The Guardian then leaked it to the international press and prominent bloggers -- such as Guido Fawkes. Sure people reported it on Twitter too, especially Stephen Fry who is a sock puppet for the Guardian and the left wing, but it wasn't the tweets that changed anything, it was the International press and the reaction in Parliament.
How's your tin foil hat looking? There was absolutely no need for them to leak anything. The list of questions was already published, the Guardian just asked Carter-Ruck if they could report that and of course C-R said no (since it was covered by the previous injunction). The Guardian reported this on their website (and I'd agree with you here that their intent was to cause outrage); from there it was trivial to figure out what the question was.
Also: international press? If the international press made any difference, then the original injunction would have been entirely withdrawn instead of being adjusted, since the Minton report is available outside the UK. Anyway - be specific. What organs of the press actually reported this before C-R withdrew? And parliament wasn't even sitting until mid-morning. The blaze of publicity had by that point made the restriction moot, it was hardly surprising that C-R caved before it reached m'lud.
The PQ about Trafigura everyone was twittering was Q61, Q62 was in fact the one mentioned in that Private Eye editorial: Q62: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will (a) collect and (b) publish statistics on the number of non-reportable injunctions issued by the High Court in each of the last five years.
With a bit of luck tomorrow we will hear how many of these things have been issued (or at least, get told when we will be told)
The actual FTC guidelines (Section V) don't use the word 'blog' in the guideline itself. Instead, they talk about 'endorsements' and define them like this:
(b) For purposes of this part, an endorsement means any advertising message (including verbal statements, demonstrations, or depictions of the name, signature, likeness or other identifying personal characteristics of an individual or the name or seal of an organization) that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experiences of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser, even if the views expressed by that party are identical to those of the sponsoring advertiser. The party whose opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience the message appears to reflect will be called the endorser and may be an individual, group, or institution.
They give a bunch of specific examples (which do mention blogs), including one of astroturfing which implies this applies to appstore, amazon reviews (which would be nice). It does seem as if they mean things like twitter should be covered. There's also a bunch of circumstances they describe where you don't have to mention your affiliation, eg if you're a sports star with a clothing contract and always wear that brand off the field as well as on, or if you appear in a clearly-labelled advertisment giving a testimonial and are only paid for the ad - its a different if you have a financial interest in the product.
They claim: We are not using any out-of-the-box virtualization, it's all custom built by our team for this purpose., or and similarly that its their own custom operating system (specifically so that the photoshop demo is a single window)
The company was formed in November 2008.
So, seriously: nothing unbelievable about that? I'd be wondering whose software they are really using there, because the development timescale doesn't add up. If they'd said nothing or said it was off-the-shelf tech that would be a bit more likely.
This is a business model that will be specifically forbidden with electronic books.
I must've imagined my O'Reilly Safari subscription then.
Incidentally, its a business model that publishers continue to attempt to prohibit with paper books: I reached for the nearest book on the shelf and it says this:
This book is sold subject to the condition that it will not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent......which is especially ironic when the book I picked up was Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, in the public domain everywhere.
It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.
No, you're wrong. In PDF text is stored as small chunks to be printed at the current point with the current font. There is no concept of a paragraph or a column. So if your text is even marginally complex - for example, you have superscripts, multiple columns, text labels on an image beside the text of your document, manual kerning, font substitution for some characters, bidi text... then you have lots of disconnected text chunks. In order to copy these, the reader needs to guess what the original formatting was. And I haven't even started on ligatures and mathematical formulae yet.
For this reason PDF readers often have 2 copy modes: rectangular and reading-order. The rectangular option tries to preserve position information (fairly easy), while the other option tries to guess and preserve the reading order (fairly hard). The rectangular option works well on tables, but poorly on multicolumn text; the opposite is generally true for reading-order selection. Evince's text selection is rectangular, Acrobat used to have both but seems to have only reading-order selection these days.
I happen to know this because I've done some work on fixing text selection in poppler; but its not just poppler-based readers that have a problem: its just as bad in Acrobat and (on the mac) Preview. Its not very hard to find documents with problems like this, and its one of the most-duped poppler/evince bugs.
People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests. Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans.
From TFA: The Scientology religion is the only major religion to have emerged in the 20th century.
You're forgetting Jedi - which scored higher than you multiple national censuses. Whats that you say? Its made-up science fiction? Yes, and so is Jedi.
It is the world's fastest growing religion, found in over 264 countries
And this is why they don't let you edit Wikipedia. You only get to 264 countries if you include Narnia, Mordor, Ankh-Morpork, Azkhaban, Ruritania, Elbonia, Grand Fenwick, and about 55 other places that are as real as Xenu.
(sorry if this is a dupe, but my link to/. went down a few hours ago when I was posting this)
I should point out the obvious assumption in what I posted: Metcalfe's law assumes 'A', the average benefit to any user of the network, is independent of 'n'. This fails eg if one particularly valuable user enters or leaves the network, but at the scale of the internet, it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of users and potential users have the same value.
I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this now... Let A = Sum(i=1..n, A(i))/n , the average benefit to any user of the network. Vj = n^2 * A. Oh wait - that's Metcalfe's law. All Beckstrom's done here is give an expansion of the average benefit per user.
BTW: it's not published in a peer-reviewed journal AFAIK. Its up on arXiv.org but not in RSPA yet (I don't see it in any of this years issues, and the tables of contents are up for issues through May)
If you RTFPreprint, you'll see he answers your question regarding Bell's theorem, by attacking the assumptions on which it relies.
Bell has pointed out (Bell, 1995) the notion that quantum mechanics is not locally causal (ie is nonlocal), depends on treating experimental parameters, such as the orientation of measuring devices, as free variables... [However, this] manifestly fails in the Invariant Set Hypothesis. In the Invariant Set Hypothesis, the only "credible scenarios" are associated with initial conditions which lie on the invariant set.
Which is reasonable. If you don't have 'free will' to choose the initial conditions of the experiment, its hardly suprising that the measurements are correlated.
Not saying I fully swallow this though. I do have a PhD in theoretical physics, but that was years ago, so I couldn't follow this if it was all maths - but I don't like that the paper is largely argument by analogy. I'd feel more comfortable with a proof or two.
I'm not sure if it is a statutory requirement or not; but the following language is extraordinarily common in DMCA takedown notices:
"I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
It's common in part because Google's instructions on how to submit a valid takedown notice tell you to write exactly that (section 6). Saves the lawyers on both sides individually checking the legalese.
In the patent application (dated 1998) they stated: One problem existing in the art is that there are no systems and methods to bridge the gap between the programming paradigm used for object-oriented systems and the programming paradigm used for relational systems.
(from here on in you know there's going to be no prior art submitted that does exactly that, when in fact there was plenty.)
Well apart from anything else, they only work in Acrobat Reader. Which isn't the default PDF viewer on any platform except Windows.
This means that (a) lots of people can't fill out the forms anyway, without installing additional software. Which may not even be an option on limited devices. (b) if you publish eg feedback forms later, lots of people will wonder why you published a whole pile of identical blank forms (c) if you used fdf forms (ie something compatible with older versions of Acrobat) the data and the pdf are not submitted together - fdf's are text files with an URL reference to the PDF that was filled. This means that if someone changes the pdf at that URL to a new version, then either the fdf will not work at all, or it'll have the form filled incorrectly.
This might be less of an issue in an intranet monoculture, but that's the excuse for IE6 as well. It/is/ a problem if you try to use those forms on the internet, and I've seen those issues cause customers pain in the Real World.
Agree 100% with the parent. You should be using version control. In fact, its such a common issue that there's even a term for what the original poster is asking about:
VENDOR BRANCHES
Go google that now. You can find more information for your system here...
With git or mercurial, patch queue solutions are probably what you want - stgit or the newer TopGit for git, Mercurial Queues for mercurial. You want to use patch queues so that you have a clean idea of how to get from their code to your code - managing vendor code via merging branches means your code history is littered with merge info making your patches less clear to your maintainers.
Why would they release this? Don't get me wrong, I, personally, am all for donating to the community and further advancing technology as a species; however, why would the NSA deliver something to the public that would, in the long run, possibly make life harder on themselves by possibly furthering the advances of private encryption? I'm not trying to play Devil's Advocate, I just genuinely don't understand why they would (possibly) make life harder for themselves.
Yes, why? This is as dangerous as releasing a dictionary - possibly allowing wildly speculative internet postings with less spelling mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Greenbaum is the social media editor at the newspaper. A while back he posted the results of a survey which showed that:
61% of his readers did not want the editors deciding what comments were offensive
Given his response to the comments on the article, I don't think he's any closer to understanding what he was told the first time.
You mean this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2069903 "Range perception through apparent image speed in freely flying honeybees."
The Guardian then leaked it to the international press and prominent bloggers -- such as Guido Fawkes. Sure people reported it on Twitter too, especially Stephen Fry who is a sock puppet for the Guardian and the left wing, but it wasn't the tweets that changed anything, it was the International press and the reaction in Parliament.
How's your tin foil hat looking? There was absolutely no need for them to leak anything. The list of questions was already published, the Guardian just asked Carter-Ruck if they could report that and of course C-R said no (since it was covered by the previous injunction). The Guardian reported this on their website (and I'd agree with you here that their intent was to cause outrage); from there it was trivial to figure out what the question was.
Also: international press? If the international press made any difference, then the original injunction would have been entirely withdrawn instead of being adjusted, since the Minton report is available outside the UK. Anyway - be specific. What organs of the press actually reported this before C-R withdrew? And parliament wasn't even sitting until mid-morning. The blaze of publicity had by that point made the restriction moot, it was hardly surprising that C-R caved before it reached m'lud.
The PQ about Trafigura everyone was twittering was Q61, Q62 was in fact the one mentioned in that Private Eye editorial:
Q62: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will (a) collect and (b) publish statistics on the number of non-reportable injunctions issued by the High Court in each of the last five years.
With a bit of luck tomorrow we will hear how many of these things have been issued (or at least, get told when we will be told)
The actual FTC guidelines (Section V) don't use the word 'blog' in the guideline itself. Instead, they talk about 'endorsements' and define them like this:
(b) For purposes of this part, an endorsement means any advertising message (including
verbal statements, demonstrations, or depictions of the name, signature, likeness or other
identifying personal characteristics of an individual or the name or seal of an organization) that
consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experiences of a party
other than the sponsoring advertiser, even if the views expressed by that party are identical to
those of the sponsoring advertiser. The party whose opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience
the message appears to reflect will be called the endorser and may be an individual, group, or
institution.
They give a bunch of specific examples (which do mention blogs), including one of astroturfing which implies this applies to appstore, amazon reviews (which would be nice). It does seem as if they mean things like twitter should be covered. There's also a bunch of circumstances they describe where you don't have to mention your affiliation, eg if you're a sports star with a clothing contract and always wear that brand off the field as well as on, or if you appear in a clearly-labelled advertisment giving a testimonial and are only paid for the ad - its a different if you have a financial interest in the product.
The only 'extra' I ever used:
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=412061&st=0&p=1886351&#entry1886351
It blocks the irritating contact-spammers that you can't get rid of through skype's settings. Hopefully it'll keep working for a while yet.
They claim: We are not using any out-of-the-box virtualization, it's all custom built by our team for this purpose., or and similarly that its their own custom operating system (specifically so that the photoshop demo is a single window)
The company was formed in November 2008.
So, seriously: nothing unbelievable about that? I'd be wondering whose software they are really using there, because the development timescale doesn't add up. If they'd said nothing or said it was off-the-shelf tech that would be a bit more likely.
This is a business model that will be specifically forbidden with electronic books.
I must've imagined my O'Reilly Safari subscription then.
Incidentally, its a business model that publishers continue to attempt to prohibit with paper books: I reached for the nearest book on the shelf and it says this:
This book is sold subject to the condition that it will not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent... ...which is especially ironic when the book I picked up was Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, in the public domain everywhere.
It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.
No, you're wrong. In PDF text is stored as small chunks to be printed at the current point with the current font. There is no concept of a paragraph or a column. So if your text is even marginally complex - for example, you have superscripts, multiple columns, text labels on an image beside the text of your document, manual kerning, font substitution for some characters, bidi text... then you have lots of disconnected text chunks. In order to copy these, the reader needs to guess what the original formatting was. And I haven't even started on ligatures and mathematical formulae yet.
For this reason PDF readers often have 2 copy modes: rectangular and reading-order. The rectangular option tries to preserve position information (fairly easy), while the other option tries to guess and preserve the reading order (fairly hard). The rectangular option works well on tables, but poorly on multicolumn text; the opposite is generally true for reading-order selection. Evince's text selection is rectangular, Acrobat used to have both but seems to have only reading-order selection these days.
I happen to know this because I've done some work on fixing text selection in poppler; but its not just poppler-based readers that have a problem: its just as bad in Acrobat and (on the mac) Preview. Its not very hard to find documents with problems like this, and its one of the most-duped poppler/evince bugs.
What other music fans?
Its those who are not "regular downloaders of unlicensed music", obviously.
When the answer to your question is given in the sentence you quoted, I know you're either a troll, or incapable of understanding English.
Ben Goldacre also makes up some facts, like this one "...for example, people who download more also buy more music."
No, you're wrong.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4718249.stm
People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests. Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans.
From TFA:
The Scientology religion is the only major religion to have emerged in the 20th century.
You're forgetting Jedi - which scored higher than you multiple national censuses. Whats that you say? Its made-up science fiction? Yes, and so is Jedi.
It is the world's fastest growing religion, found in over 264 countries
And this is why they don't let you edit Wikipedia. You only get to 264 countries if you include Narnia, Mordor, Ankh-Morpork, Azkhaban, Ruritania, Elbonia, Grand Fenwick, and about 55 other places that are as real as Xenu.
(sorry if this is a dupe, but my link to /. went down a few hours ago when I was posting this)
I'm blind in one eye.
Didn't stop André de Toth.
I should point out the obvious assumption in what I posted: Metcalfe's law assumes 'A', the average benefit to any user of the network, is independent of 'n'. This fails eg if one particularly valuable user enters or leaves the network, but at the scale of the internet, it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of users and potential users have the same value.
And surely Beckstrom must've realised this, since its trivial to get to Metcalfe's law from his equations.
Beckstrom:
Vj = Sum(i=1..n, V[i,j]) = Sum(i=1..n, Sum(k=1..n, B(i,k)) - Sum(l=1..n, C(i, l)))
= Sum(i=1..n,Sum(k=1..n, B(i, k) - C(i, k))).
= Sum(i=1..n,Sum(k=1..n, Sum(z=1..n, B(i, k) - C(i, k))/n ))
Let A(i) = Sum(z=1..n, B(i, k) - C(i, k))/n , the average benefit to user i of the network. Then:
Vj = Sum(i=1..n, Sum(z=1..n, Ai))
= Sum(i=1..n, n*Ai)
= n* Sum(i=1..n, Ai)
I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this now...
Let A = Sum(i=1..n, A(i))/n , the average benefit to any user of the network.
Vj = n^2 * A. Oh wait - that's Metcalfe's law. All Beckstrom's done here is give an expansion of the average benefit per user.
BTW: it's not published in a peer-reviewed journal AFAIK. Its up on arXiv.org but not in RSPA yet (I don't see it in any of this years issues, and the tables of contents are up for issues through May)
If you RTFPreprint, you'll see he answers your question regarding Bell's theorem, by attacking the assumptions on which it relies.
Bell has pointed out (Bell, 1995) the notion that quantum mechanics is not locally causal (ie is nonlocal), depends on treating experimental parameters, such as the orientation of measuring devices, as free variables... [However, this] manifestly fails in the Invariant Set Hypothesis. In the Invariant Set Hypothesis, the only "credible scenarios" are associated with initial conditions which lie on the invariant set.
Which is reasonable. If you don't have 'free will' to choose the initial conditions of the experiment, its hardly suprising that the measurements are correlated.
Not saying I fully swallow this though. I do have a PhD in theoretical physics, but that was years ago, so I couldn't follow this if it was all maths - but I don't like that the paper is largely argument by analogy. I'd feel more comfortable with a proof or two.
-Baz
I'm not sure if it is a statutory requirement or not; but the following language is extraordinarily common in DMCA takedown notices:
"I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
It's common in part because Google's instructions on how to submit a valid takedown notice tell you to write exactly that (section 6). Saves the lawyers on both sides individually checking the legalese.
In the patent application (dated 1998) they stated:
One problem existing in the art is that there are no systems and methods to bridge the gap between the programming paradigm used for object-oriented systems and the programming paradigm used for relational systems.
(from here on in you know there's going to be no prior art submitted that does exactly that, when in fact there was plenty.)
Liar liar pants on fire.
Well apart from anything else, they only work in Acrobat Reader. Which isn't the default PDF viewer on any platform except Windows.
This means that
(a) lots of people can't fill out the forms anyway, without installing additional software. Which may not even be an option on limited devices.
(b) if you publish eg feedback forms later, lots of people will wonder why you published a whole pile of identical blank forms
(c) if you used fdf forms (ie something compatible with older versions of Acrobat) the data and the pdf are not submitted together - fdf's are text files with an URL reference to the PDF that was filled. This means that if someone changes the pdf at that URL to a new version, then either the fdf will not work at all, or it'll have the form filled incorrectly.
This might be less of an issue in an intranet monoculture, but that's the excuse for IE6 as well. It /is/ a problem if you try to use those forms on the internet, and I've seen those issues cause customers pain in the Real World.
Agree 100% with the parent. You should be using version control. In fact, its such a common issue that there's even a term for what the original poster is asking about:
VENDOR BRANCHES
Go google that now. You can find more information for your system here...
* In (a) CVS book
* In the SVN book
* One method of doing this in bzr
With git or mercurial, patch queue solutions are probably what you want - stgit or the newer TopGit for git, Mercurial Queues for mercurial. You want to use patch queues so that you have a clean idea of how to get from their code to your code - managing vendor code via merging branches means your code history is littered with merge info making your patches less clear to your maintainers.
Why would they release this? Don't get me wrong, I, personally, am all for donating to the community and further advancing technology as a species; however, why would the NSA deliver something to the public that would, in the long run, possibly make life harder on themselves by possibly furthering the advances of private encryption? I'm not trying to play Devil's Advocate, I just genuinely don't understand why they would (possibly) make life harder for themselves.
Yes, why? This is as dangerous as releasing a dictionary - possibly allowing wildly speculative internet postings with less spelling mistakes.
Down with that sort of thing! Careful Now.
- Father ted.
It'll be like "Dallas" or "Knot's Landing", but with spaceships? Wow!
You mean exactly like The Colbys?
gah, obviously that matches an extra . - brainfart. /^((25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1[0-9]|[1-9]|)[0-9])(\.|$)){4}(?!\.)/
avoids this, still without repeating the term pattern. That last bit is the perlre for a zero-width negative look-behind assertion.
-Baz
/^((25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9])\.){3}(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9])$/
Try this: /^((25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1[0-9]|[1-9]|)[0-9])(\.|$)){4}/
And similarly: /^(([0-9a-fA-F]{2})(:|$)){6}$/
(term(delimiter|$)){n} is the generic stupid regex trick here. Works in perl, ymmv elsewhere.
-Baz