The quote was indeed used in the computer game Civilization IV for the fascism civic, but it originates from Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and has been associated with fascism in general and Nazism in particular ever since the German defeat that ended World War II in Europe and the subsequent revelations of the discrepancies between what the German people were told and what actually occurred. Although, some have argued that they (the German people) knew or should have known what was really going on and that they chose to do nothing out of apathy, general despair, and fear. The quote is still important today because it serves as both a reminder of the past and a warning to future generations that it could all happen again if we do not remain vigilant. I was aware of the quote before I ever played Civilization IV and I suspect that many others were as well since the quote is often repeated in biographical and historical information concerning World War II.
You mean Jerry Bruckheimer right? It sounds like his kind of film...lots of explosions and mind numbing dialog combined with nauseating, obvious, and clichéd plot developments.
shouldn't you have the OTHER people follow his lead, rather than fire him?
The incentives of the middle manager can be perverse sometimes. The too-smart-for-his-own-good salesman may attract the attention of higher-ups and become a potential threat to the middle manager. The middle manager reacts by eliminating a perceived threat (i.e someone who performs better and is more productive than they are) before it is too late for them to act. The middle manager typically wants to improve overall performance by raising the productivity of each worker an equally incremental amount not by having rising stars in sales steal his thunder when it comes time for promotions.
As a high-school Senior who's been required to use this since my Sophomore year, I know how it works, and it's nothing like that: the teacher only checks the marked paper (e.g. what sections TurnItIn thinks are plagarized); the student is the one that submits the paper, through their account, to the service. Usually, said submitting is a requirement to actually receive any credit for the paper.
It may be the case that you have a more enlightened instructor, but one can certainly imagine that some instructors, once they see that Turnitin has flagged the paper, will automatically fail the student for plagiarism simply because Turnitin says so. The onus is then upon the student to *prove* that their paper was not plagiarized, but the process that Turnitin uses to mark ones' paper is proprietary and not open to review. This would be the equivalent of being charged with a crime in a secret court where you are not allowed to see the evidence or hear the witness testimony against you and are presumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Also, it is possible, once the database is large enough, that just about every possible way to write a paper, especially on common academic subjects (which come up all the time in lower division humanities and writing courses), is covered and that *everyone* must therefore be plagiarizing (at least according to Turnitin that is). The fact that the student submits the paper does not in any way enhance the fairness of the system, it all depends upon the instructor and how they apply the tool.
I don't think the fair use defense is going to hold water.
I agree...The courts have ruled in several different cases (not a legal scholar so unable to site the specific cases) that copying of an original work (article, essay, book, etc...), or even a critical portion thereof (as demonstrated with Gerald Ford's book concerning the Nixon Pardon), exactly as it was presented in the original work, even for purposes of subsequent commentary, still constitutes infringement of copyright and is not protected under fair use. In addition, due to the efforts of the RIAA over the years, it does not matter if one intends to "redistribute" the work or not (i.e. a copy made to share with your friends for free or even one made for personal use, as in the mixed tape for example), it is *still* copyright infringement. It should be noted that the courts have left it purposefully ambiguous so that each case is decided separately by a judge, but the precedents are strongly against Turnitin for maintaining whole copies of student papers, if indeed that is what they do (cryptographic hashing may be an interesting question if that is also going on), in their database and it doesn't matter if they show those papers to anyone or not, the very fact that there are copies in the database is enough to trigger copyright.
a for-profit service, who is obviously deriving some economic benefit by using somebody else's copyrighted paper (by adding it to their database) is probably not going to qualify.
Absolutely...this only adds to the prejudice that any reasonable judge would have against their fair use defense, especially in light of the reasons stated above.
I actually wouldn't mind if it was covered under Fair Use, because I think that's something we could really do with broadening, but the law as written today wouldn't cover it.
Perhaps the RIAA will actually write a "friend of the court" brief in support of the students to prevent that from happening (they wouldn't want that type of fair use precedent established in the common law). They say that litigation often makes for some strange bedfellows after all.
Now, what I think will happen, is that Turnitin will advise its clients (schools, universities, etc.) that in order to use the service, they must obtain a release from students that includes permission to upload the files. This way, they'll just offload the responsibility for copyright infringement off on the schools, who will just force students to release their work, or refuse to give them a grade.
I am not sure if the students can be compelled to do that since it could be argued that they entered into the contract under duress of not getting a grade and thus a degree. Even if this is effective, it would only prevent future claims, but the ones currently working their way through the system would still be valid and thanks to the RIAA the price per infringement is quite high, on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringement which could make for a fairly spectacular judgment or at least a hefty settlement (bye bye student loans).
I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever.
Contract law is not omnipotent, if they make the contract overly broad then the contract can be dissolved by the courts or at the very least, assuming the contract is well written, the offending parts could be severed from the agreement (the court decides which language is struck) and dissolved while leaving the remainder of the contract, if anything does remain, intact.
But I think the students in the Turnitin case, have just as much if not more grounds than the plaintiffs in the similar cases of book publishers vs. Google. (Actually, I think Google has a much better Fair Use defense than Turnitin does.)
Actually, stopping when you feel better is a pretty good idea. The bug is gone, and the body will take care of the rest. The more time you expose organisms to antibiotics, the more time they have to adapt to it.
Actually not, the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance do not always grant immunity in an all or nothing fashion depending upon the type of immunity that the bacterium develop so it is better to use ALL of the prescribed medication so that even partially resistant bacteria are still killed and all of the bacteria, between your immune system and the antibiotic, are definitely disposed of. Patients are a terrible judge of when an infection has actually been cleared or under control by their immune systems so it is also best not to leave anything up to chance.
They aren't happy unless they walk out with a piece of paper or a bottle of pills in their hand. If you don't give them what they want, they walk out grumbling and go to the next doctor.
The doctors should be able to have the pharmacies call them to check whether they should give the patient the real drug or just a placebo. That way the patient gets a bottle of pills in either case, the infection runs its course and the patient gets better, but only the doctor knows that the person w/the virus just took placebo pills because the REAL antibiotics wouldn't have done anything for their viral infection anyway. Failing this the doctor could prescribe an older and CHEAPER (patients love cheaper) generic antibiotic which isn't effective anyway so it doesn't matter now if a few more people take it when they don't really have to. Paternalistic you say? Perhaps, but doctors have a responsibility to the population at large and preserve the future efficacy of powerful antibiotics, not just placate the patient at hand.
Mod the parent up...this is a good point. If Microsoft starts serving all of the doubleclick ads from their domains then it will become more difficult to filter them, although AdBlock could probably still do it using regular expressions on the http elements in the pages, but they could always randomize those if they haven't already. This could be a very bad day for ad filtering admins and their users.
Yeah, but they keep changing their domains from ad1.doubleclick to ad2.doubleclick or some such combinations to try and stay one step ahead of the host file blockers. This would not get by a regular expression of course, but the windows hosts system does not support regular expression based filtering. Fortunately, AdBlock does support regular expression based filtering and it manages to keep double click out despite the games they try to play.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if DCs in Siberia were going to attempt to do this also, provided that Siberia is truly that cold.
I have never been there personally, but by all accounts from Napoleon onwards the Russian winters, and Siberia winters in particular, are bitterly cold.
BTW: to expand on your efficient building design ideas I was just thinking that maybe instead of using all of the heat from the servers to preheat their own cooling air, you could shunt some of that heat into a Sterling Engine instead. It would be inefficient yes, but at least some of the waste heat from the servers combined with the temperature differential from outside could be recovered from the sterling engine and recycled through the system to reduce the external electricity needs somewhat. Maybe, it wouldn't be worth it, but it could be looked into at least.
No, the primary reason is a legacy of colonialism and exploitation from the age of European empires.
It is true that colonialism was, on the whole, more harmful than beneficial to those formal colonies which are now independent nations. However, it is also true to say that not everything about colonialism was necessarily a bad thing. The railroads, port facilities, and other colonial improvements made by the British throughout their former empire, notably in India, were reverted to the ownership of the newly independent nations and that windfall of improved infrastructure did partly compensate for the less desirable effects of colonialism in that the new nations began with something of a head start with regard to roads, ports, government buildings, railroads and the like.
However, even when the negative effects are accounted for, and most nations are now 50 years out from their colonial pasts, it does not fully explain why these now independent nations have failed to seize the day and produce for their citizens 50 years of economic growth and progress that was, in theory at least, possible once the colonialism ended.
In fact, modern third-world governments do a fine job of protecting property rights - of multinational corporations. It's actual citizens who lose out.
I would compare this with the dictator offering a good friend or family member, or indeed a foreigner with money to spend, special privileges that fall outside of the laws of that country or not covered by those laws because of the power of the dictator. This is not the same thing as an impartial and independent judiciary enforcing the private property rights of multinational corporations within the framework of the rule of laws. It should not therefore be used as an argument against the efficacy of protecting property rights in per se since it it in fact nothing more than the will of the dictator dressed up in words like "protecting the legitimate property rights", "freedom", and "democracy".
Then property becomes a tool for hoarding the resources of the planet, for concentrating control of capital into the hands of a state-backed owning and ruling class, then we need to realize that ideas that can usefully be applied to guitars, cannot necessarily be usefully applied to large tracts of land, natural resources, or ideas - and certainly not to shares in control of, and profit from, the actions of immortal fictitious citizens created by government fiat.
I suppose that this simply comes down to a basic disagreement on the means to best achieve the same goals. We both of us agree that we would like to own some land with a dwelling and perhaps a car and other personal possessions and amenities of our choosing, but we disagree on the best means to achieve those goals. If you believe that everyone should have an equal share of a smaller total pie then by all means vote for government control of markets and capital and we will all be equal in our misery. On the other hand if you believe in yourself and the rights of yourself in others to invest your capital in business and to work to increase that capital without the government swooping in and confiscating the fruits of your labor at whim then you should not be against the sort of concentration of capital that tends to occur in the later rather than the former system. If private property works for your guitar then why should it not work equally well for say generation of electricity or steel or other more "vital" industries, what Lenin called, the "Commanding Heights" of the economy? The answer is that it does and should not therefore be restricted. In fact, the only industry where the government should maintain complete monopsony control is in the defense industry. The history of the twentieth century proved these assertions conclusively with the collapse of communism and the abandonment by China of any pretense of Marxist economic policies.
This whole issue touches on a problem that I and others have long perceived with our current legal system and that is the presence of thousands of laws, most of which the average citizen is completely unaware of, that proscribe strict penalties for activities that well meaning and good intentioned citizens engage in on a regular basis (i.e. selling the sandwich to the personal on the "no fly list"). The unwritten rule, of course, is that these laws are invoked only as part of a larger prosecution when the state wants to, "throw the book", at someone, but there is always the threat that they *could* suddenly become arbitrarily enforced on otherwise law abiding citizens to which the authorities only offer the rather weak assurance of, "Trust us, we wouldn't do that to you. This law only applies to criminals." However, recent experience has given even the honest among us pause when that assurance is offered. The other problem inherent to these types of laws is that they engender a lesser respect for the law in general among the population due to the perceived arbitrary nature of the enforcement and that is a very dangerous road to go down for the sake of catching a few more criminals and, "throwing the book at them". The irony here is that through our continued attempts to "get tough on crime" we are increasingly sanctioning ourselves for living normal law abiding lives.
I always like to point out that corporations are chartered by the government; discussion of reducing government power to interfere in the marketplace should start with the revokation of most corporate charters (along with government-issued copyrights, patents, and land and resource deeds).
What utter nonsense. Have you ever wondered why the third world is poor compared to the first world? Is it because their share of inherently intelligent people is less? Certainly not. Is it because they are not able to grow their own crops or produce their own goods and services? No. The primary reason that the third world is not the first world is because the governments of the third world fail miserably at defining and protecting private property rights. You are suggesting that we should remove from our legal framework the very structures that permit us to define and adjudicate those property rights most efficiently. The corporation is responsible for the economic growth of the last three hundred years and if not for that then you and I would probably still be subsistence vegetable farming serfs working for some fuedal overlord or dictator. Do you really want to live in a society where the family members of the dictator are the only ones who get access to profitable businesses and where the rule of the strong is the rule of the day?
The government does not "interfere" in the marketplace by allowing certain legal constructs to exist that facilitate its role in adjudicating private property disputes through the civil judicial system. That is a completely necessary and proper function of government. This is a common argument offered by liberals against the libertarians and it is completely falacious. However, certain people here on Slashdot continue in their attempts to set up this straw man, misrepresenting the libertarian position on government interference in the marketplace, when in fact there is no contradiction between the government acting in its proper judicial role and libertarian philosophy against direct government intervention in the marketplace in the abscense of specific civil dispute.
If you're happy with a world where brick and mortar retailers just can't exist, then by all means keep the current system and they will die, and not because of free market forces, but because manufacturers can't control their street prices.
The natural order of things in the marketplace is for new technologies and new ideas to cause creative destruction of old technologies and old ideas. This is normal, healthy, and good for society because it maximizes the the benefits to all citizens and prevents the undue concentration of wealth as a direct result of state protected privilege. The repeal of anti-price ceiling laws would not, as the parent suggests, drive up prices for the consumer because there will always be competitors who are willing to undercut the prices, or if the market starts with no competitors and one firm is earning monopoly profits then other firms will enter the market in order to capture a share of these economic rents for themselves and the prices will be bid down to the equilibrium levels once more. The marketplace will see to itself so long as the government protects the commons, prevents coercion, and settles disputes through the judicial system while resisting the temptation to intervene directly.
That is because they subsequently added Ctrl + Alt keys to both sides of the keyboard. The original layout pictured in the article had them on the opposite side of the keyboard from delete, so unless the maximum span of your hand was 10+ inches then you weren't going to be able to push them all with one hand simultaneously.
The problem was that it cost a hell of a lot to produce and it had to compete against cheap schlock that got almost the same amount of viewers.
This has been the bane of good SciFi programming since the beginning. The original content is always among the most expensive to produce and it cannot be done cheaply, unless you are targeting the camp sub-genre where a little bit goes a long way, without the audience immediately recognizing it and declaring the effort as cheap and unworthy. The show might be number one in the ratings and draw huge crowds each week, but the costs always make those viewers among the most expensive to deliver in the entire television industry. The original Battlestar Galactica, not the new one although that one has also done very well and is way better than the original btw, was the number one show in 1978 and 1979 with the number one slot in the ratings, but at $1 million dollars per episode, it just wasn't as profitable as the alternatives (it wasn't loosing money). The networks could only charge so much for the ads, even though the show was number one, and for $1 million dollars back then you could have produced 4-6 less expensive shows and make more money. That was why they canceled the original Battlestar Galactica, even though it was number one, and made a bad attempt to close out the series on the cheap in 1980 with an effort that most people would rather forget.
It is getting somewhat better these days with digital effects and editing reducing the costs and improving efficiencies, but these same technologies have also made the other shows cheaper too, so SciFi is still relatively more expensive. The one saving grace is that SciFi viewers tend to be more educated and have a higher income so it is possible to advertise more expensive or higher end products to them that might be less well received on other types of networks where the audience is a bit more low brow. I actually enjoy SciFi and I hope that they continue with Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, but we have to be realistic since television is a business after all.
The parent is right, from a marketing standpoint airing ECW on SciFi is utterly stupid. The major audience of SciFi channel is mostly erudite and intellectual type people, geeks, nerds, and younger males in the coveted 18-34 category which is very difficult to target with television these days. One might think that the fact that these viewers are in 18-34 younger males category would make SciFi channel a good venue for wrestling. However, the 18-34 younger males who watch SciFi channel with any regularity fall into a special class (i.e. the nerd, engineer, geek, probably urban and liberal) which is definitely NOT interested in ECW wrestling. The executives in charge at Vivendi are too simplistic to put the facts together and they don't understand SciFi anyway so they probably don't care. They think that of all 18-34 males as one mono-category with the same likes and dislikes. If I recall correctly then Vivendi acquired SciFi channel in an unrelated acquisition anyway (they were not looking to acquire SciFi channel specifically it just came with the package). One would think that with Satellite television and hundreds of other channels, the Spike network comes to mind, that ECW would do much better with the college party crowd that likes to watch ultimate fighting, action movies, and spring break type shows on Spike and other networks which cater to the non-nerd 18-34 younger male crowd. The only reason I can think of that ECW is on SciFi is because Vivendi doesn't own Spike and the only channel where they do have the aforementioned demographic, 18-34 males, is on the SciFi channel and so they persist in ramming wrestling down our throats despite the fact that were are the subgroup of our peers that does NOT, for the most part, enjoy wrestling which means that we are not watching SciFi on Tuesdays at 10pm...Are you listening Vivendi? 99% of your regular audience for SciFi is NOT WATCHING WRESTLING...they change the channel or turn off the television and do something else. Sigh...its to bad that SciFi fell into Vivendi's hands, they are killing it. At least they haven't canceled Battlestar Galactica or Stargate...yet, but if things keep going like they are then it is only a matter of time before the Vivendi execs decide that original SciFi content is too expensive to produce and that they will therefore put the SciFi content into reruns and devote more time to...you guessed it, ECW wrestling and reality tv, by which time they will have lost all of their audience anyway. Vivendi should sell SciFi and probably ECW wrestling too, unless they can acquire a more appropriate venue or work out a deal with a competitor or pay-per-view (isn't that what they do with all of that wrestling and fighting anyway? charge hicks 10 dollars a minute to see wrestle mania 200X?).
Perhaps they had forgotten that the original purpose of Ctrl-Alt-Del was to trigger soft reboots on the IBM PCs and that the combination was selected precisely because it was IMPOSSIBLE to press all three keys with one hand and thereby trigger the reboot accidentally.
"This keyboard combination was designed by David Bradley, a designer of the original IBM PC. Bradley originally designed Control-Alt-Escape to trigger a soft reboot, but he found it was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer accidentally. He switched the key combination to Control-Alt-Delete, a combination impossible to press with just one hand (this is not true of later keyboards, such as the 102-key PC/AT keyboard or the Maltron keyboard)."
Isn't it ironic that the designers are celebrating the fact that they have reintroduced the possibility of an error that the designers of old foresaw and attempted to avoid by a three button combination that could not accidentally be triggered with the slip of one hand? Or perhaps it is the fact that Windows these days has more than one function linked to that key combination, forcing the dialog anyway...after which you are forced to "cancel or allow" the action that you selected from the dialog box that was triggered by the keyboard combination. That must be what they mean when they say "Intuitive Interface" or "Easy to use".
Re:What kind of engine for a bike?
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A Space Junkyard
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A quick calculation of the forces required to accelerate your mountain bike, presumably with you on it, to 30kph will probably put something of a damper on your plans. It will be difficult for you as a regular consumer without specialized knowledge to find for sale or build yourself any rocket motor with more than about 20 Newtons (and probably much less than that) of impulse sustained over about say 5 seconds. Recall that 1 Newton is the amount of force required to accelerate 1 kg of mass at 1 meter per second. If I were you I wouldn't try it. If you want to power your bike then look into an internal combustion engine (i.e lawn mower or weed eater) connected to your chain drive instead.
It also would be nice if they had an extra bone-white 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible with the red interior on some jack stands in the back...and oh! don't forgot the old railroad wheels too! yeah...I wonder if they Myth Busters shop at this place?
It was bound to happen. I see the day when other major retailers will pull out of Amazon's marketing agreement and build their own sites.
Indeed it was, but even if the brick and mortar companies create their own sites and do them as well as Amazon's, which is a tall order considering the flashy AJAX stuff being rolled out by Amazon now, they would still be at a competitive disadvantage because of the cost of maintaining retail stores whereas Amazon can ship most of their products from a warehouse or partner business without the need for carpeting, decor, coffee shop, and all of the other things that make physical retail expensive. Also, the technology behind Amazon is still a franchise, although it has been weakened somewhat in recent years by the appearance of cheaper and better quality development tools and better web standards support, and will remain so for some time to come. In particular, the recommendation system (i.e. other users who are scuba divers and liked product "an" also bought (or looked at) product "b") would probably be non-trivial for Borders to re-implement. Then there are the patent issues...remember the Amazon one-click ordering patent? In any case, competition between Borders and Amazon is good for the consumer in any case so I hope that they both succeed and end up lowering prices even more in the process.
Seriously - this would be an interesting article to discuss if people actually read the article instead of treating this as another opportunity to publicly flaunt their indie cred.
Perhaps you are simply asking to much, this is Slashdot after all, but in response to your selected quote from the article I would offer the explanation that the movie business, like the music business and indeed the rest of popular entertainment, has become increasingly focused on the blockbuster or "hit" concept where an extremely large budget, and therefore risky (financially) film, has to appeal to as many people as possible in order to generate the types of box office returns that cover the costs of the film AND the substantial risk premiums that the studio accepted in order to make the film in the first place.
It is therefore not surprising that many films of the science fiction genre in recent years have relied upon the simple good vs evil archetypes, zany antics in the "Space Balls" and "Galaxy Quest" style (which can be entertaining, but only to a point), and less complex characters with less development and more action. It is very difficult to avoid this temptation when producing a science fiction film. Even the Wachowski brothers found it difficult to resist dumbing down the Matrix, especially in the second and third films, to make time for more action and stunts, culminating in the completely over the top final showdown between Neo and Smith. Although, the Matrix series at least had some substance beneath the veneer where so many sci-fi films have none whatsoever.
Having said all of this there have been some interesting efforts in recent years, Primer comes to mind, which actually mounted a serious challenge to the space opera stereotype, but they are few and far between. It seems that the more sophisticated amongst us will have to be satisfied with novels, independent films, some television series (the remake of Battlestar Galactica isn't bad), and perhaps computer games until the tyranny of the blockbuster and the pigeon hole of the space opera style is broken, but if history is any indication then we will have a long time to wait. I am not going to hold my breath.
I'll go one better. Cut the fucking thing off the net until the user fixes the problem.
Then you will get lots of calls from irrate customers complaining that their "Internet" isn't working and can't you fix it for them by pushing some magic button at your office? If you have spent any time in customer support for an ISP then you know that the level of ignorance people display concerning their PCs is astounding. In fact most people probably know more about their cars, and they don't know much about them either, than their PCs, about which they know almost nothing. If they even knew that they knew nothing then that would be something, but they don't.
They get cut off and fined before access will be reconnected.
Then they will go and buy service from your competitor who is only too happy to get them as a customer. As for collecting your 'fine' well, good luck. It is hard enough to get many people to pay a bill even when they do owe money nevermind a 'fine' imposed for violating the terms of service.
how come the MTAs haven't been rewritten to not allow header forging, etc, in all that time?
How are you going to detect if the headers have been forged? They are just text after all. The only way to tell is to run reverse DNS on the headers and cross reference with your incoming message logs and that gets very expensive, computationally that is, for each message that arrives. In addition, much of the spam these days originates from the bot networks which means that your reverse DNS lookups will match legitimate hosts on major ISPs (i.e. some poor user who has no idea that their machine has been hijacked and turned into a spam zombie). So what then? are you going to block all of Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, etc..just to stop some spam? Subscribe to the Spamhaus block list, run sever side filters such as spam assassin, and encourage users to run their own filters (SpamBayes) on their clients. Other than that there is not a lot that an admin can do about the spam problem without ruining e-mail service completely.
The RIAA will be knocking on your door any second now to collect their lawfully guaranteed royalty payment for your public performance of their copyrighted work...
Slashdot Mirror
haha...MuhahaH....MwuhahahahahA....haha...hehe...h e...heh...um....cough.
The quote was indeed used in the computer game Civilization IV for the fascism civic, but it originates from Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and has been associated with fascism in general and Nazism in particular ever since the German defeat that ended World War II in Europe and the subsequent revelations of the discrepancies between what the German people were told and what actually occurred. Although, some have argued that they (the German people) knew or should have known what was really going on and that they chose to do nothing out of apathy, general despair, and fear. The quote is still important today because it serves as both a reminder of the past and a warning to future generations that it could all happen again if we do not remain vigilant. I was aware of the quote before I ever played Civilization IV and I suspect that many others were as well since the quote is often repeated in biographical and historical information concerning World War II.
Was it not Adolf Hitler who said that, "The people will more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one"?
Directed by Jack Thompson.
You mean Jerry Bruckheimer right? It sounds like his kind of film...lots of explosions and mind numbing dialog combined with nauseating, obvious, and clichéd plot developments.
shouldn't you have the OTHER people follow his lead, rather than fire him?
The incentives of the middle manager can be perverse sometimes. The too-smart-for-his-own-good salesman may attract the attention of higher-ups and become a potential threat to the middle manager. The middle manager reacts by eliminating a perceived threat (i.e someone who performs better and is more productive than they are) before it is too late for them to act. The middle manager typically wants to improve overall performance by raising the productivity of each worker an equally incremental amount not by having rising stars in sales steal his thunder when it comes time for promotions.
As a high-school Senior who's been required to use this since my Sophomore year, I know how it works, and it's nothing like that: the teacher only checks the marked paper (e.g. what sections TurnItIn thinks are plagarized); the student is the one that submits the paper, through their account, to the service. Usually, said submitting is a requirement to actually receive any credit for the paper.
It may be the case that you have a more enlightened instructor, but one can certainly imagine that some instructors, once they see that Turnitin has flagged the paper, will automatically fail the student for plagiarism simply because Turnitin says so. The onus is then upon the student to *prove* that their paper was not plagiarized, but the process that Turnitin uses to mark ones' paper is proprietary and not open to review. This would be the equivalent of being charged with a crime in a secret court where you are not allowed to see the evidence or hear the witness testimony against you and are presumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Also, it is possible, once the database is large enough, that just about every possible way to write a paper, especially on common academic subjects (which come up all the time in lower division humanities and writing courses), is covered and that *everyone* must therefore be plagiarizing (at least according to Turnitin that is). The fact that the student submits the paper does not in any way enhance the fairness of the system, it all depends upon the instructor and how they apply the tool.
I don't think the fair use defense is going to hold water.
I agree...The courts have ruled in several different cases (not a legal scholar so unable to site the specific cases) that copying of an original work (article, essay, book, etc...), or even a critical portion thereof (as demonstrated with Gerald Ford's book concerning the Nixon Pardon), exactly as it was presented in the original work, even for purposes of subsequent commentary, still constitutes infringement of copyright and is not protected under fair use. In addition, due to the efforts of the RIAA over the years, it does not matter if one intends to "redistribute" the work or not (i.e. a copy made to share with your friends for free or even one made for personal use, as in the mixed tape for example), it is *still* copyright infringement. It should be noted that the courts have left it purposefully ambiguous so that each case is decided separately by a judge, but the precedents are strongly against Turnitin for maintaining whole copies of student papers, if indeed that is what they do (cryptographic hashing may be an interesting question if that is also going on), in their database and it doesn't matter if they show those papers to anyone or not, the very fact that there are copies in the database is enough to trigger copyright.
a for-profit service, who is obviously deriving some economic benefit by using somebody else's copyrighted paper (by adding it to their database) is probably not going to qualify.
Absolutely...this only adds to the prejudice that any reasonable judge would have against their fair use defense, especially in light of the reasons stated above.
I actually wouldn't mind if it was covered under Fair Use, because I think that's something we could really do with broadening, but the law as written today wouldn't cover it.
Perhaps the RIAA will actually write a "friend of the court" brief in support of the students to prevent that from happening (they wouldn't want that type of fair use precedent established in the common law). They say that litigation often makes for some strange bedfellows after all.
Now, what I think will happen, is that Turnitin will advise its clients (schools, universities, etc.) that in order to use the service, they must obtain a release from students that includes permission to upload the files. This way, they'll just offload the responsibility for copyright infringement off on the schools, who will just force students to release their work, or refuse to give them a grade.
I am not sure if the students can be compelled to do that since it could be argued that they entered into the contract under duress of not getting a grade and thus a degree. Even if this is effective, it would only prevent future claims, but the ones currently working their way through the system would still be valid and thanks to the RIAA the price per infringement is quite high, on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringement which could make for a fairly spectacular judgment or at least a hefty settlement (bye bye student loans).
I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever.
Contract law is not omnipotent, if they make the contract overly broad then the contract can be dissolved by the courts or at the very least, assuming the contract is well written, the offending parts could be severed from the agreement (the court decides which language is struck) and dissolved while leaving the remainder of the contract, if anything does remain, intact.
But I think the students in the Turnitin case, have just as much if not more grounds than the plaintiffs in the similar cases of book publishers vs. Google. (Actually, I think Google has a much better Fair Use defense than Turnitin does.)
The students do indeed have a stron
Actually, stopping when you feel better is a pretty good idea. The bug is gone, and the body will take care of the rest. The more time you expose organisms to antibiotics, the more time they have to adapt to it.
Actually not, the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance do not always grant immunity in an all or nothing fashion depending upon the type of immunity that the bacterium develop so it is better to use ALL of the prescribed medication so that even partially resistant bacteria are still killed and all of the bacteria, between your immune system and the antibiotic, are definitely disposed of. Patients are a terrible judge of when an infection has actually been cleared or under control by their immune systems so it is also best not to leave anything up to chance.
They aren't happy unless they walk out with a piece of paper or a bottle of pills in their hand. If you don't give them what they want, they walk out grumbling and go to the next doctor.
The doctors should be able to have the pharmacies call them to check whether they should give the patient the real drug or just a placebo. That way the patient gets a bottle of pills in either case, the infection runs its course and the patient gets better, but only the doctor knows that the person w/the virus just took placebo pills because the REAL antibiotics wouldn't have done anything for their viral infection anyway. Failing this the doctor could prescribe an older and CHEAPER (patients love cheaper) generic antibiotic which isn't effective anyway so it doesn't matter now if a few more people take it when they don't really have to. Paternalistic you say? Perhaps, but doctors have a responsibility to the population at large and preserve the future efficacy of powerful antibiotics, not just placate the patient at hand.
Mod the parent up...this is a good point. If Microsoft starts serving all of the doubleclick ads from their domains then it will become more difficult to filter them, although AdBlock could probably still do it using regular expressions on the http elements in the pages, but they could always randomize those if they haven't already. This could be a very bad day for ad filtering admins and their users.
Yeah, but they keep changing their domains from ad1.doubleclick to ad2.doubleclick or some such combinations to try and stay one step ahead of the host file blockers. This would not get by a regular expression of course, but the windows hosts system does not support regular expression based filtering. Fortunately, AdBlock does support regular expression based filtering and it manages to keep double click out despite the games they try to play.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if DCs in Siberia were going to attempt to do this also, provided that Siberia is truly that cold.
I have never been there personally, but by all accounts from Napoleon onwards the Russian winters, and Siberia winters in particular, are bitterly cold.
BTW: to expand on your efficient building design ideas I was just thinking that maybe instead of using all of the heat from the servers to preheat their own cooling air, you could shunt some of that heat into a Sterling Engine instead. It would be inefficient yes, but at least some of the waste heat from the servers combined with the temperature differential from outside could be recovered from the sterling engine and recycled through the system to reduce the external electricity needs somewhat. Maybe, it wouldn't be worth it, but it could be looked into at least.
No, the primary reason is a legacy of colonialism and exploitation from the age of European empires.
It is true that colonialism was, on the whole, more harmful than beneficial to those formal colonies which are now independent nations. However, it is also true to say that not everything about colonialism was necessarily a bad thing. The railroads, port facilities, and other colonial improvements made by the British throughout their former empire, notably in India, were reverted to the ownership of the newly independent nations and that windfall of improved infrastructure did partly compensate for the less desirable effects of colonialism in that the new nations began with something of a head start with regard to roads, ports, government buildings, railroads and the like.
However, even when the negative effects are accounted for, and most nations are now 50 years out from their colonial pasts, it does not fully explain why these now independent nations have failed to seize the day and produce for their citizens 50 years of economic growth and progress that was, in theory at least, possible once the colonialism ended.
In fact, modern third-world governments do a fine job of protecting property rights - of multinational corporations. It's actual citizens who lose out.
I would compare this with the dictator offering a good friend or family member, or indeed a foreigner with money to spend, special privileges that fall outside of the laws of that country or not covered by those laws because of the power of the dictator. This is not the same thing as an impartial and independent judiciary enforcing the private property rights of multinational corporations within the framework of the rule of laws. It should not therefore be used as an argument against the efficacy of protecting property rights in per se since it it in fact nothing more than the will of the dictator dressed up in words like "protecting the legitimate property rights", "freedom", and "democracy".
Then property becomes a tool for hoarding the resources of the planet, for concentrating control of capital into the hands of a state-backed owning and ruling class, then we need to realize that ideas that can usefully be applied to guitars, cannot necessarily be usefully applied to large tracts of land, natural resources, or ideas - and certainly not to shares in control of, and profit from, the actions of immortal fictitious citizens created by government fiat.
I suppose that this simply comes down to a basic disagreement on the means to best achieve the same goals. We both of us agree that we would like to own some land with a dwelling and perhaps a car and other personal possessions and amenities of our choosing, but we disagree on the best means to achieve those goals. If you believe that everyone should have an equal share of a smaller total pie then by all means vote for government control of markets and capital and we will all be equal in our misery. On the other hand if you believe in yourself and the rights of yourself in others to invest your capital in business and to work to increase that capital without the government swooping in and confiscating the fruits of your labor at whim then you should not be against the sort of concentration of capital that tends to occur in the later rather than the former system. If private property works for your guitar then why should it not work equally well for say generation of electricity or steel or other more "vital" industries, what Lenin called, the "Commanding Heights" of the economy? The answer is that it does and should not therefore be restricted. In fact, the only industry where the government should maintain complete monopsony control is in the defense industry. The history of the twentieth century proved these assertions conclusively with the collapse of communism and the abandonment by China of any pretense of Marxist economic policies.
Mistaking property
This whole issue touches on a problem that I and others have long perceived with our current legal system and that is the presence of thousands of laws, most of which the average citizen is completely unaware of, that proscribe strict penalties for activities that well meaning and good intentioned citizens engage in on a regular basis (i.e. selling the sandwich to the personal on the "no fly list"). The unwritten rule, of course, is that these laws are invoked only as part of a larger prosecution when the state wants to, "throw the book", at someone, but there is always the threat that they *could* suddenly become arbitrarily enforced on otherwise law abiding citizens to which the authorities only offer the rather weak assurance of, "Trust us, we wouldn't do that to you. This law only applies to criminals." However, recent experience has given even the honest among us pause when that assurance is offered. The other problem inherent to these types of laws is that they engender a lesser respect for the law in general among the population due to the perceived arbitrary nature of the enforcement and that is a very dangerous road to go down for the sake of catching a few more criminals and, "throwing the book at them". The irony here is that through our continued attempts to "get tough on crime" we are increasingly sanctioning ourselves for living normal law abiding lives.
I always like to point out that corporations are chartered by the government; discussion of reducing government power to interfere in the marketplace should start with the revokation of most corporate charters (along with government-issued copyrights, patents, and land and resource deeds).
What utter nonsense. Have you ever wondered why the third world is poor compared to the first world? Is it because their share of inherently intelligent people is less? Certainly not. Is it because they are not able to grow their own crops or produce their own goods and services? No. The primary reason that the third world is not the first world is because the governments of the third world fail miserably at defining and protecting private property rights. You are suggesting that we should remove from our legal framework the very structures that permit us to define and adjudicate those property rights most efficiently. The corporation is responsible for the economic growth of the last three hundred years and if not for that then you and I would probably still be subsistence vegetable farming serfs working for some fuedal overlord or dictator. Do you really want to live in a society where the family members of the dictator are the only ones who get access to profitable businesses and where the rule of the strong is the rule of the day?
The government does not "interfere" in the marketplace by allowing certain legal constructs to exist that facilitate its role in adjudicating private property disputes through the civil judicial system. That is a completely necessary and proper function of government. This is a common argument offered by liberals against the libertarians and it is completely falacious. However, certain people here on Slashdot continue in their attempts to set up this straw man, misrepresenting the libertarian position on government interference in the marketplace, when in fact there is no contradiction between the government acting in its proper judicial role and libertarian philosophy against direct government intervention in the marketplace in the abscense of specific civil dispute.
If you're happy with a world where brick and mortar retailers just can't exist, then by all means keep the current system and they will die, and not because of free market forces, but because manufacturers can't control their street prices.
The natural order of things in the marketplace is for new technologies and new ideas to cause creative destruction of old technologies and old ideas. This is normal, healthy, and good for society because it maximizes the the benefits to all citizens and prevents the undue concentration of wealth as a direct result of state protected privilege. The repeal of anti-price ceiling laws would not, as the parent suggests, drive up prices for the consumer because there will always be competitors who are willing to undercut the prices, or if the market starts with no competitors and one firm is earning monopoly profits then other firms will enter the market in order to capture a share of these economic rents for themselves and the prices will be bid down to the equilibrium levels once more. The marketplace will see to itself so long as the government protects the commons, prevents coercion, and settles disputes through the judicial system while resisting the temptation to intervene directly.
That is because they subsequently added Ctrl + Alt keys to both sides of the keyboard. The original layout pictured in the article had them on the opposite side of the keyboard from delete, so unless the maximum span of your hand was 10+ inches then you weren't going to be able to push them all with one hand simultaneously.
The problem was that it cost a hell of a lot to produce and it had to compete against cheap schlock that got almost the same amount of viewers.
This has been the bane of good SciFi programming since the beginning. The original content is always among the most expensive to produce and it cannot be done cheaply, unless you are targeting the camp sub-genre where a little bit goes a long way, without the audience immediately recognizing it and declaring the effort as cheap and unworthy. The show might be number one in the ratings and draw huge crowds each week, but the costs always make those viewers among the most expensive to deliver in the entire television industry. The original Battlestar Galactica, not the new one although that one has also done very well and is way better than the original btw, was the number one show in 1978 and 1979 with the number one slot in the ratings, but at $1 million dollars per episode, it just wasn't as profitable as the alternatives (it wasn't loosing money). The networks could only charge so much for the ads, even though the show was number one, and for $1 million dollars back then you could have produced 4-6 less expensive shows and make more money. That was why they canceled the original Battlestar Galactica, even though it was number one, and made a bad attempt to close out the series on the cheap in 1980 with an effort that most people would rather forget.
It is getting somewhat better these days with digital effects and editing reducing the costs and improving efficiencies, but these same technologies have also made the other shows cheaper too, so SciFi is still relatively more expensive. The one saving grace is that SciFi viewers tend to be more educated and have a higher income so it is possible to advertise more expensive or higher end products to them that might be less well received on other types of networks where the audience is a bit more low brow. I actually enjoy SciFi and I hope that they continue with Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, but we have to be realistic since television is a business after all.
The parent is right, from a marketing standpoint airing ECW on SciFi is utterly stupid. The major audience of SciFi channel is mostly erudite and intellectual type people, geeks, nerds, and younger males in the coveted 18-34 category which is very difficult to target with television these days. One might think that the fact that these viewers are in 18-34 younger males category would make SciFi channel a good venue for wrestling. However, the 18-34 younger males who watch SciFi channel with any regularity fall into a special class (i.e. the nerd, engineer, geek, probably urban and liberal) which is definitely NOT interested in ECW wrestling. The executives in charge at Vivendi are too simplistic to put the facts together and they don't understand SciFi anyway so they probably don't care. They think that of all 18-34 males as one mono-category with the same likes and dislikes. If I recall correctly then Vivendi acquired SciFi channel in an unrelated acquisition anyway (they were not looking to acquire SciFi channel specifically it just came with the package). One would think that with Satellite television and hundreds of other channels, the Spike network comes to mind, that ECW would do much better with the college party crowd that likes to watch ultimate fighting, action movies, and spring break type shows on Spike and other networks which cater to the non-nerd 18-34 younger male crowd. The only reason I can think of that ECW is on SciFi is because Vivendi doesn't own Spike and the only channel where they do have the aforementioned demographic, 18-34 males, is on the SciFi channel and so they persist in ramming wrestling down our throats despite the fact that were are the subgroup of our peers that does NOT, for the most part, enjoy wrestling which means that we are not watching SciFi on Tuesdays at 10pm...Are you listening Vivendi? 99% of your regular audience for SciFi is NOT WATCHING WRESTLING...they change the channel or turn off the television and do something else. Sigh...its to bad that SciFi fell into Vivendi's hands, they are killing it. At least they haven't canceled Battlestar Galactica or Stargate...yet, but if things keep going like they are then it is only a matter of time before the Vivendi execs decide that original SciFi content is too expensive to produce and that they will therefore put the SciFi content into reruns and devote more time to...you guessed it, ECW wrestling and reality tv, by which time they will have lost all of their audience anyway. Vivendi should sell SciFi and probably ECW wrestling too, unless they can acquire a more appropriate venue or work out a deal with a competitor or pay-per-view (isn't that what they do with all of that wrestling and fighting anyway? charge hicks 10 dollars a minute to see wrestle mania 200X?).
Perhaps they had forgotten that the original purpose of Ctrl-Alt-Del was to trigger soft reboots on the IBM PCs and that the combination was selected precisely because it was IMPOSSIBLE to press all three keys with one hand and thereby trigger the reboot accidentally.
"This keyboard combination was designed by David Bradley, a designer of the original IBM PC. Bradley originally designed Control-Alt-Escape to trigger a soft reboot, but he found it was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer accidentally. He switched the key combination to Control-Alt-Delete, a combination impossible to press with just one hand (this is not true of later keyboards, such as the 102-key PC/AT keyboard or the Maltron keyboard)."
Isn't it ironic that the designers are celebrating the fact that they have reintroduced the possibility of an error that the designers of old foresaw and attempted to avoid by a three button combination that could not accidentally be triggered with the slip of one hand? Or perhaps it is the fact that Windows these days has more than one function linked to that key combination, forcing the dialog anyway...after which you are forced to "cancel or allow" the action that you selected from the dialog box that was triggered by the keyboard combination. That must be what they mean when they say "Intuitive Interface" or "Easy to use".
A quick calculation of the forces required to accelerate your mountain bike, presumably with you on it, to 30kph will probably put something of a damper on your plans. It will be difficult for you as a regular consumer without specialized knowledge to find for sale or build yourself any rocket motor with more than about 20 Newtons (and probably much less than that) of impulse sustained over about say 5 seconds. Recall that 1 Newton is the amount of force required to accelerate 1 kg of mass at 1 meter per second. If I were you I wouldn't try it. If you want to power your bike then look into an internal combustion engine (i.e lawn mower or weed eater) connected to your chain drive instead.
It also would be nice if they had an extra bone-white 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible with the red interior on some jack stands in the back...and oh! don't forgot the old railroad wheels too! yeah...I wonder if they Myth Busters shop at this place?
It was bound to happen. I see the day when other major retailers will pull out of Amazon's marketing agreement and build their own sites.
Indeed it was, but even if the brick and mortar companies create their own sites and do them as well as Amazon's, which is a tall order considering the flashy AJAX stuff being rolled out by Amazon now, they would still be at a competitive disadvantage because of the cost of maintaining retail stores whereas Amazon can ship most of their products from a warehouse or partner business without the need for carpeting, decor, coffee shop, and all of the other things that make physical retail expensive. Also, the technology behind Amazon is still a franchise, although it has been weakened somewhat in recent years by the appearance of cheaper and better quality development tools and better web standards support, and will remain so for some time to come. In particular, the recommendation system (i.e. other users who are scuba divers and liked product "an" also bought (or looked at) product "b") would probably be non-trivial for Borders to re-implement. Then there are the patent issues...remember the Amazon one-click ordering patent? In any case, competition between Borders and Amazon is good for the consumer in any case so I hope that they both succeed and end up lowering prices even more in the process.
Seriously - this would be an interesting article to discuss if people actually read the article instead of treating this as another opportunity to publicly flaunt their indie cred.
Perhaps you are simply asking to much, this is Slashdot after all, but in response to your selected quote from the article I would offer the explanation that the movie business, like the music business and indeed the rest of popular entertainment, has become increasingly focused on the blockbuster or "hit" concept where an extremely large budget, and therefore risky (financially) film, has to appeal to as many people as possible in order to generate the types of box office returns that cover the costs of the film AND the substantial risk premiums that the studio accepted in order to make the film in the first place.
It is therefore not surprising that many films of the science fiction genre in recent years have relied upon the simple good vs evil archetypes, zany antics in the "Space Balls" and "Galaxy Quest" style (which can be entertaining, but only to a point), and less complex characters with less development and more action. It is very difficult to avoid this temptation when producing a science fiction film. Even the Wachowski brothers found it difficult to resist dumbing down the Matrix, especially in the second and third films, to make time for more action and stunts, culminating in the completely over the top final showdown between Neo and Smith. Although, the Matrix series at least had some substance beneath the veneer where so many sci-fi films have none whatsoever.
Having said all of this there have been some interesting efforts in recent years, Primer comes to mind, which actually mounted a serious challenge to the space opera stereotype, but they are few and far between. It seems that the more sophisticated amongst us will have to be satisfied with novels, independent films, some television series (the remake of Battlestar Galactica isn't bad), and perhaps computer games until the tyranny of the blockbuster and the pigeon hole of the space opera style is broken, but if history is any indication then we will have a long time to wait. I am not going to hold my breath.
I'll go one better. Cut the fucking thing off the net until the user fixes the problem.
Then you will get lots of calls from irrate customers complaining that their "Internet" isn't working and can't you fix it for them by pushing some magic button at your office? If you have spent any time in customer support for an ISP then you know that the level of ignorance people display concerning their PCs is astounding. In fact most people probably know more about their cars, and they don't know much about them either, than their PCs, about which they know almost nothing. If they even knew that they knew nothing then that would be something, but they don't.
They get cut off and fined before access will be reconnected.
Then they will go and buy service from your competitor who is only too happy to get them as a customer. As for collecting your 'fine' well, good luck. It is hard enough to get many people to pay a bill even when they do owe money nevermind a 'fine' imposed for violating the terms of service.
how come the MTAs haven't been rewritten to not allow header forging, etc, in all that time?
How are you going to detect if the headers have been forged? They are just text after all. The only way to tell is to run reverse DNS on the headers and cross reference with your incoming message logs and that gets very expensive, computationally that is, for each message that arrives. In addition, much of the spam these days originates from the bot networks which means that your reverse DNS lookups will match legitimate hosts on major ISPs (i.e. some poor user who has no idea that their machine has been hijacked and turned into a spam zombie). So what then? are you going to block all of Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, etc..just to stop some spam? Subscribe to the Spamhaus block list, run sever side filters such as spam assassin, and encourage users to run their own filters (SpamBayes) on their clients. Other than that there is not a lot that an admin can do about the spam problem without ruining e-mail service completely.
The RIAA will be knocking on your door any second now to collect their lawfully guaranteed royalty payment for your public performance of their copyrighted work...