The core of the Grokster ruling was that the court thought that company's business model was, basically, built around copyright infringement. This alone makes it obvious that the ruling can't be applied to the GIMP - there is no company, ergo no business model at all, and even if there was, it's quite clear that the primary purpose of the GIMP is image editing.
It's good to be wary, but you're either paranoid or sensationalist here (or maybe both).
I agree with most of what you said, and in fact, I think that yours is one of the most well-written posts I've seen in this discussion so far.
Still, I think you're missing one thing, and that is that it's not possible to do "intelligence" statistics the same way you can do statistics about, say, the height of people (or other physical characteristics).
There are two basic issues with statistics on intelligence. For one, unlike with physical characteristics such as height, there is no simple, objective, canonical way to measure intelligence; IQ tests are OK, but it needs to be recognized that they are, basically, an attempt to express intelligence as a single number, which is necessarily bound to fail. There are different kinds of intelligence, and the score a person gets on an IQ test very much depends on the nature of the test - not to mention on other factors such as how many IQ tests this person has done in the past (it's a known fact that people who frequently take them develop an "IQ test skill", so to speak). So when we speak about intelligence, we should be careful to keep in mind that while the outcome of an IQ test gives us a rough estimate of how intelligent a person is, we shouldn't depend on the number too much. There's a high chance that someone who scores 140 on an IQ test is more intelligent than someone who scores 70 on the same test; but it's not a 100% chance, and the scores just might be reversed on the next test that uses a different approach. And furthermore, smaller differences are mostly meaningless - if I got a score of 102 and you got one of 103, would you really want to say that you're more intelligent than I am?
The second problem with measuring intelligence is that unlike - say - height, it's not a fixed characteristic that never changes. In other words, the results need to be interpreted - you can't necessarily take them at face value. One explanation of a result of "group X is, on average, less intelligent than group Y" could simply be that they're not receiving the same quality of education, for example - or it could be a general situation where group Y is encouraged to study and get good grades and learn things, while group X isn't - or at least not as much. This certainly sounds like it *could* be true with women and men - it could well be that men, whose traditional role model is that of the one who works and feeds the family, are encouraged to study harder so they can get a good job, while with women, whose traditional role model is different, there is not as much pressure and/or encouragement.
In other words, if I train someone to be a professional football player and then compare him with someone who merely plays football for fun, then it's likely that the professional will be found to be the better player, but the reason for that is not that he comes from a different group - the reason is that he received a different kind and amount of training.
Not knowing the study, we of course are in no position to speculate on these things; as you said, we'll just have to wait and see. Only when we know what methodology was used to determine intelligence and how the results were interpreted, we'll be able to say whether the purported result that men are more intelligent than women really is a valid result (that nevertheless needs to be viewed in light of the circumstances under which the study was conducted) or whether it's rubbish.
For that matter, why did those sites keep logs, anyway? That seems like a pretty dumb idea to me really; there was at least one case in the past where a site (Cryptome?) was subpoenaed for httpd access logs but came back saying that they didn't keep any.
I don't want to advocate copyright infringement, but if you do it, then you at least shouldn't do it in a blatantly amateurish way...
There's a difference between a high-level executive (like Ford) and a boss who's directly in touch with the actual engineers, though.
What every boss needs to be able to do is oversee the work of those who report to him and determine whether they did a good job, where there's room for improvement and all that. If you're a manager who has other managers reporting to you, then you don't actually need to have computer skills (or whatever it is that your company does), true; but if you supervise people who directly work on the products, then sorry, but yes, you have to have some insight into what they're actually doing.
You may not need to know every little detail, like how to best apply this or that design pattern in your code, but if you're not even able to clean spyware of your windows pc (which really requires nothing more than running a program that does the job for you), then you're not suited for this kind of job - you should get promoted as soon as possible before you can do any harm.:)
I can understand AOL users, but... Belgians? Huh? Why Belgians? I've been to Belgium, and it's actually a very nice country with very nice (in general) people. Or are there any cliches I'm not aware of?
Many sites will offer alternatives for that - things along the lines of "download a sound file and type in what it says". It's essentially the same thing as a captcha, when you think about it, only that it's not an image.
Of course, things get hairy when you're both blind and deaf... and not all sites offer this kind of alternative, either. But that seems to be part of a more general problem where people don't make their sites accessible, and in fact often don't even realize that there might be a problem for some users.
I'm sometimes bitten by this myself. Fortunately, I'm not fully blind or suffering from another major disability, but I'm colourblind (for certain colours), and there are surprisingly many sites which rely on colours to convey information. Often, it's red vs. green, which is exactly what I have difficulties with; it's highly annoying, but it's really a very minor thing in comparison. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for someone with bigger disabilities.
Is there an awareness campaign dedicated to teaching webmasters about accessability?
Well, a more accurate title for Slashdot would be "ads for money". That's all the site is really about these days - the stories are just posted to get readers to the site, who in turn will see the ads (or pay for the privilege of not having to).
Among other things, this influences what stories are posted and whether they make it to the front page - stuff that'll draw in more readers is more likely to get posted.
So, yeah... so much for "news for nerds". It was a nice idea, but these days, it's more about the stuff that matters - money.
It happened before, though, with VHS vs. Beta, for example; and also, with the introduction of any new standard, there always is a period where content is available in both formats.
So... content *will* be available in both formats, and it will make little difference what kind of device customers buy. However, the format war will slow the overall adoption of *both* formats. DVDs and CDs will still be around for a long while to come, and I wouldn't be surprised if, eventually, there'll be devices that simply handle both formats and thus avoid the incompatibility issues altogether (just like there's combined CD/DVD±R/W/RW readers/writers now, for example).
That's all assuming that there'll be no major DRM goof-ups, of course. If either format makes it too difficult for people to access their legitimately-bought content, then it'll lose out big time, and the manufacturers know this. Considering that there's also pressure from the other side (the "content industry") to include as much DRM as possible, though, it's gonna be interesting to see how things turn out.
Although it's rather surprising that *Google* of all companies is unable to cope with a Slashdotting. I mean, seriously - these guys have *hundreds of thousands* of servers in their farms. How many more do you need?
Of course, they didn't officially announce the whole thing yet, so it may well be that they didn't anticipate the amount of load at this point, but if that's the case, then someone at Google deserves a naivity award for opening up the service to the public at this point and relying on the hope that nobody will find out that it's already working (and post it to Slashdot).:)
While we're on the topic of encryption, let me say that while gaim-encryption is nice, there's an even better solution, namely Off-The-Record messaging (OTR). It's available as both a GAIM plugin and an AIM proxy server (for other clients); Adium X (a multi-protocol IM client for OS X) also has built-in support for OTR.
Definitely worth a try if you value your privacy and don't want every rag, tag and bobtail reading your IM conversations with people.
Well, seriously... why not? It certainly would be something that would make most people feel uncomfortable, but there wouldn't be any children hurt in *any* way or form whatsoever, while on the other hand, a successful therapy might mean that *real* abuse won't happen in the future.
I don't know about you, but for me, it's immediately clear that this means that yes, it would be worth it. It'd still make me feel uneasy, of course - but it'd be worth it.
And yet somehow over the last 200 years America was at the fore front of science and technology.
No, it hasn't. It's been at the forefront for the last 70 years or so, but that's mostly due to the nazi's rise to power, which caused a big wave of immigration of European scientists.
Now, please don't take this as flamebait; I don't intend to say that the USA don't have their own brilliant minds or that they didn't have them before the nazis, but I think that the current situation, where the USA, which account for less than 5% of the world's population, are the scientific center of the world, so to speak, is in no small part due to the fact that many top scientists did go to the USA back then.
In the future, over time, things will shift again. Not necessarily back to Europe, but India and China, for example (both nations with more than a billion inhabitants, which is more than the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and Japan have combined) will definitely leave us behind them in terms of scientific significance.
Basing politics on religion rather than science is just gonna speed that up even further.
Now if only there was an sls, smv and scp [1], too... seriously, sln is useful, but the one time where I actually screwed up my glibc installation and had to use it, I *really* was annoyed by the lack of statically linked versions of other standard tools.
They say that Unix gives you enough rope to hang yourself with - judging from this story, it certainly seems to be true.
The moral of the story is probably that Unix and its shells are very powerful tools, but that you need to know what you're doing. But then, doesn't that go for most powerful tools? That's not to say that there couldn't be additional safeguards (both programmatic and administrative) that might/could/should prevent things like this from happening, but it's a fact of life that when you dumb down something to a point where it cannot possibly Do The Wrong Thing(tm) anymore, then you also took away everything that made it useful in the first place.
You may want to read up on international trademarks; for example, see what Wikipedia has to say about them.
In particular, it seems that only around 70 countries participate in the Madrid system for international trademarks. I haven't been able to find a list right away, but I wouldn't be surprised if Swaziland was not among them.
Can someone (a trademark lawyer reading Slashdot, maybe?) enlighten us?
When you think about it, this story, and the fact that it is considered news, is actually rather funny - or disturbing, depending on how you look at it.
Why does it matter what M$ thinks about a proposed new anti-spam bill - or any bill, for that matter? Shouldn't the only thing that matters be what the *people* of New Zealand think?
Why not? There's a world outside of the USA, and not every country has a DMCA equivalent. Quite the opposite - there are many European countries, for example, where "fair use" actually still means something. So someone could just develop a driver outside of the USA and put it up on the web; it might not be included in the standard kernel tree, but it would be available, at least.
The same thing has happened before, too. Remember the International Kernel Patch that added crypto support to the kernel back when in the days when Phil Zimmermann was being investigated for PGP and when it wasn't clear whether you could legally export cryptographic software from the USA? The same thing just might happen again. Or as another example, take OpenBSD - it's been developed in Canada, not the USA, ever since the project was born, for exactly the same reason.
Insightful, too, though. The president has a moral obligation to do what's best for the country as a whole instead of acting out of his own personal religious beliefs.
A restriction on federal funding *is* a restriction of research, though. It's like trying to travel without having a valid driver's license or some other form of photo ID - you can do it, but there's gonna be a lot of hassles (try flying or booking a hotel room without photo ID!).
That's not to say that every possible study under the sun should be funded, no matter what it's about. But the discrimination between what is and what isn't funded should be based on objective criteria, not on one man's personal religious beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
The core of the Grokster ruling was that the court thought that company's business model was, basically, built around copyright infringement. This alone makes it obvious that the ruling can't be applied to the GIMP - there is no company, ergo no business model at all, and even if there was, it's quite clear that the primary purpose of the GIMP is image editing.
It's good to be wary, but you're either paranoid or sensationalist here (or maybe both).
We're talking about good writers, not successful ones. ;)
I agree with most of what you said, and in fact, I think that yours is one of the most well-written posts I've seen in this discussion so far.
Still, I think you're missing one thing, and that is that it's not possible to do "intelligence" statistics the same way you can do statistics about, say, the height of people (or other physical characteristics).
There are two basic issues with statistics on intelligence. For one, unlike with physical characteristics such as height, there is no simple, objective, canonical way to measure intelligence; IQ tests are OK, but it needs to be recognized that they are, basically, an attempt to express intelligence as a single number, which is necessarily bound to fail. There are different kinds of intelligence, and the score a person gets on an IQ test very much depends on the nature of the test - not to mention on other factors such as how many IQ tests this person has done in the past (it's a known fact that people who frequently take them develop an "IQ test skill", so to speak). So when we speak about intelligence, we should be careful to keep in mind that while the outcome of an IQ test gives us a rough estimate of how intelligent a person is, we shouldn't depend on the number too much. There's a high chance that someone who scores 140 on an IQ test is more intelligent than someone who scores 70 on the same test; but it's not a 100% chance, and the scores just might be reversed on the next test that uses a different approach. And furthermore, smaller differences are mostly meaningless - if I got a score of 102 and you got one of 103, would you really want to say that you're more intelligent than I am?
The second problem with measuring intelligence is that unlike - say - height, it's not a fixed characteristic that never changes. In other words, the results need to be interpreted - you can't necessarily take them at face value. One explanation of a result of "group X is, on average, less intelligent than group Y" could simply be that they're not receiving the same quality of education, for example - or it could be a general situation where group Y is encouraged to study and get good grades and learn things, while group X isn't - or at least not as much. This certainly sounds like it *could* be true with women and men - it could well be that men, whose traditional role model is that of the one who works and feeds the family, are encouraged to study harder so they can get a good job, while with women, whose traditional role model is different, there is not as much pressure and/or encouragement.
In other words, if I train someone to be a professional football player and then compare him with someone who merely plays football for fun, then it's likely that the professional will be found to be the better player, but the reason for that is not that he comes from a different group - the reason is that he received a different kind and amount of training.
Not knowing the study, we of course are in no position to speculate on these things; as you said, we'll just have to wait and see. Only when we know what methodology was used to determine intelligence and how the results were interpreted, we'll be able to say whether the purported result that men are more intelligent than women really is a valid result (that nevertheless needs to be viewed in light of the circumstances under which the study was conducted) or whether it's rubbish.
For that matter, why did those sites keep logs, anyway? That seems like a pretty dumb idea to me really; there was at least one case in the past where a site (Cryptome?) was subpoenaed for httpd access logs but came back saying that they didn't keep any.
I don't want to advocate copyright infringement, but if you do it, then you at least shouldn't do it in a blatantly amateurish way...
There's a difference between a high-level executive (like Ford) and a boss who's directly in touch with the actual engineers, though.
:)
What every boss needs to be able to do is oversee the work of those who report to him and determine whether they did a good job, where there's room for improvement and all that. If you're a manager who has other managers reporting to you, then you don't actually need to have computer skills (or whatever it is that your company does), true; but if you supervise people who directly work on the products, then sorry, but yes, you have to have some insight into what they're actually doing.
You may not need to know every little detail, like how to best apply this or that design pattern in your code, but if you're not even able to clean spyware of your windows pc (which really requires nothing more than running a program that does the job for you), then you're not suited for this kind of job - you should get promoted as soon as possible before you can do any harm.
Or, for that matter, doesn't have a mobile phone (yes, Virginia, there are people who don't).
OK - thanks for the explanation. :)
I can understand AOL users, but... Belgians? Huh? Why Belgians? I've been to Belgium, and it's actually a very nice country with very nice (in general) people. Or are there any cliches I'm not aware of?
Many sites will offer alternatives for that - things along the lines of "download a sound file and type in what it says". It's essentially the same thing as a captcha, when you think about it, only that it's not an image.
Of course, things get hairy when you're both blind and deaf... and not all sites offer this kind of alternative, either. But that seems to be part of a more general problem where people don't make their sites accessible, and in fact often don't even realize that there might be a problem for some users.
I'm sometimes bitten by this myself. Fortunately, I'm not fully blind or suffering from another major disability, but I'm colourblind (for certain colours), and there are surprisingly many sites which rely on colours to convey information. Often, it's red vs. green, which is exactly what I have difficulties with; it's highly annoying, but it's really a very minor thing in comparison. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for someone with bigger disabilities.
Is there an awareness campaign dedicated to teaching webmasters about accessability?
Well, a more accurate title for Slashdot would be "ads for money". That's all the site is really about these days - the stories are just posted to get readers to the site, who in turn will see the ads (or pay for the privilege of not having to).
Among other things, this influences what stories are posted and whether they make it to the front page - stuff that'll draw in more readers is more likely to get posted.
So, yeah... so much for "news for nerds". It was a nice idea, but these days, it's more about the stuff that matters - money.
Would you rather have Microsoft buy them up?
It happened before, though, with VHS vs. Beta, for example; and also, with the introduction of any new standard, there always is a period where content is available in both formats.
So... content *will* be available in both formats, and it will make little difference what kind of device customers buy. However, the format war will slow the overall adoption of *both* formats. DVDs and CDs will still be around for a long while to come, and I wouldn't be surprised if, eventually, there'll be devices that simply handle both formats and thus avoid the incompatibility issues altogether (just like there's combined CD/DVD±R/W/RW readers/writers now, for example).
That's all assuming that there'll be no major DRM goof-ups, of course. If either format makes it too difficult for people to access their legitimately-bought content, then it'll lose out big time, and the manufacturers know this. Considering that there's also pressure from the other side (the "content industry") to include as much DRM as possible, though, it's gonna be interesting to see how things turn out.
Although it's rather surprising that *Google* of all companies is unable to cope with a Slashdotting. I mean, seriously - these guys have *hundreds of thousands* of servers in their farms. How many more do you need?
:)
Of course, they didn't officially announce the whole thing yet, so it may well be that they didn't anticipate the amount of load at this point, but if that's the case, then someone at Google deserves a naivity award for opening up the service to the public at this point and relying on the hope that nobody will find out that it's already working (and post it to Slashdot).
While we're on the topic of encryption, let me say that while gaim-encryption is nice, there's an even better solution, namely Off-The-Record messaging (OTR). It's available as both a GAIM plugin and an AIM proxy server (for other clients); Adium X (a multi-protocol IM client for OS X) also has built-in support for OTR.
Definitely worth a try if you value your privacy and don't want every rag, tag and bobtail reading your IM conversations with people.
Well, seriously... why not? It certainly would be something that would make most people feel uncomfortable, but there wouldn't be any children hurt in *any* way or form whatsoever, while on the other hand, a successful therapy might mean that *real* abuse won't happen in the future.
I don't know about you, but for me, it's immediately clear that this means that yes, it would be worth it. It'd still make me feel uneasy, of course - but it'd be worth it.
No, it hasn't. It's been at the forefront for the last 70 years or so, but that's mostly due to the nazi's rise to power, which caused a big wave of immigration of European scientists.
Now, please don't take this as flamebait; I don't intend to say that the USA don't have their own brilliant minds or that they didn't have them before the nazis, but I think that the current situation, where the USA, which account for less than 5% of the world's population, are the scientific center of the world, so to speak, is in no small part due to the fact that many top scientists did go to the USA back then.
In the future, over time, things will shift again. Not necessarily back to Europe, but India and China, for example (both nations with more than a billion inhabitants, which is more than the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and Japan have combined) will definitely leave us behind them in terms of scientific significance.
Basing politics on religion rather than science is just gonna speed that up even further.
Now if only there was an sls, smv and scp [1], too... seriously, sln is useful, but the one time where I actually screwed up my glibc installation and had to use it, I *really* was annoyed by the lack of statically linked versions of other standard tools.
1. Not *that* scp.
The Coral Cache works, though.
They say that Unix gives you enough rope to hang yourself with - judging from this story, it certainly seems to be true.
The moral of the story is probably that Unix and its shells are very powerful tools, but that you need to know what you're doing. But then, doesn't that go for most powerful tools? That's not to say that there couldn't be additional safeguards (both programmatic and administrative) that might/could/should prevent things like this from happening, but it's a fact of life that when you dumb down something to a point where it cannot possibly Do The Wrong Thing(tm) anymore, then you also took away everything that made it useful in the first place.
You may want to read up on international trademarks; for example, see what Wikipedia has to say about them.
In particular, it seems that only around 70 countries participate in the Madrid system for international trademarks. I haven't been able to find a list right away, but I wouldn't be surprised if Swaziland was not among them.
Can someone (a trademark lawyer reading Slashdot, maybe?) enlighten us?
When you think about it, this story, and the fact that it is considered news, is actually rather funny - or disturbing, depending on how you look at it.
Why does it matter what M$ thinks about a proposed new anti-spam bill - or any bill, for that matter? Shouldn't the only thing that matters be what the *people* of New Zealand think?
Words like these embiggen even the smallest article. :)
Why not? There's a world outside of the USA, and not every country has a DMCA equivalent. Quite the opposite - there are many European countries, for example, where "fair use" actually still means something. So someone could just develop a driver outside of the USA and put it up on the web; it might not be included in the standard kernel tree, but it would be available, at least.
The same thing has happened before, too. Remember the International Kernel Patch that added crypto support to the kernel back when in the days when Phil Zimmermann was being investigated for PGP and when it wasn't clear whether you could legally export cryptographic software from the USA? The same thing just might happen again. Or as another example, take OpenBSD - it's been developed in Canada, not the USA, ever since the project was born, for exactly the same reason.
Insightful, too, though. The president has a moral obligation to do what's best for the country as a whole instead of acting out of his own personal religious beliefs.
A restriction on federal funding *is* a restriction of research, though. It's like trying to travel without having a valid driver's license or some other form of photo ID - you can do it, but there's gonna be a lot of hassles (try flying or booking a hotel room without photo ID!).
That's not to say that every possible study under the sun should be funded, no matter what it's about. But the discrimination between what is and what isn't funded should be based on objective criteria, not on one man's personal religious beliefs.