Anyway, the subpoena was for aggregated search queries, not for anything traceable to a user. It had nothing to do with any reasonable understanding of privacy. Google just chose to spin their refusal as concern for their users.
Well, shit, let's start our journey at Death Valley, California and consider this the largest vertical climb ever!
Yeah, I'm looking forward to when someone posts live updates from the Death Valley to Mount Whitney ultramarathon, and you dopes complain that he used Front Page instead of vi.
It's pretty naive to think you've done anything at all if you've made it to a base camp of a climb where people are living in shelters or small villages.
Nobody is saying that going to base camp is a huge accomplishment. The AC who posted originally (not sure if that's you) was claiming that a couple of the top climbers in the world don't know what they're doing because they've been acclimatizing instead of charging straight up the mountain.
I can't say I've ever done anything like this, though I've read a lot of books about it.
No offense, but I'd trust Conrad Anker's judgment on this over yours...
I'm not sure exactly what you think they're doing so wrong, so maybe this is obvious to you but: "1,200m so far" is counting from Everest base camp, which is already at 5200 meters.
The comments here are like a parody of IT Guy obnoxiousness. Mark Kahrl is hauling gear up to 21,000 feet and updating a website at sub-freezing temperatures and no oxygen. And summiting Mounrt Everest next week.
Meanwhile, a bunch of IT dorks who a) have a 70% chance of developing a basic LAMP site correctly at sea level and b) a 15% chance of walking around the block without stopping for breath are sneering at him for -- using Flash.
In the interests of openness, would you mind publishing these calculations of yours? I'm sure we'd like to see your quantification of the open-source development process, particularly for software as complex as this evidently is.
Day 0: Someone registers a project on Sourceforge, commits main.c to CVS.
Day 3: It's noted on Digg, Reddit
Day 30: Slashdot links to project, hails it as "the Photosynth killer", misspells project leader's name. Commenters gloat about M$'s lack of innovation, speculate on the throwing of chairs in Redmond, argue about atheism and gun control.
Day 33: Slashdot dupes story, misspells "Photosynth", "killer" and "the".
Your comments are true for large industrial farms but reveal your ignorance regarding farming in general.
Nope. Not in developed countries. When you buy organic food in the supermarket, or vegetables at a farmers' market, that's raised from big bags of seeds they bought from professional seed growers. Yes, there are "small but forceful" groups of hobbyists and enthusiasts who save seeds, but they're essentially irrelevant in the context of the agricultural industry.
As for the actual point, it appears that you don't grasp pollination and reproduction. Just like you share genetic material from your mother and father, your imaginary hippie's magical corn now produces a crossbreed of what planted and the GMO stuff his neighbor planted.
Look at my original comment. Do you really think I need to have that explained?
...your imaginary hippie's magical corn now produces a crossbreed of what planted and the GMO stuff his neighbor planted. There is a very real possibility that the corn he picks inherited the "terminator gene" and his strain of corn is now gone. His concern isn't the corn growing next door, per se, but the offspring of that corn and his corn, which he will pick from his field.
Think this through a little harder. Let's say farmer A is growing his precious heirloom strain. To the north, farmer B is growing a different heirloom or commercial strain; to the south, farmer C is growing a terminator strain. There's some cross-pollination and A winds up with 0.001% hybridization with both B and C's crop. If anything, the problem for him is B! A tiny rate of sterile seeds are a non-issue. (Assuming the sterility is dominant, which presumably it is, otherwise this is even more of a non-issue.) In reality, so is the contamination from B, but you can't simultaneously claim that cross-pollination is rampant and that it's only a concern with strains you really don't like. The real problem (and as I said, it's a problem, so you don't need to give me another condescending lecture on why it's a problem) is that the 0.001% contamination is enough to show up in screens for GMOs.
"More like ... BOREophyll!"
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 0, Troll
That is such a perfect name. I can't believe no one has thought of it before.
First, my point was to clarify the genetics and normal agricultural practice, not to claim that this stuff couldn't ever cause a problem for anyone. People seem to be under the impression that farmers routinely plant seed from last year's crop and that this is a greedy attempt to force them to buy seed every year. That simply isn't the case anymore except in the most remote, poorest corners of the world.
Second, that said, I don't understand your scenario anyway. If corn readily pollinates between farms and some hippie has a magical pure strain of corn that musn't be contaminated, surely a strain that can't reproduce is the *least* of his concerns!
There *is* a legitimate concern about contamination, which is that if a tiny amount of GMO pollen gets into non-GMO field, it can prevent the whole crop from being sold to Europe or sold for higher prices in North America. (Or, in a handful of cases, get the farmer into some licensing trouble.) If anything, you could say that terminator strains are less of a threat than other GMO strains, but that's not really true because the Earth-loving organic guys buy hybrid seed every year just like the horrible conventional farmers do.
But as with all this GMO stuff, every possible bogeyman is always invoked for every possible concern, even when it makes no sense. As in this case, where people are worrying about the spread of sterility!?!
I realize that many of you have convinced yourselves that artists don't make any money from legal sales, so you're only ripping off bad people, and have a tremendous amount of your self-esteem invested in that notion.
Rather than argue that point, I'll just note that the issue is what happens when no one makes money from recordings. (See, I can use italic tags, too.)
A few months ago, someone here unwittingly made what I think is one of the strongest arguments that piracy drives music to the least common denominator: look at Asia. Artists and labels can't expect to make money from recordings, so they generate an endless stream of teen-friendly clones who can make money from mall concerts. I pointed that out to the guy who was citing China as the example of a music industry flourishing despite rampant piracy, and none of the furious responses (Faye Wong!, Faye Wong!, What about Faye Wong?, You're a racist, and what about Faye Wong?) convinced me otherwise.
Before you flame me, have you written you congressman and senators to support the Internet Radio Equality Act? No? Then STFU, write to them, and then berate me about Faye Wong.
Last year's seed cannot compete with the engineered mule seed that the large corporations use. Pesticide resistance, herbicide resistance, better drought tolerance, etc, all come bundled with the sterility gene package.
I'm not sure if you realize this or not, but to say it explicitly:
Modern corn seeds are F1 hybrids from two parent strains that are only used to generate seed. You don't save seeds for next year because then you get a range of variable F2 progeny, and over time you just get a mess. Terminator strains were developed to keep those F1's from growing accidentally.
The image of good ol' Farmer Bob pickin' through his corn to collect seeds for next year, and being thwarted by a greedy corporation, has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of who this seed is being sold to. If Farmer Bob wants to grow his own seed he doesn't use these to begin with.
also, customers accepting sub-par performance when a cheap and easy upgrade will solve a lot of problems is nothing new. xp with 128 mb? right.
That's the point: dividing RAM sales by some FUD-driven fantasy about how much new RAM Vista users will need is stretching "Now comes some hard data" a bit.
Microsoft's new algorithms correctly guessed the gender of a Web surfer 80% of the time, and his or her age 60% of the time.
Link to paper. I don't claim to be knowledgeable about this stuff but that success rate doesn't look too remarkable to me. China's sex ratio is hardly so skewed (yet, anyway) that this could remotely identify someone from a pool of a billion users, or even out of a single Internet cafe.
I'd wonder more about the quality of research Microsoft is getting out of their Beijing site if they think this worth bragging about.
99.9% of scientists you happen to know. Certainly not the ones I know - and they are not mathematicians.
I didn't say "scientists", I said "life science researchers". And I stand by what I said. The overwhelming majority of life science researchers have never heard of TeX, outside of some very small computational and theoretical niches. The premier molecular biology journal, for example, requests "Word, RTF, and TXT".
99.9+% of life science researchers have never even heard of TeX. Even in math-heavy sub-fields, it's rare. Word is overwhelmingly the standard. My limited experience in working with chemists is the same.
Maybe in physics and math TeX is the norm, but nowhere else.
Forgot to add: Tivo tracks what you watch, comes up with preferences for you and reports data back. There are quite a few complaints about it deciding viewers are gay -- there are several possible conclusions one might make about that. Deliberately watching lots of ESPN and Spike to reset it doesn't seem to help.
I often thought of that same thing , how can they track what I watch and what I do.
Nielsen has no idea what you are doing. They recruit viewers who install special monitoring equipment and/or keep diaries and extrapolate that to the overall population.
LAST I HEARD ITS NOT THE GOVERNMENTS JOB, ITS THE PARENT. YOU SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO HAVE A LICENSE TO HAVE CHILDREN. OTHERWISE THE PARENTS LOOSE A FINGER EVERYTIME.
was particularly insightful and thought-provoking.
How much more do I need to type to get the caps through? This much?
They didn't need $150 million in stock sales to keep them afloat, and such a stock sale certainly couldn't be characterized as a "much needed cash infusion". It was a vote of confidence in Apple by Microsoft - a PR move and little more.
True, but that vote of confidence was a desperately needed boost to Apple. The cash itself meant nothing, but the support for Apple and for Mac Office was incredibly important in keeping Apple from going the way of Commodore.
The study also showed that over 50% of workers still keep their passwords on a Post-It note, in spite of all the education the IT security industry to do it differently. And in the don't do-as-I do-dept., more than 50% of respondents admitted to using Post-It notes to store passwords to administrator accounts. One-fifth of all organizations admitted that they rarely changed their administrative passwords with seven percent saying they never change administrative passwords.
I'm skeptical about the snooping (much as I bitch about admins, they're actually remarkably ethical about privacy given the access they have, IME) but that password thing sounds dead on. Whenever they give us the lecture about how keeping track of the login/password combos for 25 different accounts, each rotated every 60-90 days, with mandatory mixed case, numbers and punctuation is easy -- why all you do is make up a little story -- "Mary went to the store to buy milk" becomes h7^Y8U0bs# -- I always ask them for the story to their previous password to the office furniture request page. They splutter about how no, that's a security risk to part with one of their expired stories but I can see the Post-It with the root password in their minds, like I'm Professor Snape.
Just how do they propose to keep track of "name changes" from a sex offender.
Name changes are administered by the courts. The state has a list of sex offenders. The court checks the list when someone requests a name change. It hardly requires hacking anyone's brain.
Does this take into account the air that is "cleaned" by the growing of the plants used in the first place, minus any downside effects in the refining process as compared to gasoline? I suspect not. The conclusions are too simplistic for a true model here.
I don't know about that study, but biofuel advocates do make that argument. The problem is that it breaks down if you clear, for example, Amazon rainforest to grow sugar cane for ethanol. Which is usually the case, since productive sites for agriculture are usually growing something else (either another crop or wild plants) already.
The newly discovered patch of soil has been given the informal name "Gertrude Weise," after a player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, according to Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the rovers.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, the subpoena was for aggregated search queries, not for anything traceable to a user. It had nothing to do with any reasonable understanding of privacy. Google just chose to spin their refusal as concern for their users.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to when someone posts live updates from the Death Valley to Mount Whitney ultramarathon, and you dopes complain that he used Front Page instead of vi.
It's pretty naive to think you've done anything at all if you've made it to a base camp of a climb where people are living in shelters or small villages.
Nobody is saying that going to base camp is a huge accomplishment. The AC who posted originally (not sure if that's you) was claiming that a couple of the top climbers in the world don't know what they're doing because they've been acclimatizing instead of charging straight up the mountain.
No offense, but I'd trust Conrad Anker's judgment on this over yours...
I'm not sure exactly what you think they're doing so wrong, so maybe this is obvious to you but: "1,200m so far" is counting from Everest base camp, which is already at 5200 meters.
Meanwhile, a bunch of IT dorks who a) have a 70% chance of developing a basic LAMP site correctly at sea level and b) a 15% chance of walking around the block without stopping for breath are sneering at him for -- using Flash.
Your comments are true for large industrial farms but reveal your ignorance regarding farming in general.
Nope. Not in developed countries. When you buy organic food in the supermarket, or vegetables at a farmers' market, that's raised from big bags of seeds they bought from professional seed growers. Yes, there are "small but forceful" groups of hobbyists and enthusiasts who save seeds, but they're essentially irrelevant in the context of the agricultural industry.
As for the actual point, it appears that you don't grasp pollination and reproduction. Just like you share genetic material from your mother and father, your imaginary hippie's magical corn now produces a crossbreed of what planted and the GMO stuff his neighbor planted.
Look at my original comment. Do you really think I need to have that explained?
Think this through a little harder. Let's say farmer A is growing his precious heirloom strain. To the north, farmer B is growing a different heirloom or commercial strain; to the south, farmer C is growing a terminator strain. There's some cross-pollination and A winds up with 0.001% hybridization with both B and C's crop. If anything, the problem for him is B! A tiny rate of sterile seeds are a non-issue. (Assuming the sterility is dominant, which presumably it is, otherwise this is even more of a non-issue.) In reality, so is the contamination from B, but you can't simultaneously claim that cross-pollination is rampant and that it's only a concern with strains you really don't like. The real problem (and as I said, it's a problem, so you don't need to give me another condescending lecture on why it's a problem) is that the 0.001% contamination is enough to show up in screens for GMOs.
That is such a perfect name. I can't believe no one has thought of it before.
Second, that said, I don't understand your scenario anyway. If corn readily pollinates between farms and some hippie has a magical pure strain of corn that musn't be contaminated, surely a strain that can't reproduce is the *least* of his concerns!
There *is* a legitimate concern about contamination, which is that if a tiny amount of GMO pollen gets into non-GMO field, it can prevent the whole crop from being sold to Europe or sold for higher prices in North America. (Or, in a handful of cases, get the farmer into some licensing trouble.) If anything, you could say that terminator strains are less of a threat than other GMO strains, but that's not really true because the Earth-loving organic guys buy hybrid seed every year just like the horrible conventional farmers do.
But as with all this GMO stuff, every possible bogeyman is always invoked for every possible concern, even when it makes no sense. As in this case, where people are worrying about the spread of sterility!?!
Rather than argue that point, I'll just note that the issue is what happens when no one makes money from recordings. (See, I can use italic tags, too.)
Before you flame me, have you written you congressman and senators to support the Internet Radio Equality Act? No? Then STFU, write to them, and then berate me about Faye Wong.
I'm not sure if you realize this or not, but to say it explicitly:
Modern corn seeds are F1 hybrids from two parent strains that are only used to generate seed. You don't save seeds for next year because then you get a range of variable F2 progeny, and over time you just get a mess. Terminator strains were developed to keep those F1's from growing accidentally.
The image of good ol' Farmer Bob pickin' through his corn to collect seeds for next year, and being thwarted by a greedy corporation, has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of who this seed is being sold to. If Farmer Bob wants to grow his own seed he doesn't use these to begin with.
That's the point: dividing RAM sales by some FUD-driven fantasy about how much new RAM Vista users will need is stretching "Now comes some hard data" a bit.
If I'm understanding this correctly:
Link to paper. I don't claim to be knowledgeable about this stuff but that success rate doesn't look too remarkable to me. China's sex ratio is hardly so skewed (yet, anyway) that this could remotely identify someone from a pool of a billion users, or even out of a single Internet cafe.
I'd wonder more about the quality of research Microsoft is getting out of their Beijing site if they think this worth bragging about.
Uh, no, I said it's the norm among mathematicians. It's rare in even the math-heavier parts of biology research.
I didn't say "scientists", I said "life science researchers". And I stand by what I said. The overwhelming majority of life science researchers have never heard of TeX, outside of some very small computational and theoretical niches. The premier molecular biology journal, for example, requests "Word, RTF, and TXT".
Maybe in physics and math TeX is the norm, but nowhere else.
Forgot to add: Tivo tracks what you watch, comes up with preferences for you and reports data back. There are quite a few complaints about it deciding viewers are gay -- there are several possible conclusions one might make about that. Deliberately watching lots of ESPN and Spike to reset it doesn't seem to help.
Nielsen has no idea what you are doing. They recruit viewers who install special monitoring equipment and/or keep diaries and extrapolate that to the overall population.
How much more do I need to type to get the caps through? This much?
That much, apparently.
True, but that vote of confidence was a desperately needed boost to Apple. The cash itself meant nothing, but the support for Apple and for Mac Office was incredibly important in keeping Apple from going the way of Commodore.
I'm skeptical about the snooping (much as I bitch about admins, they're actually remarkably ethical about privacy given the access they have, IME) but that password thing sounds dead on. Whenever they give us the lecture about how keeping track of the login/password combos for 25 different accounts, each rotated every 60-90 days, with mandatory mixed case, numbers and punctuation is easy -- why all you do is make up a little story -- "Mary went to the store to buy milk" becomes h7^Y8U0bs# -- I always ask them for the story to their previous password to the office furniture request page. They splutter about how no, that's a security risk to part with one of their expired stories but I can see the Post-It with the root password in their minds, like I'm Professor Snape.
Name changes are administered by the courts. The state has a list of sex offenders. The court checks the list when someone requests a name change. It hardly requires hacking anyone's brain.
I don't know about that study, but biofuel advocates do make that argument. The problem is that it breaks down if you clear, for example, Amazon rainforest to grow sugar cane for ethanol. Which is usually the case, since productive sites for agriculture are usually growing something else (either another crop or wild plants) already.
As you say, it's complicated.
No offense to Gertrude Weise, but -- huh?