"However, I am opposed to the bulk gathering of data about people in any form."
Personally, it's gathering of personal data which I'm opposed to, and agregate data gathering which I don't mind. Bulk data is (if properly collected) anonymous, and that is usefull data to companies; they can see how much fun people are having, if the players are repeatedly stuck at a single place, if 70% of the gamers don't use a particular weapon etc etc etc. That is good use of data. Personal data is only usefull for targetted adds, which is only good if it actually knocks ten bucks off the games' price.
"when peers demonstrated that feeding even white noise or parallel downward sloping lines into the researchers' plotting program"
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: you need to provide a link for that statement, 'cause I've never heard of this before.
I have however seen and done the same kind of testing of software (boxcounting an image to determine fractal dimension of an attractor) as a calibration/selfchecking step. I just need to see a reputable link to believe that such a step was missed by any scientist who has gotten his degree.
Hark unto this guy. At least 20 Nobel laureates agree with him to the point that they have put it in writing.
I'm still amazed at the lack of media attention 20 Nobel laureates gets you. I guess they should have hired Britney Spears for topless pics for their letterhead:(
Hehe...I recently did a project on chaos theory (strange attractor provided by water drops from a needle tip); there's one uni in the Netherlands where these projects aren't allowed, because the results are (inherrently to chaos theory:)) not reproducable:)
Sure, you could call chaos theory a mere following of cooking recipes instead of a science due to that fact, but the same goes for quantum mechanics (for totally other reasons).
"problems of sample bias, such as the vast majority of environmental scientists strangely enough are environmentalists..."
YEah...observational bias...if you saw and could interpret the data, you would be an environmentalist too. I'm a physicist and have followed a few lectures on climate, gasseous interaction and thermodynamics; trust the guys who have studied this stuff, not the engineers who drill for oil (and I say this as someone who has also studied mech. eng.).
Engineers have it easy: you just have to look at 'what works'. A scientist has to know 'how and why that thing works there'.
As to the scientific method: what you mention is not a fallacy, it's a limitation. What it does is say that you never know if your description is actually what happens in the 'real world', but you can sure as hell tell if your description fits with the reslts the real world give you. End result: closer and closer approximations of real world phenomenon, with more and more decimal results. And as we know, an engineer just needs three decimals (or as few as absolutely possible); a scientists wants them all.
No: your view is biased by the media, bigtime. It was the 1950's when the first scientist 'discovered' clues to glabal warming based on opbservations done at Hawaii. Coupled with observations and a hypothesis about conditions on Mars, global warming theory was formed. This was the '50's, maybe early '60's. Come 1970 and global warming was pretty much established science and by the 1980's it was scientific theory with a few crackpot holdouts which continue to this day.
What's interesting is that your timeline is correct in it's generalities, but off by a decade or two. And it is very easy to trace that bias to how the media has covered the issue. Scientists knew a while back, but the media didn't catch on, and to this day still gives equal time to unrespected/unrelated scientists (who often work in totally unrelated fields! The media's credibilty crumbled for me when I saw a political scienctist comment on the science of global warming on air...). Fact is, every world leader should be held accountable for mass genocide in the next couple of decades; the numbers were out there, but they just didn't want to listen to them (and the most vacuous argument is 'it'll be bad for the economy!', for one because it's not true [what, all those filters and conversion units don't need to be built and manufatured?] but also because even if it where, a hard economy is better than all the problems associated with global warming).
Just as you can't controll what books your kids read...but you can be informed as a parent, and more importantly you can educate and raise your kid so they can make their choices on their own and have a sence3 of reality to go along with it.
"you wanted to do the very thing your parents said you were too young to do."
Which means you failed to get a decent relationship with your kid, is all that that means. I know it's simnple to say and hard to do, but it is the truth.
" this isn't a problem where you can point a finger in one direction and solve it."
Actually, I can give it a pretty decent try:) : it's american culture which is to blame. Any culture where it's OK to hack off a tit, but lick the tit and it's x-rated is fucked up.
Love and sex is much preferable to violence...but as this case very literally shows, the powers that be think violence is preferable to affection.
If you're that concerned with the correct time and being lazy, get one of those watches which gets synced to a nuclear clock over the ether. They're quite cheap....and more accurate than your system clock.
"what right does your boss have to know where you are?"
I agree...but what right does an employer have to know that you smoke marihuana? Or, even more preposterous, what your credit rating is? I love the last one: it actually can stop you from getting a job when you really need one!
The only thing an employer should need to know about you are your educational/employment history and your personality (to see if you fit in/can work with your collegues). But that hasn't stopped employers from wanting to know everything from your DNA-specified prediliction towards cancer of the little pinky and your sock-size.
Yeah...like the one which says that every employee has to be loyal to the company, but the company doesn't have to be loyal to it's employees. I always love that: in the big bad world of business, it's A-OK to fire a tenth of your workforce (especially the tenth which DIDN'T get the compnay into that situation), because that's just business. But at the same time, your employees have to be loyal to the company to get hired or to work there (ie don't ever critisice the company).
Personally, I think it went wrong when corporations got the same rights as humans (owning property etc), because corporations never have and never will have what humans do: a concience and moral character. A corporation exists solely to earn it's shareholders money. But what was left out was the fact that corporations don't operate in a vacuum; they operate in a society. Allowing them basic human rights without being able to punish them like humans is where it went wrong. Allowing them to spend their way out of trouble when doing morally reprehensible things (like poluting, making cost/benefit analyses concerning human deaths) instead of giving them a deathsentence (in the states where that's applicable) means they can have human rights without human duties.
Really? Here in Delft, it's usually dual format: pdf and latex. Doesn't arxiv.org also do postscript files?
Although I do agree: for some reason pdf is the uniting factor...it's just that I hate that cumbersome, spacehogging, userunfriendly, format which is fine for printing, but an absolute horror for actual/reading/ '~'.
"If the planet's environment is life-friendly, then it's only a matter of time before life evolves on it."
And you base this one what? An empirical basis of exactly 1 instance? Pretty presumptious of you.
Now, considering the size and nature of the universe, I'd be pretty surprised if there was no other life in it. But scientifically, or even statistically, you only have the one sample where life has evolved. So a sweeping statement like yours is IMO wrong and damaging to science as a whole, either through mangling of the scientific method or through a demonstration of how badly the scientific method has been taught in school.
This is not an ad-hominem, just an observation with an attached tentative explanation.
Yeah...I've always wanted a tablet for uni; I can just imagine the ease of dragging and thus copy/pasting a just made graph instead of filling the current one with too many curves or hastily scribling the entire graph over and over again in an attempt at clarity. But they're just too expensive...wake me up when they hit $500.
You want WAY too much. I'd settle for easy conversion from html and txt (screw pdf, with a passion! Although due to the volume of 'em out there, a pdf converter would be nice), but native support is not an issue for me. Also required, as you say, is normal memory; no memorystick, just SD or CF. A proprietary connector wouldn't bother me much either...USB2 just isn't necessary for txt. And I realy don't care to add an mp3 player etc to an ebook reader; I'd rather have a thin device than a slightly bulkier one which also does music.
Anyway, I say this as someone who's an avid reader. I've used my IIIc and am using my T3 for a while now, reading through more than a gig of books. I'd be happy with a dedicated ebook reader with a large(ish) e-paper screen which looked good in sunlight and was rugged enough to take to the beach. I'd pay up to $100 for such a dedicated device, too. More than that and I'll stick to something which does what my T3 does (play mp3's, agenda, contacts, graphical calculator, emulate etc etc etc).
The analogy is wrong: in your ATM case, the withdrawees ask for something and got something else entirely; an error was clearly made. With the wap case, something was asked for and an affirmative was given out of a possible yes/no. Nothing unexpected (or even an indication that something was granted which shouldn't have been) occured.
As an aside: you say they where charged with theft (and let's face it, those student knew that they where doing something wrong)...but I would bet that were they to take it to trail, they wouldn't be convicted. The bank had a case of equipment error, the WAP didn't. As for cases of bank error, you should google the story about the guy who actually cashed one of those 'you have won $10.000' fraudster lottery checks (or other cases of ATM error by people who have followed them to conclusion). You'll find out that the bank is actually 'shit out of luck'...but in most cases they can frighten those involved into acquiesence. For even better examples on how this works, look into equipment error which leads to calamity instead of something positive to the person whom it happens to; automobile/engineering which goes wrong. You'll find that the party who makes the mistake is always at fault (ie the part/auto manufacturor, not the user).
"But it appears that people don't have a right to remove their content from circulation"
Sure they do; the problem is one of theory and practice. In practice, it's like Linus once said: "real men don't backup; they upload the contents of their RAID array to an ftp server and let the whole world mirror their data!" (yeah, I know I mangled the quote:)). Online data has a habit of sticking around.
I think what you have highlighted is one more problem which technology brings, alongside of the benefits. But that's life. For the web to work like everyone wants it to, mirroring of data/websites is incredibly usefull. What should have sufficed in this case was aa simple e-mail to google asking for the data to be deleted, followed by google asking for a passport picture or some other form of verification followed by the removal of the data. How this got to a lawsuit is beyond me...I wouldn't be surprised if it's due to the litigious atmosphere and a direct lack of gentlemanlyness on the part of the claimant, coupled by money-grubbingness of same.
But back to the underlying issue: if you want a fast and filled internet, data mirroring is what you'll have to accept; 'deleting' data has in this case been neccesstated into an opt-out affair. Which is fine by me, in this case.
And as an extra: you should always be aware of the consequences of your action, which is why I've never been in porn:P
It's 'cause OS game engines just aren't there yet in terms of functionality and user friendlyness. Not that modding is in any way userfriendly, and not that engines like OGRE aren't impressive...but making an actual game with OS engine is much more time consuming than laying a mod on an existing game (engine).
Plus there's the installed base. HL2, NWN and Doom have large install bases, so more people will play their mod.
Such a low/.id and so little luck with a simple gfx driver install/uninstall?
Frankly, I'm stunned. First off, the only reason your install could possibly have taken so long was if you paid Valve on the day of release and tried to autheticate and download whilst half the world was doing the same. A single day of waiting (or buying retail, which meant a disk install which/can not/ take hours) and you'd've had no problems. And for all the idiots shouting 'yeah well, Valve should have expected that! I( had to wait hours on release day!': you should have expected that. Whining about it is like me whouting 'I wanna million dollars'; it just work that way in the real world.
As for the reformat...I've gone through a couple of vidcards and numerous drivers...never have I had to re-format and I've never heard of anyone who had to do that for gfx drivers (well, maybe in winME, but that's winME:)).
YEah, a good idea, maybe, if it was thought up and introduced by the industry itself. My question is WTF is the EU doing sticking it's nose in private enterprise in this way? There are other things they should make legislation for...and this sure ain't where they should stick their noses.
IANAL (duh), but wifi transmissions take place in free spectrum. The guy's allowed to transmit pretty near anything he wants there. It's your responsibility to make sure that what/you/ do with that free spectrum is what you want it to be. If your equipment does something with the guy's signal, that is your fault for impropperly using the incoming waves of the free spectrum. When the guy asks for acknowledgement to use your network (his equipment litterally transmist a code asking if it can interface) and you, through your equipment, send an ack code back the quistion truly becomes: 'how was the guy supposed to know that that acknowledgement (that ack signal) that you sent that it's ok to use your equipment is/not really/ an ack, and that he's supposed to take that answer as a no?'.
That handshaking your equipment does on your behalf is my '"de facto" authorization crap' and why "That's the way the Internet works" will stand up in court. Just remember, computers will only do exactly what you tell them to do. It's on your head to ensure that it actualy does what you want it to.
I'd just construct a SEP-field and paint it pink. Failing that, I'd call my friends in the contruction business and hope no-one notices that new moon in the morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is because with win2000/xp, MS finally came out with a stable OS.
Too bad they immediately jacked up the price by 400% and left all the security holes in...
"However, I am opposed to the bulk gathering of data about people in any form."
Personally, it's gathering of personal data which I'm opposed to, and agregate data gathering which I don't mind. Bulk data is (if properly collected) anonymous, and that is usefull data to companies; they can see how much fun people are having, if the players are repeatedly stuck at a single place, if 70% of the gamers don't use a particular weapon etc etc etc. That is good use of data. Personal data is only usefull for targetted adds, which is only good if it actually knocks ten bucks off the games' price.
If this where the 1980's, you would be right. But this is more akin to doubting Einstein's validity after Trinity.
"when peers demonstrated that feeding even white noise or parallel downward sloping lines into the researchers' plotting program"
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: you need to provide a link for that statement, 'cause I've never heard of this before.
I have however seen and done the same kind of testing of software (boxcounting an image to determine fractal dimension of an attractor) as a calibration/selfchecking step. I just need to see a reputable link to believe that such a step was missed by any scientist who has gotten his degree.
Hark unto this guy. At least 20 Nobel laureates agree with him to the point that they have put it in writing.
:(
I'm still amazed at the lack of media attention 20 Nobel laureates gets you. I guess they should have hired Britney Spears for topless pics for their letterhead
Hehe...I recently did a project on chaos theory (strange attractor provided by water drops from a needle tip); there's one uni in the Netherlands where these projects aren't allowed, because the results are (inherrently to chaos theory :)) not reproducable :)
Sure, you could call chaos theory a mere following of cooking recipes instead of a science due to that fact, but the same goes for quantum mechanics (for totally other reasons).
"problems of sample bias, such as the vast majority of environmental scientists strangely enough are environmentalists..."
YEah...observational bias...if you saw and could interpret the data, you would be an environmentalist too. I'm a physicist and have followed a few lectures on climate, gasseous interaction and thermodynamics; trust the guys who have studied this stuff, not the engineers who drill for oil (and I say this as someone who has also studied mech. eng.).
Engineers have it easy: you just have to look at 'what works'. A scientist has to know 'how and why that thing works there'.
As to the scientific method: what you mention is not a fallacy, it's a limitation. What it does is say that you never know if your description is actually what happens in the 'real world', but you can sure as hell tell if your description fits with the reslts the real world give you. End result: closer and closer approximations of real world phenomenon, with more and more decimal results. And as we know, an engineer just needs three decimals (or as few as absolutely possible); a scientists wants them all.
No: your view is biased by the media, bigtime. It was the 1950's when the first scientist 'discovered' clues to glabal warming based on opbservations done at Hawaii. Coupled with observations and a hypothesis about conditions on Mars, global warming theory was formed. This was the '50's, maybe early '60's. Come 1970 and global warming was pretty much established science and by the 1980's it was scientific theory with a few crackpot holdouts which continue to this day.
What's interesting is that your timeline is correct in it's generalities, but off by a decade or two. And it is very easy to trace that bias to how the media has covered the issue. Scientists knew a while back, but the media didn't catch on, and to this day still gives equal time to unrespected/unrelated scientists (who often work in totally unrelated fields! The media's credibilty crumbled for me when I saw a political scienctist comment on the science of global warming on air...). Fact is, every world leader should be held accountable for mass genocide in the next couple of decades; the numbers were out there, but they just didn't want to listen to them (and the most vacuous argument is 'it'll be bad for the economy!', for one because it's not true [what, all those filters and conversion units don't need to be built and manufatured?] but also because even if it where, a hard economy is better than all the problems associated with global warming).
Just as you can't controll what books your kids read...but you can be informed as a parent, and more importantly you can educate and raise your kid so they can make their choices on their own and have a sence3 of reality to go along with it.
:) : it's american culture which is to blame. Any culture where it's OK to hack off a tit, but lick the tit and it's x-rated is fucked up.
"you wanted to do the very thing your parents said you were too young to do."
Which means you failed to get a decent relationship with your kid, is all that that means. I know it's simnple to say and hard to do, but it is the truth.
" this isn't a problem where you can point a finger in one direction and solve it."
Actually, I can give it a pretty decent try
Love and sex is much preferable to violence...but as this case very literally shows, the powers that be think violence is preferable to affection.
If you're that concerned with the correct time and being lazy, get one of those watches which gets synced to a nuclear clock over the ether. They're quite cheap....and more accurate than your system clock.
"what right does your boss have to know where you are?"
I agree...but what right does an employer have to know that you smoke marihuana? Or, even more preposterous, what your credit rating is? I love the last one: it actually can stop you from getting a job when you really need one!
The only thing an employer should need to know about you are your educational/employment history and your personality (to see if you fit in/can work with your collegues).
But that hasn't stopped employers from wanting to know everything from your DNA-specified prediliction towards cancer of the little pinky and your sock-size.
"You knew the rules"
Yeah...like the one which says that every employee has to be loyal to the company, but the company doesn't have to be loyal to it's employees.
I always love that: in the big bad world of business, it's A-OK to fire a tenth of your workforce (especially the tenth which DIDN'T get the compnay into that situation), because that's just business. But at the same time, your employees have to be loyal to the company to get hired or to work there (ie don't ever critisice the company).
Personally, I think it went wrong when corporations got the same rights as humans (owning property etc), because corporations never have and never will have what humans do: a concience and moral character. A corporation exists solely to earn it's shareholders money. But what was left out was the fact that corporations don't operate in a vacuum; they operate in a society. Allowing them basic human rights without being able to punish them like humans is where it went wrong. Allowing them to spend their way out of trouble when doing morally reprehensible things (like poluting, making cost/benefit analyses concerning human deaths) instead of giving them a deathsentence (in the states where that's applicable) means they can have human rights without human duties.
Really? Here in Delft, it's usually dual format: pdf and latex. Doesn't arxiv.org also do postscript files?
/reading/ '~'.
Although I do agree: for some reason pdf is the uniting factor...it's just that I hate that cumbersome, spacehogging, userunfriendly, format which is fine for printing, but an absolute horror for actual
Or Dowe, Cheatum and Howe.
"If the planet's environment is life-friendly, then it's only a matter of time before life evolves on it."
And you base this one what? An empirical basis of exactly 1 instance? Pretty presumptious of you.
Now, considering the size and nature of the universe, I'd be pretty surprised if there was no other life in it. But scientifically, or even statistically, you only have the one sample where life has evolved. So a sweeping statement like yours is IMO wrong and damaging to science as a whole, either through mangling of the scientific method or through a demonstration of how badly the scientific method has been taught in school.
This is not an ad-hominem, just an observation with an attached tentative explanation.
Yeah...I've always wanted a tablet for uni; I can just imagine the ease of dragging and thus copy/pasting a just made graph instead of filling the current one with too many curves or hastily scribling the entire graph over and over again in an attempt at clarity. But they're just too expensive...wake me up when they hit $500.
You want WAY too much. I'd settle for easy conversion from html and txt (screw pdf, with a passion! Although due to the volume of 'em out there, a pdf converter would be nice), but native support is not an issue for me.
Also required, as you say, is normal memory; no memorystick, just SD or CF. A proprietary connector wouldn't bother me much either...USB2 just isn't necessary for txt. And I realy don't care to add an mp3 player etc to an ebook reader; I'd rather have a thin device than a slightly bulkier one which also does music.
Anyway, I say this as someone who's an avid reader. I've used my IIIc and am using my T3 for a while now, reading through more than a gig of books. I'd be happy with a dedicated ebook reader with a large(ish) e-paper screen which looked good in sunlight and was rugged enough to take to the beach. I'd pay up to $100 for such a dedicated device, too. More than that and I'll stick to something which does what my T3 does (play mp3's, agenda, contacts, graphical calculator, emulate etc etc etc).
The analogy is wrong: in your ATM case, the withdrawees ask for something and got something else entirely; an error was clearly made. With the wap case, something was asked for and an affirmative was given out of a possible yes/no. Nothing unexpected (or even an indication that something was granted which shouldn't have been) occured.
As an aside: you say they where charged with theft (and let's face it, those student knew that they where doing something wrong)...but I would bet that were they to take it to trail, they wouldn't be convicted. The bank had a case of equipment error, the WAP didn't.
As for cases of bank error, you should google the story about the guy who actually cashed one of those 'you have won $10.000' fraudster lottery checks (or other cases of ATM error by people who have followed them to conclusion). You'll find out that the bank is actually 'shit out of luck'...but in most cases they can frighten those involved into acquiesence.
For even better examples on how this works, look into equipment error which leads to calamity instead of something positive to the person whom it happens to; automobile/engineering which goes wrong. You'll find that the party who makes the mistake is always at fault (ie the part/auto manufacturor, not the user).
"But it appears that people don't have a right to remove their content from circulation"
:)). Online data has a habit of sticking around.
:P
Sure they do; the problem is one of theory and practice. In practice, it's like Linus once said: "real men don't backup; they upload the contents of their RAID array to an ftp server and let the whole world mirror their data!" (yeah, I know I mangled the quote
I think what you have highlighted is one more problem which technology brings, alongside of the benefits. But that's life. For the web to work like everyone wants it to, mirroring of data/websites is incredibly usefull. What should have sufficed in this case was aa simple e-mail to google asking for the data to be deleted, followed by google asking for a passport picture or some other form of verification followed by the removal of the data.
How this got to a lawsuit is beyond me...I wouldn't be surprised if it's due to the litigious atmosphere and a direct lack of gentlemanlyness on the part of the claimant, coupled by money-grubbingness of same.
But back to the underlying issue: if you want a fast and filled internet, data mirroring is what you'll have to accept; 'deleting' data has in this case been neccesstated into an opt-out affair. Which is fine by me, in this case.
And as an extra: you should always be aware of the consequences of your action, which is why I've never been in porn
Too true; however, instead of a sci-fi flick, you'd then have a /french/ movie :P
'The Game' suffered from that, too. As did 'The Shawshank redemption'...but there, all the endings where actualy very well done.
It's 'cause OS game engines just aren't there yet in terms of functionality and user friendlyness. Not that modding is in any way userfriendly, and not that engines like OGRE aren't impressive...but making an actual game with OS engine is much more time consuming than laying a mod on an existing game (engine).
Plus there's the installed base. HL2, NWN and Doom have large install bases, so more people will play their mod.
Such a low /.id and so little luck with a simple gfx driver install/uninstall?
/can not/ take hours) and you'd've had no problems.
:)).
Frankly, I'm stunned. First off, the only reason your install could possibly have taken so long was if you paid Valve on the day of release and tried to autheticate and download whilst half the world was doing the same. A single day of waiting (or buying retail, which meant a disk install which
And for all the idiots shouting 'yeah well, Valve should have expected that! I( had to wait hours on release day!': you should have expected that. Whining about it is like me whouting 'I wanna million dollars'; it just work that way in the real world.
As for the reformat...I've gone through a couple of vidcards and numerous drivers...never have I had to re-format and I've never heard of anyone who had to do that for gfx drivers (well, maybe in winME, but that's winME
YEah, a good idea, maybe, if it was thought up and introduced by the industry itself. My question is WTF is the EU doing sticking it's nose in private enterprise in this way? There are other things they should make legislation for...and this sure ain't where they should stick their noses.
It's like they really have nothing better to do!
IANAL (duh), but wifi transmissions take place in free spectrum. The guy's allowed to transmit pretty near anything he wants there. It's your responsibility to make sure that what /you/ do with that free spectrum is what you want it to be. If your equipment does something with the guy's signal, that is your fault for impropperly using the incoming waves of the free spectrum. /not really/ an ack, and that he's supposed to take that answer as a no?'.
When the guy asks for acknowledgement to use your network (his equipment litterally transmist a code asking if it can interface) and you, through your equipment, send an ack code back the quistion truly becomes: 'how was the guy supposed to know that that acknowledgement (that ack signal) that you sent that it's ok to use your equipment is
That handshaking your equipment does on your behalf is my '"de facto" authorization crap' and why "That's the way the Internet works" will stand up in court.
Just remember, computers will only do exactly what you tell them to do. It's on your head to ensure that it actualy does what you want it to.
I'd just construct a SEP-field and paint it pink. Failing that, I'd call my friends in the contruction business and hope no-one notices that new moon in the morning.