I think that TV will take a LOT longer, because there's a lot more involved. The credits on a TV show run to dozens of people, from lighting to costumers. A band can get by with just an engineer, and maybe an outside producer.
And the more people that you add, the more people that you have to add to manage those people. Shooting a professional TV show requires a small town. Even indie movie directors rapidly learn that they need at least dozen people to produce something that doesn't look like a home movie.
It's very difficult to become a "big" group without the aid of the labels. "Big" is not a function of talent; it's a function of advertising money. Lots of talented artists never go anywhere; lots of talentless hacks become very big.
If TV networks break up, we'll probably lose a lot of the high-production-value shows. You couldn't possibly shoot a $10 million pilot without a network, and its over-the-air broadcasts to everybody and its attendant must-carry provisions on every cable network.
Similarly, we lose "big" musical groups in exchange for a lot of little ones. In the case of TV shows, there's something definitely lost.
In the case of music groups, though... well, recording a song properly takes a lot more time and money than some people would have you believe. You can't do it with a $50 microphone and a copy of Garage Band, not if you want it to sound professional. But you can do it for a few thousand, which is a lot more accessible than TV shows.
They still can't be big without extensive promotion, but there will be a bit more interest if the promoting power of the networks to drown out everything else breaks up.
It's astonishing how bad sound can make a good actor sound dreadful. Some soap opera actors are actually quite talented; they sound awful because of horrible dialogue, overly-softened lighting, creepy music, cheesy editing, and (most of all) bad sound.
That bad sound has a open, hollow, echoey, ringing tone caused by using good microphones in an undeadened room. It saps voices of their energy, making everybody sound insincere. There's never any foley added, and the lack of any background noise makes it feel very staged. You know nobody every talks like that because it's pinging in the silence.
You get opposite dreadful effects with hand-held video cameras, which miss the rich parts of the voice and pick up ALL of the background noise. It feels cheap and it also makes actors sound uncommitted.
You're from Austin, aren't you? Austin's not really part of Texas, despite being the capital. I have the word of a large number of Texans on the subject.
I'd look at you quizzically if you handed me $21.01 for a $6.06 charge. The change is $14.95, and you'd have done just as well to have given me $20.01; that extra dollar bill is coming straight back at you. (And yeah, I was so perplexed by what you said that I did double-check it with a calculator.)
I might as you if you had a nickel, or at least a quarter or a dime.
I think you're missing the target market for this machine. It's your basic road-warrior type, who uses the machine away from the office. They give Powerpoint presentations, read and send email from coffee shop and hotel wireless, watch a few movies, type up documents and spreadsheets, etc.
They have their IT department install software at the office, from another computer or an attached laptop. These people haul their computers around all day every day and want something really, really light and small.
It's always been Apple's brilliance to see what people can live without and making their computers more streamlined. People spazzed when the iMac didn't have a floppy drive.
I dunno if this is the right computer for its target market; that's Apple's gamble. But it doesn't surprise me that you're not in it. It's not for everybody. A machine for everybody is a machine for nobody; it doesn't make any of them completely happy.
There's a lot more to a high-quality production than special effects. Most films produced cheaply, even with the best possible special effects, feel inauthentic. The stories told with special effects are less interesting than the stories told with real people.
Bad lighting for example, will make a scene feel cheap and take the viewer out of the story. Good lighting does require a fair bit of money: you need many, many instruments, carefully balanced. "Reality" isn't nearly as convincing: it leaves distracting shadows that you don't notice when you're there because you're immersed in the scene and unconsciously correcting for where the sun is, where the trees and buildings are, etc.
It takes a huge amount of time and effort to set those up properly. It also takes a highly skilled operator to know what's going to work, and that operator has to work in conjunction with the cameras, the set, the makeup artists, the costume designers, etc.
A really professional and polished TV show or movie is an immensely unwieldy beast. And incredibly expensive, because so many of those people are standing around doing nothing so much of the time, but an adjustment by any one of them can involve an effort by all of them.
You probably think you don't need all this stuff, but it's because when it's well done, you don't notice any of it. It looks as if the sun just happened to be in the right place, the camera lens just happened to match what your eye would have done under the circumstance, the sound just happened to capture what you think your eyes are seeing...
Trust me, nothing on a movie or TV stage "just happens". You can produce some nice small films and pass off the cheap feel as "indie", and such films often wonderfully highlight the acting, directing, and writing talent. But even a small professional movie costs millions of dollars, and the effect is vastly more enjoyable to most people. They can't say why because they don't know what they're looking at, and that's all to the good, but it doesn't mean that they don't have preferences.
The article starts by noting that California dominates the House of Representatives, but this doesn't really change that fact. Tweaking a seat up or down does change things a bit, especially where the electoral college is concerned, but the real problem is gerrymandering. Seats end up being permanently allocated to one party or another, with the incumbent enjoying an immense advantage.
If you want to fix a problem, come up with a better algorithm for drawing district boundaries. Right now the party in charge DOES use an algorithm, one designed to create the pessimal boundaries that ensure its maximum advantage.
Of course, there are many such algorithms, and no matter how fair they are the legislature would vote to choose whichever one favors them best.
I have been following the Intrade market, and I think that Obama's recent surge on that market may represent a serious blow to the idea.
I don't need Intrade to tell me what's happening at the polls; I can get that from the news. Intrade is interesting only if it's able to make predictions, and for a long time Clinton was twice as expensive as Obama. Today it's the reverse. That makes it a fine place to gamble, but not an interesting place to get an accurate representation of the future.
That market is still predicting that Huckabee's victory in Iowa will be short-lived, and it's still convinced that Romney's chances are low, but it's still heavily influenced by McCain's recent surge in the New Hampshire polls.
The campaign contains relatively few surprises. Candidates do not radically change their opinions or introduce truly novel programs. A sudden revelation can tank a candidate, but we're basically counting on Intrade to let the wisdom of crowds ferret out all of that before the polls, not after them.
Intrade may still redeem itself. The polls may be introducing a lot of volatility that will ultimately settle down. But it predicted Clinton vs Giuliani by wide margins for a very long time, and I'll put a lot less faith in its predictions if it's just tracking the state-by-state polls.
That's correct, though I can't help but suspect that we won't actually offset fossil fuels. Prices will drop, because an alternative is introduced, and people will go out and buy bigger cars.
Or if we replace the cars with electrics, we'll just burn the oil for something else. Knowing human beings, if we have no other use, we'll just set it on fire because it's pretty.
My empathy on your frustration. I'll add what I think is yet another aggravating factor: not only are you hearing scientists contradicted by people who haven't done their research, but there's an implicit (or explicit) accusation that the scientists have ulterior motives.
It is not a coincidence that nearly all climate change deniers are of a particular political stripe. Since they are arguing in a partisan fashion, rather than on facts, they assume that you are, too.
Those researchers are being called not only fools, but liars, and I think the latter accusation stings harder.
(I should add that in fact very few people on either side of the argument have done sufficient research to make their pronouncements. Many people who talk about climate change are also willing to believe because of their ideology, not because they've run the numbers. They happen to be right, according to the vast majority of climate scientists, but their justification isn't often any better.)
It's not so much that science is pre-supposed towards randomness, as waiting to hold off on positing a designer until we can characterize the term better.
It may well be that we reach a point where we say, "Aha! Somebody designed strings so they'd create muons and neutrinos, giving rise to DNA, and..." etc. But until we know something about that designer, it's not useful to start guessing what it had in mind.
The real crux of the argument, I'm afraid, is that many people want to equate that designer with their own deity, and the moral principles they believe that deity imposes. Since those principles are not otherwise always justified, and in fact are antithetical to what many people believe is an otherwise virtuous lifestyle, we're going to run into arguments.
But it's not necessary that science pre-suppose the deity not exist, only that it make no statements one way or the other. If one insists that it MUST be so, science's refusal to confirm that fact looks like denial. Some will in fact deny it, as a kind of mental shortcut, but that's actually aside from the proper conduct of science, in which the existence of a designer is not even a proposition until that designer is properly characterized. To my knowledge, that has not been done yet, though some putative characterizations have been rejected.
It's certainly interesting that we had an approximation (Maxwell, Newton) which as so simple it seemed that it must be fundamental, or nearly so. If there was anything more fundamental, one would expect it to be even simpler: why should a more-complex set of rules just happen to have a nice, neat approximation right at the scales where humans happen to be able to observe them easily?
I suspect that one day we'll find out that there's a very good explanation, but I'll be darned if I have any idea what it is.
I'm certainly not going to defend the audiophiles and their gold foil aftermarket eardrums, but there are reasons to get the music in higher-than-audible resolutions. If you're going to do any further processing on it (converting to MP3, remove the vocals for karaoke, add your own effects in a mix) those non-audible data bits will have an effect on the result that might well be audible.
So I take it you think of the LibDems and Labour as the same party?
You still have far more parties represented in Parliament than the Americans do. The entire House is either Democrat or Republican, and the Senate has exactly two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. Zero third party representation at all.
That's an interesting observation. Duverger's Law says that things tend to two-party systems, at least when you apportion votes to geographical districts. Even where you apparently have multiple parties, like in England, the coalitions are fairly static and form a close approximation to two parties.
So I wonder if people feel more effective when they're offered an apparent choice, even if it's really mostly the same choice.
That's the ironic thing about punishment. It doesn't do you any good to punish somebody. It's supposed to be a deterrent, but if the person hasn't been deterred, it costs you more to punish him than to let him go.
But you have to do it anyway, as a message to the next guy that you're serious. The severity of the punishment has zero to do with what this guy did, and everything to do with how strong a message you want to send to the next guy.
In the case of spam, though, deterrence is fruitless. There will always be somebody undeterred, and the economics of spam make that one guy aggravating all out of proportion.
It's why Slashdotters semi-seriously call for much, much harsher punishments. They feel very, very strongly about the message, precisely because they know that it's unlikely to be heard.
Strictly speaking, I do know a few people who are not Creationists in the Biblical sense and reject the 6-day-creation story (as well as the "a day can mean anything I want it to mean" variant) but still don't believe that random mutation and natural selection are sufficient to create the diversity we see. They are ID proponents but not Creationists.
I'm afraid that it's very hard to convince them otherwise. They know enough science to understand some of the "irreducible complexity" examples, but not enough to understand the refutations of them, or why even if they held up the Intelligent Designer explanation is still not a scientific theory to explain them.
But they at least put up a better argument than the creationists-in-disguise, who rarely know enough science to do more than copy-and-paste the irreducible complexity examples but WILL copy and past them freely and count that as an argument.
They shared some of their movie preference information with the IMDB, but they may have intended to keep the rest of it private. Some of those private ratings have now slipped out.
I don't know if anything really important came of it, but it's extremely illustrative: even anonymized data can become known if you can tie it in to a public data source. Movie ratings data may be important, or at most slightly embarrassing ("you LIKED Ghost Dad? Ewwww!") but it could easily have been worse if the data had been important.
It's a message about privacy: secret stuff has to stay secret, and just failing to release the names can't be counted on to be sufficient.
It's also a warning that you yourself need to be more circumspect. Even public information can be used to deduce private stuff.
Interesting that all four of those are outside of the US. Could it be that Americans are gradually upgrading to harder-to-infect systems (even Vista) while other countries are still stuck with the older products? Or that the users (or service providers) themselves are finally getting tired of having their machines spew spam?
It seems to me that at least in the US, that gives us yet another advantage: nearly all of the email I get is from other Americans and will get very little via overseas mail servers. If it comes from outside the US, give it the hairy eyeball in the spam filter.
They don't need to know this particular user. The collaborative filtering system works by comparing your pattern to other patterns. Find somebody (anybody) with a similar pattern and then use their ratings on movies you didn't rate. You can use other Netflix users (which is what Netflix has been doing all along) but you can increase your pool with the IMDB. It makes it more likely to find somebody who has similar ratings to yours overall and has seen some movie that you haven't rated.
Which almost makes it inevitable that people who rated things on both Netflix and the IMDb would be found out: that other person used as your model would be perfect because it's you.
They were hoping that by giving the name of the movie they could pull in other sources of data (RottenTomatoes, IMDB) to make better guesses. They were seeking more than just better curve-fitting of the data points. If nothing else, the IMDb's huge pile of data points of ratings gives you a lot more fodder for your collaborative filter, but only if you can tie in the names of the movies.
Strictly speaking, only Apple shareholders who have owned the stock for that long made all that money. Those who bought in when they thought that the company was more profitable than it really was overpaid for it based on bad information.
Not that I'm happy about these idiots. I really have owned stock for that long and any money the company spends fighting the lawsuit is really my money. But short-term share-holders really could be screwed by financial mis-reporting, and long-term shareholders depend on those short-termers to provide liquidity for our shares. So we can't just dismiss them out of hand. The market needs to be priced fairly.
I'm glad the lawsuit is gone, and I do think these guys are being stupid, but I'm not charging them with ingratitude. I'm charging them with being suckered by yet another one of those class-action law firms who make 80% of the money out of these suits.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that TV will take a LOT longer, because there's a lot more involved. The credits on a TV show run to dozens of people, from lighting to costumers. A band can get by with just an engineer, and maybe an outside producer.
And the more people that you add, the more people that you have to add to manage those people. Shooting a professional TV show requires a small town. Even indie movie directors rapidly learn that they need at least dozen people to produce something that doesn't look like a home movie.
It's very difficult to become a "big" group without the aid of the labels. "Big" is not a function of talent; it's a function of advertising money. Lots of talented artists never go anywhere; lots of talentless hacks become very big.
If TV networks break up, we'll probably lose a lot of the high-production-value shows. You couldn't possibly shoot a $10 million pilot without a network, and its over-the-air broadcasts to everybody and its attendant must-carry provisions on every cable network.
Similarly, we lose "big" musical groups in exchange for a lot of little ones. In the case of TV shows, there's something definitely lost.
In the case of music groups, though... well, recording a song properly takes a lot more time and money than some people would have you believe. You can't do it with a $50 microphone and a copy of Garage Band, not if you want it to sound professional. But you can do it for a few thousand, which is a lot more accessible than TV shows.
They still can't be big without extensive promotion, but there will be a bit more interest if the promoting power of the networks to drown out everything else breaks up.
It's astonishing how bad sound can make a good actor sound dreadful. Some soap opera actors are actually quite talented; they sound awful because of horrible dialogue, overly-softened lighting, creepy music, cheesy editing, and (most of all) bad sound.
That bad sound has a open, hollow, echoey, ringing tone caused by using good microphones in an undeadened room. It saps voices of their energy, making everybody sound insincere. There's never any foley added, and the lack of any background noise makes it feel very staged. You know nobody every talks like that because it's pinging in the silence.
You get opposite dreadful effects with hand-held video cameras, which miss the rich parts of the voice and pick up ALL of the background noise. It feels cheap and it also makes actors sound uncommitted.
You're from Austin, aren't you? Austin's not really part of Texas, despite being the capital. I have the word of a large number of Texans on the subject.
I'd look at you quizzically if you handed me $21.01 for a $6.06 charge. The change is $14.95, and you'd have done just as well to have given me $20.01; that extra dollar bill is coming straight back at you. (And yeah, I was so perplexed by what you said that I did double-check it with a calculator.)
I might as you if you had a nickel, or at least a quarter or a dime.
I think you're missing the target market for this machine. It's your basic road-warrior type, who uses the machine away from the office. They give Powerpoint presentations, read and send email from coffee shop and hotel wireless, watch a few movies, type up documents and spreadsheets, etc.
They have their IT department install software at the office, from another computer or an attached laptop. These people haul their computers around all day every day and want something really, really light and small.
It's always been Apple's brilliance to see what people can live without and making their computers more streamlined. People spazzed when the iMac didn't have a floppy drive.
I dunno if this is the right computer for its target market; that's Apple's gamble. But it doesn't surprise me that you're not in it. It's not for everybody. A machine for everybody is a machine for nobody; it doesn't make any of them completely happy.
There's a lot more to a high-quality production than special effects. Most films produced cheaply, even with the best possible special effects, feel inauthentic. The stories told with special effects are less interesting than the stories told with real people.
Bad lighting for example, will make a scene feel cheap and take the viewer out of the story. Good lighting does require a fair bit of money: you need many, many instruments, carefully balanced. "Reality" isn't nearly as convincing: it leaves distracting shadows that you don't notice when you're there because you're immersed in the scene and unconsciously correcting for where the sun is, where the trees and buildings are, etc.
It takes a huge amount of time and effort to set those up properly. It also takes a highly skilled operator to know what's going to work, and that operator has to work in conjunction with the cameras, the set, the makeup artists, the costume designers, etc.
A really professional and polished TV show or movie is an immensely unwieldy beast. And incredibly expensive, because so many of those people are standing around doing nothing so much of the time, but an adjustment by any one of them can involve an effort by all of them.
You probably think you don't need all this stuff, but it's because when it's well done, you don't notice any of it. It looks as if the sun just happened to be in the right place, the camera lens just happened to match what your eye would have done under the circumstance, the sound just happened to capture what you think your eyes are seeing...
Trust me, nothing on a movie or TV stage "just happens". You can produce some nice small films and pass off the cheap feel as "indie", and such films often wonderfully highlight the acting, directing, and writing talent. But even a small professional movie costs millions of dollars, and the effect is vastly more enjoyable to most people. They can't say why because they don't know what they're looking at, and that's all to the good, but it doesn't mean that they don't have preferences.
The article starts by noting that California dominates the House of Representatives, but this doesn't really change that fact. Tweaking a seat up or down does change things a bit, especially where the electoral college is concerned, but the real problem is gerrymandering. Seats end up being permanently allocated to one party or another, with the incumbent enjoying an immense advantage.
If you want to fix a problem, come up with a better algorithm for drawing district boundaries. Right now the party in charge DOES use an algorithm, one designed to create the pessimal boundaries that ensure its maximum advantage.
Of course, there are many such algorithms, and no matter how fair they are the legislature would vote to choose whichever one favors them best.
Thank you. That was remarkably cogent.
I have been following the Intrade market, and I think that Obama's recent surge on that market may represent a serious blow to the idea.
I don't need Intrade to tell me what's happening at the polls; I can get that from the news. Intrade is interesting only if it's able to make predictions, and for a long time Clinton was twice as expensive as Obama. Today it's the reverse. That makes it a fine place to gamble, but not an interesting place to get an accurate representation of the future.
That market is still predicting that Huckabee's victory in Iowa will be short-lived, and it's still convinced that Romney's chances are low, but it's still heavily influenced by McCain's recent surge in the New Hampshire polls.
The campaign contains relatively few surprises. Candidates do not radically change their opinions or introduce truly novel programs. A sudden revelation can tank a candidate, but we're basically counting on Intrade to let the wisdom of crowds ferret out all of that before the polls, not after them.
Intrade may still redeem itself. The polls may be introducing a lot of volatility that will ultimately settle down. But it predicted Clinton vs Giuliani by wide margins for a very long time, and I'll put a lot less faith in its predictions if it's just tracking the state-by-state polls.
That's correct, though I can't help but suspect that we won't actually offset fossil fuels. Prices will drop, because an alternative is introduced, and people will go out and buy bigger cars.
Or if we replace the cars with electrics, we'll just burn the oil for something else. Knowing human beings, if we have no other use, we'll just set it on fire because it's pretty.
My empathy on your frustration. I'll add what I think is yet another aggravating factor: not only are you hearing scientists contradicted by people who haven't done their research, but there's an implicit (or explicit) accusation that the scientists have ulterior motives.
It is not a coincidence that nearly all climate change deniers are of a particular political stripe. Since they are arguing in a partisan fashion, rather than on facts, they assume that you are, too.
Those researchers are being called not only fools, but liars, and I think the latter accusation stings harder.
(I should add that in fact very few people on either side of the argument have done sufficient research to make their pronouncements. Many people who talk about climate change are also willing to believe because of their ideology, not because they've run the numbers. They happen to be right, according to the vast majority of climate scientists, but their justification isn't often any better.)
Why is it that on the rare occasion somebody who actually knows something about something posts about it to Slashdot, I never have any mod points?
It's not so much that science is pre-supposed towards randomness, as waiting to hold off on positing a designer until we can characterize the term better.
..." etc. But until we know something about that designer, it's not useful to start guessing what it had in mind.
It may well be that we reach a point where we say, "Aha! Somebody designed strings so they'd create muons and neutrinos, giving rise to DNA, and
The real crux of the argument, I'm afraid, is that many people want to equate that designer with their own deity, and the moral principles they believe that deity imposes. Since those principles are not otherwise always justified, and in fact are antithetical to what many people believe is an otherwise virtuous lifestyle, we're going to run into arguments.
But it's not necessary that science pre-suppose the deity not exist, only that it make no statements one way or the other. If one insists that it MUST be so, science's refusal to confirm that fact looks like denial. Some will in fact deny it, as a kind of mental shortcut, but that's actually aside from the proper conduct of science, in which the existence of a designer is not even a proposition until that designer is properly characterized. To my knowledge, that has not been done yet, though some putative characterizations have been rejected.
It's certainly interesting that we had an approximation (Maxwell, Newton) which as so simple it seemed that it must be fundamental, or nearly so. If there was anything more fundamental, one would expect it to be even simpler: why should a more-complex set of rules just happen to have a nice, neat approximation right at the scales where humans happen to be able to observe them easily?
I suspect that one day we'll find out that there's a very good explanation, but I'll be darned if I have any idea what it is.
I'm certainly not going to defend the audiophiles and their gold foil aftermarket eardrums, but there are reasons to get the music in higher-than-audible resolutions. If you're going to do any further processing on it (converting to MP3, remove the vocals for karaoke, add your own effects in a mix) those non-audible data bits will have an effect on the result that might well be audible.
So I take it you think of the LibDems and Labour as the same party?
You still have far more parties represented in Parliament than the Americans do. The entire House is either Democrat or Republican, and the Senate has exactly two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. Zero third party representation at all.
That's an interesting observation. Duverger's Law says that things tend to two-party systems, at least when you apportion votes to geographical districts. Even where you apparently have multiple parties, like in England, the coalitions are fairly static and form a close approximation to two parties.
So I wonder if people feel more effective when they're offered an apparent choice, even if it's really mostly the same choice.
That's the ironic thing about punishment. It doesn't do you any good to punish somebody. It's supposed to be a deterrent, but if the person hasn't been deterred, it costs you more to punish him than to let him go.
But you have to do it anyway, as a message to the next guy that you're serious. The severity of the punishment has zero to do with what this guy did, and everything to do with how strong a message you want to send to the next guy.
In the case of spam, though, deterrence is fruitless. There will always be somebody undeterred, and the economics of spam make that one guy aggravating all out of proportion.
It's why Slashdotters semi-seriously call for much, much harsher punishments. They feel very, very strongly about the message, precisely because they know that it's unlikely to be heard.
Strictly speaking, I do know a few people who are not Creationists in the Biblical sense and reject the 6-day-creation story (as well as the "a day can mean anything I want it to mean" variant) but still don't believe that random mutation and natural selection are sufficient to create the diversity we see. They are ID proponents but not Creationists.
I'm afraid that it's very hard to convince them otherwise. They know enough science to understand some of the "irreducible complexity" examples, but not enough to understand the refutations of them, or why even if they held up the Intelligent Designer explanation is still not a scientific theory to explain them.
But they at least put up a better argument than the creationists-in-disguise, who rarely know enough science to do more than copy-and-paste the irreducible complexity examples but WILL copy and past them freely and count that as an argument.
They shared some of their movie preference information with the IMDB, but they may have intended to keep the rest of it private. Some of those private ratings have now slipped out.
I don't know if anything really important came of it, but it's extremely illustrative: even anonymized data can become known if you can tie it in to a public data source. Movie ratings data may be important, or at most slightly embarrassing ("you LIKED Ghost Dad? Ewwww!") but it could easily have been worse if the data had been important.
It's a message about privacy: secret stuff has to stay secret, and just failing to release the names can't be counted on to be sufficient.
It's also a warning that you yourself need to be more circumspect. Even public information can be used to deduce private stuff.
Interesting that all four of those are outside of the US. Could it be that Americans are gradually upgrading to harder-to-infect systems (even Vista) while other countries are still stuck with the older products? Or that the users (or service providers) themselves are finally getting tired of having their machines spew spam?
It seems to me that at least in the US, that gives us yet another advantage: nearly all of the email I get is from other Americans and will get very little via overseas mail servers. If it comes from outside the US, give it the hairy eyeball in the spam filter.
They don't need to know this particular user. The collaborative filtering system works by comparing your pattern to other patterns. Find somebody (anybody) with a similar pattern and then use their ratings on movies you didn't rate. You can use other Netflix users (which is what Netflix has been doing all along) but you can increase your pool with the IMDB. It makes it more likely to find somebody who has similar ratings to yours overall and has seen some movie that you haven't rated.
Which almost makes it inevitable that people who rated things on both Netflix and the IMDb would be found out: that other person used as your model would be perfect because it's you.
They were hoping that by giving the name of the movie they could pull in other sources of data (RottenTomatoes, IMDB) to make better guesses. They were seeking more than just better curve-fitting of the data points. If nothing else, the IMDb's huge pile of data points of ratings gives you a lot more fodder for your collaborative filter, but only if you can tie in the names of the movies.
But yeah, that introduces a data leak.
Strictly speaking, only Apple shareholders who have owned the stock for that long made all that money. Those who bought in when they thought that the company was more profitable than it really was overpaid for it based on bad information.
Not that I'm happy about these idiots. I really have owned stock for that long and any money the company spends fighting the lawsuit is really my money. But short-term share-holders really could be screwed by financial mis-reporting, and long-term shareholders depend on those short-termers to provide liquidity for our shares. So we can't just dismiss them out of hand. The market needs to be priced fairly.
I'm glad the lawsuit is gone, and I do think these guys are being stupid, but I'm not charging them with ingratitude. I'm charging them with being suckered by yet another one of those class-action law firms who make 80% of the money out of these suits.