Roughly: Patents == idea; Copyright == implementation of an idea.
Even if that were correct, which it isn't, don't those two concepts seem much more closely related to each other than either is to a field of lettuce or a warehouse full of steel?
After all, the argument being made by Stallman and echoed by his zombie cultists like the one who opened this tangent isn't that the terminology is suboptimal; it's that it's deliberately misleading and anyone who claims to see a relationship between patents and copyrights is speaking in bad faith. At a minimum, I'd think it's obvious that a reasonable case can be made that property rights on the implementation of two different creations fall under the same umbrella.
It's like you created a "superset" term for your wife, your car and the frozen pizza in your the fridge.
That's silly. Patents and copyrights are obviously related in a way that patents and ice cream are not. The term is used because it's useful.
Stallman doesn't like the term "intellectual property" because he doesn't like the idea of ownership of inventions, so he's issued a fatwa against naming something he dislikes. All the rest is just handwaving.
Nonsense! The OLPC people have explained very clearly how software they don't have time to implement themselves will be written for them by kids who have never seen a light bulb before.
'It is described as the largest class-action in Canadian history, potentially affecting every cellphone user in the country. Currently, there are 7,500 complainants signed onto the suit.'"
I'm as up for ridiculing Canadians as the next person, but surely "massive" is tongue-in-cheek here? There are, what, 30,000 Canadians? Inuit don't get cell reception but that still leaves at least 15,000 others.
She also plans to provide incentives for women and minorities to enter math-, science-, and engineering-related fields by making diversity a requirement for federal education and research grants.
Not that such a thing would ever be meaningfully implemented anyway, but I can't imagine the second half of that *helping* research.
Ok, I'll confess that I might be missing some finer element to the statistics here, but the principle is sound.
There are ways to correct for multiple hypotheses, and clinical trials, for example, normally do it correctly. The academic epidemiologists Ioannidis studies almost never are careful about it, though.
That's a good point, but still... Some guy says that there's one dead bull and some other animals with the same nebulous symptoms the people have -- my money is still on hysteria.
It's much more ridiculous than that. People who warez music and movies (because, as you say, they suck and that's why it's so important to steal them!) are at least substituting for *some* purchases. No clickfraudster would be clicking on ads manually if he had gone into another line of work instead.
Most people who go into the "fuzzy" vs the "hard" sciences do so because they're not good at or don't like math.
Actually you need more math for a PhD in psychology or sociology than you do for molecular biology, unless you're in a really math-heavy specialty.
The biologists, being generally smart, can usually pick up what they need (math, programming, equipment building) on the fly. The problem is that, as you say, statistics frequently is counterintuitive.
That's why around here (the University of Wisconsin), it's standard practice that if your work depends on someone else's result, you first replicate her experiment and make sure you get the same result. (If you can't, you write a letter to the appropriate publication making note of your inability to replicate the result.)
Out of curiosity:
1) What is the usual failure rate for replication?
2) Do the letters routinely get published?
3) You just do that for work you're following up with experiments, not for everything you cite, right?
In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.
His work seems to focus on population genetics and epidemiology, which is notorious for having unreproducible claims due to a combination of uncorrected multiple testing, publication bias and statistical incompetence. This "gender and genes" is a perfect example: someone does a study, finds nothing, slices and dices the data until he gets p = 0.04 for females or Asians or smokers and publishes his breakthrough finding. I'd have been surprised if he hadn't found almost all of those to be wrong.
If you look at more in-vitro molecular biology and biochemistry work, I doubt if nearly as high a percentage of it is clearly "wrong", although quite a bit of it is worthless.
I haven't used non-x86 Linux in a couple of years and don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be that other architectures had de-facto "controlled forks". PowerPC, for example, was officially supported in the Linus kernel but pretty much everyone used a separate fork in which code was developed and slowly copied over to the main source tree.
My guess is that having his cake and eating it too is a lot more attractive than giving up major label money and moving into the apartment next door to Jonathan Coulton's. But we'll see...
It's no doubt due to my Ivy League education, but I have no idea why that's obvious. Am I supposed to be a particularly good typist (false) or have particularly poor handwriting (true)?
The link is about supporting an iPod on Linux, but you can, in fact, install Linux on the device. (You need Linux installed to play Doom -- not sure if that reasoning seems any more sane to the OP, though.)
Sure, but that doesn't help the computer makers check a box on the feature list, which is the whole point here.
I doubt if they even want to sell any. Do you think Dell wants to be taking support calls about solar panels? They probably deliberately priced it unattractively.
This is now even more promising: a Microsoft spec, Lotus Notes code and a Brooksian army of offshored developers! It's hard to imagine how this couldn't work!
It's a user *hint*, bozo. You're neither insightful (I see no insight), nor informative, and as there isn't a mod status for "Just plain wrong", I'm responding instead of moderating.
When you posted this, someone had already made the same point much more coherently and courteously and I had already responded to him. As long as you're jumping in too, I'll further add:
1) The link I posted is who theorized the security aspect of that feature. I'd simply found it inexplicable.
2) The security claim is actually a vaguely reasonable justification for that behavior. "I still know whether I've typed it correctly before I hit enter" is an absurd "solution" to a non-problem and is completely at odds with any other interface any user is accustomed to.
3) Looking deep into the Notes documentation, I see that the annoying random bullets in the password field are designed to thwart shoulder surfing, exactly as I said. The even more annoying blinking of the hieroglyphics is irrelevant to the "knowing whether your password is correct without having to hit 'Enter'" idiocy.
(Yes, I work for IBM. No, I don't work for Lotus. Yes, I do use Notes every day, and know it's got a whole load better as a mail client since the last time you looked at it)
The last time I looked at it was the last time I checked my email. I'll take another look -- nope, it still makes emacs look like Eudora.
I appreciate the correction -- I'd been mystified as to why the blinking hieroglyphics where there are at all, and when I read the Hall of Shame page, figured that must be the explanation.
It still seems like an annoying solution to a complete non-issue, or at least something that would be an non-issue if it weren't for the even more annoying random number of bullets per password character. (Does that also have some utility I'm not noticing?) I'm more than old enough to remember modems and don't recall lengthy authentication failures being a big problem.
Anyway, I brought it up because I was wondering how it could be extended to support accessibility. Obviously, it's not nearly as egregious a "quirk" as, for example, Notes' dealing with archiving emails to a full disk by irreversibly setting their length to zero.
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Even if that were correct, which it isn't, don't those two concepts seem much more closely related to each other than either is to a field of lettuce or a warehouse full of steel?
After all, the argument being made by Stallman and echoed by his zombie cultists like the one who opened this tangent isn't that the terminology is suboptimal; it's that it's deliberately misleading and anyone who claims to see a relationship between patents and copyrights is speaking in bad faith. At a minimum, I'd think it's obvious that a reasonable case can be made that property rights on the implementation of two different creations fall under the same umbrella.
That's silly. Patents and copyrights are obviously related in a way that patents and ice cream are not. The term is used because it's useful.
Stallman doesn't like the term "intellectual property" because he doesn't like the idea of ownership of inventions, so he's issued a fatwa against naming something he dislikes. All the rest is just handwaving.
Nonsense! The OLPC people have explained very clearly how software they don't have time to implement themselves will be written for them by kids who have never seen a light bulb before.
The scientific, math and engineering research Clinton is proposing to restrict is not currently done by "the children of the richest alumni".
I'm as up for ridiculing Canadians as the next person, but surely "massive" is tongue-in-cheek here? There are, what, 30,000 Canadians? Inuit don't get cell reception but that still leaves at least 15,000 others.
Not that such a thing would ever be meaningfully implemented anyway, but I can't imagine the second half of that *helping* research.
There are ways to correct for multiple hypotheses, and clinical trials, for example, normally do it correctly. The academic epidemiologists Ioannidis studies almost never are careful about it, though.
That's a good point, but still... Some guy says that there's one dead bull and some other animals with the same nebulous symptoms the people have -- my money is still on hysteria.
It's much more ridiculous than that. People who warez music and movies (because, as you say, they suck and that's why it's so important to steal them!) are at least substituting for *some* purchases. No clickfraudster would be clicking on ads manually if he had gone into another line of work instead.
No one has mentioned what I think is the likeliest explanation: hysteria unrelated to any physical cause.
Actually you need more math for a PhD in psychology or sociology than you do for molecular biology, unless you're in a really math-heavy specialty.
The biologists, being generally smart, can usually pick up what they need (math, programming, equipment building) on the fly. The problem is that, as you say, statistics frequently is counterintuitive.
Out of curiosity:
1) What is the usual failure rate for replication?
2) Do the letters routinely get published?
3) You just do that for work you're following up with experiments, not for everything you cite, right?
His work seems to focus on population genetics and epidemiology, which is notorious for having unreproducible claims due to a combination of uncorrected multiple testing, publication bias and statistical incompetence. This "gender and genes" is a perfect example: someone does a study, finds nothing, slices and dices the data until he gets p = 0.04 for females or Asians or smokers and publishes his breakthrough finding. I'd have been surprised if he hadn't found almost all of those to be wrong.
If you look at more in-vitro molecular biology and biochemistry work, I doubt if nearly as high a percentage of it is clearly "wrong", although quite a bit of it is worthless.
I haven't used non-x86 Linux in a couple of years and don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be that other architectures had de-facto "controlled forks". PowerPC, for example, was officially supported in the Linus kernel but pretty much everyone used a separate fork in which code was developed and slowly copied over to the main source tree.
My guess is that having his cake and eating it too is a lot more attractive than giving up major label money and moving into the apartment next door to Jonathan Coulton's. But we'll see...
It's no doubt due to my Ivy League education, but I have no idea why that's obvious. Am I supposed to be a particularly good typist (false) or have particularly poor handwriting (true)?
The link is about supporting an iPod on Linux, but you can, in fact, install Linux on the device. (You need Linux installed to play Doom -- not sure if that reasoning seems any more sane to the OP, though.)
And Bill Gates has contributed far more to computing than any dozen gamerzzz have.
I had the same thought while reading that article.
Where does Steven Levy think transistors came from? Or electricity, or math?
I doubt if they even want to sell any. Do you think Dell wants to be taking support calls about solar panels? They probably deliberately priced it unattractively.
This is now even more promising: a Microsoft spec, Lotus Notes code and a Brooksian army of offshored developers! It's hard to imagine how this couldn't work!
I realize that, but what do you suggest I "update" to get a newer screenshot on someone else's page?
When you posted this, someone had already made the same point much more coherently and courteously and I had already responded to him. As long as you're jumping in too, I'll further add:
1) The link I posted is who theorized the security aspect of that feature. I'd simply found it inexplicable.
2) The security claim is actually a vaguely reasonable justification for that behavior. "I still know whether I've typed it correctly before I hit enter" is an absurd "solution" to a non-problem and is completely at odds with any other interface any user is accustomed to.
3) Looking deep into the Notes documentation, I see that the annoying random bullets in the password field are designed to thwart shoulder surfing, exactly as I said. The even more annoying blinking of the hieroglyphics is irrelevant to the "knowing whether your password is correct without having to hit 'Enter'" idiocy.
(Yes, I work for IBM. No, I don't work for Lotus. Yes, I do use Notes every day, and know it's got a whole load better as a mail client since the last time you looked at it)
The last time I looked at it was the last time I checked my email. I'll take another look -- nope, it still makes emacs look like Eudora.
It still seems like an annoying solution to a complete non-issue, or at least something that would be an non-issue if it weren't for the even more annoying random number of bullets per password character. (Does that also have some utility I'm not noticing?) I'm more than old enough to remember modems and don't recall lengthy authentication failures being a big problem.
Anyway, I brought it up because I was wondering how it could be extended to support accessibility. Obviously, it's not nearly as egregious a "quirk" as, for example, Notes' dealing with archiving emails to a full disk by irreversibly setting their length to zero.
For those fortunate enough not to know what I'm talking about: see the last entry on this page.