I am not entirely certain that the "non-sanitized" version of the game would have drawn flak from legal quarters in Germany. Sure, display of the nazi symbols are prohibited generally but I am sure there are exceptions made depending on the context. For example, you can burn a swastika flag without trouble, or you can wear an anti-nazi shirt with a red bar across the swastika. Quite often in movies and TV shows they use nazi costumes for nazi characters.
That said, I think holding an opinion sould not be a crime no matter how repulsive the opinion might be to somebody.
I am guessing that the smart guy meant exactly zero when he said "numerous". After all, it is not slashdot effect if the webmaster intentionally made the service unavailable.
The summary (not surprisingly for a/. summary) omits a couple of details that give the reader a rather partial picture.
For one, Paul Ohm is an Assistant Professor of law, and although the summary makes it sounds like the linked article would be from a technical perspective, (mostly) it is not.
A quote like:
"Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."
needs a bit of background about the qualification of the person making that claim. Why? Simply because it sounds like a rather technical remark. If some computer science researcher made this claim, I would tend to take it more on the face value, otherwise I would take it with a grain of salt.
Now obviously this statement was not meant to be taken quite literally because the notion of "useful" is not precise. I can get reasonably useful information like "most of the people in my country like to buy branded stuff" or "most people who rent videos of actor X regularly, also rent the videos of actor Y regularly" without needing the underlying data to contain *any* personally identifiable information. The fact that extra data is store is a different thing.
I personally believe that instead of claiming that some researcher has argued X, it can be more informative to actually say what kind of researcher it is who made a claim. Not because only researchers in a certain area can be trusted, but because a little bit of background puts the claims in right perspective.
No need to jump on my throat, pal. Had my reaction been knee-jerk, it would have had a bit more emotional outburst.
First, they have been found GUILTY of willful patent infringement, not just accused.
I stand corrected.
you'll see that MS approached i4i about working together on national security issues and then STOLE THEIR CODE.
I didn't really see that claim in the article you linked to. I might have missed it though as I didn't read it thoroughly. The closest thing to stealing anything, as mentioned in the article, was about MS "pinching the technology".
The only person muddying the waters here is you, because you are trying to paint MS' actions in a decent light, when they are clearly, clearly in the wrong.
You are reading too much into what I wrote. Nowhere did I hint that the actions of MS were justified. Hell, I didn't even hint that patents were a bad thing, just that patents and copyrights were different beasts and it is important to make the distinction every time one talks about them.
That or, the MS Office programmers were smart enough to cover their tracks and that copyright infringement wasn't possible to prove unequivocally.
And how would they hide their tracks and copy code at the same time? I would suppose that they did it by writing their own code but doing things the way covered in the patent granted to i4i, hence patent violation.
They seem to have been caught directly lifting code from someone else's stuff who was relying on that to make money and putting it into their own.
They have been accused of patent-infringement. That means that even the patent holders aren't accusing MS of stealing code directly. Had that been the case, MS would have been accused of copyright infringement as well.
Muddying the differences between patents, copyright, and trademark is part of the reason why debates about "intellectual property" is often confused.
Dan Frumkin, the lead researcher of the group that created a way to "fake DNA" is the founder of Nucleix, the company selling the test for such forgery.
Not that this has any bearing whatsoever on the quality of the research behind all this, but still one would think that such information was relevant to this news.
It's Punjabi. Punjab is the name of a state of India, and Punjabi is the spoken language of Punjab. Also, I doubt that the majority of Indians "stealing" your job speak Punjabi.
Population of Punjab: 24 million approx. Population of India : 1.2 billion approx.
What exactly is the "Cormac McCarthy style"? The article doesn't mention it all. I even skimmed through the paper and all it does it quote a paragraph from some work of Cormac McCarthy.
I can't figure out what his style exactly is, and I certainly would not be able to fake it as the participants were supposed to. And the participants were supposed to not be literary geniuses.
I thought the whole point was that monopoly is bad for the consumer who gets stuck with shitty product because no one can compete fairly and bring better products in the game. So here we are, with a gazillion books sitting there with no one to bring them to the people the way Google is trying to, while everyone else bitches and moans about one thing or the other. Pardon my antipathy to the reasons like being lazy or not being resourceful enough, but at the end of the day I would really like it if those books were easily accessible to me and to everyone else.
Here's a thought: Let Google become a monopoly here. We get a nice new service. Once the service is there others would like to compete. *Then* we can bring the anti-monopoly whip out and beat Google senseless. In the meantime either get off your asses and get something similar done, or stop whining about why Google doing this or that is bad because no one else will be able to do it once Google has a monopoly. We will cross that bridge when we get there.
Actually a particular instance of the traveling salesman problem, involving just seven cities, was solved. The importance was not solving that particular instance in itself but doing it differently; that particular instance would be pretty easy to solve on a computer as you have just 7! possibilities to check.
Re:Wake me when they have something in production.
on
New Nano-Laser Created
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· Score: 3, Informative
damn it! I mistakenly modded you redundant (I was going for insightful). Replying to undo the mod and to earn some off-topic mods probably:(
The pdf comes from the office of international services. It lists the statement about hiring international students as being cheaper, only as an answer to "Isn't it more expensive to hire foreigners?"
Come to think of it, this is more like a specific part of the university trying to encourage companies to hire foreign students. Given that it is the office of international services that is doing so, I would think this is not surprising at all, maybe even expected. After all the whole point of such groups is to sell their foreign students. This is like each department pitching that they are the best.
The document is not saying that the companies should not be hiring americans, rather that if they are not hiring foreigners it should not be because it is more expensive to hire them; it is not.
Mountain out of a molehill if you ask me. Had I been an american, I would have ignored this story.
Before people start suggesting openvpn.. some wise guy on slashdot once pointed out that openvpn guys hijack all your google searches.
I went ahead and installed my own dns server.
If you want to install your own dns server and if you don't know much about it (like me), keep in mind that on linux/etc/resolv.conf needs to specify 127.0.0.1 as the default DNS server. Also, this file is autogenerated when your machine acquires an ip address via DHCP so writing to this file does not result in a permanent change. To make the localhost your preferred DNS server permanently you need to put "prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;" (without quotes) in/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
Okay, the thing with holding onto your data after you have closed your account is a genuine point, but don't you see the "allow app xzy to access your profile data?" warning clear enough? If you willingly let someone pull your profile data then for sure there is no violation of a law. Well either that or Canada has some crazy laws in this regard.
It is annoying nevertheless that you can't select what portion of your profile data is visible to some app.
Perhaps you are trolling but I will respond nevertheless.
India is an amazing country: full of contradictions, and somehow the wheels still turn just fine.
I have been to banks in India where I had to spend the whole day to encash a cheque; the usual routine was to go to the bank, get in the queue and hand the cheque to the cashier, take a token, go home, have lunch, and come back in time to get the money. I have also been to banks that one would consider pretty efficient with every encashing taking roughly two or three minutes despite it being pretty crowded.
The government is horribly inefficient, but some private companies are as efficient as I have seen here in Germany. The point being that chances are that the companies involved in the outsourcing business are not government-owned.
I have heard people complain about the quality of outsourced jobs - and frankly I have no experience about either side of the story - but that is another story altogether and has nothing to do with the fact that the Indian government can't handle issuing voter-id cards properly.
Not that I look forward to being in a huge database, but I am curious how long it will take given that things are so chaotic in India.
Some years ago when the government decided to issue voter cards for everyone eligible to vote, everyone in my family who qualified went to get photographed etc and some months later the cards turned up... with everyone's data mixed up. So my father was not only a woman but the daughter of my sister who happened to be the wife of my mother and so on. And pretty much every family in the neighborhood had their's screwed up as well.
So one billion people and at least two trials.. I would give the program at least 10 years - and that is being optimistic, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
And the parent post is troll because...?
I am not entirely certain that the "non-sanitized" version of the game would have drawn flak from legal quarters in Germany. Sure, display of the nazi symbols are prohibited generally but I am sure there are exceptions made depending on the context. For example, you can burn a swastika flag without trouble, or you can wear an anti-nazi shirt with a red bar across the swastika. Quite often in movies and TV shows they use nazi costumes for nazi characters.
That said, I think holding an opinion sould not be a crime no matter how repulsive the opinion might be to somebody.
I am guessing that the smart guy meant exactly zero when he said "numerous". After all, it is not slashdot effect if the webmaster intentionally made the service unavailable.
If every observatory ever built were using a galaxy as a sort of measuring instrument, then yeah. What's your point?
Why on earth is every article about biotech tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong"?
Potential nitpick, but here goes.
The summary (not surprisingly for a /. summary) omits a couple of details that give the reader a rather partial picture.
For one, Paul Ohm is an Assistant Professor of law, and although the summary makes it sounds like the linked article would be from a technical perspective, (mostly) it is not.
A quote like:
"Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."
needs a bit of background about the qualification of the person making that claim. Why? Simply because it sounds like a rather technical remark. If some computer science researcher made this claim, I would tend to take it more on the face value, otherwise I would take it with a grain of salt.
Now obviously this statement was not meant to be taken quite literally because the notion of "useful" is not precise. I can get reasonably useful information like "most of the people in my country like to buy branded stuff" or "most people who rent videos of actor X regularly, also rent the videos of actor Y regularly" without needing the underlying data to contain *any* personally identifiable information. The fact that extra data is store is a different thing.
I personally believe that instead of claiming that some researcher has argued X, it can be more informative to actually say what kind of researcher it is who made a claim. Not because only researchers in a certain area can be trusted, but because a little bit of background puts the claims in right perspective.
No need to jump on my throat, pal. Had my reaction been knee-jerk, it would have had a bit more emotional outburst.
First, they have been found GUILTY of willful patent infringement, not just accused.
I stand corrected.
you'll see that MS approached i4i about working together on national security issues and then STOLE THEIR CODE.
I didn't really see that claim in the article you linked to. I might have missed it though as I didn't read it thoroughly. The closest thing to stealing anything, as mentioned in the article, was about MS "pinching the technology".
The only person muddying the waters here is you, because you are trying to paint MS' actions in a decent light, when they are clearly, clearly in the wrong.
You are reading too much into what I wrote. Nowhere did I hint that the actions of MS were justified. Hell, I didn't even hint that patents were a bad thing, just that patents and copyrights were different beasts and it is important to make the distinction every time one talks about them.
That or, the MS Office programmers were smart enough to cover their tracks and that copyright infringement wasn't possible to prove unequivocally.
And how would they hide their tracks and copy code at the same time? I would suppose that they did it by writing their own code but doing things the way covered in the patent granted to i4i, hence patent violation.
They seem to have been caught directly lifting code from someone else's stuff who was relying on that to make money and putting it into their own.
They have been accused of patent-infringement. That means that even the patent holders aren't accusing MS of stealing code directly. Had that been the case, MS would have been accused of copyright infringement as well.
Muddying the differences between patents, copyright, and trademark is part of the reason why debates about "intellectual property" is often confused.
Dan Frumkin, the lead researcher of the group that created a way to "fake DNA" is the founder of Nucleix, the company selling the test for such forgery.
Not that this has any bearing whatsoever on the quality of the research behind all this, but still one would think that such information was relevant to this news.
It's Punjabi. Punjab is the name of a state of India, and Punjabi is the spoken language of Punjab. Also, I doubt that the majority of Indians "stealing" your job speak Punjabi.
Population of Punjab: 24 million approx.
Population of India : 1.2 billion approx.
Gravity is a myth; Earth sucks.
What exactly is the "Cormac McCarthy style"? The article doesn't mention it all. I even skimmed through the paper and all it does it quote a paragraph from some work of Cormac McCarthy.
I can't figure out what his style exactly is, and I certainly would not be able to fake it as the participants were supposed to. And the participants were supposed to not be literary geniuses.
If you look at the context, I wasn't replying to "Google *is* a monopoly" but rather to "Google *will be* a monopoly".
Remind me why monopoly is bad, again?
I thought the whole point was that monopoly is bad for the consumer who gets stuck with shitty product because no one can compete fairly and bring better products in the game. So here we are, with a gazillion books sitting there with no one to bring them to the people the way Google is trying to, while everyone else bitches and moans about one thing or the other. Pardon my antipathy to the reasons like being lazy or not being resourceful enough, but at the end of the day I would really like it if those books were easily accessible to me and to everyone else.
Here's a thought: Let Google become a monopoly here. We get a nice new service. Once the service is there others would like to compete. *Then* we can bring the anti-monopoly whip out and beat Google senseless. In the meantime either get off your asses and get something similar done, or stop whining about why Google doing this or that is bad because no one else will be able to do it once Google has a monopoly. We will cross that bridge when we get there.
Actually a particular instance of the traveling salesman problem, involving just seven cities, was solved. The importance was not solving that particular instance in itself but doing it differently; that particular instance would be pretty easy to solve on a computer as you have just 7! possibilities to check.
damn it! I mistakenly modded you redundant (I was going for insightful). Replying to undo the mod and to earn some off-topic mods probably :(
On top of all that fatty food leaves you feeling bloated.
That is why for my short-term memory loss and performance hit in physical activities I prefer marijuana.
The pdf comes from the office of international services. It lists the statement about hiring international students as being cheaper, only as an answer to "Isn't it more expensive to hire foreigners?"
Come to think of it, this is more like a specific part of the university trying to encourage companies to hire foreign students. Given that it is the office of international services that is doing so, I would think this is not surprising at all, maybe even expected. After all the whole point of such groups is to sell their foreign students. This is like each department pitching that they are the best.
The document is not saying that the companies should not be hiring americans, rather that if they are not hiring foreigners it should not be because it is more expensive to hire them; it is not.
Mountain out of a molehill if you ask me. Had I been an american, I would have ignored this story.
Yeah my bad about the name..
And I have no idea why my comment showed up in this story. I replied to the other story.
Oh well..
Before people start suggesting openvpn.. some wise guy on slashdot once pointed out that openvpn guys hijack all your google searches.
I went ahead and installed my own dns server.
If you want to install your own dns server and if you don't know much about it (like me), keep in mind that on linux /etc/resolv.conf needs to specify 127.0.0.1 as the default DNS server. Also, this file is autogenerated when your machine acquires an ip address via DHCP so writing to this file does not result in a permanent change. To make the localhost your preferred DNS server permanently you need to put "prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;" (without quotes) in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
PS: Why can't I see any comments to any story anymore? I would appreciate if someone who has a clue replied to this post about how I go fixing it. :/
Okay, the thing with holding onto your data after you have closed your account is a genuine point, but don't you see the "allow app xzy to access your profile data?" warning clear enough? If you willingly let someone pull your profile data then for sure there is no violation of a law. Well either that or Canada has some crazy laws in this regard.
It is annoying nevertheless that you can't select what portion of your profile data is visible to some app.
Perhaps you are trolling but I will respond nevertheless.
India is an amazing country: full of contradictions, and somehow the wheels still turn just fine.
I have been to banks in India where I had to spend the whole day to encash a cheque; the usual routine was to go to the bank, get in the queue and hand the cheque to the cashier, take a token, go home, have lunch, and come back in time to get the money. I have also been to banks that one would consider pretty efficient with every encashing taking roughly two or three minutes despite it being pretty crowded.
The government is horribly inefficient, but some private companies are as efficient as I have seen here in Germany. The point being that chances are that the companies involved in the outsourcing business are not government-owned.
I have heard people complain about the quality of outsourced jobs - and frankly I have no experience about either side of the story - but that is another story altogether and has nothing to do with the fact that the Indian government can't handle issuing voter-id cards properly.
Not that I look forward to being in a huge database, but I am curious how long it will take given that things are so chaotic in India.
Some years ago when the government decided to issue voter cards for everyone eligible to vote, everyone in my family who qualified went to get photographed etc and some months later the cards turned up... with everyone's data mixed up. So my father was not only a woman but the daughter of my sister who happened to be the wife of my mother and so on. And pretty much every family in the neighborhood had their's screwed up as well.
So one billion people and at least two trials.. I would give the program at least 10 years - and that is being optimistic, I think.
Unfortunately, I have yet to find a single drive to store my whole collection... :-(
Sex drive should be enough of a drive to store all your collection, or at least to try to.