If they opened up the archives, their website would instantly become *A LOT* more useful.
There are such things as libraries, though. The San Francisco Public Library, for one, offers access to a complete online newspaper archive that includes the New York Times in addition to many other papers. The deal is, you have to punch in your library card number to access it. After that, though, you can read, save, and print all those articles that the Times purportedly keeps under lock and key.
The fact that most people don't even know this makes me fearful for the future of libraries.
(Greyhound might be another comparison, and a cursory inspection seems to indicate they don't require it.)
I seem to recall that I was asked to present ID last time I bought a Greyhound ticket. I know for certain that passengers are routinely subject to baggage searches, and not just at the initial point of embarkation. Possession of a weapon or any form of alcohol will get you kicked right off a Greyhound bus.
A scientist will not claim that all alternative medicine doesn't work, he will claim that many don't, that you cannot trust them and that some treatments are detrimental.
I think you're reading a lot into my post but maybe you have done a better job of saying the exact thing that I was trying to.
Yes, but that's not what homeopathy means. No doctor claims that natural, so-called alternative medicines don't work. Modern medicine acknowledges that aspirin came from willow bark, for example. The term "homeopathy" implies more than just herbal cures; read the rest of the thread for info.
They don't know enough and truly are practicing--on their patients. If it doesn't work out, it's "oh well, we did all we could." This would be acceptable, if it wasn't for the unbearable arrogance of many in the medical profession, and their looking condescending attitude towards anyone who tries anything that has not been blessed by the high temple that is the American Medical Association.
This argument completely goes both ways.
Example: I have an embarrassing confession to make. I once contracted a disease called scabies. Scabies, long story short, is bugs living in your skin. Your skin becomes inflamed and it itches. I have no idea how I got it, but it is fairly contagious, particularly if you have prolonged close contact with somebody who has it (e.g. you share a bed). My doctor diagnosed it, prescribed a treatment for me which I used to the letter, and I was cured. End of that story. Except...
Go online and do a search for scabies and you will find all sorts of interesting stuff. There are whole forum threads devoted to it. The cure, which for me was really very simple, does not seem to be simple at all for a lot of people.
It will probably help if I explain something else about it. Like I said, scabies is bugs, and you get welts and they itch. But these are not bug bites, per se. What is happening is that your body has initiated a systemic allergic reaction to the presence of the insects. You're basically breaking out in hives. Often you will break out in areas where no bugs have ever been. And the problem with this is that the cure for scabies is to kill them. Killing them, however, doesn't get them out of your skin -- it just interrupts their lifecycle. Eventually your skin will shed and they will all be gone. But in the meantime they are dead but still there... which means that even after you are cured of scabies, you keep having symptoms... sometimes for several weeks after the successful treatment. So you can maybe see how this freaks people out.
Back to the Web. Go online and search for "scabies cure" and you will find all kinds of people who are very frustrated about their symptoms, which has led them to try all sorts of things:
You're only supposed to use the medicine once, maybe twice. That will be enough to cure you. But some people apply the medicine again and again and never see any improvement. This is not really surprising; the medicine is a common commercial insecticide, which is highly inflammatory to the skin. In other words, they're wrecking their own skin and that's why the itch seems to be getting worse.
Often, the people who claim to have the worst, least curable cases are the people who started off trying home remedies instead of just going to the doctor. "I've tried everything," they cry -- everything, that is, except the treatment that is proven to work. Other people read their accounts and assume they are in the same straits.
You hear a lot of people claiming their entire house is infested with scabies and that's why they keep getting re-infected. This is highly unlikely. Scientists have shown that scabies mites can't live more than an absolute maximum of 48 hours when they're not on a person, and it's probably more like 12 hours. But because these people keep itching, they keep trying to self-medicate and so the symptoms never seem to go away.
After suffering for a while, some people develop theories about their infection. Some will tell you that their fingernails are the worst trouble spot, and that they have to dig thousands of the bugs out from under their fingernails. This, again, is highly unlikely -- a scabies-infected person with a healthy immune system will probably have no more than 10-15 mites on their entire bodies.
So as the condition progresses, out of frustration they try more and more elaborate home remedies. By "home remedies," I mean scrubbing their skin with Comet. I mean
Good point. For those who don't recall, Good Technology has already licensed patents from NTP.
Then again, the patents might be something as simple as "method for indicating that new email has arrived using a blinking red LED on a mobile device." Anyone less lazy than I am and care to look them up?
Unless you only use the CC-BY license (only 60 albums exist in that license), you can't "sync" audio and video legally for free for your own projects. And that's for the CC music we are talking about
This isn't really a comment on your thesis here, but you got me thinking... is there a CC license that basically says, "NO, you cannot distribute my work... you may only distribute derivative works?" In other words, sure, sync my music with your video, put it up on YouTube... make a remix of it... but if folks just want an MP3 of it, they need to download it from me. Might be kinda interesting.
Pascal isn't native code. Pascal compilers may compile the language to native code, but Java compilers can do that, too.
And the way I remember it, Apple ][ Pascal compiled to a variant of UCSD p-Code, which seemed obscure at the time but seems kind of ahead of its time now.
???? He seems to be the only one who got an interesting story at all.
Haha, ohh-kayyyy... so what is his big story supposed to be?
AMD EXECS MUM ON PLANS, TRADE SECRETS
Reporters Given No Tour, Told Nothing
Analysts fear the worst
(Singapore) - Reporters were turned away from a courtesy tour of a factory today when they valiantly refused to sign boilerplate contracts. No further information was given, but some analysts speculate a terrible mystery could be behind it all, with disaster, failure, and moral horror in the offing.
"I was expecting to see some big machines at least," said Tran Minh, reporter for the Saigon Herald. "Maybe one of those big acid-bath things that they dip the silicon wafers into."
Instead Tran, like other reporters who failed to sign the paper at the front door, was brutally forced to snack on hors d'oerves at the courtesy catering tray in the AMD press office, while being excluded from the factory tour.
Reporters who did sign the papers were allowed into the factory emerged 45 minutes later. Many were smiling and asking questions of the attractive, professionally-dressed tour guide. None, however, would speak to the viciously excluded reporters.
"We asked them if they could tell us what they saw in the factory," said Steven Hau, himself a victim of the brutal AMD exclusion policy. "But they wouldn't say anything. They just said, 'Cool stuff in there' -- I'm certain AMD people have gotten to them. They're part of it now."
AMD executives' complete refusal to disclose information leads many to speculate about the future of the company's manufacturing plans.
"Did you see how I asked them if they had spring rolls on the catering tray earlier, and they didn't answer my question? Well look -- they don't have any spring rolls here. None at all. So a few minutes ago I tried to ask one of the execs some details on AMD's upcoming Barcelona chipset and he wouldn't say anything. He just turned his back and walked away. All I can say is, sell off your AMD stock now."
The sheer amount of information not known by the excluded reporters, who were given no interviews and did not see demos of upcoming products, is staggering, leading some to suspect any number of possibilities.
"It could be bad or it could be even worse," said one reporter. "Whatever they've got in there -- it can't be good. Not good enough to sign a paper, anyway."
Re:Wow. You replied without reading my comment.
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AMD NDA Scandal
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· Score: 1
Then, on the second day, when they were in a foreign city and it would be much more difficult to say no, they were asked to sign the original NDA, again.
Actually, according the the article that I read (and that you apparently did not) it was a different NDA. And I re-iterate: If you're a reporter for the trade press and you expect to be let onto a factory floor without signing anything, you're an idiot.
How is that any different than the vast majority of any Hollywood produced films based upon any previously written storyline? They always change the ending and fuck up a good bit of the story along the way and it's part of why watching a movie based on a novel you have already read generally sucks.
Not always, though. The movie "Fight Club" was better than the book. "Master and Commander" took a lot of liberties but was an admirable representation of the source material. The "Godfather" movies were WAY better than Mario Puzo's books. "The Exorcist" was a better movie than a book. There are a good number of stage plays that have survived the trip to the big screen. And then there are other examples -- "The Shining" is an incredible movie, but it's so different from the book (also good) that they might as well be unrelated.
I think the main difference with any of the movies I'm talking about, though, is that none of them were conceived as a "franchise" aimed at the 14-24 year old demographic, to be accompanied by merchandising tie-ins, toys, global licensing rights, fat paychecks for a good hundred studio execs, and expensive catering. Go to the movies to see juvenalia and dumb movies is what you get.
No offense to "Robotech," I enjoyed it a lot when it was broadcast (the Macross part, anyway), but if you're somehow expecting this movie to by anything but a vehicle for Hasbro to pull in some money from grade schoolers, I think you're kidding yourself.
Maguire is producing through his Maguire Entertainment banner and is eyeing the lead role in what the studio plans as an SF franchise a la Paramount's hit Transformers.'
Wait... so one crappy movie counts as a "franchise" these days? No wonder movies suck so bad. They've stopped even pretending they're supposed to entertain people. From the second the ink dries on the contract, it's nothing but keychains and Happy Meals. Screw you, Maguire.
In the UK, and other countries where budgets are tighter, freebies often are accepted. The UK journalists I know who do accept freebies would be adamant that they only accept ones that have true editorial interest and would also argue that it doesn't influence their writing. For the average staff writer that's probably correct - they don't know, or care who is paying for the flight.
In the latter case then that seems fair enough, provided the editor who accepted the package isn't going to put pressure on the writer to spin the story a certain way. I'd argue that the U.S. system is superior, though. I think you would be surprised what a lot of reporters in the U.S. actually earn, based on your comment about budgets, but they're encouraged to pay for their own hamburgers anyway.
Then again, if you're really broke, but your profession is such that people are always dangling freebies in your face, that encourages corruption. If your company has a policy that you can accept gifts "as long as it doesn't influence your work," then in a sense I suppose that can help let off some of the pressure of temptation. I can see it both ways.
Crazy, isn't it? It's almost like keeping all your monetary assets in one bank, or entrusting your retirement savings with one investment management company.
So we're in... total agreement? Or, wait, you think these are good ideas?
And it's not like your bank-issued credit card keeps a list of everywhere you bought something, ate something, or visited an ATM. Who'd ever tolerate that?
Tolerate it? I demand it. It's part of the services that I expect from my financial service providers. If they didn't give it to me, yep, I'd go somewhere else. Good thing there's more than one credit card around.
Re:another example
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AMD NDA Scandal
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· Score: 2, Interesting
AMD sucks, the reporter is a hero, and you can't read (or spell).
Right. The guy accepted a vacation package paid for by AMD, showed up at a fluff PR event in Singapore, then went home without any story at all. What a hero. He better buy a second phone right away, or else the New York Times hiring office might not be able to get through the busy signal.
Re:No technical knowledge? Don't work in tech comp
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AMD NDA Scandal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It seems quite common that executives of technical companies have no understanding of their company's products, and because of that they sometimes have sink-the-company ideas.
I'm sorry, but if I was an executive of a large vendor in the highly competitive tech sector and I allowed reporters to tour my manufacturing plant without signing an NDA... THAT would be a sink-the-company idea.
You don't give out tours of the factory to give journos the scoop on everything you're working on for the next ten years. You do it to create goodwill, spin some big yarns full of impressive figures, give the writers something to yak about at the subsequent briefing/luncheon, etc.
If you go on a factory tour expecting to find tanks full of cloned aliens in the basement, you're not just a bad reporter, you're an idiot.
Excuse me? If I went on any "5-star, all-expense paid trip to Singapore" at a vendor's expense I'm going to be--and I would deserve to be--fired in less time than it took me to write this note.
Hear, hear. I've worked for a couple of different publications in the trade press and we were generally only allowed to accept gifts from vendors totaling in the realm of about $20. Attending an industry meet-n-greet held at a fancy restaurant was often enough to set fingers wagging.
You use an example from the 1800, early 1900's as an example of what Rosa was stopping. Are you next going to claim that slavery was still legal? Minorities were doing all the same things that whites (majories) were doing. But it was segregated. That was the real problem.
Seriously, dude -- crack a book sometime. It'll do you some good.
Slashdot Mirror
There are such things as libraries, though. The San Francisco Public Library, for one, offers access to a complete online newspaper archive that includes the New York Times in addition to many other papers. The deal is, you have to punch in your library card number to access it. After that, though, you can read, save, and print all those articles that the Times purportedly keeps under lock and key.
The fact that most people don't even know this makes me fearful for the future of libraries.
I seem to recall that I was asked to present ID last time I bought a Greyhound ticket. I know for certain that passengers are routinely subject to baggage searches, and not just at the initial point of embarkation. Possession of a weapon or any form of alcohol will get you kicked right off a Greyhound bus.
I think you're reading a lot into my post but maybe you have done a better job of saying the exact thing that I was trying to.
Yes, but that's not what homeopathy means. No doctor claims that natural, so-called alternative medicines don't work. Modern medicine acknowledges that aspirin came from willow bark, for example. The term "homeopathy" implies more than just herbal cures; read the rest of the thread for info.
This argument completely goes both ways.
Example: I have an embarrassing confession to make. I once contracted a disease called scabies. Scabies, long story short, is bugs living in your skin. Your skin becomes inflamed and it itches. I have no idea how I got it, but it is fairly contagious, particularly if you have prolonged close contact with somebody who has it (e.g. you share a bed). My doctor diagnosed it, prescribed a treatment for me which I used to the letter, and I was cured. End of that story. Except...
Go online and do a search for scabies and you will find all sorts of interesting stuff. There are whole forum threads devoted to it. The cure, which for me was really very simple, does not seem to be simple at all for a lot of people.
It will probably help if I explain something else about it. Like I said, scabies is bugs, and you get welts and they itch. But these are not bug bites, per se. What is happening is that your body has initiated a systemic allergic reaction to the presence of the insects. You're basically breaking out in hives. Often you will break out in areas where no bugs have ever been. And the problem with this is that the cure for scabies is to kill them. Killing them, however, doesn't get them out of your skin -- it just interrupts their lifecycle. Eventually your skin will shed and they will all be gone. But in the meantime they are dead but still there ... which means that even after you are cured of scabies, you keep having symptoms ... sometimes for several weeks after the successful treatment. So you can maybe see how this freaks people out.
Back to the Web. Go online and search for "scabies cure" and you will find all kinds of people who are very frustrated about their symptoms, which has led them to try all sorts of things:
Good point. For those who don't recall, Good Technology has already licensed patents from NTP.
Then again, the patents might be something as simple as "method for indicating that new email has arrived using a blinking red LED on a mobile device." Anyone less lazy than I am and care to look them up?
This isn't really a comment on your thesis here, but you got me thinking ... is there a CC license that basically says, "NO, you cannot distribute my work ... you may only distribute derivative works?" In other words, sure, sync my music with your video, put it up on YouTube... make a remix of it... but if folks just want an MP3 of it, they need to download it from me. Might be kinda interesting.
I, too, have often thought that the people who believe you can sustain an economy on exports of "knowledge only" must be high.
"Change name of organization from Islamic Jihad Union to Kittens For Peace."
And the way I remember it, Apple ][ Pascal compiled to a variant of UCSD p-Code, which seemed obscure at the time but seems kind of ahead of its time now.
...which is probably why font designers spend all that time setting up kerning pairs.
You're making me, Ang Lee. They won't like me when I'm Ang Lee.
Haha, ohh-kayyyy... so what is his big story supposed to be?
AMD EXECS MUM ON PLANS, TRADE SECRETS
Reporters Given No Tour, Told Nothing
Analysts fear the worst
(Singapore) - Reporters were turned away from a courtesy tour of a factory today when they valiantly refused to sign boilerplate contracts. No further information was given, but some analysts speculate a terrible mystery could be behind it all, with disaster, failure, and moral horror in the offing.
"I was expecting to see some big machines at least," said Tran Minh, reporter for the Saigon Herald. "Maybe one of those big acid-bath things that they dip the silicon wafers into."
Instead Tran, like other reporters who failed to sign the paper at the front door, was brutally forced to snack on hors d'oerves at the courtesy catering tray in the AMD press office, while being excluded from the factory tour.
Reporters who did sign the papers were allowed into the factory emerged 45 minutes later. Many were smiling and asking questions of the attractive, professionally-dressed tour guide. None, however, would speak to the viciously excluded reporters.
"We asked them if they could tell us what they saw in the factory," said Steven Hau, himself a victim of the brutal AMD exclusion policy. "But they wouldn't say anything. They just said, 'Cool stuff in there' -- I'm certain AMD people have gotten to them. They're part of it now."
AMD executives' complete refusal to disclose information leads many to speculate about the future of the company's manufacturing plans.
"Did you see how I asked them if they had spring rolls on the catering tray earlier, and they didn't answer my question? Well look -- they don't have any spring rolls here. None at all. So a few minutes ago I tried to ask one of the execs some details on AMD's upcoming Barcelona chipset and he wouldn't say anything. He just turned his back and walked away. All I can say is, sell off your AMD stock now."
The sheer amount of information not known by the excluded reporters, who were given no interviews and did not see demos of upcoming products, is staggering, leading some to suspect any number of possibilities.
"It could be bad or it could be even worse," said one reporter. "Whatever they've got in there -- it can't be good. Not good enough to sign a paper, anyway."
Actually, according the the article that I read (and that you apparently did not) it was a different NDA. And I re-iterate: If you're a reporter for the trade press and you expect to be let onto a factory floor without signing anything, you're an idiot.
Not always, though. The movie "Fight Club" was better than the book. "Master and Commander" took a lot of liberties but was an admirable representation of the source material. The "Godfather" movies were WAY better than Mario Puzo's books. "The Exorcist" was a better movie than a book. There are a good number of stage plays that have survived the trip to the big screen. And then there are other examples -- "The Shining" is an incredible movie, but it's so different from the book (also good) that they might as well be unrelated.
I think the main difference with any of the movies I'm talking about, though, is that none of them were conceived as a "franchise" aimed at the 14-24 year old demographic, to be accompanied by merchandising tie-ins, toys, global licensing rights, fat paychecks for a good hundred studio execs, and expensive catering. Go to the movies to see juvenalia and dumb movies is what you get.
No offense to "Robotech," I enjoyed it a lot when it was broadcast (the Macross part, anyway), but if you're somehow expecting this movie to by anything but a vehicle for Hasbro to pull in some money from grade schoolers, I think you're kidding yourself.
In the latter case then that seems fair enough, provided the editor who accepted the package isn't going to put pressure on the writer to spin the story a certain way. I'd argue that the U.S. system is superior, though. I think you would be surprised what a lot of reporters in the U.S. actually earn, based on your comment about budgets, but they're encouraged to pay for their own hamburgers anyway.
Then again, if you're really broke, but your profession is such that people are always dangling freebies in your face, that encourages corruption. If your company has a policy that you can accept gifts "as long as it doesn't influence your work," then in a sense I suppose that can help let off some of the pressure of temptation. I can see it both ways.
So we're in ... total agreement? Or, wait, you think these are good ideas?
Tolerate it? I demand it. It's part of the services that I expect from my financial service providers. If they didn't give it to me, yep, I'd go somewhere else. Good thing there's more than one credit card around.Right. The guy accepted a vacation package paid for by AMD, showed up at a fluff PR event in Singapore, then went home without any story at all. What a hero. He better buy a second phone right away, or else the New York Times hiring office might not be able to get through the busy signal.
I'm sorry, but if I was an executive of a large vendor in the highly competitive tech sector and I allowed reporters to tour my manufacturing plant without signing an NDA... THAT would be a sink-the-company idea.
You don't give out tours of the factory to give journos the scoop on everything you're working on for the next ten years. You do it to create goodwill, spin some big yarns full of impressive figures, give the writers something to yak about at the subsequent briefing/luncheon, etc.
If you go on a factory tour expecting to find tanks full of cloned aliens in the basement, you're not just a bad reporter, you're an idiot.
Hear, hear. I've worked for a couple of different publications in the trade press and we were generally only allowed to accept gifts from vendors totaling in the realm of about $20. Attending an industry meet-n-greet held at a fancy restaurant was often enough to set fingers wagging.
And all your information being "owned" by one commercial organization is a good thing why?
Seriously, dude -- crack a book sometime. It'll do you some good.