Authors Guild burned up a lot of respect for me...
on
Authors' Amazon Awareness
·
· Score: 3, Informative
When the President of the Authors Guild went on a rant about how text to speech was infringing on authors "audio rights". http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html?_r=1 I won't go into the arguments, but suffice it to say I sure as hell don't just automatically trust whatever the authors guild is trying to push. Even if you think he's right, was this issue SO important he had to write a very public article about it in the NYT?
On the other hand, Amazon isn't the must trustworthy company in the world either. The incident with 1984 on the Kindle comes to mind. This incident only makes it crystal clear that the Kindle is essentially like renting books, not owning them. It's just kind of amazing that the entire e-book world is rife with anti-consumer paranoia.
The entire e-book industry is doomed to failure unless they're significantly cheaper than the paper version. How many people really want to buy a book on technology platform for only a little less? We all know these are essentially throw-away devices. In 2 years there will be some Great New "gotta have it" book reader platform that'll make anything right now obsolete. In 5 years Kindles will be essentially worthless and people will turn their noses up at them like it's a Palm Pilot. Meanwhile the paper book holds essentially the same value as it did 100 years ago. So which medium should I buy? If I don't need a new version of a recent book, I can get a used copy on Amazon for next to nothing, or deeply discounted. The e-book I can't re-sell, easily loan to a friend, etc. Inferior technologies can only compete on price.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology. I just consider "paper books" to be technology (a competing technology of course). Newer doesn't mean better, and it's difficult for electronics to compete with paper when the content is completely static.
So after a project dies it forks off into a slew a Legacy systems all needed independent modifications and changes. That is the Ugly side of Open Source to me.
Unless all the owners of the legacy systems got together and formed some sort of.. foundation to maintain the old version. They could all share the code and benefit from the modifications. They could call it something like the Apache Software Foundation (oops, I guess that one's already taken).
Kidding aside, the "problem" you describe has nothing to do with "open source", and everything to do with the rest of the world moving on to something new. With open source at least the people dependent on the old version could maintain it if they wanted to/needed to. With closed source, it's upgrade or suffer.
So if it's so great and trouble free, then why isn't it being touted as The Great Solution?
Every time I hear about some New Technology it's always advertised with all its advantages, and any disadvantage is swept under the rug. I've heard of sodium cooled breeder reactors for a decade. Has anyone built any of these reactors on a commercial scale anywhere in the world? If not, why not?
There are a lot of things you can do with a radio signal that are a lot tougher to do with light.
And there's a lot of things you can do in an unregulated spectrum that you can't do in a regulated one. One is simply the transmission power. I don't see why you can't do amplitude modulation with such a wide transmission range. and frequency-modulating a (single) laser diode is a good trick.
I don't see how this can work at the speed they're claiming. 1+ Gbps means they're pulsing that light at sub-nanosecond intervals
What makes you think that? 1+ Gb/sec doesn't mean modulating at 1 billion times/second, it's a raw bit rate. Why couldn't they be using some encoding scheme that gets multiple bits/pulse?
How do you figure? The "revelation" that this was a scam won't make the fools any smarter. They'll just find someone else to trick them. These people aren't looking for truth, they're looking for belief.
With all due respect to Zappa, it's Marcel Duchamp who understood this first, around 1913.
You really think it took until 1913 for someone to understand this very simple concept? Duchamp was the one who popularized the concept in the modern world, but we'll never know who first thought of it.
I knew this story wouldn't go well on this site. Nerds typically don't get art.
Lots of people here "get art". That doesn't mean you have to think it's particularly clever or "good". This particular piece is certainly a good scam and way to make some dough for the original guy. It's about as good "art" as the thing Bernie Madhoff did though (Maybe 'ol Bernie should have just called his scam art, and he wouldn't be rotting in jail now)
Since I am a geek, I don't pretend to fully understand the artists thinking behind it and am even willing to admit that I personally think he might be blowing a bit of smoke. But the failing is mine, not his.
And you have fully bought into "the emperor has no clothes" concept that's all too common in the art world. If you're not familiar with the concept, here's the synopsis:
1. Some acclaimed, but inexplicable (i.e. crap) piece of art is laid out before you. 2. You can't quite make head or tail of it.. but not wanting to sound like an idiot you talk about how great it is (Some idiot paid 100,000 for it, so it MUST be good right? Plus.. it's in this museum! These are trained professionals, they know what they're doing! It must be I just don't "get art").
I've gone to plenty of art museums over the years. There's quite a bit of really shitty art in them. A year ago a saw what amounts to some of the worst I've ever seen. It was a Japanese artists who essentially took a lot of plastic crap and burned it. He had quite the display of burned plastic crap and resin, so somehow he hypnotized enough people into thinking this was somehow great enough to wind up in a museum.
Some might argue that you "need to keep an open mind". I agree, Just don't keep it so open that your brain falls out.
Not true at all. He wants to exceed the speed of sound by falling quickly, but the dang balloon keeps lifting him up! If anything, it's actively working against him!
Clever, but misses the point.
Rather than argue what "a machine" is, I'd rather step back and wonder what the original distinction was supposed to convey. He's certainly using a tool, since the balloon, gondola and parachute aren't part of his body. He's not using his muscles to propel himself, so this isn't a physical feat of strength (beyond the obvious endurance of cold/stress of the environment). It's true the tool he's using isn't directly propelling him, but the balloon is certainly later enabling him to gain such high velocity. Dismissing the role of the technology as counter-productive is just self-deception.
If you want to categorize this, it's mostly a feat of daring and technology. To me that puts it closer to the category of "land speed record" than it does of "longest long jump".
Is there an unwritten rule that you must deposit cash back into the ATM so that it's available for the next person to be able make a withdrawal or is the ATM's float large enough that it doesn't run out of cash in a year??
I'd expect that the places you can spend money at have to buy supplies just like any other business, and I'd guess they're not using currency to do so. So the logical conclusion is that there's some person that acts as "banker", and is able to take in bills and credit the stores account. The store can then purchase supplies, and the "banker" puts the money back in the ATM.
That doesn't mean it's meaningless, as most any idea starts out pretty vague.
No it doesn't. But at this early stage of development, it doesn't really belong on Slashdot or in general public discourse either. I'm sure there's countless vague theories that only exist in one persons head, but haven't reached a level ready to be consumed by even those able to examine it.
I see a lot of explanations and mathematics, but I don't see anything in the way of testable predictions.
Scanning through the paper the word prediction occurs twice. Here's both of them:
Does this view of gravity lead to predictions? The statistical average should give the usual laws, hence one has to study the fluctuations in the gravitational force. Their size depends on the effective temperature, which may not be universal and depends on the effective value of . An interesting thought is that fluctuations may turn out to be more pronounced for weak gravitational fields between small bodies of matter. But clearly, we need a better understanding of the theory to turn this in to a prediction.
Wake me when the guy comes up with at least one, and it's testable.
You may be a little bit confused. Milk is a movie about the first openly gay elected official in the US, who was later assassinated (along with the mayor) by another elected official. It's not really a "gay" movie any more than Malcolm X was a "black" movie.
It might be the mainstream thing as you say. But looking at my own city I do note that the more liberal areas of the city are far more likely to be watching Milk than the more conservative parts.
The jury is not there as an expert in forensic science
The jury is also not an expert in eyewitness testimony. You accuse those who believe in forensic and expert testimony of making an appeal to authority. I accuse you of making an appeal to the infallibility of individuals and memory. People lie, have bad memories, are influenced by what they heard elsewhere, and insulate themselves from anything contradicting what they think they saw. How is that not as equally inaccurate as forensic evidence or expert testimony?
You don't have to pay a lot of attention to realize this. Just read any news story the day after it happened, and then later on find out what actually occurred. One example that sticks out of my mind was when the DC sniper was running amok, eyewitnesses claimed that the shots came from a white van. Later of course we all learned that John Muhammad was driving a blue Chevy Caprice (which you may note looks nothing like a white van). It doesn't take a lot of effort to find wild inaccuracies in eye-witness accounts.
You're right that we shouldn't take forensic evidence as a gold standard above all else. It simply needs to be interpreted with the unreliability of ALL evidence.
Mod parent way down, as GP said nothing of the sort.
We must have read two different posts. The post I read was trying to put both categories of evidence on equal footing. Neither is as perfect and reliable as the side presenting it is trying to make it out to be. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and expert witnesses and forensic evidence have their own problems. Ignoring one of them over the other because of your personal bias is a bad idea.
I'd forgive you, but the article was written for lay people and it clearly answered your question.
I was always assuming that, given that scientists who know what they're doing should have invented this test, there was some sophisticated process that would ensure that they would somehow only choose base pairs from the subset that was actually different in different individuals
If you had read the article, you might have noticed that it says the test selected for non-coding DNA (that is it doesn't produce proteins) that commonly varies in humans.
Having the names of the people associated with each DNA analysis would be completely unnecessary. Just assign each person a unique, meaningless number in place of their name and the problem is solved. There's probably 6 other ways to solve the privacy problem and still make the data useful. If researchers find special cases where they need actual identities to better understand what's going on, make them sign NDAs and release the information to only them.
The FBI doesn't want to release this because they know there's a lot of partial or complete matches in the database. Suddenly having news stories about how there's 100 people in the FBI DNA database with the same 13 identifiers (flash to expert testimony claiming billions to one of such a match) would be a major disaster for the FBI. The FBI would then talk about how most of them are the same person using different names, and various other explanations, but the damage would be done (flash to news story about one side of a match being a 22 year old male from Alaska, and another a 76 year old female from Florida).
I understand why the FBI doesn't want to do this, but it's extremely important data about how valid this type of DNA testing is (especially within certain populations) (flash to news story about racism). Essentially the government holds evidence about the validity of DNA testing that's relevant to thousands of criminal cases that it refuses to release. That sounds like a strong constitutional issue to me.
It is a certainty that any well-funded terrorist group will eventually have access to nuclear-scale weapons, and probably in the next hundred years.
WTF? Are you actually SERIOUS? Plutonium isn't exactly available at Wal-Mart. Nuclear weapons are inherently difficult weapons to create, and to even dream of doing to you need to the fissile material, which is even harder to obtain.
Back that up. . . . For example, if a terrorist group has a nuke
So in your mind these "the terrorists" have gone from failing to detonate an explosive to obtaining nuclear weapons? Just how far can your imagination turn into reality? Apparently "back that up" doesn't apply to the capability for nuclear weapons.
If you have to turn to "Ask Slashdot" for what's likely THE most important decision your business could make (sale), then you really have no business farming this out to someone you've just met.
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a rather poor place for high-level business strategy (I know! I thought slashdot knew everything!). I don't know much about selling a company, but I do know a little about risk. If you really don't have the skills internally to do this yourself, there's an ENORMOUS risk of looking outside the company to find someone with these skills. If you don't have the skills to do this yourself, how are you going to know who's qualified to make such a big decision? How are you going to know if they're doing a good job? Put into simple terms, what's your expected gain in value from selling the company vs. selling your product? Now think about that in terms of hiring the wrong sales guy.
The thing is, you can always sell the company later. If you've demonstrated a viable sales strategy, your company is going to be that much more easy to sell, and worth more money.
This really isn't that big of a deal. And it might even be a good thing for the United States long term. Relying on one country for an important mineral is almost always a bad thing. Doubly for a country like China that's we've not always been on the friendliest terms with.
Scream "fascist" all you want, but you and most other westerners do not understand Chinese civilization or the role that government has traditionally played in it . . . it isn't unheard of to hear of a foreigner beaten into a coma for deflowering local girls. . . .
Right, nothing fascist about that. Why would anyone scream fascist?
I'm sorry, but "understanding" a culture doesn't excuse it. I'm sure if you "understood" slavery in the United States you it might make more sense. I'm actually a bit surprised the Great Firewall Of China allows you to post on slashdot. How many stories haven't you been able to read because the Chinese government doesn't approve of it?
Also, Thorium reactions do not produce plutonium. The fact that Thorium reactions do not produce weaponized by products is one of its huge advantages
That's not quite true. Thorium reactors produce U-233 (which is the actual fuel, thorium itself is not fissile). U-233 can and has been used to produce nuclear weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
When the President of the Authors Guild went on a rant about how text to speech was infringing on authors "audio rights".
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html?_r=1
I won't go into the arguments, but suffice it to say I sure as hell don't just automatically trust whatever the authors guild is trying to push. Even if you think he's right, was this issue SO important he had to write a very public article about it in the NYT?
On the other hand, Amazon isn't the must trustworthy company in the world either. The incident with 1984 on the Kindle comes to mind. This incident only makes it crystal clear that the Kindle is essentially like renting books, not owning them. It's just kind of amazing that the entire e-book world is rife with anti-consumer paranoia.
The entire e-book industry is doomed to failure unless they're significantly cheaper than the paper version. How many people really want to buy a book on technology platform for only a little less? We all know these are essentially throw-away devices. In 2 years there will be some Great New "gotta have it" book reader platform that'll make anything right now obsolete. In 5 years Kindles will be essentially worthless and people will turn their noses up at them like it's a Palm Pilot. Meanwhile the paper book holds essentially the same value as it did 100 years ago. So which medium should I buy? If I don't need a new version of a recent book, I can get a used copy on Amazon for next to nothing, or deeply discounted. The e-book I can't re-sell, easily loan to a friend, etc. Inferior technologies can only compete on price.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology. I just consider "paper books" to be technology (a competing technology of course). Newer doesn't mean better, and it's difficult for electronics to compete with paper when the content is completely static.
So after a project dies it forks off into a slew a Legacy systems all needed independent modifications and changes. That is the Ugly side of Open Source to me.
Unless all the owners of the legacy systems got together and formed some sort of.. foundation to maintain the old version. They could all share the code and benefit from the modifications. They could call it something like the Apache Software Foundation (oops, I guess that one's already taken).
Kidding aside, the "problem" you describe has nothing to do with "open source", and everything to do with the rest of the world moving on to something new. With open source at least the people dependent on the old version could maintain it if they wanted to/needed to. With closed source, it's upgrade or suffer.
So if it's so great and trouble free, then why isn't it being touted as The Great Solution?
Every time I hear about some New Technology it's always advertised with all its advantages, and any disadvantage is swept under the rug. I've heard of sodium cooled breeder reactors for a decade. Has anyone built any of these reactors on a commercial scale anywhere in the world? If not, why not?
There are a lot of things you can do with a radio signal that are a lot tougher to do with light.
And there's a lot of things you can do in an unregulated spectrum that you can't do in a regulated one. One is simply the transmission power. I don't see why you can't do amplitude modulation with such a wide transmission range.
and frequency-modulating a (single) laser diode is a good trick.
So use multiple diodes at multiple frequencies.
I don't see how this can work at the speed they're claiming. 1+ Gbps means they're pulsing that light at sub-nanosecond intervals
What makes you think that? 1+ Gb/sec doesn't mean modulating at 1 billion times/second, it's a raw bit rate. Why couldn't they be using some encoding scheme that gets multiple bits/pulse?
They're doing the human race a favour. Really.
How do you figure? The "revelation" that this was a scam won't make the fools any smarter. They'll just find someone else to trick them. These people aren't looking for truth, they're looking for belief.
With all due respect to Zappa, it's Marcel Duchamp who understood this first, around 1913.
You really think it took until 1913 for someone to understand this very simple concept? Duchamp was the one who popularized the concept in the modern world, but we'll never know who first thought of it.
I knew this story wouldn't go well on this site. Nerds typically don't get art.
Lots of people here "get art". That doesn't mean you have to think it's particularly clever or "good". This particular piece is certainly a good scam and way to make some dough for the original guy. It's about as good "art" as the thing Bernie Madhoff did though (Maybe 'ol Bernie should have just called his scam art, and he wouldn't be rotting in jail now)
Since I am a geek, I don't pretend to fully understand the artists thinking behind it and am even willing to admit that I personally think he might be blowing a bit of smoke. But the failing is mine, not his.
And you have fully bought into "the emperor has no clothes" concept that's all too common in the art world. If you're not familiar with the concept, here's the synopsis:
1. Some acclaimed, but inexplicable (i.e. crap) piece of art is laid out before you.
2. You can't quite make head or tail of it.. but not wanting to sound like an idiot you talk about how great it is (Some idiot paid 100,000 for it, so it MUST be good right? Plus.. it's in this museum! These are trained professionals, they know what they're doing! It must be I just don't "get art").
I've gone to plenty of art museums over the years. There's quite a bit of really shitty art in them. A year ago a saw what amounts to some of the worst I've ever seen. It was a Japanese artists who essentially took a lot of plastic crap and burned it. He had quite the display of burned plastic crap and resin, so somehow he hypnotized enough people into thinking this was somehow great enough to wind up in a museum.
Some might argue that you "need to keep an open mind". I agree, Just don't keep it so open that your brain falls out.
All of his newest pieces of 'art' just seem to be money makers for himself that prey on people who want to seem like they are hip to the 'art scene.'
Heheh.. How many successful artists have done the exact same thing, but just weren't so overt about it?
Not true at all. He wants to exceed the speed of sound by falling quickly, but the dang balloon keeps lifting him up! If anything, it's actively working against him!
Clever, but misses the point.
Rather than argue what "a machine" is, I'd rather step back and wonder what the original distinction was supposed to convey. He's certainly using a tool, since the balloon, gondola and parachute aren't part of his body. He's not using his muscles to propel himself, so this isn't a physical feat of strength (beyond the obvious endurance of cold/stress of the environment). It's true the tool he's using isn't directly propelling him, but the balloon is certainly later enabling him to gain such high velocity. Dismissing the role of the technology as counter-productive is just self-deception.
If you want to categorize this, it's mostly a feat of daring and technology. To me that puts it closer to the category of "land speed record" than it does of "longest long jump".
Is there an unwritten rule that you must deposit cash back into the ATM so that it's available for the next person to be able make a withdrawal or is the ATM's float large enough that it doesn't run out of cash in a year??
I'd expect that the places you can spend money at have to buy supplies just like any other business, and I'd guess they're not using currency to do so. So the logical conclusion is that there's some person that acts as "banker", and is able to take in bills and credit the stores account. The store can then purchase supplies, and the "banker" puts the money back in the ATM.
That doesn't mean it's meaningless, as most any idea starts out pretty vague.
No it doesn't. But at this early stage of development, it doesn't really belong on Slashdot or in general public discourse either. I'm sure there's countless vague theories that only exist in one persons head, but haven't reached a level ready to be consumed by even those able to examine it.
I see a lot of explanations and mathematics, but I don't see anything in the way of testable predictions.
Scanning through the paper the word prediction occurs twice. Here's both of them:
Wake me when the guy comes up with at least one, and it's testable.
You may be a little bit confused. Milk is a movie about the first openly gay elected official in the US, who was later assassinated (along with the mayor) by another elected official. It's not really a "gay" movie any more than Malcolm X was a "black" movie.
It might be the mainstream thing as you say. But looking at my own city I do note that the more liberal areas of the city are far more likely to be watching Milk than the more conservative parts.
Milk is in the top 3 movies in San Francisco in every area except the Castro. Try explaining that one if you can.
Maybe most people in Castro already saw it in the theater, or rented it months ago? The DVD came out in March of last year, so it's not exactly new.
The jury is not there as an expert in forensic science
The jury is also not an expert in eyewitness testimony. You accuse those who believe in forensic and expert testimony of making an appeal to authority. I accuse you of making an appeal to the infallibility of individuals and memory. People lie, have bad memories, are influenced by what they heard elsewhere, and insulate themselves from anything contradicting what they think they saw. How is that not as equally inaccurate as forensic evidence or expert testimony?
You don't have to pay a lot of attention to realize this. Just read any news story the day after it happened, and then later on find out what actually occurred. One example that sticks out of my mind was when the DC sniper was running amok, eyewitnesses claimed that the shots came from a white van. Later of course we all learned that John Muhammad was driving a blue Chevy Caprice (which you may note looks nothing like a white van). It doesn't take a lot of effort to find wild inaccuracies in eye-witness accounts.
You're right that we shouldn't take forensic evidence as a gold standard above all else. It simply needs to be interpreted with the unreliability of ALL evidence.
Mod parent way down, as GP said nothing of the sort.
We must have read two different posts. The post I read was trying to put both categories of evidence on equal footing. Neither is as perfect and reliable as the side presenting it is trying to make it out to be. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and expert witnesses and forensic evidence have their own problems. Ignoring one of them over the other because of your personal bias is a bad idea.
Forgive me that I'm a layperson who didn't RTFA
I'd forgive you, but the article was written for lay people and it clearly answered your question.
I was always assuming that, given that scientists who know what they're doing should have invented this test, there was some sophisticated process that would ensure that they would somehow only choose base pairs from the subset that was actually different in different individuals
If you had read the article, you might have noticed that it says the test selected for non-coding DNA (that is it doesn't produce proteins) that commonly varies in humans.
Having the names of the people associated with each DNA analysis would be completely unnecessary. Just assign each person a unique, meaningless number in place of their name and the problem is solved. There's probably 6 other ways to solve the privacy problem and still make the data useful. If researchers find special cases where they need actual identities to better understand what's going on, make them sign NDAs and release the information to only them.
The FBI doesn't want to release this because they know there's a lot of partial or complete matches in the database. Suddenly having news stories about how there's 100 people in the FBI DNA database with the same 13 identifiers (flash to expert testimony claiming billions to one of such a match) would be a major disaster for the FBI. The FBI would then talk about how most of them are the same person using different names, and various other explanations, but the damage would be done (flash to news story about one side of a match being a 22 year old male from Alaska, and another a 76 year old female from Florida).
I understand why the FBI doesn't want to do this, but it's extremely important data about how valid this type of DNA testing is (especially within certain populations) (flash to news story about racism). Essentially the government holds evidence about the validity of DNA testing that's relevant to thousands of criminal cases that it refuses to release. That sounds like a strong constitutional issue to me.
It is a certainty that any well-funded terrorist group will eventually have access to nuclear-scale weapons, and probably in the next hundred years.
WTF? Are you actually SERIOUS? Plutonium isn't exactly available at Wal-Mart. Nuclear weapons are inherently difficult weapons to create, and to even dream of doing to you need to the fissile material, which is even harder to obtain.
How anyone modded this up is beyond me.
Back that up.
.
.
.
For example, if a terrorist group has a nuke
So in your mind these "the terrorists" have gone from failing to detonate an explosive to obtaining nuclear weapons? Just how far can your imagination turn into reality? Apparently "back that up" doesn't apply to the capability for nuclear weapons.
If you have to turn to "Ask Slashdot" for what's likely THE most important decision your business could make (sale), then you really have no business farming this out to someone you've just met.
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a rather poor place for high-level business strategy (I know! I thought slashdot knew everything!). I don't know much about selling a company, but I do know a little about risk. If you really don't have the skills internally to do this yourself, there's an ENORMOUS risk of looking outside the company to find someone with these skills. If you don't have the skills to do this yourself, how are you going to know who's qualified to make such a big decision? How are you going to know if they're doing a good job? Put into simple terms, what's your expected gain in value from selling the company vs. selling your product? Now think about that in terms of hiring the wrong sales guy.
The thing is, you can always sell the company later. If you've demonstrated a viable sales strategy, your company is going to be that much more easy to sell, and worth more money.
This really isn't that big of a deal.
And it might even be a good thing for the United States long term. Relying on one country for an important mineral is almost always a bad thing. Doubly for a country like China that's we've not always been on the friendliest terms with.
Scream "fascist" all you want, but you and most other westerners do not understand Chinese civilization or the role that government has traditionally played in it
.
.
.
it isn't unheard of to hear of a foreigner beaten into a coma for deflowering local girls.
.
.
.
Right, nothing fascist about that. Why would anyone scream fascist?
I'm sorry, but "understanding" a culture doesn't excuse it. I'm sure if you "understood" slavery in the United States you it might make more sense. I'm actually a bit surprised the Great Firewall Of China allows you to post on slashdot. How many stories haven't you been able to read because the Chinese government doesn't approve of it?
Also, Thorium reactions do not produce plutonium. The fact that Thorium reactions do not produce weaponized by products is one of its huge advantages
That's not quite true. Thorium reactors produce U-233 (which is the actual fuel, thorium itself is not fissile). U-233 can and has been used to produce nuclear weapons.