As a founder of an Arabic (Jordanian) blogging community, what do you perceive to be the source of news most popular/trusted by Arab bloggers? Is it local, Arab (AlJazeera, etc), European (BBC, TV5, etc), or American (NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, etc)? Is the Arab blogging community a large echo chamber for the latest and greatest western conspiracy theories, or is there genuine diversity of sources and opinions?
Sure, you can take many positions on trade (for, against, somewhere in between) and be coherent (if not necessarily right!). My complaint is about people who single out importing one commodity - IT services, aka outsourcing - while giving a pass to the myriad other commodities we import (like PC and gaming hardware!).
The AC reply to this is spot-on, but let me elaborate. There's no fundamental economic difference between outsourcing a job and importing a good. If you prefer, you can think of 'outsourcing a job' as 'impoting a service'. And there's no fundamental economic difference between 'goods' and 'services'; in fact most economic theory will use 'commodity' to refer to both goods and services.
So pick only two: 1) Against outsourcing 2) For trade 3) Have a coherent point of view
Why wasn't the RSS spec designed from the get-go to duplicate the functionality in Usenet? It seems to me that a good RSS reader should have the basic functionality of a Usenet newsreader: threading, sorting (by author, date, etc), read vs unread, catchup, reply (if the feed allows comments), article expiration, etc.
In Mozilla Thunderbird, if you set up an RSS account for a Google group (using the atom 1.0 feed), it looks like a usenet subscription, except it's much more limited. If it's the same paradigm (except where the articles are hosted), why not the same functionality?
Courts certainly (district, appeals) can and do rule that some patents are invalid. It may be that they can only make this ruling on narrower grounds (fraud by patent applicant, failure to disclose prior art, etc) than the USPTO, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know.
The grandparent poster's question is valid. Perhaps an IP attorney can enlighten us?
It's a single click to disable *if you know about it*. Did *you* know that while that window is open, your usage is being tracked by Apple? Did Apple disclose this connection in an obvious way?
+5 Insightful? the Mind Boggles!
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
1) "But you can turn it off!" - And here I thought it was about default settings and opt-in. Didn't we (users) already fight these battles with Windows Media Player and Real?
2) "But Amazon does it!" - In a browser, while online browsing on *their* servers. A child can see the difference.
3) "But it's useful!" - So, potentially, is any invasion of privacy. If they know everything about you, they can make your shopping experience *really* convenient!
4) "But Apple wouldn't use the info for bad purposes!" - The government wanted to access your bookstore receipts and library checkouts (in addition to monitoring your phonecalls and emails without warrants). I'm sure Apple will fight to the last cent before handing over one iota of info to the government...
Every one of these points was made in a +5 moderated post. Think, moderators, think!
The parent post is probably correct in its description of the process, but there's reason to believe that this system is not "fundamentally and deeply flawed".
Consider that the patent office received 406,302 patent applications in FY2005 ( http://www.uspto.gov/ ). It would be horribly *inefficient* to evaluate each of those applications thoroughly, especially because the vast majority of those patents are without value and will never be heard of again. What you really need is a system that somehow *selects* valuable patents, and subjects *only those valuable patents* to scrutiny.
The process where the USPTO first rejects an application, then eventually accepts it if you spend the money and persist is one way for the system to select valuable patents: applicants will only spend time and money on multiple resubmissions in proportion to the value they place on the patent.
The fact that patents can be challenged in court is another way the system selects valuable patents: useless patents are never challenged, while those with value will be challenged and carefully scrutinized by a court.
The patent system isn't perfect, but all serious reform proposals, e.g. third party pre-grant challenges, take this selection idea into account.
Identification vs Self-Identification
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
I think it's ineffective to try to identify who the 'gifted' kids are and to try to 'nurture' them. It's much better to set up the whole system so that gifted kids can distinguish themselves. Nobody should be able to get 100% on an exam, thus maxing out expectations, and there should always be options available for extra work/credit.
This is not difficult. Anyone who's gone to a halfway decent college has seen this system in action: the average students get through, while the gifted/hardworking ones get the A's, the good grad school admissions, and the nice job offers.
The big change for me from version 1 is that version 2 does multiple users correctly on Win2k and WinXP. Each user can separately choose to auto-launch and/or index files they have permission to view.
I don't have much use for the sidebar, but the Outlook (what I use at work) search is exceptionally good . Nothing like typing a few key words and finding that email from 6 months ago in 2 seconds. Puts the built-in search in Outlook to shame.
Already a bunch of +4 and +5 Insightful posts bashing MS.
From TFA:
"CDT [Center for Democracy and Technology] President Jerry Berman praised Microsoft's move as "a landmark moment in the cause of establishing and protecting individual privacy rights online.... While we have not reached consensus on all of the provisions of a privacy bill, we applaud Microsoft 's willingness to work actively with other high tech companies, consumer organizations and policymakers."
"Chris Hoofnagle, EPIC's senior counsel, agreed that Microsoft's position has softened significantly over the years. He noted that it was opposition from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard that derailed an industry-friendly privacy bill from Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) that was quickly gathering support a few years ago 'Microsoft is being more assertive now and it shows that the company is maturing,' he said"
"ACLU legislative counsel Timothy Sparapani also praised Microsoft's move, but cautioned that any federal privacy law would need to include safeguards for data gathered by commercial data brokers."
"The majority of the expenses associated with new drug discovery are actually made in the public sector - by Universities and so forth."
Private R&D spending on pharmaceuticals exceeds public R&D spending. This is actually true for R&D in general ($132 billion federal vs. $190 billion industry), and it's true for pharmaceuticals ($30 billion federal vs. $49 billion industry). For the first 3 figures, see here: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rd06main.htm [chapters 2 & 4] For the last figure, see here: http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications//20 05-03-17.1145.pdf The last is an industry organization, but r&d spending is part of companies' public SEC filings and the figures are in line with the aggregate numbers.
It's a fallacy that public and private pharmaceutical r&d are substitutes. Public r&d tends to focus on basic science while private r&d focuses on specific drug development and testing. Here it is from the horse's mouth:
The public sector would be just as good at developing drugs as it would be at making cars and televisions (see Union, Soviet).
"these additional resources are a *fraction* of the total increase in drug prices that result from the patents they are awarded"
If patents over-compensate drug companies, then we'd see a lot more entry into the (apparently very lucrative) drug business by new firms until these extra-ordinary returns are competed away. Even with patent protection, lucrative business models attract entry by competitors until excess profits are competed away.
I know it's not fair to editorialize in a story submission, though I'd probably do it again in this case.
The problem with your analogies is that Congress has a history of ignoring privacy rights when it suits them. Consider how fast the Patriot Act passed Congress. And consider the 'turbo' subpoenas of the DMCA.
I think it's good to have both technological and legal barriers to invasions of privacy. I don't want to live in a world where the government has the technological capability, if not the legal right, to monitor everyone's life at will.
How many follow is not important. How many *mainstream business* ones follow is. If you get Red Hat, SuSE, (and maybe Debian/Ubuntu,) you've already won the battle. That's enough busniess linux market share to justify building apps commercially.
says that USPTO "has now issued preliminary rejections of the five NTP patents that RIM was found to have violated in the jury trial. The most recent of those patent office decisions came last week".
Maybe this is why the story isn't getting much news coverage; RIM will probably be OK.
This is not about integrating VOIP into eBay's auction business. It's about large tech companies scrambling to get a share of the predicted-to-boom VOIP market.
Just recently, Microsoft purchased Teleo, which will allow MSN messenger users to make PC-to-Phone calls. Yahoo purchased Dialpad, which has similar capabilities to Skype (PC-to-PC and PC-to-Phone). And of course Google introduced Google talk, which is the first step in the process. eBay just doesn't want to be left out.
Which seems not to be much more expensive than building your own. The same company has a nice line of other desktop and network drives (I have no connection to this company whatsoever).
I'll spell it out for you. 10,000+ employee companies generally have IT departments that plan hardware/software rollouts, and there's a lot of pressure to keep these rollouts fairly uniform to avoid interoperability and support nightmares. I'm not saying companies will not convert single divisions/departments to a different platform, but that at least many IT departments will make that decision on a company-wide basis or for a large proportion of its desktops.
Now the article says 1 in 5 large company employees runs an OS X desktop. For that to be an *average* for these large companies, it has to be the case that many converted substantial proportions to OS X. In fact, if many don't do full conversions, then you'd expect much more than 1 in 5 *of the companies* to have had large partial conversions (still with me on the math?). And when large companies convert substantial proportions of their desktops to non-Wintel platforms, you tend to hear about it in the press.
The Jupiter report is not accessible, but it's either worthless or being grossly misquoted by Macworld. 1 in 5?! Where are those Fortune 500 companies that have announced rollouts of Macs as replacements for their IBM and Dell Wintel machines?
I would amend that slightly to "pushes consumer-driven innovation". When the interests of consumers and companies collide, as they do, for example, in the case of popup ads, MS has to tread lightly and balance both sides but Firefox/Mozilla doesn't.
Actually, it's more like 'inevitable'. I'll bet almost everyone has unintentionally lost digital data permanently and will do so again in the future.
The key, I think, is prioritization. We all do it individually (important stuff gets backed up many times and often, unimportant stuff perhaps never backed up), and NARA will have to do it too. I don't think backing up a president's email and backing up some minor whitehouse aide's email should have equal importance. The trick will be to come up with a reasonable prioritization scheme that will make the probability of losing the most important stuff very small.
Actually, the good old 'power user' from Win2k is still available in Windows XP. Unfortunately, you can't assign users to that group through the graphical 'User Accounts' in control panel, but you have to use the 'Local Users and Groups' section of the 'Computer Management' panel. Once you create a power user, they'll show up as 'Unknown account type' in the 'User Accounts' panel.
Considering that 'power user' was a reasonable (read: not horrible) compromise between convenience and security in Win2k, I was surprised that MS hid it so deeply in Windows XP. It must've been an aesthetic decision to match the new default "dog" search in explorer and the candy themed UI (thankfully, both of which can still be reverted back to Win2k styles!)
This project looks like a giant, hot, slow, old-tech, loud, power-hog of a 500 Gig 'drive' for $250 (low-ball estimate with all the eBay pricing and special batch price on the drives the author got, and not counting time/labor).
A 400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty) costs about $260 on newegg.
Reminds me of people using 486's as routers/firewalls when you can pick up a Linksys or D-Link for $20 or $30.
Slashdot Mirror
As a founder of an Arabic (Jordanian) blogging community, what do you perceive to be the source of news most popular/trusted by Arab bloggers? Is it local, Arab (AlJazeera, etc), European (BBC, TV5, etc), or American (NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, etc)? Is the Arab blogging community a large echo chamber for the latest and greatest western conspiracy theories, or is there genuine diversity of sources and opinions?
Sure, you can take many positions on trade (for, against, somewhere in between) and be coherent (if not necessarily right!). My complaint is about people who single out importing one commodity - IT services, aka outsourcing - while giving a pass to the myriad other commodities we import (like PC and gaming hardware!).
The AC reply to this is spot-on, but let me elaborate. There's no fundamental economic difference between outsourcing a job and importing a good. If you prefer, you can think of 'outsourcing a job' as 'impoting a service'. And there's no fundamental economic difference between 'goods' and 'services'; in fact most economic theory will use 'commodity' to refer to both goods and services.
So pick only two:
1) Against outsourcing
2) For trade
3) Have a coherent point of view
Why wasn't the RSS spec designed from the get-go to duplicate the functionality in Usenet? It seems to me that a good RSS reader should have the basic functionality of a Usenet newsreader: threading, sorting (by author, date, etc), read vs unread, catchup, reply (if the feed allows comments), article expiration, etc.
In Mozilla Thunderbird, if you set up an RSS account for a Google group (using the atom 1.0 feed), it looks like a usenet subscription, except it's much more limited. If it's the same paradigm (except where the articles are hosted), why not the same functionality?
Courts certainly (district, appeals) can and do rule that some patents are invalid. It may be that they can only make this ruling on narrower grounds (fraud by patent applicant, failure to disclose prior art, etc) than the USPTO, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know.
The grandparent poster's question is valid. Perhaps an IP attorney can enlighten us?
It's a single click to disable *if you know about it*. Did *you* know that while that window is open, your usage is being tracked by Apple? Did Apple disclose this connection in an obvious way?
1) "But you can turn it off!" - And here I thought it was about default settings and opt-in. Didn't we (users) already fight these battles with Windows Media Player and Real?
...
2) "But Amazon does it!" - In a browser, while online browsing on *their* servers. A child can see the difference.
3) "But it's useful!" - So, potentially, is any invasion of privacy. If they know everything about you, they can make your shopping experience *really* convenient!
4) "But Apple wouldn't use the info for bad purposes!" - The government wanted to access your bookstore receipts and library checkouts (in addition to monitoring your phonecalls and emails without warrants). I'm sure Apple will fight to the last cent before handing over one iota of info to the government
Every one of these points was made in a +5 moderated post. Think, moderators, think!
The parent post is probably correct in its description of the process, but there's reason to believe that this system is not "fundamentally and deeply flawed".
Consider that the patent office received 406,302 patent applications in FY2005 ( http://www.uspto.gov/ ). It would be horribly *inefficient* to evaluate each of those applications thoroughly, especially because the vast majority of those patents are without value and will never be heard of again. What you really need is a system that somehow *selects* valuable patents, and subjects *only those valuable patents* to scrutiny.
The process where the USPTO first rejects an application, then eventually accepts it if you spend the money and persist is one way for the system to select valuable patents: applicants will only spend time and money on multiple resubmissions in proportion to the value they place on the patent.
The fact that patents can be challenged in court is another way the system selects valuable patents: useless patents are never challenged, while those with value will be challenged and carefully scrutinized by a court.
The patent system isn't perfect, but all serious reform proposals, e.g. third party pre-grant challenges, take this selection idea into account.
I think it's ineffective to try to identify who the 'gifted' kids are and to try to 'nurture' them. It's much better to set up the whole system so that gifted kids can distinguish themselves. Nobody should be able to get 100% on an exam, thus maxing out expectations, and there should always be options available for extra work/credit.
This is not difficult. Anyone who's gone to a halfway decent college has seen this system in action: the average students get through, while the gifted/hardworking ones get the A's, the good grad school admissions, and the nice job offers.
The big change for me from version 1 is that version 2 does multiple users correctly on Win2k and WinXP. Each user can separately choose to auto-launch and/or index files they have permission to view.
I don't have much use for the sidebar, but the Outlook (what I use at work) search is exceptionally good . Nothing like typing a few key words and finding that email from 6 months ago in 2 seconds. Puts the built-in search in Outlook to shame.
Already a bunch of +4 and +5 Insightful posts bashing MS.
... While we have not reached consensus on all of the provisions of a privacy bill, we applaud Microsoft 's willingness to work actively with other high tech companies, consumer organizations and policymakers."
From TFA:
"CDT [Center for Democracy and Technology] President Jerry Berman praised Microsoft's move as "a landmark moment in the cause of establishing and protecting individual privacy rights online.
"Chris Hoofnagle, EPIC's senior counsel, agreed that Microsoft's position has softened significantly over the years. He noted that it was opposition from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard that derailed an industry-friendly privacy bill from Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) that was quickly gathering support a few years ago
'Microsoft is being more assertive now and it shows that the company is maturing,' he said"
"ACLU legislative counsel Timothy Sparapani also praised Microsoft's move, but cautioned that any federal privacy law would need to include safeguards for data gathered by commercial data brokers."
"The majority of the expenses associated with new drug discovery are actually made in the public sector - by Universities and so forth."
0 05-03-17.1145.pdf
Private R&D spending on pharmaceuticals exceeds public R&D spending. This is actually true for R&D in general ($132 billion federal vs. $190 billion industry), and it's true for pharmaceuticals ($30 billion federal vs. $49 billion industry). For the first 3 figures, see here:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rd06main.htm [chapters 2 & 4]
For the last figure, see here:
http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications//2
The last is an industry organization, but r&d spending is part of companies' public SEC filings and the figures are in line with the aggregate numbers.
It's a fallacy that public and private pharmaceutical r&d are substitutes. Public r&d tends to focus on basic science while private r&d focuses on specific drug development and testing. Here it is from the horse's mouth:
http://ott.od.nih.gov/Reports/211856ottrept.pdf
The public sector would be just as good at developing drugs as it would be at making cars and televisions (see Union, Soviet).
"these additional resources are a *fraction* of the total increase in drug prices that result from the patents they are awarded"
If patents over-compensate drug companies, then we'd see a lot more entry into the (apparently very lucrative) drug business by new firms until these extra-ordinary returns are competed away. Even with patent protection, lucrative business models attract entry by competitors until excess profits are competed away.
I know it's not fair to editorialize in a story submission, though I'd probably do it again in this case.
The problem with your analogies is that Congress has a history of ignoring privacy rights when it suits them. Consider how fast the Patriot Act passed Congress. And consider the 'turbo' subpoenas of the DMCA.
I think it's good to have both technological and legal barriers to invasions of privacy. I don't want to live in a world where the government has the technological capability, if not the legal right, to monitor everyone's life at will.
How many follow is not important. How many *mainstream business* ones follow is. If you get Red Hat, SuSE, (and maybe Debian/Ubuntu,) you've already won the battle. That's enough busniess linux market share to justify building apps commercially.
This writeup from USA Today
g y/2005-10-07-rim_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technolo
says that USPTO "has now issued preliminary rejections of the five NTP patents that RIM was found to have violated in the jury trial. The most recent of those patent office decisions came last week".
Maybe this is why the story isn't getting much news coverage; RIM will probably be OK.
Thanks for linking to newer research that contradicts it.
Please take a look at the first three graphs on this page from a NASA website:
i mchng.html
http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/land/global/cl
Can you really look at this information, then confidently declare that human actions are the main determinant of climate change?
This is not about integrating VOIP into eBay's auction business. It's about large tech companies scrambling to get a share of the predicted-to-boom VOIP market.
0 0000e2511c8.html
Just recently, Microsoft purchased Teleo, which will allow MSN messenger users to make PC-to-Phone calls. Yahoo purchased Dialpad, which has similar capabilities to Skype (PC-to-PC and PC-to-Phone). And of course Google introduced Google talk, which is the first step in the process. eBay just doesn't want to be left out.
This is not really my insight. See for example:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d1218d8c-2097-11da-81ef-
As a future project, I was thinking of building a RAID 5 solution from stock parts, but then I came across this
2 6
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=103
Which seems not to be much more expensive than building your own. The same company has a nice line of other desktop and network drives (I have no connection to this company whatsoever).
Drawbacks?
I'll spell it out for you. 10,000+ employee companies generally have IT departments that plan hardware/software rollouts, and there's a lot of pressure to keep these rollouts fairly uniform to avoid interoperability and support nightmares. I'm not saying companies will not convert single divisions/departments to a different platform, but that at least many IT departments will make that decision on a company-wide basis or for a large proportion of its desktops.
Now the article says 1 in 5 large company employees runs an OS X desktop. For that to be an *average* for these large companies, it has to be the case that many converted substantial proportions to OS X. In fact, if many don't do full conversions, then you'd expect much more than 1 in 5 *of the companies* to have had large partial conversions (still with me on the math?). And when large companies convert substantial proportions of their desktops to non-Wintel platforms, you tend to hear about it in the press.
And so my (rhetorical) question stands.
The Jupiter report is not accessible, but it's either worthless or being grossly misquoted by Macworld. 1 in 5?! Where are those Fortune 500 companies that have announced rollouts of Macs as replacements for their IBM and Dell Wintel machines?
I would amend that slightly to "pushes consumer-driven innovation". When the interests of consumers and companies collide, as they do, for example, in the case of popup ads, MS has to tread lightly and balance both sides but Firefox/Mozilla doesn't.
Actually, it's more like 'inevitable'. I'll bet almost everyone has unintentionally lost digital data permanently and will do so again in the future.
The key, I think, is prioritization. We all do it individually (important stuff gets backed up many times and often, unimportant stuff perhaps never backed up), and NARA will have to do it too. I don't think backing up a president's email and backing up some minor whitehouse aide's email should have equal importance. The trick will be to come up with a reasonable prioritization scheme that will make the probability of losing the most important stuff very small.
Actually, the good old 'power user' from Win2k is still available in Windows XP. Unfortunately, you can't assign users to that group through the graphical 'User Accounts' in control panel, but you have to use the 'Local Users and Groups' section of the 'Computer Management' panel. Once you create a power user, they'll show up as 'Unknown account type' in the 'User Accounts' panel.
Considering that 'power user' was a reasonable (read: not horrible) compromise between convenience and security in Win2k, I was surprised that MS hid it so deeply in Windows XP. It must've been an aesthetic decision to match the new default "dog" search in explorer and the candy themed UI (thankfully, both of which can still be reverted back to Win2k styles!)
This project looks like a giant, hot, slow, old-tech, loud, power-hog of a 500 Gig 'drive' for $250 (low-ball estimate with all the eBay pricing and special batch price on the drives the author got, and not counting time/labor).
A 400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty) costs about $260 on newegg.
Reminds me of people using 486's as routers/firewalls when you can pick up a Linksys or D-Link for $20 or $30.
Thanks, but no thanks.