If a report is being trumpted as being written by some child prodigy analyst, then yes, I do expect more from it.
I'm perfectly capable of trying to understand what someone is saying if they have difficulty getting their views across. But the point is that if they have difficulty getting their views across, I'm not sure why special attention is being paid to it. Why is this any better than millions of other essays written by 15 year olds? How about we filter them by quality, rather than who was lucky to get work experience at a big company?
Put it this way - if someone was applying to a job at Morgan Stanley, and the covering letter had mistakes, do you think they'd say "Well, I'm sure we can understand what he meant to say"? Or do you think they'll use it as an easy way to filter him out from the large number of other applicants?
I like the implementation of LiveJournal - settings to easily make material non-public, and it avoids all of the Facebook confusion about who is broadcasting what information about you and who can see it.
I look at her page, and see 3-4 updates from some of her friends on a daily basis, and we're not talking high school or college kids here. And half of them are lame attempts at introspective comments like - "can't wait to go drinking", "feeling lonely", "two days until the weekend", "my life is like xxx song lyric", etc.
I think this is a particular problem with Facebook, as it encourages people to type in whatever random thing they're doing or feeling write now. So it means that the feed is mostly boring, and anything important gets lost in the noise. LiveJournal is meant as a blog/journal, so people are more likely to write something worthwhile, every single time they post (and if you have a friend who still writes crap all the time, well, don't read them).
(It's not all bad though, I think Facebook does do organising "Events" better - as the information gets tagged separate, as well as being emailed to you.)
And I love SMS because I hate talking on phones. Also it has the advantage that you don't both need to be there and ready to take a call. You could probably say the same thing about email, "it's quicker to phone them", but email has its advantages, and some people simply prefer it to phones.
I just don't understand why so many people are so addicted to these computer based types of social networks when to an outsiders perspective many of the posts seem either phony or useless.
I bet conversation snippets between you and a friend chatting to a pub are completely phony or useless if heard by a complete stranger. Same with most phone calls, come to that. And how do you think a random selection of Slashdot comments would look to an outsider?
I've never used Twitter, but I can't help noticing that you're making the same classic mistake that was made of sites like LiveJournal - do you seriously think it's meant to be a place where you trawl random strangers' posts, hoping for something interesting to you? That's about as relevant as saying that the web is useless, because 99.99% of websites are irrelevant to you.
The point with social networking sites like these - as the name may give you a clue - is that you use it to communicate with your friends. That's your friends, not someone else's, or random people you found. If you have no friends, or all your friends are boring, I guess Twitter will not fix your problems.
I don't use twitter but... why the need to restrict it to "important events"?
Do we say that Slashdot should only be used for reporting "important events" (which, a 15 year old writing something about Twitter does not qualify)? Do we say that the forum here should only be used for "important posts"?
As for limited bandwidth, I entirely agree. Which means the "only" use for Twitter is anyone with a mobile phone.
it's just that he seems to be the only person with the courage to come out and say it.
Nonsense, lots of people have been slagging off Twitter - you only have to look here on Slashdot to see that. This is only gaining publicity because Morgan Stanley are pulling a tabloid-style tactic - they're big enough to give it publicity, but by using a 15 year old, they can get away with slagging Twitter off in a manner that is less professional than what people would usually expect of them. And they get even more publicity, because people go "OMG, 15 year old wrote this? How amazing!!!"
But whereas the average teenager is working retail or ogling bikinis at the local pool, this kid's interning at one of the most powerful companies in the world, and wrote something that sufficiently impressed them that they published it under their name. Sounds like a smart kid.
So if Twitter, one of the top websites in the world, got a 12 year old to write a paper saying "Actually Morgan Stanley don't know anything, and this report is a load of rubbish", you'd say it was a smart kid, and we should take it seriously?
What he says may or may not be insightful. There are plenty of 15 year olds who have written insightful essays - most of them do so at school, and never get the chance to intern at anywhere exciting and have their work promoted outside of the school (note, at 15, he can't be legally employed, so this isn't a job he got - as TFS says, it's work experience). But one can't conclude it was good merely because it was published by Morgan Stanley. That's just falling into the same "The emperor has clothes" trap that the OP talked about!
I agree - in particular, this is just a classic example of "slagging something off gets you lots of page hits", as popularised by many a tabloid journalist. It is no indication of how good a writer you are, or how accurate or insightful your point is.
The irony is that he trashes other people for no one viewing their tweets. Perhaps he should think himself lucky that he was given a platform for his views. If he'd published this by himself (whether on twitter, or anything else), how many people would have viewed what he had to say?
(Personally I'm not into twitter, but "realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless" does not make one an "analyst". We get plenty of people slagging off the latest Internet craze here on Slashdot, on the grounds of "I don't like it, so it must be crap", and they're not analysts either).
I agree. Another obvious point is that this solely looked at the Presidential campaign. This is something that (a) the media would have been focused on, using the full extent of their resources, meanwhile (b) it could be argued that non-professionals were less likely to be covering it, partly because of (a), the media are already covering it immensely, so there's no need to do it, and also possibly issues to do with the hassles of security in attended events where presidential candidates were present.
What's the picture like for less notable events?
It's also unclear what they count as a blog (does Slashdot count? What about people using blogs for journalling, or commentary, and not for news reporting?) or indeed a news site (do they include local news? What about non-US sources?)
but otherwise does not come with the depth of research from a good, non-lazy journalist that does his or her homework, uses multiple sources to back up facts, etc. etc.
When did we have that?
(Okay, there are some good investigative journalists around, but this is not an in anyway reasonable description of most of the media, who seem to be happy to copy and paste facts to each other without citing sources or fact checking - let alone using multiple sources - and either pushing their own bias, or just reproducing press releases sent to them by the Government or organisations without further checks.)
I don't use adblockers myself, but: it's immoral to use software on your own computer in order to decide what to see?
I do hope you never use fast forward to skip past adverts on TV you've recorded.
And tell me, if you need to use the toilet or make a drink during the ad break, do you wrestle with your conscience in an attempt to see if you can morally justify your need to have a wee?
If you have trouble understanding English, or are unable to work it out from the context, then I would hope that a computer geek at least knows how to look it up in an online dictionary using his Internet connection.
So a Canadian court might hear things under Chinese law, if a Canadian citizien was threatened over some political statements they'd written on a Canadian website; or Islamic law, over some criticism of Islam they'd posted to a Canadian website - even when in all cases it was legal in Canada to do these things?
Oh hurrah! Let's throw a party. Aren't they being so reasonable that when someone in another country hasn't broken the law, they offer them a choice of being sued, or having low resolution images?
I bet you'd love to be sued by someone from somewhere like China, who offers you the reasonable choice of taking down some political statements it disagrees with, or getting sued?
They're working with the law and with their client's needs
So they are free to not show those images to people accessing from other countries, if they're really so worried.
As a public body, they have the responsibility to carry out their mandate to the British people, while not costing those same people more than is necessary to do so.
As a UK citizen who pays their taxes, I object to them trying to claim ownership on images that should belong in the public domain.
Who says they were uploaded under CC? The images are clearly tagged correctly with the "Public Domain" tag.
(Even if someone did try to apply CC to a public domain image, in the US it would be meaningless for the same reason that the Gallery's claim has no grounds.)
they have no right to apply to someone else's work
Oh, I love it. But it's okay for you to claim ownership on someone else's public domain work?
I'm Derrick Coetzee, an English Wikipedia administrator
A poor choice of phrasing, but I presume he means he's an administrator of English Wikipedia (as opposed to the foreign language versions)...
His "English Wikipedia" user page states "I'm Derrick Coetzee, an American software developer at Microsoft Research carrying a masters in computer science and bachelor degrees in computer science and mathematics, and an administrator on the English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. I'm starting on my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in August 2009."
(Well, I suppose that could mean he's "A developer of American software"...)
We get a front page story everytime something is ported to the Iphone, so why not the Dingoo A320, and perhaps every other device too? And it's not like this even made the front page.
I've also experienced this first hand - I was taking a photograph, when suddenly an undercover policeman revealed himself to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to take photos without someone's permission, and demanding I delete the photo.
The London police have always been running a scaremongering advertising campaign against photographers:
There are valid concerns with top secret items and the gov't not wanting you to take pictures of them.
Ir's not top secret if it's in public, and you're only taking a photo of what people can see in public with their own eyes! According to your original post, even material that can only be visible from the air is fair game.
Moreover, even if your argument is true, then you've still lost, as it means that your original assertion of "There is no expectation of privacy when you leave the protection of a building" isn't true in the first place. So which is it? Or are you conceding my point that buildings have more rights to privacy in public than people do? (Although note, my links do not just refer to buildings - people have been hassled for taking photos of police officers.)
For example if the gov't came out with a new plane that had some new, awesome and secret technology it makes sense they don't want you taking a picture of it.
Who cares what they want? I don't want to have a plane or CCTV taking photos of me all the time. But according to you, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place, when I want it or not. So if the Government wheels its so-called "secret" plane into public, then what it wants is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Wake we up when he's offered a position as a Morgan Stanley analyst - then we can expect a higher standard.
Meanwhile if a 15 year old is posting on Slashdot, no one would care about the grammar.
just like to bitch, or trying to make yourself seem better by putting other people down.
Just like to bitch, or slagging off other things? He should write a report for Morgan Stanley...
If a report is being trumpted as being written by some child prodigy analyst, then yes, I do expect more from it.
I'm perfectly capable of trying to understand what someone is saying if they have difficulty getting their views across. But the point is that if they have difficulty getting their views across, I'm not sure why special attention is being paid to it. Why is this any better than millions of other essays written by 15 year olds? How about we filter them by quality, rather than who was lucky to get work experience at a big company?
Put it this way - if someone was applying to a job at Morgan Stanley, and the covering letter had mistakes, do you think they'd say "Well, I'm sure we can understand what he meant to say"? Or do you think they'll use it as an easy way to filter him out from the large number of other applicants?
I like the implementation of LiveJournal - settings to easily make material non-public, and it avoids all of the Facebook confusion about who is broadcasting what information about you and who can see it.
I look at her page, and see 3-4 updates from some of her friends on a daily basis, and we're not talking high school or college kids here. And half of them are lame attempts at introspective comments like - "can't wait to go drinking", "feeling lonely", "two days until the weekend", "my life is like xxx song lyric", etc.
I think this is a particular problem with Facebook, as it encourages people to type in whatever random thing they're doing or feeling write now. So it means that the feed is mostly boring, and anything important gets lost in the noise. LiveJournal is meant as a blog/journal, so people are more likely to write something worthwhile, every single time they post (and if you have a friend who still writes crap all the time, well, don't read them).
(It's not all bad though, I think Facebook does do organising "Events" better - as the information gets tagged separate, as well as being emailed to you.)
And I love SMS because I hate talking on phones. Also it has the advantage that you don't both need to be there and ready to take a call. You could probably say the same thing about email, "it's quicker to phone them", but email has its advantages, and some people simply prefer it to phones.
I just don't understand why so many people are so addicted to these computer based types of social networks when to an outsiders perspective many of the posts seem either phony or useless.
I bet conversation snippets between you and a friend chatting to a pub are completely phony or useless if heard by a complete stranger. Same with most phone calls, come to that. And how do you think a random selection of Slashdot comments would look to an outsider?
I've never used Twitter, but I can't help noticing that you're making the same classic mistake that was made of sites like LiveJournal - do you seriously think it's meant to be a place where you trawl random strangers' posts, hoping for something interesting to you? That's about as relevant as saying that the web is useless, because 99.99% of websites are irrelevant to you.
The point with social networking sites like these - as the name may give you a clue - is that you use it to communicate with your friends. That's your friends, not someone else's, or random people you found. If you have no friends, or all your friends are boring, I guess Twitter will not fix your problems.
I don't use twitter but ... why the need to restrict it to "important events"?
Do we say that Slashdot should only be used for reporting "important events" (which, a 15 year old writing something about Twitter does not qualify)? Do we say that the forum here should only be used for "important posts"?
As for limited bandwidth, I entirely agree. Which means the "only" use for Twitter is anyone with a mobile phone.
it's just that he seems to be the only person with the courage to come out and say it.
Nonsense, lots of people have been slagging off Twitter - you only have to look here on Slashdot to see that. This is only gaining publicity because Morgan Stanley are pulling a tabloid-style tactic - they're big enough to give it publicity, but by using a 15 year old, they can get away with slagging Twitter off in a manner that is less professional than what people would usually expect of them. And they get even more publicity, because people go "OMG, 15 year old wrote this? How amazing!!!"
But whereas the average teenager is working retail or ogling bikinis at the local pool, this kid's interning at one of the most powerful companies in the world, and wrote something that sufficiently impressed them that they published it under their name. Sounds like a smart kid.
So if Twitter, one of the top websites in the world, got a 12 year old to write a paper saying "Actually Morgan Stanley don't know anything, and this report is a load of rubbish", you'd say it was a smart kid, and we should take it seriously?
What he says may or may not be insightful. There are plenty of 15 year olds who have written insightful essays - most of them do so at school, and never get the chance to intern at anywhere exciting and have their work promoted outside of the school (note, at 15, he can't be legally employed, so this isn't a job he got - as TFS says, it's work experience). But one can't conclude it was good merely because it was published by Morgan Stanley. That's just falling into the same "The emperor has clothes" trap that the OP talked about!
I agree - in particular, this is just a classic example of "slagging something off gets you lots of page hits", as popularised by many a tabloid journalist. It is no indication of how good a writer you are, or how accurate or insightful your point is.
The irony is that he trashes other people for no one viewing their tweets. Perhaps he should think himself lucky that he was given a platform for his views. If he'd published this by himself (whether on twitter, or anything else), how many people would have viewed what he had to say?
(Personally I'm not into twitter, but "realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless" does not make one an "analyst". We get plenty of people slagging off the latest Internet craze here on Slashdot, on the grounds of "I don't like it, so it must be crap", and they're not analysts either).
I agree. Another obvious point is that this solely looked at the Presidential campaign. This is something that (a) the media would have been focused on, using the full extent of their resources, meanwhile (b) it could be argued that non-professionals were less likely to be covering it, partly because of (a), the media are already covering it immensely, so there's no need to do it, and also possibly issues to do with the hassles of security in attended events where presidential candidates were present.
What's the picture like for less notable events?
It's also unclear what they count as a blog (does Slashdot count? What about people using blogs for journalling, or commentary, and not for news reporting?) or indeed a news site (do they include local news? What about non-US sources?)
but otherwise does not come with the depth of research from a good, non-lazy journalist that does his or her homework, uses multiple sources to back up facts, etc. etc.
When did we have that?
(Okay, there are some good investigative journalists around, but this is not an in anyway reasonable description of most of the media, who seem to be happy to copy and paste facts to each other without citing sources or fact checking - let alone using multiple sources - and either pushing their own bias, or just reproducing press releases sent to them by the Government or organisations without further checks.)
Can you reference where someone's making this argument, or are you just making up a straw man to argue against for easy karma?
I don't use adblockers myself, but: it's immoral to use software on your own computer in order to decide what to see?
I do hope you never use fast forward to skip past adverts on TV you've recorded.
And tell me, if you need to use the toilet or make a drink during the ad break, do you wrestle with your conscience in an attempt to see if you can morally justify your need to have a wee?
If you have trouble understanding English, or are unable to work it out from the context, then I would hope that a computer geek at least knows how to look it up in an online dictionary using his Internet connection.
Photog? Litho? You cannot be bothered to type those out?
Fixed that for you.
I agree with your other points, and I'm all in favour of improved space exploration, but:
Building those would create jobs across the board across the entire income and skill spread of the american populace
That's just the broken window fallacy. The money that would have been spent on improving the shuttles is still available to create jobs elsewhere.
So a Canadian court might hear things under Chinese law, if a Canadian citizien was threatened over some political statements they'd written on a Canadian website; or Islamic law, over some criticism of Islam they'd posted to a Canadian website - even when in all cases it was legal in Canada to do these things?
Oh hurrah! Let's throw a party. Aren't they being so reasonable that when someone in another country hasn't broken the law, they offer them a choice of being sued, or having low resolution images?
I bet you'd love to be sued by someone from somewhere like China, who offers you the reasonable choice of taking down some political statements it disagrees with, or getting sued?
They're working with the law and with their client's needs
Who is their client?
So they are free to not show those images to people accessing from other countries, if they're really so worried.
As a public body, they have the responsibility to carry out their mandate to the British people, while not costing those same people more than is necessary to do so.
As a UK citizen who pays their taxes, I object to them trying to claim ownership on images that should belong in the public domain.
It's an encyclopedia - like all encyclopedias, it's not meant to be a place for original research.
And in general, I find Wikipedia a far higher standard than many museums, which are happy to use all sorts of weasel words.
The relevant ruling here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp. ) applies to exact photographic copies, where there is no originality.
So firstly, whether you think it makes sense or not is irrelevant - under US law, this is not covered by copyright. It's not up for debate.
Secondly, taking a photo of a mountain is not an exact photographic copy - you have enough variables such as lighting, angles, cloud formation.
Who says they were uploaded under CC? The images are clearly tagged correctly with the "Public Domain" tag.
(Even if someone did try to apply CC to a public domain image, in the US it would be meaningless for the same reason that the Gallery's claim has no grounds.)
they have no right to apply to someone else's work
Oh, I love it. But it's okay for you to claim ownership on someone else's public domain work?
I'm Derrick Coetzee, an English Wikipedia administrator
A poor choice of phrasing, but I presume he means he's an administrator of English Wikipedia (as opposed to the foreign language versions)...
His "English Wikipedia" user page states "I'm Derrick Coetzee, an American software developer at Microsoft Research carrying a masters in computer science and bachelor degrees in computer science and mathematics, and an administrator on the English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. I'm starting on my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in August 2009."
(Well, I suppose that could mean he's "A developer of American software"...)
We get a front page story everytime something is ported to the Iphone, so why not the Dingoo A320, and perhaps every other device too? And it's not like this even made the front page.
Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is pure speculation.
No, it's happened. Not sure why your post would be marked insightful since it is wrong...
There are plenty of known cases of police harassing photographers in public in the UK. A quick Google finds:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/27/pretend-cops-bully-v.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/18/uk-police-seize-amat.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/22/police-warn-uk-man-t.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/17/uk-cop-war-on-terror.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/photographers-criminalised-as-police-abuse-antiterror-laws-1228149.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7888301.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/12/photographers-anti-terror-laws
I've also experienced this first hand - I was taking a photograph, when suddenly an undercover policeman revealed himself to me, telling me I wasn't allowed to take photos without someone's permission, and demanding I delete the photo.
The London police have always been running a scaremongering advertising campaign against photographers:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/04/london-cops-declare.html
There are valid concerns with top secret items and the gov't not wanting you to take pictures of them.
Ir's not top secret if it's in public, and you're only taking a photo of what people can see in public with their own eyes! According to your original post, even material that can only be visible from the air is fair game.
Moreover, even if your argument is true, then you've still lost, as it means that your original assertion of "There is no expectation of privacy when you leave the protection of a building" isn't true in the first place. So which is it? Or are you conceding my point that buildings have more rights to privacy in public than people do? (Although note, my links do not just refer to buildings - people have been hassled for taking photos of police officers.)
For example if the gov't came out with a new plane that had some new, awesome and secret technology it makes sense they don't want you taking a picture of it.
Who cares what they want? I don't want to have a plane or CCTV taking photos of me all the time. But according to you, there's no expectation of privacy in a public place, when I want it or not. So if the Government wheels its so-called "secret" plane into public, then what it wants is irrelevant.
Also, Mac OS X is in some ways the continuation of Mac OS, but in other ways it's very much not
Indeed, although I'd go so far as to say that in all ways, it's not, except for sharing the brandname, and that it was marketed as the successor.