How is wearing tinfoil around a badge, and removing it when asked, being "a jerk to innocent guys?" Sounds to me like the confrontation is being caused by typical, officious guard behavior. Nor is it clear to me that he didn't protest the badge when it was handed to him--I don't know where you got that from.
If you read Perens' account, you doubtless saw the UN (according to Perens, anyway) broke a promise not to use RFID cards at this year's protest--presumably in response to complaints last year to the "head of security" or some such. The options are presumably complain again, boycott the conference, or do some sort of symbolic protest. Boycotting in a hissy fit would be acting like a jack ass; complaining has proven to be useless; he chose the last option.
I'm definitely not a Stallman fan (my impression of him is summed up by joking about killing an anti-Free Software spokesmen, then needing to explain to Perens that "he wouldn't really kill anyone.") But this two-bit protest became an issue because guards felt their manhood was being challenged.
Firstly, there is a world of difference between "lesser" and "least". He said lesser. He didn't say least.
Two houses on a street are smaller than the other ones, they are the smallest on the street.
Discrimination makes a lesser contributions than the other factors discussed, it is the least important one discussed.
But, more importantly, you started off by saying that he was completely denying the existence of sexism as a contributing factor
No, I didn't.
Now how does the existence of discrimination contradict what he says? It doesn't. In fact, since he acknowledges sexism as a contributing factor, however slightly, it actually agrees with him.
I'll let you try and figure out whether there's any way at all those two points I raised might be relevant to a discussion of the relative importance of discrimination and innate effects. (Look at both points, including the one you edited out; it'll be easier for you.) I'll get you started: see if they're relevant to a defense of the antithetical idea ("Active and passive discrimination are factors, with lesser contributions from innate male/female differences.")
So if you aren't keen on labelling him a bigot, why have you continued to misrepresent what he is saying?
Huh? I do know insulting words besides "bigot", you know. It should be obvious the label I want to attach to him is "arrogant".
I read what he said. He said there were various problems, and based on an incomplete view of the data announced sexism was the least important of them.
Now take a deep breath read what I said. I never labelled him a bigot, or scum; in fact, I agree the response was overboard. Did you miss that?
My personal opinion is that he's probably a succesful man whose become over-confident of his opinions, even when it's on subjects outside his field like biology or female scientists. So he went off half-cocked, unfamiliar with research on the subjects, figuring he was the smartest guy in the room, and blabbing to a room full of equally opionated Harvard professors, and got called on it. Go figure.
The net effect may be "fine tuning the rate" as you say. What makes this so fascinating is the mechanism is completely new.
Speculating wildly, I suspect it could be more an "accident" than correction mechanism--the correct sequence may be in some RNA reservoir which occasionally gets "mistakenly" inserted in the normal reproduction process. We never noticed before, because normally the RNA sequence would complement the DNA sequence completely. But even this would be amazing, since we don't know how or when that would happen.
I can't quite figure out when this would be especially useful as a corrective mechanism; if it were actually triggered to come into play correct non-adaptive mutations a generation later, it would be mind-bogglingly huge as a discovery.
A third possibility is, of course, a misleading experimental result. That would still be interesting, but only because it made the cover of Nature;)
Interesting thing. People make a big deal out of what he said, yet ever fail to acknowledge that the stats on which he based that part of his talk are emperical.
And yet more applicable empirical facts go against his proposal (for example: otherwise identical scientific articles are rated lower by reviewers if they are given a woman's name; in other ccultures, women test out better in the sciences). Summers himself later admitted unfamiliarity with the overall literature on the study.
I agree the thing's been overdone a bit, but when you collect only a small sub-set of facts which happen to support a pet theory, ignore all the rest, and then pat yourself on the back for being "open-minded", you deserve a good bit of derision.
I expect a long series of posts detailing a lot of thought experiments and speculations on how exactly evolution uses this, many outright contradictory, none observed. Just more Evolution of the Gaps from the Crowd of Lawyer-Wannabes.
Typical. Talk about taking the fun out of cool stuff; a single interesting, but unconfirmed result in one species is used as "proof" that evolution is wrong by those creationists who claim to be such wonderfully cautious skeptics.
And they didn't even need to RTFA to do so:
But up to 10 percent of the plants' offspring kept reverting to normal.
So 90%+ of mutations get through. Not exactly a huge stumbling block for any existing theory.
Fascinating discovery, though, for those who actually care about science. It could have implications in any number of things.
Many posters are missing an important point here: just because something is commercial doesn't mean it can't quality for fair use. The law precedes this section by saying "the factors to be considered shall include." It's not an absolute requirement.
True. I was responding to the OP claim that Google News was non-commercial.
None of the points below, isolated, are enough to invalidate Google's fair use claim. I'm not even sure they are enough taken together. But it seems different from most analogies people are drawing here.
What's presented is merely a thumbail, which afaik is legally treated much like an excerpt.
If you are right, that obviously helps Google. Note that in the paper world however, a low-quality or smaller copy of an image is not treated as an "excerpt."
You're ignoring the fact that Google reproduces only a portion of the work. By your logic, movie trailers damage the market for full motion pictures.
The excerpt defense has no bearing on "market damage" impact assessment. Google News competes with other distributors who pay for content and try to sell their own papers by including an AFP article, photo, and headline; this market must be damaged if these are available elsewhere. The fact Google routes to the AFP site for the full article doesn't necessarily exonerate Google; AFP might prefer that readers get the article from the more lucrative redistribution market.
Whether or not I convince someone that an article is worth reading has no bearing on whether I made fair use of the article by excerpting it. Excerpts in book reviews are a canonical example of fair use, even when they convince people not to go buy the book.
This was a "significance of excerpt" point, not a "market damage" argument. The difference is important: Losing the original author a reader by convincing him the work is bad is fine. Copying so much that the original becomes irrelevant is not.
The more important difference: If you are a reviewer, you create a new work, and use a short excerpt to illustrate your own point made in your own words. (Note the same thing applies to blogs or Slashdot.) The reason this is the canonical fair use example is because it's an exercise of thought and speech, and protected by the first ammendment.
OTOH, Google is not creating a new work or adding new ideas to the marketplace. It's only copying verbatim the the most significant portion of the existing protected work. If I'm an AFP lawyer, that difference is significant. If I'm a judge? Not sure.
I'm betting they'll settle out of court like most cases these days.
Probably. Although, Google News' business model might prevent them from giving a penny to AFP, in which case they may want a clear court decision.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such . . . news reporting
It doesn't put Google in the clear at all. Google is distributing, not reporting.
Basically this clause means that if I want to report that Dan Rather was wrong about Bush's Guard papers, I can. It doesn't mean I can rebroadcast CBS news because I'm using it for "news" purposes.
At least you went on, and I'll agree it's a grey area. Some more responses:
Contrary to your claim, Google News isn't commercial.
Huh? They are part of Google, a very commercial company. "No adds directly on the page" doesn't mean non-commerical.
Only the first paragraph is copied, normally, as well as a blurb picture. That's a relatively small part of most reports.
A picture is usually a copyrighted work in its own right, so it's 100% of the work there.
As for the text, I'm not sure, but the first paragraph is the essentials of the following work for journalism, so it could be argued it's substantial.
[redirecting helping the market] is the real crux that I think exhaunerates Google.
No. The news-producers often make money by re-selling their reporting to other producers (ie, your local paper runs NY Times stories). And definitely so for photos. That market is damaged if AFP stories are distributed free by Google.
There are other damages also: for example, by reprinting the first paragraph, some portion of users will feel that's "enough" information and not feel the need to visit the real site. And Google's product certainly competes with one essential marketing tool of a newspaper: the front page.
The funniest part is that Google already does the same thing with their search page
Not really, there are several differences. Not least of which is anyone can opt out of their search engine.
Overall, the balance may be that Google's usage is OK, but I'd be mildly surprised.
Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.
It's very easy to explain, and it's not even necessarily a "secondary effect" (depending what you mean).
Your standard reductionist scientist assumes every sensation is ultimately chemical, as neurotransmitters or something else in the control chain fire and trigger signals that shout "pain". So the natural assumption, even without an experiment would be that the "placebo effect" is simply that your body produces either more or less of some chemical that causes or inhibits pain.
So it makes perfect sense that some other chemical can influence the whole chemical process. This is somewhat interesting (for getting closer to the chemical pathways involved) and somewhat depressing (because many of us like the "mind over matter" idea, and this is a counter example), but leading a list of "things that don't make sense" with this is super weak.
You seem to have supplied an excellent example on the weaknesses of Wikipedia. When it started out, I expected it to die within a year It didn't. I was wrong. I never refer to it myself, though, because I do not trust it. How could I - even if a friend referred me to your article, I can't be sure of the source when I get around to viewing it.
This seems to be a common worry, but it also seems primarily theoretical. That is, a worry by people like you who don't use wikipedia, rather than those who have actual knowledge of its quality.
Most people don't use wikipedia in a vacuum--we have some ability to detect BS, and make judgements as to the quality and reliability of information after we read an article. The concerns are different, but this is fundamentally no different from using critical facilities when reading a book or newspaper article.
In works like Encyclopedia Britannica and other real encyclopedias, articles are written by notable scholars and reviewed by other specialists. They are comparable to excerpts of academic textbooks and reflect thorough knowledge of the subject. Get over the hype.
I love the Britannica, but you seem to be enamored by the brand and hazy on the content. The articles are written by experts, but are only textbook-like if compared first-year college textbooks. They are written for educated laymen, and certainly do not reflect "thorough knowledge" on any subject.
Britannica is usually better written, and less likely to contain mistakes. It's also more likely to be out of date on any subject and have articles on interesting subjects truncated due to space consideration.
You can pick one; I find both fulfill the function of an actual encyclopedia pretty well.
I think you're a little misinformed--in today's world, it's already settled that not giving the "best treatment available" to the control group is unethical.
For example, in AIDS trials you'll find none of them use placebos except when no treatment exists (such as vaccine/prophylactic trials) or in certain combination trials where one drug of several may be a placebo (though even that's rare these days).
There may be some exceptions for non-health threatening treatments, like painkillers, but you'll note that even most, if not all, of the Vioxx and Celebrex trials in the news recently compared themselves to other analgesics.
So, you have one party that overwhelmingly supports it, and one that is mixed on it. Surely you can come up with a better example than that when trying to show that they're the same!
No, because the "mix" is based on how the pork is divied up, not on any principle. The dominant party gives its members (Republicans) more pork and thus more of them vote for it.
If a majority of congressman had been willing to vote on principle, there would have been no pork at all. This was a move to cut $5 billion in subisidies that resulted in a $130 billion tax cut.
Oh, please, give me a break. Present a *REAL* example of a single bill that has gone that way. If you can't, then drop it.
Try the corporate tax relief bill, just to name a high profile one that bothered me in the last two months.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/corpor at e.taxes.ap/
Whether the parties are essentially "the same" depends on what's important to you. On cultural issues, I'd agree with you. On what matters more to me--broad economic decisions--both Republicans and Democrats happily impose steel tarriffs, add convoluted loop-holes to the tax code, extend copyright terms and generally try to protect the current business models of any large industry. Independent of their real-world rhetoric.
To paraphrase your challenge, "a *REAL* example of a single bill" voted down for too much pork would reduce my jaded cynicism;)
If Mr. McHenry's problems with wikipedia was just that this one article has an error, you would be correct, however, he is pointing out that the problem is endemic to the literature form, and that without a staff responsible for researching and verifying the accuracy of all of the articles, and held accountable for that accuracy, there is no way that wikipedia should ever be used as an authoritative source for formal research.
There's also no way Britannica should be ever used as "an authoritative source for formal research." It, like wikipedia, is a useful reference if you have limited knowledge and want a quick overview.
If you actually want to do something in depth you should be going to actual works on the subject. Not that I wouldn't trust Britannica proof reading more than wiki's, all else being equal. But I trust both a lot, and I'd toss both out if they conflicted with a work devoted to the subject at hand.
BTW, here's how Britannica.com reports Hamilton's birth:
born January 11, 1755/57
Doesn't really give the reader anyway to resolve the dispute, does it?
Unlike ATM, there is no money being transferred... or lookups to financial accounts... or cash being dispensed... or communications across different banks... or printout receipts... or...
Ironically, many of these things actually make it easier to use an ATM confidently.
Each trasaction is being checked by multiple parties, usually more than once. That is, you count your money, check your receipt, and then review the statement the bank mails to your home at the end of the month. And every bank involved reviews as well. Clients and banks are allowed to investigate and rectify discrepancies after the transaction. And despite these checks, there's still a significant error rate (> 1%, in dollar terms, IIRC).
In voting, we want to keep individual transactions secret from the "bank," not give the user a printed receipt, in fact not allow the users to check on the transaction after the fact, but still have 0% error rates.
I agree that overhyping by scientists or sloppy writing by journalists can leave the public mis-informed, but you're argument is very close to saying that accurate information should be suppressed from the masses, because they can't understand it.
There are probably be people who read this and think "didn't they already do that" because they've misunderstood the other techniques used for discovering planets. You're never going to be able to guarantee that someone who only cares enough to scans headlines will come away with actual knowledge. That doesn't mean that this news needs to be restricted to people who work in astronomy departments at universities.
You're confusing science and news announcements. For those of us outside the field (like, say, me) it's interesting to hear about now, instead of two years later. So what if the investigation is incomplete? You can also read about ongoing research and speculation on AIDS vaccines, neuroscience, quantum computing, etc. if you want. Nothing irresponsible about it.
And it's not like the press release says this is certain:
The definitive answer is now awaiting further observations.
On several occasions during the past years, astronomical images revealed faint objects, seen near much brighter stars. Some of these have been thought to be those of orbiting exoplanets, but after further study, none of them could stand up to the real test. Some turned out to be faint stellar companions, others were entirely unrelated background stars.
Worst Puzzle: "put junk mail on satchel". Ok, maybe the three previous steps for getting the fish were somewhat logical, but the "confuse-the-upper-half-of-the-room-robot" step was ridiculous!
I didn't have trouble with that one . . . the game's response was something like "The flying robot catches the Babel fish, which is the only flying junk it can find."
Hmm. Need more airborne junk. As always, you go through your inventory and look for something you haven't used yet. Hey, something called "junk mail"! Seemed pretty obvious to me.
The problem with games based on riddles is how subjective they are: what's obvious to some is obscure to others. And it only takes one that you can't just get to stop the game.
The cruelest trick in an infocom game was Starcross, IMHO, where it let you "solve" a puzzle by using a charge from your gun. Only near the end of your game, the missing charge will dead-end the game.
The plot is much less original than that, of course. I remember a Ben Bova (I think) book from the '60s called "The Dueling Machine" with the same theme. I'd assume there are many long before that, too, though none spring to mind.
You've got it backwards--without patents, the choice is stop developing new drugs or go out of business. All innovation would need to be focused at developing cheaper manufacturing processes, so they could compete on cost.
A billion-dollar-a-year drug is a wonderful success today. However, if lack of patent protection reduces the profit margin (excluding R&D) to a couple %, that means even the the best drugs are producing only 10-20 million a year in profit. Since a drug costs around $300 million* to develop, it simply becomes utterly uneconomical--no company can afford to make an investment that can't be recouped for 15-30 years, best case.
Incidentally, it doesn't even help that much on the existing treatments example I gave. Clinical trials generally make up the bulk of research costs, so it's still too expensive to sponsor the studies that would get aspirin to market.
(*Accounting in the industry can be weird, but that's a reasonable mid-range number for a single new drug. This includes the cost of drugs that go belly-up during pre-clinical or clinical trials. If you exclude these, you can still easily reach $50-100 million per drug, and you're left with no way of funding "unsuccesful" research.)
As some one who actually works in the industry, this is just wrong. If you're curious what would happen without patent protection, there are various cases of non-patentable potential medications which might treat important conditions, but no company will spend the money on trials necessary to prove efficacy because the economics don't work out unless they can "overcharge" enough to make a profit. Without patents, they do all the startup work and other, non-research focused companies reap the benefits.
Aspirin is a simple example--it took many, many years for it's use in heart disease to be studied in detail since the benefits would accrue to everyone, not just the company doing the trial. Meanwhile, various other medications that were generally worse, less safe and more expensive for the same problems were invented, studied and marketed.
The companies (and innovations) that suffer from this are broadly speaking on the generic side (copying existing drugs, manufacturing drugs cheaper), not the companies which are actually researching the latest cutting edge drugs.
None of which means the patent system and related licensing laws aren't occasionally abused to eke out (or rake in) a couple extra years of profit. Such behavior is shameful and common across all industries. But that has nothing to do with the benefits of the patent system itself.
This is just stupid. 1) Last time I checked, the recall was part of the California Constitution, making a recall of an elected official legal.
So? Buying a home is also legal in California, but isn't something that can be done without money.
2) It takes nearly 1 million voters to agree with a recall effort. They have to agree with the assertion that the current administration is doing a terrible job, and take time out of their day to sign the petition to make the recall legal. In no way can you "buy" an election. This is why we have had many recall efforts come and go, and this one being the first one that was successfull.
Having actually raised signatures, it's a piece of cake to get about 70% of the people you ask to sign anything. If you get enough gatherers standing around long enough, you could get a million signatures on just about anything. And if you are willing to pay, you can get as many gatherers to stand around as long as you want.
So yeah, the new election was purchased because one of the may who hates Davis was rich and ambitious. If fewer people hated him, the purchase price would have been higher, but it's still for sale.
This is the first interesting election we Californians have had in our life time. I actually feel like my 1 vote might make a difference.
Glad your interested. The main point of politics should always be there entertainment value. Unfortuantely, I have yet to see one iota of evidence it will produce anyone even willing to talk about issues we're facing, let alone deal with them.
Second of all, there are probably quite a number of programmers in America who would be willing to work for $20 an hour if they could telecomute from the backwoods of Maine so as to minimize their living expenses.
Healthcare, payroll taxes, HR support, etc. all add up. Telecommuting avoids some office costs, but if there's, say, a couple face-to-face meetings a year the company's probably covering travel & lodging costs.
If a company is spending $20 an hour, a programmer might well only see $15 or $10/hour in pay, before his share of taxes. (I've forgotten exact ratios, but 30-40% is probably reasonable overhead). How low do you think people are willing to go? How low should is it healthy to go?
Slashdot Mirror
How is wearing tinfoil around a badge, and removing it when asked, being "a jerk to innocent guys?" Sounds to me like the confrontation is being caused by typical, officious guard behavior. Nor is it clear to me that he didn't protest the badge when it was handed to him--I don't know where you got that from.
If you read Perens' account, you doubtless saw the UN (according to Perens, anyway) broke a promise not to use RFID cards at this year's protest--presumably in response to complaints last year to the "head of security" or some such. The options are presumably complain again, boycott the conference, or do some sort of symbolic protest. Boycotting in a hissy fit would be acting like a jack ass; complaining has proven to be useless; he chose the last option.
I'm definitely not a Stallman fan (my impression of him is summed up by joking about killing an anti-Free Software spokesmen, then needing to explain to Perens that "he wouldn't really kill anyone.") But this two-bit protest became an issue because guards felt their manhood was being challenged.
(sigh)
Firstly, there is a world of difference between "lesser" and "least". He said lesser. He didn't say least.
Two houses on a street are smaller than the other ones, they are the smallest on the street.
Discrimination makes a lesser contributions than the other factors discussed, it is the least important one discussed.
But, more importantly, you started off by saying that he was completely denying the existence of sexism as a contributing factor
No, I didn't.
Now how does the existence of discrimination contradict what he says? It doesn't. In fact, since he acknowledges sexism as a contributing factor, however slightly, it actually agrees with him.
I'll let you try and figure out whether there's any way at all those two points I raised might be relevant to a discussion of the relative importance of discrimination and innate effects. (Look at both points, including the one you edited out; it'll be easier for you.) I'll get you started: see if they're relevant to a defense of the antithetical idea ("Active and passive discrimination are factors, with lesser contributions from innate male/female differences.")
So if you aren't keen on labelling him a bigot, why have you continued to misrepresent what he is saying?
Huh? I do know insulting words besides "bigot", you know. It should be obvious the label I want to attach to him is "arrogant".
I read what he said. He said there were various problems, and based on an incomplete view of the data announced sexism was the least important of them.
Now take a deep breath read what I said. I never labelled him a bigot, or scum; in fact, I agree the response was overboard. Did you miss that?
My personal opinion is that he's probably a succesful man whose become over-confident of his opinions, even when it's on subjects outside his field like biology or female scientists. So he went off half-cocked, unfamiliar with research on the subjects, figuring he was the smartest guy in the room, and blabbing to a room full of equally opionated Harvard professors, and got called on it. Go figure.
The net effect may be "fine tuning the rate" as you say. What makes this so fascinating is the mechanism is completely new.
;)
Speculating wildly, I suspect it could be more an "accident" than correction mechanism--the correct sequence may be in some RNA reservoir which occasionally gets "mistakenly" inserted in the normal reproduction process. We never noticed before, because normally the RNA sequence would complement the DNA sequence completely. But even this would be amazing, since we don't know how or when that would happen.
I can't quite figure out when this would be especially useful as a corrective mechanism; if it were actually triggered to come into play correct non-adaptive mutations a generation later, it would be mind-bogglingly huge as a discovery.
A third possibility is, of course, a misleading experimental result. That would still be interesting, but only because it made the cover of Nature
Interesting thing. People make a big deal out of what he said, yet ever fail to acknowledge that the stats on which he based that part of his talk are emperical.
And yet more applicable empirical facts go against his proposal (for example: otherwise identical scientific articles are rated lower by reviewers if they are given a woman's name; in other ccultures, women test out better in the sciences). Summers himself later admitted unfamiliarity with the overall literature on the study.
I agree the thing's been overdone a bit, but when you collect only a small sub-set of facts which happen to support a pet theory, ignore all the rest, and then pat yourself on the back for being "open-minded", you deserve a good bit of derision.
I expect a long series of posts detailing a lot of thought experiments and speculations on how exactly evolution uses this, many outright contradictory, none observed. Just more Evolution of the Gaps from the Crowd of Lawyer-Wannabes.
Typical. Talk about taking the fun out of cool stuff; a single interesting, but unconfirmed result in one species is used as "proof" that evolution is wrong by those creationists who claim to be such wonderfully cautious skeptics.
And they didn't even need to RTFA to do so:
But up to 10 percent of the plants' offspring kept reverting to normal.
So 90%+ of mutations get through. Not exactly a huge stumbling block for any existing theory.
Fascinating discovery, though, for those who actually care about science. It could have implications in any number of things.
Many posters are missing an important point here: just because something is commercial doesn't mean it can't quality for fair use. The law precedes this section by saying "the factors to be considered shall include." It's not an absolute requirement.
True. I was responding to the OP claim that Google News was non-commercial.
None of the points below, isolated, are enough to invalidate Google's fair use claim. I'm not even sure they are enough taken together. But it seems different from most analogies people are drawing here.
What's presented is merely a thumbail, which afaik is legally treated much like an excerpt.
If you are right, that obviously helps Google. Note that in the paper world however, a low-quality or smaller copy of an image is not treated as an "excerpt."
You're ignoring the fact that Google reproduces only a portion of the work. By your logic, movie trailers damage the market for full motion pictures.
The excerpt defense has no bearing on "market damage" impact assessment. Google News competes with other distributors who pay for content and try to sell their own papers by including an AFP article, photo, and headline; this market must be damaged if these are available elsewhere. The fact Google routes to the AFP site for the full article doesn't necessarily exonerate Google; AFP might prefer that readers get the article from the more lucrative redistribution market.
Whether or not I convince someone that an article is worth reading has no bearing on whether I made fair use of the article by excerpting it. Excerpts in book reviews are a canonical example of fair use, even when they convince people not to go buy the book.
This was a "significance of excerpt" point, not a "market damage" argument. The difference is important: Losing the original author a reader by convincing him the work is bad is fine. Copying so much that the original becomes irrelevant is not.
The more important difference: If you are a reviewer, you create a new work, and use a short excerpt to illustrate your own point made in your own words. (Note the same thing applies to blogs or Slashdot.) The reason this is the canonical fair use example is because it's an exercise of thought and speech, and protected by the first ammendment.
OTOH, Google is not creating a new work or adding new ideas to the marketplace. It's only copying verbatim the the most significant portion of the existing protected work. If I'm an AFP lawyer, that difference is significant. If I'm a judge? Not sure.
I'm betting they'll settle out of court like most cases these days.
Probably. Although, Google News' business model might prevent them from giving a penny to AFP, in which case they may want a clear court decision.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such . . . news reporting
It doesn't put Google in the clear at all. Google is distributing, not reporting.
Basically this clause means that if I want to report that Dan Rather was wrong about Bush's Guard papers, I can. It doesn't mean I can rebroadcast CBS news because I'm using it for "news" purposes.
At least you went on, and I'll agree it's a grey area. Some more responses:
Contrary to your claim, Google News isn't commercial.
Huh? They are part of Google, a very commercial company. "No adds directly on the page" doesn't mean non-commerical.
Only the first paragraph is copied, normally, as well as a blurb picture. That's a relatively small part of most reports.
A picture is usually a copyrighted work in its own right, so it's 100% of the work there.
As for the text, I'm not sure, but the first paragraph is the essentials of the following work for journalism, so it could be argued it's substantial.
[redirecting helping the market] is the real crux that I think exhaunerates Google.
No. The news-producers often make money by re-selling their reporting to other producers (ie, your local paper runs NY Times stories). And definitely so for photos. That market is damaged if AFP stories are distributed free by Google.
There are other damages also: for example, by reprinting the first paragraph, some portion of users will feel that's "enough" information and not feel the need to visit the real site. And Google's product certainly competes with one essential marketing tool of a newspaper: the front page.
The funniest part is that Google already does the same thing with their search page
Not really, there are several differences. Not least of which is anyone can opt out of their search engine.
Overall, the balance may be that Google's usage is OK, but I'd be mildly surprised.
Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.
It's very easy to explain, and it's not even necessarily a "secondary effect" (depending what you mean).
Your standard reductionist scientist assumes every sensation is ultimately chemical, as neurotransmitters or something else in the control chain fire and trigger signals that shout "pain". So the natural assumption, even without an experiment would be that the "placebo effect" is simply that your body produces either more or less of some chemical that causes or inhibits pain.
So it makes perfect sense that some other chemical can influence the whole chemical process. This is somewhat interesting (for getting closer to the chemical pathways involved) and somewhat depressing (because many of us like the "mind over matter" idea, and this is a counter example), but leading a list of "things that don't make sense" with this is super weak.
If nothing fundamentally changes, you'll notice the shortcomings of WP pretty soon.
Are you basing your arguments on a faith that it will get bad, rather than what it currently is?
You may be right, but that's hardly a compelling argument.
I might be mistaken and WP is turned over to an independent body. But will the WP admins cease control easily?
Isn't WP already an independent body? Who are they beholden to?
You seem to have supplied an excellent example on the weaknesses of Wikipedia.
When it started out, I expected it to die within a year It didn't. I was wrong.
I never refer to it myself, though, because I do not trust it. How could I - even if a friend referred me to your article, I can't be sure of the source when I get around to viewing it.
This seems to be a common worry, but it also seems primarily theoretical. That is, a worry by people like you who don't use wikipedia, rather than those who have actual knowledge of its quality.
Most people don't use wikipedia in a vacuum--we have some ability to detect BS, and make judgements as to the quality and reliability of information after we read an article. The concerns are different, but this is fundamentally no different from using critical facilities when reading a book or newspaper article.
In works like Encyclopedia Britannica and other real encyclopedias, articles are written by notable scholars and reviewed by other specialists. They are comparable to excerpts of academic textbooks and reflect thorough knowledge of the subject. Get over the hype.
I love the Britannica, but you seem to be enamored by the brand and hazy on the content. The articles are written by experts, but are only textbook-like if compared first-year college textbooks. They are written for educated laymen, and certainly do not reflect "thorough knowledge" on any subject.
Britannica is usually better written, and less likely to contain mistakes. It's also more likely to be out of date on any subject and have articles on interesting subjects truncated due to space consideration.
You can pick one; I find both fulfill the function of an actual encyclopedia pretty well.
I think you're a little misinformed--in today's world, it's already settled that not giving the "best treatment available" to the control group is unethical.
For example, in AIDS trials you'll find none of them use placebos except when no treatment exists (such as vaccine/prophylactic trials) or in certain combination trials where one drug of several may be a placebo (though even that's rare these days).
There may be some exceptions for non-health threatening treatments, like painkillers, but you'll note that even most, if not all, of the Vioxx and Celebrex trials in the news recently compared themselves to other analgesics.
So, you have one party that overwhelmingly supports it, and one that is mixed on it. Surely you can come up with a better example than that when trying to show that they're the same!
No, because the "mix" is based on how the pork is divied up, not on any principle. The dominant party gives its members (Republicans) more pork and thus more of them vote for it.
If a majority of congressman had been willing to vote on principle, there would have been no pork at all. This was a move to cut $5 billion in subisidies that resulted in a $130 billion tax cut.
Oh, please, give me a break. Present a *REAL* example of a single bill that has gone that way. If you can't, then drop it.
r at e.taxes.ap/
;)
Try the corporate tax relief bill, just to name a high profile one that bothered me in the last two months.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/corpo
Whether the parties are essentially "the same" depends on what's important to you. On cultural issues, I'd agree with you. On what matters more to me--broad economic decisions--both Republicans and Democrats happily impose steel tarriffs, add convoluted loop-holes to the tax code, extend copyright terms and generally try to protect the current business models of any large industry. Independent of their real-world rhetoric.
To paraphrase your challenge, "a *REAL* example of a single bill" voted down for too much pork would reduce my jaded cynicism
If Mr. McHenry's problems with wikipedia was just that this one article has an error, you would be correct, however, he is pointing out that the problem is endemic to the literature form, and that without a staff responsible for researching and verifying the accuracy of all of the articles, and held accountable for that accuracy, there is no way that wikipedia should ever be used as an authoritative source for formal research.
There's also no way Britannica should be ever used as "an authoritative source for formal research." It, like wikipedia, is a useful reference if you have limited knowledge and want a quick overview.
If you actually want to do something in depth you should be going to actual works on the subject. Not that I wouldn't trust Britannica proof reading more than wiki's, all else being equal. But I trust both a lot, and I'd toss both out if they conflicted with a work devoted to the subject at hand.
BTW, here's how Britannica.com reports Hamilton's birth:
born January 11, 1755/57
Doesn't really give the reader anyway to resolve the dispute, does it?
Unlike ATM, ...
there is no money being transferred...
or lookups to financial accounts...
or cash being dispensed...
or communications across different banks...
or printout receipts...
or
Ironically, many of these things actually make it easier to use an ATM confidently.
Each trasaction is being checked by multiple parties, usually more than once. That is, you count your money, check your receipt, and then review the statement the bank mails to your home at the end of the month. And every bank involved reviews as well. Clients and banks are allowed to investigate and rectify discrepancies after the transaction. And despite these checks, there's still a significant error rate (> 1%, in dollar terms, IIRC).
In voting, we want to keep individual transactions secret from the "bank," not give the user a printed receipt, in fact not allow the users to check on the transaction after the fact, but still have 0% error rates.
Good luck.
I agree that overhyping by scientists or sloppy writing by journalists can leave the public mis-informed, but you're argument is very close to saying that accurate information should be suppressed from the masses, because they can't understand it.
There are probably be people who read this and think "didn't they already do that" because they've misunderstood the other techniques used for discovering planets. You're never going to be able to guarantee that someone who only cares enough to scans headlines will come away with actual knowledge. That doesn't mean that this news needs to be restricted to people who work in astronomy departments at universities.
You're confusing science and news announcements. For those of us outside the field (like, say, me) it's interesting to hear about now, instead of two years later. So what if the investigation is incomplete? You can also read about ongoing research and speculation on AIDS vaccines, neuroscience, quantum computing, etc. if you want. Nothing irresponsible about it.
And it's not like the press release says this is certain:
The definitive answer is now awaiting further observations.
On several occasions during the past years, astronomical images revealed faint objects, seen near much brighter stars. Some of these have been thought to be those of orbiting exoplanets, but after further study, none of them could stand up to the real test. Some turned out to be faint stellar companions, others were entirely unrelated background stars.
Worst Puzzle: "put junk mail on satchel". Ok, maybe the three previous steps for getting the fish were somewhat logical, but the "confuse-the-upper-half-of-the-room-robot" step was ridiculous!
I didn't have trouble with that one . . . the game's response was something like "The flying robot catches the Babel fish, which is the only flying junk it can find."
Hmm. Need more airborne junk. As always, you go through your inventory and look for something you haven't used yet. Hey, something called "junk mail"! Seemed pretty obvious to me.
The problem with games based on riddles is how subjective they are: what's obvious to some is obscure to others. And it only takes one that you can't just get to stop the game.
The cruelest trick in an infocom game was Starcross, IMHO, where it let you "solve" a puzzle by using a charge from your gun. Only near the end of your game, the missing charge will dead-end the game.
And I never made any headway in Suspect.
The plot is much less original than that, of course. I remember a Ben Bova (I think) book from the '60s called "The Dueling Machine" with the same theme. I'd assume there are many long before that, too, though none spring to mind.
You've got it backwards--without patents, the choice is stop developing new drugs or go out of business. All innovation would need to be focused at developing cheaper manufacturing processes, so they could compete on cost.
A billion-dollar-a-year drug is a wonderful success today. However, if lack of patent protection reduces the profit margin (excluding R&D) to a couple %, that means even the the best drugs are producing only 10-20 million a year in profit. Since a drug costs around $300 million* to develop, it simply becomes utterly uneconomical--no company can afford to make an investment that can't be recouped for 15-30 years, best case.
Incidentally, it doesn't even help that much on the existing treatments example I gave. Clinical trials generally make up the bulk of research costs, so it's still too expensive to sponsor the studies that would get aspirin to market.
(*Accounting in the industry can be weird, but that's a reasonable mid-range number for a single new drug. This includes the cost of drugs that go belly-up during pre-clinical or clinical trials. If you exclude these, you can still easily reach $50-100 million per drug, and you're left with no way of funding "unsuccesful" research.)
As some one who actually works in the industry, this is just wrong. If you're curious what would happen without patent protection, there are various cases of non-patentable potential medications which might treat important conditions, but no company will spend the money on trials necessary to prove efficacy because the economics don't work out unless they can "overcharge" enough to make a profit. Without patents, they do all the startup work and other, non-research focused companies reap the benefits.
Aspirin is a simple example--it took many, many years for it's use in heart disease to be studied in detail since the benefits would accrue to everyone, not just the company doing the trial. Meanwhile, various other medications that were generally worse, less safe and more expensive for the same problems were invented, studied and marketed.
The companies (and innovations) that suffer from this are broadly speaking on the generic side (copying existing drugs, manufacturing drugs cheaper), not the companies which are actually researching the latest cutting edge drugs.
None of which means the patent system and related licensing laws aren't occasionally abused to eke out (or rake in) a couple extra years of profit. Such behavior is shameful and common across all industries. But that has nothing to do with the benefits of the patent system itself.
This is just stupid.
1) Last time I checked, the recall was part of the California Constitution, making a recall of an elected official legal.
So? Buying a home is also legal in California, but isn't something that can be done without money.
2) It takes nearly 1 million voters to agree with a recall effort. They have to agree with the assertion that the current administration is doing a terrible job, and take time out of their day to sign the petition to make the recall legal. In no way can you "buy" an election. This is why we have had many recall efforts come and go, and this one being the first one that was successfull.
Having actually raised signatures, it's a piece of cake to get about 70% of the people you ask to sign anything. If you get enough gatherers standing around long enough, you could get a million signatures on just about anything. And if you are willing to pay, you can get as many gatherers to stand around as long as you want.
So yeah, the new election was purchased because one of the may who hates Davis was rich and ambitious. If fewer people hated him, the purchase price would have been higher, but it's still for sale.
This is the first interesting election we Californians have had in our life time.
I actually feel like my 1 vote might make a difference.
Glad your interested. The main point of politics should always be there entertainment value. Unfortuantely, I have yet to see one iota of evidence it will produce anyone even willing to talk about issues we're facing, let alone deal with them.
Second of all, there are probably quite a number of programmers in America who would be willing to work for $20 an hour if they could telecomute from the backwoods of Maine so as to minimize their living expenses.
Healthcare, payroll taxes, HR support, etc. all add up. Telecommuting avoids some office costs, but if there's, say, a couple face-to-face meetings a year the company's probably covering travel & lodging costs.
If a company is spending $20 an hour, a programmer might well only see $15 or $10/hour in pay, before his share of taxes. (I've forgotten exact ratios, but 30-40% is probably reasonable overhead). How low do you think people are willing to go? How low should is it healthy to go?