working as an underpaid post-doc.
Other than the professors who have these candidates working under them to continue their research, is the amount of money spent on educating them actually paying off in the long run? Or, as the article suggests, do we spend lots of resources in making a bunch of people who have in-depth knowledge of something nobody cares about so they can graduate and then "move onto something else".
I've known people who have withdrawn from PhD programs --- precisely because they felt that it was 5 more years or exhaustively researching what was effectively minutia. And, except for the very faint hope of becoming a professor, was providing precisely no more benefits in terms of finding a career afterwards. In fact, it was actually hurting their career prospects.
It's hard to read articles talking about grad students being nothing more than lab techs and not come to the conclusion that some of the people in a PhD program are not learning anything that prepares them for a real job. From the outside, it certainly does seem like it can be a horrible dead-end which only preps these people to work in specific bits of academia, or be unemployed.
Again, not saying this is all PhD students -- but it's hard to escape the observation that a good chunk of these students are graduating without a skillset which is useful to anybody except the professor who they trained under.
And this is why people who lack critical reasoning skills should not be allowed to have their opinions count.
Apparently, the right not to be offended has trumped the freedom of speech and right to make a joke.
A light hearted, tongue-in-cheek column leads to a respected surgeon from resigning his post because a bunch of outside protestors objects to his op-ed piece.
Who are these groups who protested, and why do they carry enough clout to pressure the American College of Surgeons?
Once your data is in the cloud, you don't really control it anymore. And, some of the TOS for these things more or less say "we get to keep it and use it if we want to".
The fact that these fold an go under is hardly surprising ... and I bet the legal status of your data is a little bit murky if the assets get sold off to someone else.
The cloud has always seemed a little bit sketchy in some places ... both because it's poorly defined, and what's to say your data doesn't end up in a country with rather liberal "all your data are belong to us" laws?