One of the major points of Firefly is that it's the exact opposite of Star Trek:
They are outlaws
The equivalent of the Federation is corrupt and oppressive
The crew is held together by loyalty rather than duty (which makes it believable that they would risk all to save one of them)
The premise is that humanity hasn't really changed in the far future, things are still basically the same, just with spaceships.
The only moral absolute is crew first, everything else secondary.
None of that exists in the Trek series'. Picard would rather chop off his arm than kill an evil person in cold blood, but Mal will kick them through an engine without a second thought.
That repetitive drivel like Enterprise gets to last this long while the ream gems (FireFly, Farscape) pass away tragically.
Those shows had more originality, creativity and quality writing than the Star Trek franchise can hope to match. Not to say that Star Trek wasn't good and original in its day, but that day has passed.
I recently showed Firefly to a housemate for the first time, he was hooked after the pilot. After each episode (we just finished the last one), he sits in stunned amazement, quietly saying "why was this cancelled?". It's sad really.
It's the new fashion! Tell your customers/students/employees you don't trust them....AND...make them do the work of "proving" that they're not breaking the rules in some humilliating way.
The best way for students to prove that they're not breaking the rules, in this case, is to actually do the damned work. We're fortunate that it's become so easy to catch plagiarizers, a method that catches most of the offenders and produces no more false positives than convential methods.
Good students should be applauding this, because now their honest effort won't be in the shadow of someone's $35 store bought paper written by a poor grad student.
Sounds like a batch of disaffected students looking for a cause to get worked up about. They should consider putting their energy towards a cause worth fighting for.
The reason plagiarism is becoming more of a problem is because it's more convenient, that's the short of it. It's the same reason noone really cared about music piracy back in the days of the cassette tape. It was such a pain in the ass that it was barely a blip on the radar. Now with PtoP it's convenient enough that a *much* larger percentage of people find it worth doing on a large scale.
And so it goes with copying term papers.
Now the music piracy issue can be argued both ways (when one considers the negative effects of the RIAA monopoly on the music industry), but this issue cannot. Assuming these tools are well made and provide references to the supposed original sources, there should be, in theory, zero false positives. If there are any false positives, they can be investigated, but there were baseless accusations of plagiarism long before the first computer was invented, so this is nothing new.
So in this case the only students who have something to worry about are the ones actually plagiarizing. There's no moral high ground here, no more so than objecting to your professor running your work through a sepll-chekcer.
No, of course not. Nor do I want to cause him further harm.
But a person who does something like this should be made to confront the fact that it was a tragic mistake of judgement, not coddled and told he's a nice caring person, and maybe next time he'll get that 12 million.
There are times when folk need to be brought into contact with unpleasant truth, it's part of learnin.
Point A. He doesn't want to believe the best in people, his brain has kicked up a defense mechanism to keep him from losing it and jumping off a bridge.
Point B. If he's earned enough in his life to front $320,000 he should know better. This guy doesn't deserved sympathy in the sense of the mentally disabled. He deserves derision for having willfully ruined his life with greed.
One could keep extending this analogy until we are all sitting around feeling sorry for poor Adolf Hitler because after all, it was his upbringing that shaped him into a mass murderer.
Somewhere you have to draw a line and say that this person is to blame for his screw up and then stick it to him. It is through drawing such distinctions that we learn what to do and what not to do, both by crossing that line ourselves, and by observing what happens to others.
And I have to ask, what makes him seem like a caring guy? The fact that he's willing to risk the nest egg and lifestyle that his disabled wife is depending on to make a fast buck?
These things are lightyears away from providing useful military training. They would not behave like real soldiers in any way, shape or form. In fact, our soldiers would probably end up the worse for the training.
Further, they probably run $100K each and would get shredded in seconds by any actual contact with modern weaponry.
on the web monkey who coded up that streaming client.
I know it's getting hammered, but you can't even pause the damned thing to let it catch up, and if you restart it, you get 2 simultaneous audio streams at different time points.
A second problem is that of resonance. Your brain produces a reference wave and measures sensory input as an interference pattern to that wave. While you could easily exploit that phenominon to transmit data to the brain, it would be nearly impossible to make it believe the information is coming from the sensory organs.
Is passing off pet theories as well established facts. While the brain does use oscillations of varying frequencies, there's not yet a good reason to consider one of them a reference wave and the input an interference pattern.
Furthermore, and even more critically, said poster is drastically incorrect about fooling the brain into thinking the input is authentic. It has been commonly demonstrated for many decades, if not centuries, that fooling the brain about sensory input is fairly trivial. Example, a vibration applied to one nerve can create the illusion of kinethesis quite some distance away from this point. Turning in circles makes you dizzy by generating spurious vestibular input.
Basically, any input coming in along nerves is treated as authentic sensory input by default, and the brain will try to incorporate it into the worldview as experience dictates.
There are some businesses for which conservative practices are appropriate. I think it's a damned fine thing that the airline industry is one of them, given how devastating failures are.
The safety record of the airline industry is rather remarkable when you think about it. Doubly so when you see them cutting corners in maintenance and still getting away with it.
Now consider the somewhat less conservative auto market. We've got BMW's with engines that sieze up because of software bugs. Not the end of the world when driving (usually), but not something a plane can handle.
And what makes it worse... the astronauts can't afford to touch the surface of the shuttle while doing this.
Those tiles are like styrofoam. If an astronaut should miscalculate and drift into the belly of the orbiter, they'd cause real problems, even if there wasn't anything wrong in the first place.
I'm glad to see that Information Society is finally getting the recognition they deserve for doing such cutting edge stuff. Their music was absolutely transcendental.
I'm not all that pleased to see the UN having a hand in this however. Their history of intervention in the techno scene is hardly something to be proud of.
There's this algorithm called Latent Semantic Analysis which has been under development for quite some time (freely available!). It's quite good at comparing the semantic content of 2 bits of speech based on its database of many thousands of book (in fact you can specify the education level by choosing different databases).
The output of LSA has been shown to be roughly equivalent to human scorers for examining summary essays produced in tests.
Point is, that by combining this here paraphrasing algorithm with LSA, we can have computers summarizing text and other computers giving them grades on it. This takes students and teachers out of the equation entirely. Saves us big bucks and get public education back on its feet!
The first time I saw it mentioned in Norway a couple of years ago it was precisely lovestruck teenagers Netcom was targetting. Think of the market you have if teenagers are willing to pay to set up "chance encounters" every time they fall in love!
There's a word for that. It starts with S-T-A-L-K...
Slashdot Mirror
No I can't. Nor do I want to.
One of the major points of Firefly is that it's the exact opposite of Star Trek:
They are outlaws
The equivalent of the Federation is corrupt and oppressive
The crew is held together by loyalty rather than duty (which makes it believable that they would risk all to save one of them)
The premise is that humanity hasn't really changed in the far future, things are still basically the same, just with spaceships.
The only moral absolute is crew first, everything else secondary.
None of that exists in the Trek series'. Picard would rather chop off his arm than kill an evil person in cold blood, but Mal will kick them through an engine without a second thought.
Errrr "real" gems...
Sheesh, I need a personal assistant.
That repetitive drivel like Enterprise gets to last this long while the ream gems (FireFly, Farscape) pass away tragically.
Those shows had more originality, creativity and quality writing than the Star Trek franchise can hope to match. Not to say that Star Trek wasn't good and original in its day, but that day has passed.
I recently showed Firefly to a housemate for the first time, he was hooked after the pilot. After each episode (we just finished the last one), he sits in stunned amazement, quietly saying "why was this cancelled?". It's sad really.
Yes please. First 5 are great and hits the skids hard thereafter.
I hold different positions in those arguments.
The circumstances are very different though.
Real life is complicated
Get 10 years on ya, bet your outlook will differ.
It's the new fashion! Tell your customers/students/employees you don't trust them....AND...make them do the work of "proving" that they're not breaking the rules in some humilliating way.
The best way for students to prove that they're not breaking the rules, in this case, is to actually do the damned work. We're fortunate that it's become so easy to catch plagiarizers, a method that catches most of the offenders and produces no more false positives than convential methods.
Good students should be applauding this, because now their honest effort won't be in the shadow of someone's $35 store bought paper written by a poor grad student.
So where's the money to create these circumstances that evoke this amazing well of untapped creativity?
Teaching is hard, these teachers aren't lazy, they just don't want to waste their valuable time doing a task that a computer can do better.
Sounds like a batch of disaffected students looking for a cause to get worked up about. They should consider putting their energy towards a cause worth fighting for.
The reason plagiarism is becoming more of a problem is because it's more convenient, that's the short of it. It's the same reason noone really cared about music piracy back in the days of the cassette tape. It was such a pain in the ass that it was barely a blip on the radar. Now with PtoP it's convenient enough that a *much* larger percentage of people find it worth doing on a large scale.
And so it goes with copying term papers.
Now the music piracy issue can be argued both ways (when one considers the negative effects of the RIAA monopoly on the music industry), but this issue cannot. Assuming these tools are well made and provide references to the supposed original sources, there should be, in theory, zero false positives. If there are any false positives, they can be investigated, but there were baseless accusations of plagiarism long before the first computer was invented, so this is nothing new.
So in this case the only students who have something to worry about are the ones actually plagiarizing. There's no moral high ground here, no more so than objecting to your professor running your work through a sepll-chekcer.
PeopleFinder is on it's way then :)
And Google will soon provide us with Poogle.
Or maybe Stoogle
(St for Stalking)
When people poke fun at /. they make up stories just like this.
No, of course not. Nor do I want to cause him further harm.
But a person who does something like this should be made to confront the fact that it was a tragic mistake of judgement, not coddled and told he's a nice caring person, and maybe next time he'll get that 12 million.
There are times when folk need to be brought into contact with unpleasant truth, it's part of learnin.
I said he fronted it.
Not that it wasn't his.
Not everyone can walk in and get $320K in loans.
Point A. He doesn't want to believe the best in people, his brain has kicked up a defense mechanism to keep him from losing it and jumping off a bridge.
Point B. If he's earned enough in his life to front $320,000 he should know better. This guy doesn't deserved sympathy in the sense of the mentally disabled. He deserves derision for having willfully ruined his life with greed.
This is taking compassion too far.
One could keep extending this analogy until we are all sitting around feeling sorry for poor Adolf Hitler because after all, it was his upbringing that shaped him into a mass murderer.
Somewhere you have to draw a line and say that this person is to blame for his screw up and then stick it to him. It is through drawing such distinctions that we learn what to do and what not to do, both by crossing that line ourselves, and by observing what happens to others.
And I have to ask, what makes him seem like a caring guy? The fact that he's willing to risk the nest egg and lifestyle that his disabled wife is depending on to make a fast buck?
These things are lightyears away from providing useful military training. They would not behave like real soldiers in any way, shape or form. In fact, our soldiers would probably end up the worse for the training.
Further, they probably run $100K each and would get shredded in seconds by any actual contact with modern weaponry.
on the web monkey who coded up that streaming client.
I know it's getting hammered, but you can't even pause the damned thing to let it catch up, and if you restart it, you get 2 simultaneous audio streams at different time points.
BS Advisory Bulletin
The above poster who said this:
A second problem is that of resonance. Your brain produces a reference wave and measures sensory input as an interference pattern to that wave. While you could easily exploit that phenominon to transmit data to the brain, it would be nearly impossible to make it believe the information is coming from the sensory organs.
Is passing off pet theories as well established facts. While the brain does use oscillations of varying frequencies, there's not yet a good reason to consider one of them a reference wave and the input an interference pattern.
Furthermore, and even more critically, said poster is drastically incorrect about fooling the brain into thinking the input is authentic. It has been commonly demonstrated for many decades, if not centuries, that fooling the brain about sensory input is fairly trivial. Example, a vibration applied to one nerve can create the illusion of kinethesis quite some distance away from this point. Turning in circles makes you dizzy by generating spurious vestibular input.
Basically, any input coming in along nerves is treated as authentic sensory input by default, and the brain will try to incorporate it into the worldview as experience dictates.
There are some businesses for which conservative practices are appropriate. I think it's a damned fine thing that the airline industry is one of them, given how devastating failures are.
The safety record of the airline industry is rather remarkable when you think about it. Doubly so when you see them cutting corners in maintenance and still getting away with it.
Now consider the somewhat less conservative auto market. We've got BMW's with engines that sieze up because of software bugs. Not the end of the world when driving (usually), but not something a plane can handle.
And what makes it worse... the astronauts can't afford to touch the surface of the shuttle while doing this.
Those tiles are like styrofoam. If an astronaut should miscalculate and drift into the belly of the orbiter, they'd cause real problems, even if there wasn't anything wrong in the first place.
I'm glad to see that Information Society is finally getting the recognition they deserve for doing such cutting edge stuff. Their music was absolutely transcendental.
I'm not all that pleased to see the UN having a hand in this however. Their history of intervention in the techno scene is hardly something to be proud of.
silly Rabbit, messed up the link
It's coloradO.edu
There's this algorithm called Latent Semantic Analysis which has been under development for quite some time (freely available!). It's quite good at comparing the semantic content of 2 bits of speech based on its database of many thousands of book (in fact you can specify the education level by choosing different databases).
The output of LSA has been shown to be roughly equivalent to human scorers for examining summary essays produced in tests.
Point is, that by combining this here paraphrasing algorithm with LSA, we can have computers summarizing text and other computers giving them grades on it. This takes students and teachers out of the equation entirely. Saves us big bucks and get public education back on its feet!
Bush says How High?
I'd be happy with a new space race, but it's embarassing that our foreign policy is entirely dictated by what the Joneses are doing.
The first time I saw it mentioned in Norway a couple of years ago it was precisely lovestruck teenagers Netcom was targetting. Think of the market you have if teenagers are willing to pay to set up "chance encounters" every time they fall in love!
There's a word for that. It starts with S-T-A-L-K...
Yep, they're called "trucks".
I don't know why a 2 wheeled gizmo adds anything useful to the process of carrying things around.