I've been dubious for years about what good a laptop is if you're starving; but see Doris Lessing's Nobel prize acceptance speech for just how hungry people can be for books even in the most dire circumstances.
How 1996: which is when Bob Metcalfe made the same prediction in a widely publicized column. Metcalfe promised to eat his words if it didn't come true, and at the conference he ran in early 1997, his column was ground up into paste and he did exactly that.
Along these lines, last Wednesday the INquirer ran a piece of mine, an interview with Scott Chasin, CTO of MX Logic, talking about the techniques in use by the spammers (branching out into p2p architecture). Chasin, too, believes things will get worse. And, from the sounds of it, the measures taken by service providers and others will continue to make the Net a far more restrictive place than it was originally designed to be.
In the UK -- and, I believe, the rest of Europe -- there is actually a "public lending right", and there is a collection society that surveys libraries and makes payouts to authors based on the results of the survey. So apparently these countries do believe that authors should be compensated for lost sales due to library loans.
I don't buy this premise, myself -- but I'm not about to refuse the whole £40 I've been paid in PLR in my career, either.
Just ask Margaret Hamilton. After playing the Wicked Witch of the West, she found it nearly impossible to get work doing anything else -- and how many movies/TV shows are there calling for a green-faced witch in a given year? I believe she wound up doing birthday parties -- and you know, she *was* a talented actress.
I suggested something similar to an analyst one time when I was writing an article about this, and he said that in fact although yes, the company can afford the *money* no company that wants to do business in Europe (and Microsoft gets a fair percentage of its revenues from Europe) is going to simply pay the fine and ignore the ruling. They could be held in contempt of court, and greater sanctions imposed, and it could be made very uncomfortable for them to continue doing business.
I (the journalist who wrote the Wired News story) asked both the team leader and the organizer about that (and asked both whether they thought the strategy wasn't cheating), and the organizer said that the problem with limiting each team to one player is that you could never assure that two teams weren't acting in collusion.
I think it's cheating in terms of the original spirit of the game, but it wasn't against the rules of the competition, and both Kendall and Jennings said that in the end they thought the agent research was more important than the competition itself.
I mentioned the BBC's five streaming video channels (UK broadband customers only, but if you qualify see www.bbc.co.uk/olympics and follow the links for live video) in last Friday's net.wars, and have since had email from people around the world including Australia and Scandinavia to the effect that because the BBC bought the "Net rights" other broadcasters such as the ABC and various ones in Europe have turned off their Internet streams for the duration of the Games because they can't guarantee that some Olympic coverage won't be included in current affairs programs.
wg
I wrote about this a month or two ago in my net.wars column
I was at the Berkeley conference with the FTC to discuss this, and what was notable is that a lot of Silicon Valley's biggest companies really hate the way the system is now: they file for the patents, yes, but it's one of those paranoia-fed vicious circles where everybody does because if they don't everyone else will. A lot of them are really unhappy about the fact that the patent system is now held in such disregard by the engineers and inventors and want it reformed so that a patent really means something.
It really depends who you are and where you use your machine. Saying that as a blanket rule is like saying it's a waste of money for people to have health insurance because *you've* never needed it.
Like you, I don't run a virus scanner, and I've never had an infected computer. But I don't have kids playing on my machine (and swapping stuff with friends I have no control over), I am reasonably computerate, my computer is behind a firewall, and I operate various policies that limit the risks wrt email (eg, I don't use Outlook, etc).
But I hsve helped a number of people install anti-virus software for whom none of those things were true. They have kids; they are non-computerate; they use Outlook and exchange email routinely with other people who have all those same issues (one of whom adamantly refused to disinfect her machine); they *cannot*, for work reasons, refuse to accept attachments.
I think it's a miscalculation of risk to assume that the same conditions and risks apply to all users uniformly.
When I researched an article on anti-plagiarism stuff, a friend of mine told me that at her university their student club archived the tests from related classes to help people study. All the professors involved knew they were doing it. Including one professor who nonetheless gave the same test every year.
Not always are professors only going to catch plagiarists who use sources they're familiar with. A friend of mine who is a professor was greatly struck a few years ago by a paper one of his students submitted. It was a sensitive first-person essay about the student's faith, and how the student struggled with these religious feeling when contemplating having an abortion the previous year.
I have mixed feelings about these sites. But an 18yo friend of mine submitted a paper at community college last year that his teacher thought was plagiarized because, he said, the writing was "too good". This kid has been able to write better than most adults since he was 12, and he might not do or not turn in a homework assignment, but it would be more work for him to plagiarize than to do it himself.
The teacher, as far as we can tell, did not submit my friend's paper to any sites, did not do a Google search, and did not even look at the writing sample my friend was required to submit at the beginning of the year. Had he followed *any* of those procedures, it might have been obvious to him he was mistaken. In the end, my friend withdrew from the class and the teacher promised not to repeat the accusation, but the situation was unsatisfactory for all concerned.
The thing is, even having a paper not show up in one of those databases doesn't guarantee it's *not* plagiarized.
YOu can get more details on how he does his work from his pages at shr.aaas.org (I think it is), which have a number of papers and explanations of how they construct the data model.
Agreed, re physical protest. How about everyone shows up with an illegal movie or song burned onto a CD, so people can physically trade the CDs? That would make a very nice visual, as would a huge heap of illegal CDs...
I'm an author (see http:pelicancrossing.net for links etc.) and this sort of nonsense really annoys me. Bigger used bookstores like Powell's and Cody's also sell new and used books together: are we supposed to boycott them, too?
The problem of how to pay authors is real: aside from the very few big names, most authors are in desperate straits, if only because publishers demand so many more rights now and discontinue titles so much more quickly. The attitude among commercial publishers is that a book has sold all it's going to sell after a few months, and then you might as well remainder it.
But I hardly think the answer to any of it is to attack the sales of used books.
This is an interesting point. We often comment about the way online communication seems to encourage flaming and other hasty and ill-considered, ott responses. No one, however, has made the connection between that and the ott response of "the real world" to online communications.
wg
Re:This effectively only applies to intangible goo
on
EU Web Tax Proposed
·
· Score: 1
Let's think for a second: how will a site tell whether you're based in the EU or not? Presumably a) by asking you and b) by checking what domain you're coming in from. It used to be possible, in the days when the NY Times charged non-US users a small fortune but was free to US folks, to defeat the differential registration by coming in from CompuServe or AOL, as the site couldn't tell the difference. My guess is that what will happen if they go through with this mad plan is something similar, so they will wind up driving traffic away from European service providers. Bright, real bright. Or someone will set up an anonymizing mirror service. or something. wg
Do we know for sure that the institutional investors were that clueless? That sounds like criminal negligence (in terms of the due diligence with which they are supposed to inspect the stocks they buy) to me.
Yes, but here's the part I don't understand. The rules stop you from buying the stock at IPO -- but there are no rules to stop you from buying the same stock at 3x the price the next day on the open market. It makes no sense. Of course, all the brokers explain carefully that they want investors to regard IPOs as long-term investments and warn that if you turn over the stock quickly you may be kept out of future IPOs -- but that sort of trading is still going on.
So it makes even less sense, since you guys are less likely to flip the stock quickly...
Slashdot Mirror
I've been dubious for years about what good a laptop is if you're starving; but see Doris Lessing's Nobel prize acceptance speech for just how hungry people can be for books even in the most dire circumstances.
wg
How 1996: which is when Bob Metcalfe made the same prediction in a widely publicized column. Metcalfe promised to eat his words if it didn't come true, and at the conference he ran in early 1997, his column was ground up into paste and he did exactly that.
wg
Along these lines, last Wednesday the INquirer ran a piece of mine, an interview with Scott Chasin, CTO of MX Logic, talking about the techniques in use by the spammers (branching out into p2p architecture). Chasin, too, believes things will get worse. And, from the sounds of it, the measures taken by service providers and others will continue to make the Net a far more restrictive place than it was originally designed to be.
wg
In the UK -- and, I believe, the rest of Europe -- there is actually a "public lending right", and there is a collection society that surveys libraries and makes payouts to authors based on the results of the survey. So apparently these countries do believe that authors should be compensated for lost sales due to library loans.
I don't buy this premise, myself -- but I'm not about to refuse the whole £40 I've been paid in PLR in my career, either.
wg
Just ask Margaret Hamilton. After playing the Wicked Witch of the West, she found it nearly impossible to get work doing anything else -- and how many movies/TV shows are there calling for a green-faced witch in a given year? I believe she wound up doing birthday parties -- and you know, she *was* a talented actress.
wg
I suggested something similar to an analyst one time when I was writing an article about this, and he said that in fact although yes, the company can afford the *money* no company that wants to do business in Europe (and Microsoft gets a fair percentage of its revenues from Europe) is going to simply pay the fine and ignore the ruling. They could be held in contempt of court, and greater sanctions imposed, and it could be made very uncomfortable for them to continue doing business.
Not gonna happen.
wg
I (the journalist who wrote the Wired News story) asked both the team leader and the organizer about that (and asked both whether they thought the strategy wasn't cheating), and the organizer said that the problem with limiting each team to one player is that you could never assure that two teams weren't acting in collusion.
I think it's cheating in terms of the original spirit of the game, but it wasn't against the rules of the competition, and both Kendall and Jennings said that in the end they thought the agent research was more important than the competition itself.
wg
I mentioned the BBC's five streaming video channels (UK broadband customers only, but if you qualify see www.bbc.co.uk/olympics and follow the links for live video) in last Friday's net.wars, and have since had email from people around the world including Australia and Scandinavia to the effect that because the BBC bought the "Net rights" other broadcasters such as the ABC and various ones in Europe have turned off their Internet streams for the duration of the Games because they can't guarantee that some Olympic coverage won't be included in current affairs programs. wg
I wrote about this a month or two ago in my net.wars column
I was at the Berkeley conference with the FTC to discuss this, and what was notable is that a lot of Silicon Valley's biggest companies really hate the way the system is now: they file for the patents, yes, but it's one of those paranoia-fed vicious circles where everybody does because if they don't everyone else will. A lot of them are really unhappy about the fact that the patent system is now held in such disregard by the engineers and inventors and want it reformed so that a patent really means something.
wg
It really depends who you are and where you use your machine. Saying that as a blanket rule is like saying it's a waste of money for people to have health insurance because *you've* never needed it.
Like you, I don't run a virus scanner, and I've never had an infected computer. But I don't have kids playing on my machine (and swapping stuff with friends I have no control over), I am reasonably computerate, my computer is behind a firewall, and I operate various policies that limit the risks wrt email (eg, I don't use Outlook, etc).
But I hsve helped a number of people install anti-virus software for whom none of those things were true. They have kids; they are non-computerate; they use Outlook and exchange email routinely with other people who have all those same issues (one of whom adamantly refused to disinfect her machine); they *cannot*, for work reasons, refuse to accept attachments.
I think it's a miscalculation of risk to assume that the same conditions and risks apply to all users uniformly.
wg
When I researched an article on anti-plagiarism stuff, a friend of mine told me that at her university their student club archived the tests from related classes to help people study. All the professors involved knew they were doing it. Including one professor who nonetheless gave the same test every year.
wg
Not always are professors only going to catch plagiarists who use sources they're familiar with. A friend of mine who is a professor was greatly struck a few years ago by a paper one of his students submitted. It was a sensitive first-person essay about the student's faith, and how the student struggled with these religious feeling when contemplating having an abortion the previous year.
One problem: submitting student was male.
wg
I have mixed feelings about these sites. But an 18yo friend of mine submitted a paper at community college last year that his teacher thought was plagiarized because, he said, the writing was "too good". This kid has been able to write better than most adults since he was 12, and he might not do or not turn in a homework assignment, but it would be more work for him to plagiarize than to do it himself.
The teacher, as far as we can tell, did not submit my friend's paper to any sites, did not do a Google search, and did not even look at the writing sample my friend was required to submit at the beginning of the year. Had he followed *any* of those procedures, it might have been obvious to him he was mistaken. In the end, my friend withdrew from the class and the teacher promised not to repeat the accusation, but the situation was unsatisfactory for all concerned.
The thing is, even having a paper not show up in one of those databases doesn't guarantee it's *not* plagiarized.
wg
YOu can get more details on how he does his work from his pages at shr.aaas.org (I think it is), which have a number of papers and explanations of how they construct the data model.
wg
AIUI, the company has said several times that if it fails it will open the TiVo boxes so they can be programmed etc. without the service.
wg
We have our own media now...
wg
Agreed, re physical protest. How about everyone shows up with an illegal movie or song burned onto a CD, so people can physically trade the CDs? That would make a very nice visual, as would a huge heap of illegal CDs...
wg
I'm an author (see http:pelicancrossing.net for links etc.) and this sort of nonsense really annoys me. Bigger used bookstores like Powell's and Cody's also sell new and used books together: are we supposed to boycott them, too?
The problem of how to pay authors is real: aside from the very few big names, most authors are in desperate straits, if only because publishers demand so many more rights now and discontinue titles so much more quickly. The attitude among commercial publishers is that a book has sold all it's going to sell after a few months, and then you might as well remainder it.
But I hardly think the answer to any of it is to attack the sales of used books.
wg
This is an interesting point. We often comment about the way online communication seems to encourage flaming and other hasty and ill-considered, ott responses. No one, however, has made the connection between that and the ott response of "the real world" to online communications.
wg
Let's think for a second: how will a site tell whether you're based in the EU or not? Presumably a) by asking you and b) by checking what domain you're coming in from. It used to be possible, in the days when the NY Times charged non-US users a small fortune but was free to US folks, to defeat the differential registration by coming in from CompuServe or AOL, as the site couldn't tell the difference. My guess is that what will happen if they go through with this mad plan is something similar, so they will wind up driving traffic away from European service providers. Bright, real bright. Or someone will set up an anonymizing mirror service. or something. wg
I'd have said
The Invisible Man.
shrunk down to one pixel, of course, so as not to interfere with the speed of loading.
wg
Do we know for sure that the institutional investors were that clueless? That sounds like criminal negligence (in terms of the due diligence with which they are supposed to inspect the stocks they buy) to me.
wg
Yes, but here's the part I don't understand. The rules stop you from buying the stock at IPO -- but there are no rules to stop you from buying the same stock at 3x the price the next day on the open market. It makes no sense. Of course, all the brokers explain carefully that they want investors to regard IPOs as long-term investments and warn that if you turn over the stock quickly you may be kept out of future IPOs -- but that sort of trading is still going on.
So it makes even less sense, since you guys are less likely to flip the stock quickly...
wg