Arguably, this has already happened. Just a few weeks ago doctors managed to save a 22-week fetus, which is well before the 28-week limit that the Supreme Court somewhat arbitrarily imposed in Roe v. Wade.
Don't get me wrong; I'm actually very pro-choice. But the difference between viable and non-viable life is getting very, very blurry.
(A word of advice, BTW: be careful with expressions like "The death of the fetus is just an unfortunate side effect" when discussing this with people who don't agree with you. It's sure to launch a major tirade about how cold and callous you are. In fact you ARE being cold and callous; you're making a binary decision to end one life in favor of another in a situation where "life" is very fuzzy. You've just got to be prepared with something morally stronger than "unfortunate side effect".)
It's true that the models are far from perfect, but that's not a reason to dismiss them entirely and assume that all is hunky-dory.
The models are not simply tweaked to prove whatever the researcher wants them to prove. These are scientists making sincere efforts at accurate modeling. If you're going to accuse an entire scientific community of outright fraud you'd better have some serious data to back that up.
Even in the absence of sophisticated models, some things are both worrying and clear. The amount of CO2 in the air is up by a lot in the last few centuries, and it takes only simple experiments to demonstrate that CO2 in the air helps trap heat. In addition, satellite data show increased warming, and the melting glaciers demonstrate a more easily visible model.
None of which proves absolutely that it's human-caused global warming. And it does not absolutely prove that reducing carbon output will actually help.
But it's the best guess we can make, based on the data we have. If 40 years from now the models get more sophisticated and do demonstrate that reducing CO2 output will help, they (we) will wish like crazy that we'd done something about it 40 years prior.
We should not do anything rash, or panicky. We don't have to do anything drastic, yet. But well-chosen measures based on the best available data can make gradual improvements and with luck will avert the need to do something drastic later, and the suffering that will engender.
Since when is "some dipstick believed something they read on Wikipedia" news?
I can't help but darkly suspect that this is mostly about a major newspaper trying to declare, "You still need us". And I think that we do, neither blogs (opinion) nor Wikipedia (rumor) replace news from organizations that have an interest in being first (or at least timely) and in being correct.
But non-stories like this make me wonder if the Chicago Sun-Times is one of those organizations.
It seems like a matter of fair use to me. Looking at every web site and making word indexes is almost certainly fair use. But making exact copies and redistributing them is not fair use. She wrote the content, and therefore she owns it. Putting it on the web implicitly gives you the right to look at it, but not to give it to others.
Potentially, it deprives her of ad-based revenue, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that she owns it and should have something to say about who gets to distribute it. She can't retract something she said; if it's embarrassing then it's out there. But to have somebody else using her content for another purpose just feels wrong to me.
Maybe I'm behind the times in terminology, but I think of "spidering" as looking at every web page by following links. That's not the same as making and distributing exact copies. (Is "crawling" any different from "spidering"?)
Archive.org should work the same way YouTube does: if she sends in a notice saying that she doesn't want her site mirrored there, then they should take it down. Along with a snarky note about how if she'd just put a robots.txt file there in the first place, she wouldn't have this problem.
Mistakes Were Made apology Usually by the guy who Takes Responsibility, in the form of issuing a press release. (As opposed to, say, resigning, being fired, going to jail, paying a fine, actually changing the underlying cause, etc.)
I used to work at a McD's. (Yeah, I'm a professional computer programmer now.) I can tell you that we absolutely, positively did not give a rat's ass about your special order. Maybe the guys over at BK were paid enough to care, but I was working for four bucks an hour. A special order came over the printer every once in a while and we ignored it until it went away.
Probably because porn providers lie. There's nothing inherently awful about porn; more reputable porn providers are perfectly happy to sign up with services like NetNanny.
But there will always be a large number of porn sites which are desperate for any hit. Same applies to gambling. When the service you provide has a seamy underside, there will always be somebody willing to break the rules to provide it.
So PICS doesn't effectively screen out porn. It would be useful in helping you find porn, but not terribly: the same urge that makes people put innocent tags on porn sites will also make them put inappropriate tags as well. You may be searching for particular porn but you'll be flooded with people claiming to have it just to get a glimpse from you.
If you want to keep porn off your computer you're going to have to do it on a whitelist rather than a blacklist basis. You can try graylisting with a content-based filter, and PICS can help there, but it's not going to be 100% effective. And for the people campaigining For The Children, they're always after 100%.
It's a side effect of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Laws such as the law of conservation of energy begin to break down under the Uncertainty Principle: for very short periods of time and in very small amounts, matter can be created from nothing. Immediately the Principle deals with position and velocity: you can't know both precisely. You can combine the resulting inequality with definitions of mass and you can say that you don't know how much stuff there is, either, beyond a certain amount of precision.
What this usually means is that a quark/antiquark pair can come into existence, and then a very short time later (on the order of 10^-43 seconds, called the "Planck time"), they cancel each other out. That's consistent with the Uncertainty Principle: over the long term mass is conserved but within a short enough time you can't measure it precisely enough.
("Measure" here refers not just to what humans can accomplish with a scale or ruler. It means that the precise amount is literally undefined. That's important: it's not just that they're too small to see, as you suggest, but that they are literally undefined. Time and space behave very strangely when you cut them fine enough, and below the Planck time they essentially disappear.)
This would all just be irrelevant, since you can't perceive it, but under very rare circumstances (like on the edge of a black hole) you can actually see the quarks appear. (Well, not so much "see", when it comes to quarks; they're too small.) If the pair appears on the edge of a black hole, and one falls in, the other comes out, free in the universe.
It is possible, under this way of looking at things, that the entire universe could just be a manifestation of the uncertainty principle. It appeared from nowhere as a few quarks that just happened to persist longer than they might have because of an accident of the way they happened to interact with each other in the gazillionth of a second before they would have disappeared.
In which case there should be a bunch of anti-matter out there somewhere, perhaps in the form of a dark energy we can't detect yet. Or maybe it disappeared through some other mechanism we don't understand.
The amount of energy released by fusing hydrogen is immensely more than the amount released chemically. A tank full of water will drive your car to the moon and back if you've got cold fusion going, even if it's only 11% hydrogen.
But if all you're doing is reducing it with oxygen in the air, you're going to have to fill your tank fairly often if you've only got 9% hydrogen in your tank.
Given that the article is five years old, it sounds like that technology didn't go much of anywhere. Maybe they learned some useful stuff from it that will apply to another hydrogen store, but after five years with no follow-up it sounds like a dead end in itself.
But it does show that there is some demand for Blu-Ray discs (or at least, people who think they want one; let's see how many are returned once people realize they can't play them in a standard DVD player).
If it is real, then it shows that format shift from DVD to one or the other format may actually happen. That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Reading previous Slashdot discussions you get the impression that nobody was interested in the new features, especially not at the cost of having to put up with a new DRM format.
I don't think this necessarily shows that Blu-Ray will beat out HD-DVD; both formats are just starting. But if significant numbers of copies are sold of either format, it means that the whole concept isn't necessarily DOA.
For actual communication, yeah, especially today. Slipping in a bit of 1337-speke used to be (a long time ago) an example of linguistic cleverness, which has today become rote by script-kiddies.
Much as the term "hack" used to imply depth of understanding of the internal workings of a system, but today simply means to apply tools developed by smarter people. Part of that linguistic play that real geeks share is the fact that it's constantly shifting as the riff-raff keep moving in.
assuming, that is, that we're getting the whole story here.
That sounds like a big assumption to me. I don't know the full details, but TFA is wide-eyed and heavily slanted against the groups in question. Slashdot spins it as a censorship and Google story, but the article is about how they can "finally" get rid of that "objectionable" material.
It also misspells "YouTube", which is not a particularly difficult word to spell and causes me to doubt the research and editing of the article.
Correct. A non-profit often does participate in commerce, i.e. it sells things to make money. Non-profit status just says what it does with the money, which goes to some stated purpose rather than to enriching the owners of the company.
A nonprofit doesn't even have owners in the usual sense; it has a management and a document explaining what that company does. Any money it makes must go to that purpose. It can sell stuff, and hire employees. Those employees can even be paid quite handsomely, though usually not; the employees of nonprofits often see the public good as their goal and work for less money. Necessary employees, however, like skilled fund raisers, will often do quite well for themselves.
But they generally behave just like any other corporation; they get no breaks on copyrights and have to buy rights like anybody else. The uses of copyright material are with the purpose raising money for some purpose or other: using a copyrighted image in a fundraising campaign, performing a play under copyright as part of an educational mission, etc. That's very commercial activity, even if it's a noble cause.
They never found a promoter who did them any good. I'm not certain why. Like everything else, I'm sure that 90% of them are crap, and that there are many bands pursuing the good ones.
Thank you for your advice. I'm told that it's partly the area they made their home base (Washington, DC) which books more cover bands than indie bands. They also partly blame their interest in rather complicated, non-radio-friendly, non-hook-driven music. I'm not a musician myself, and I don't go to many bars, so I can't really say.
I'm very sorry that this band had to break up. They had extraordinary musical talent, and did put in the time and energy and follow-through, but even in the best of circumstances the odds were against them. I'm sure the musicians will find new bands, and when they do I'll relay what you told me.
Twenty paying shows a month? You're absolutely extraordinary.
I'm serious: I worked with a woman who did your job for a while. She spent the days making phone calls to venues who generally never called back. The band I worked for was extraordinarily talented (download some of their music for free here). They quit their day jobs for over two years. They toured up and down the East coast and as far as Detroit. They had a devoted but small audience.
If they could have booked 20 paying gigs a month, they'd still be in existence. Most venues want cover bands, not original music. The venues have the power and so they get to treat me rudely. I bow before your superior nagging-people-on-the-phone skills.
(It's because of that that the "Hey, give the music away and make it up at the live shows" argument on Slashdot makes me furious. But if you've got the secret for booking venues, please let me know and I'll retract everything I've said about it.)
Right. President Clinton, in this case. A Democrat. You really should make an effort to figure out why the poster is asking a question before assuming they're ignorant.
And they're missing the patent that's relevant to this case: 5341457. Sounds like everybody who uses mp3licensing.com could be in for a nasty surprise.
Good to know. My next computer is going to be a Mac, and I'd really miss the keyboard menu navigation. Windows has had "you won't always have a mouse" built into it from the earliest versions, when computers didn't regularly come with them, and it's something I've always appreciated.
On Windows (as well as MacOS) the operating system also includes a lot of the look-and-feel. It's not just dialogue boxes; it's the way you activate commands, whether menus morph in or just appear, whether certain dialogue boxes are modal or not, etc.
One of the things they mention in the article, for example, is "mouse precision". One of the nice things about MacOS is that the menu bar is always at the top of the screen, so you can be less precise about flinging your mouse up to the menu; you don't have to worry about overshooting. In Windows, even with a maximized app, you have the window title above the menus, so you have to be a bit more precise with your mouse movements. More precise mouse movements take more time, and that cuts into your productivity.
So even identical applications presented on the two different platforms can have different productivities.
From a Linux user's standpoint it's all the same; the OS is just the kernel and the rest of the user interface is up to the user's choice of window manager and the app designer's choice of widgets. There's upsides and downsides to that; more flexibility for the user vs. a common, uniform look that you only have to learn once.
Also remember that "productivity" depends on what you want to measure. I personally use mostly keyboard commands, and like the fact Windows menus can generally be operated without taking my hands off the keyboard, where MacOS is more secretive. There's also the fact that subjective effects can be more important than objective ones: if it feels faster to the user than that may be better for the overall experience, even if it is slower by a stopwatch. Good feedback, for example, can make slow operations seem faster; poor feedback can make an instantaneous one seem to take forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Arguably, this has already happened. Just a few weeks ago doctors managed to save a 22-week fetus, which is well before the 28-week limit that the Supreme Court somewhat arbitrarily imposed in Roe v. Wade.
Don't get me wrong; I'm actually very pro-choice. But the difference between viable and non-viable life is getting very, very blurry.
(A word of advice, BTW: be careful with expressions like "The death of the fetus is just an unfortunate side effect" when discussing this with people who don't agree with you. It's sure to launch a major tirade about how cold and callous you are. In fact you ARE being cold and callous; you're making a binary decision to end one life in favor of another in a situation where "life" is very fuzzy. You've just got to be prepared with something morally stronger than "unfortunate side effect".)
It's true that the models are far from perfect, but that's not a reason to dismiss them entirely and assume that all is hunky-dory.
The models are not simply tweaked to prove whatever the researcher wants them to prove. These are scientists making sincere efforts at accurate modeling. If you're going to accuse an entire scientific community of outright fraud you'd better have some serious data to back that up.
Even in the absence of sophisticated models, some things are both worrying and clear. The amount of CO2 in the air is up by a lot in the last few centuries, and it takes only simple experiments to demonstrate that CO2 in the air helps trap heat. In addition, satellite data show increased warming, and the melting glaciers demonstrate a more easily visible model.
None of which proves absolutely that it's human-caused global warming. And it does not absolutely prove that reducing carbon output will actually help.
But it's the best guess we can make, based on the data we have. If 40 years from now the models get more sophisticated and do demonstrate that reducing CO2 output will help, they (we) will wish like crazy that we'd done something about it 40 years prior.
We should not do anything rash, or panicky. We don't have to do anything drastic, yet. But well-chosen measures based on the best available data can make gradual improvements and with luck will avert the need to do something drastic later, and the suffering that will engender.
Since when is "some dipstick believed something they read on Wikipedia" news?
I can't help but darkly suspect that this is mostly about a major newspaper trying to declare, "You still need us". And I think that we do, neither blogs (opinion) nor Wikipedia (rumor) replace news from organizations that have an interest in being first (or at least timely) and in being correct.
But non-stories like this make me wonder if the Chicago Sun-Times is one of those organizations.
It seems like a matter of fair use to me. Looking at every web site and making word indexes is almost certainly fair use. But making exact copies and redistributing them is not fair use. She wrote the content, and therefore she owns it. Putting it on the web implicitly gives you the right to look at it, but not to give it to others.
Potentially, it deprives her of ad-based revenue, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that she owns it and should have something to say about who gets to distribute it. She can't retract something she said; if it's embarrassing then it's out there. But to have somebody else using her content for another purpose just feels wrong to me.
Maybe I'm behind the times in terminology, but I think of "spidering" as looking at every web page by following links. That's not the same as making and distributing exact copies. (Is "crawling" any different from "spidering"?)
Archive.org should work the same way YouTube does: if she sends in a notice saying that she doesn't want her site mirrored there, then they should take it down. Along with a snarky note about how if she'd just put a robots.txt file there in the first place, she wouldn't have this problem.
I used to work at a McD's. (Yeah, I'm a professional computer programmer now.) I can tell you that we absolutely, positively did not give a rat's ass about your special order. Maybe the guys over at BK were paid enough to care, but I was working for four bucks an hour. A special order came over the printer every once in a while and we ignored it until it went away.
Oh, right, I was thinking of... I can't remember what I was thinking of. Yeah, I'd like to see more of that.
Probably because porn providers lie. There's nothing inherently awful about porn; more reputable porn providers are perfectly happy to sign up with services like NetNanny.
But there will always be a large number of porn sites which are desperate for any hit. Same applies to gambling. When the service you provide has a seamy underside, there will always be somebody willing to break the rules to provide it.
So PICS doesn't effectively screen out porn. It would be useful in helping you find porn, but not terribly: the same urge that makes people put innocent tags on porn sites will also make them put inappropriate tags as well. You may be searching for particular porn but you'll be flooded with people claiming to have it just to get a glimpse from you.
If you want to keep porn off your computer you're going to have to do it on a whitelist rather than a blacklist basis. You can try graylisting with a content-based filter, and PICS can help there, but it's not going to be 100% effective. And for the people campaigining For The Children, they're always after 100%.
It's a side effect of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Laws such as the law of conservation of energy begin to break down under the Uncertainty Principle: for very short periods of time and in very small amounts, matter can be created from nothing. Immediately the Principle deals with position and velocity: you can't know both precisely. You can combine the resulting inequality with definitions of mass and you can say that you don't know how much stuff there is, either, beyond a certain amount of precision.
What this usually means is that a quark/antiquark pair can come into existence, and then a very short time later (on the order of 10^-43 seconds, called the "Planck time"), they cancel each other out. That's consistent with the Uncertainty Principle: over the long term mass is conserved but within a short enough time you can't measure it precisely enough.
("Measure" here refers not just to what humans can accomplish with a scale or ruler. It means that the precise amount is literally undefined. That's important: it's not just that they're too small to see, as you suggest, but that they are literally undefined. Time and space behave very strangely when you cut them fine enough, and below the Planck time they essentially disappear.)
This would all just be irrelevant, since you can't perceive it, but under very rare circumstances (like on the edge of a black hole) you can actually see the quarks appear. (Well, not so much "see", when it comes to quarks; they're too small.) If the pair appears on the edge of a black hole, and one falls in, the other comes out, free in the universe.
It is possible, under this way of looking at things, that the entire universe could just be a manifestation of the uncertainty principle. It appeared from nowhere as a few quarks that just happened to persist longer than they might have because of an accident of the way they happened to interact with each other in the gazillionth of a second before they would have disappeared.
In which case there should be a bunch of anti-matter out there somewhere, perhaps in the form of a dark energy we can't detect yet. Or maybe it disappeared through some other mechanism we don't understand.
The amount of energy released by fusing hydrogen is immensely more than the amount released chemically. A tank full of water will drive your car to the moon and back if you've got cold fusion going, even if it's only 11% hydrogen.
But if all you're doing is reducing it with oxygen in the air, you're going to have to fill your tank fairly often if you've only got 9% hydrogen in your tank.
Given that the article is five years old, it sounds like that technology didn't go much of anywhere. Maybe they learned some useful stuff from it that will apply to another hydrogen store, but after five years with no follow-up it sounds like a dead end in itself.
But it does show that there is some demand for Blu-Ray discs (or at least, people who think they want one; let's see how many are returned once people realize they can't play them in a standard DVD player).
If it is real, then it shows that format shift from DVD to one or the other format may actually happen. That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Reading previous Slashdot discussions you get the impression that nobody was interested in the new features, especially not at the cost of having to put up with a new DRM format.
I don't think this necessarily shows that Blu-Ray will beat out HD-DVD; both formats are just starting. But if significant numbers of copies are sold of either format, it means that the whole concept isn't necessarily DOA.
Or hack into somebody's wide-open box (usually Windows) and run your proxy daemon. It seems to keep the spammers safe.
I'm not saying that Google is some paragon of virtue, but they have money and lawyers.
Now all they need is guns. It would be much more fun and would earn the Warren Zevon seal of approval.
For actual communication, yeah, especially today. Slipping in a bit of 1337-speke used to be (a long time ago) an example of linguistic cleverness, which has today become rote by script-kiddies.
Much as the term "hack" used to imply depth of understanding of the internal workings of a system, but today simply means to apply tools developed by smarter people. Part of that linguistic play that real geeks share is the fact that it's constantly shifting as the riff-raff keep moving in.
assuming, that is, that we're getting the whole story here.
That sounds like a big assumption to me. I don't know the full details, but TFA is wide-eyed and heavily slanted against the groups in question. Slashdot spins it as a censorship and Google story, but the article is about how they can "finally" get rid of that "objectionable" material.
It also misspells "YouTube", which is not a particularly difficult word to spell and causes me to doubt the research and editing of the article.
Playing with spelling and grammar cleverly are also marks of being a geek. 1337speke and puns are examples of those markers you mentioned.
Those only work against a background of correct spelling and grammar. It's not clever to break the rules if you don't know what the rules are.
Correct. A non-profit often does participate in commerce, i.e. it sells things to make money. Non-profit status just says what it does with the money, which goes to some stated purpose rather than to enriching the owners of the company.
A nonprofit doesn't even have owners in the usual sense; it has a management and a document explaining what that company does. Any money it makes must go to that purpose. It can sell stuff, and hire employees. Those employees can even be paid quite handsomely, though usually not; the employees of nonprofits often see the public good as their goal and work for less money. Necessary employees, however, like skilled fund raisers, will often do quite well for themselves.
But they generally behave just like any other corporation; they get no breaks on copyrights and have to buy rights like anybody else. The uses of copyright material are with the purpose raising money for some purpose or other: using a copyrighted image in a fundraising campaign, performing a play under copyright as part of an educational mission, etc. That's very commercial activity, even if it's a noble cause.
They never found a promoter who did them any good. I'm not certain why. Like everything else, I'm sure that 90% of them are crap, and that there are many bands pursuing the good ones.
Thank you for your advice. I'm told that it's partly the area they made their home base (Washington, DC) which books more cover bands than indie bands. They also partly blame their interest in rather complicated, non-radio-friendly, non-hook-driven music. I'm not a musician myself, and I don't go to many bars, so I can't really say.
I'm very sorry that this band had to break up. They had extraordinary musical talent, and did put in the time and energy and follow-through, but even in the best of circumstances the odds were against them. I'm sure the musicians will find new bands, and when they do I'll relay what you told me.
Twenty paying shows a month? You're absolutely extraordinary.
I'm serious: I worked with a woman who did your job for a while. She spent the days making phone calls to venues who generally never called back. The band I worked for was extraordinarily talented (download some of their music for free here). They quit their day jobs for over two years. They toured up and down the East coast and as far as Detroit. They had a devoted but small audience.
If they could have booked 20 paying gigs a month, they'd still be in existence. Most venues want cover bands, not original music. The venues have the power and so they get to treat me rudely. I bow before your superior nagging-people-on-the-phone skills.
(It's because of that that the "Hey, give the music away and make it up at the live shows" argument on Slashdot makes me furious. But if you've got the secret for booking venues, please let me know and I'll retract everything I've said about it.)
Congress doesn't sign bills. Presidents do.
Right. President Clinton, in this case. A Democrat. You really should make an effort to figure out why the poster is asking a question before assuming they're ignorant.
And they're missing the patent that's relevant to this case: 5341457. Sounds like everybody who uses mp3licensing.com could be in for a nasty surprise.
Good to know. My next computer is going to be a Mac, and I'd really miss the keyboard menu navigation. Windows has had "you won't always have a mouse" built into it from the earliest versions, when computers didn't regularly come with them, and it's something I've always appreciated.
On Windows (as well as MacOS) the operating system also includes a lot of the look-and-feel. It's not just dialogue boxes; it's the way you activate commands, whether menus morph in or just appear, whether certain dialogue boxes are modal or not, etc.
One of the things they mention in the article, for example, is "mouse precision". One of the nice things about MacOS is that the menu bar is always at the top of the screen, so you can be less precise about flinging your mouse up to the menu; you don't have to worry about overshooting. In Windows, even with a maximized app, you have the window title above the menus, so you have to be a bit more precise with your mouse movements. More precise mouse movements take more time, and that cuts into your productivity.
So even identical applications presented on the two different platforms can have different productivities.
From a Linux user's standpoint it's all the same; the OS is just the kernel and the rest of the user interface is up to the user's choice of window manager and the app designer's choice of widgets. There's upsides and downsides to that; more flexibility for the user vs. a common, uniform look that you only have to learn once.
Also remember that "productivity" depends on what you want to measure. I personally use mostly keyboard commands, and like the fact Windows menus can generally be operated without taking my hands off the keyboard, where MacOS is more secretive. There's also the fact that subjective effects can be more important than objective ones: if it feels faster to the user than that may be better for the overall experience, even if it is slower by a stopwatch. Good feedback, for example, can make slow operations seem faster; poor feedback can make an instantaneous one seem to take forever.