I'd like to think Scwartz's goal was bigger than these small-minded, egotistical prosecutors. Lets talk about how we can open up the data, not how to engage in a witch hunt. Prosecutorial overreach, to me, is a separate conversation.
I agree we should talk about something bigger than specific people, but Swartz was extremely interested in injustice in addition to information freedom, so I don't see it as an either-or. We can talk about how to open data, and we can also talk about how to reform the American criminal-justice system. After all, the latter led more directly to his death.
NASA images are generally public domain; that's why there's a huge pile of them on Wikipedia, among other places. There are a few exceptions for stuff created by third-party contractors, though; depending on the terms of the contract, the copyrights might be owned by the contractor. The NASA logo itself is also not in the public domain, so you can't sell knockoff NASA tshirts.
Sure, EADS's shares are up, and since their major competitor Boeing had bad news today, perhaps we can speculate that "EADS shares up on bad news for rival Boeing", as finance journalists like to speculate. But you know who else's shares went up today? Boeing's. The stock market is weird, and a lot of factors go into price movements.
The article just says that the contribution of soot to global warming is higher than previously thought. It doesn't say that soot is now the sole or even the main cause of global warming (the linked article ranks it #2, behind CO2).
Even high-level players do tend to use a bit of that kind of thing. Kasparov mentioned that was one of the odd things about playing Deep Blue, that unlike playing another grandmaster, there wasn't this human meta-game element: he couldn't intimidate the machine into screwing up.
My guess is that this is some kind of clumsy way of trying to get in on the LinkedIn gravy train. LinkedIn has a setup where you have to pay for a premium account to be able to message people you aren't directly connected to, and they actually pull in quite a bit of cash through that, because recruiters and various other kinds of businesspeople will pony up to send those messages.
The official reason is that they're trade secrets they don't want their competitors to copy.
A more plausible charitable interpretation is that the companies have actually vetted the chemicals internally and are sure they're safe (at least as used), but the companies are worried about the expenses of lawsuits, i.e. they'd prevail in the end, but only after a bunch of regulatory hassle and legal fees.
The uncharitable interpretation is that either the chemicals aren't safe, or nobody really knows because the companies haven't really done any rigorous research to find out.
And for #1, it doesn't help that the mixture of chemicals is kept secret, and its safety hasn't been rigorously studied. I would be willing to consider fracking in principle, if there were some actual vetting of what is being pumped down there and what its effects are.
I cannot say it was pleasant, but it was not even close to being a scenario in which I could have been the victim of homosexual rape or any of the other awful things idiots on Slashdot speculate about when they imagine prison.
I'm glad you got lucky, but it's hardly mere "speculation": the prevalence of rape in U.S. prisons, by both guards and other inmates, is well documented.
A lot of people do, though. It's not at all uncommon for people facing long prison sentences to kill themselves before reporting to prison. Courts sometimes order special observation around the time of sentencing for that reason.
It's not even necessarily irrational. I think I would probably rather off myself than spend 30 years in prison. Life is in general worth living, but not in every possible set of circumstances.
And even if you don't, software incompatibilities may lead to the same result. It's starting to appear in digital cameras now. For example, the Sony NEX-5R and NEX-6 cameras add an ability to be remote-controlled by a smartphone: you can get a remote view through the viewfinder and trigger the shutter remotely. Kind of cool idea in principle. But the Android app doesn't work on the newest version of Android, and Sony hasn't given an indication of when they plan to release an update.
A lot of companies are, too. Hell, a university I used to be affiliated with had someone in the communications department editing its professors' Wikipedia articles. This kind of stuff is everywhere!
Unfortunately, a lot of European banks use Java applets as part of their login process. Many EU countries were a bit ahead of the curve in requiring better logins than just user/pass in the early 2000s (e.g. two-factor authentication), which at the time was a good idea, but the downside is that a lot of those systems were built in Java, since that was the obvious choice circa 2001 (doing serious client-side stuff in JavaScript wasn't really done at the time), and now there's a bunch of legacy cruft still stuck using it.
There was an earlier discussion about that. Afaict, the answer is "not really", but some of the Japanese and Korean brands may have a bigger proportion of their production done in, respectively, Japan and Korea.
I'm not all the way into drinking the Agile koolaid, but to be fair the original idea of Scrum meetings was explicitly designed to avoid that problem. Scrum meetings are supposed to be led by a "Scrum-master", who is not supposed to be the manager or boss of the meeting participants. In fact the manager is not even supposed to be there. Scrum is supposed to be a way to facilitate communication within a team, so everyone knows what everyone else is working on. The scrummaster is just supposed to be another engineer on the team who facilitates the meeting so it moves along, and is not supposed to be someone who has any particular authority over the project or the participants.
Most companies have ignored that part, and the Scrum meetings are, as you say, run by the manager, as these daily "report your progress" checkins.
Filing for patents has been a routine part of being an IBM employee for decades, so employees know how to do it, the internal bureaucracy is in place to make it happen, employees are used to identifying what might count as patentable and submitting it, and there are some minor incentives to do it (bonuses). The fact that IBM usually doesn't make embarrassing headlines with stupid lawsuits (they use them mostly defensively) helps grease that also, because employees don't feel like huge jerks filing them.
But by default you won't be paid if you stay home, so there's still an incentive to try to come in and hide it if you feel you're at all on the borderline, and to come back as soon as you no longer look visibly sick (even if you're still contagious).
Some employers do give their employees a certain number of sick days to reduce that incentive, but labor law in most states doesn't require it, and many employers don't. For example, neither Starbucks nor McDonald's offer sick days to their retail workers. Oddly, they do offer sick days to their non-retail workers (office employees, e.g. accountants, managers, etc.), despite those employees not being customer-facing. Perhaps they care about whether corporate HQ is sick more than whether customers get sick.:P
I agree with your characterization of what good publishers do, but I think it's more about the publisher than the license. Good publishers do: 1) vetting, so crap doesn't go out under their name; and 2) editing, both for style/substance and copyediting. Books that don't go through that process are more hit-or-miss, because literally anyone can publish them. Some of 'em are good, and some not.
But I don't really see a license-related difference between "all rights reserved" books and "creative commons" books. Most books published on Lulu are all-rights-reserved, and the average quality isn't particularly stellar. And in the other direction, CC-licensed books published by major publishers are typically on a quality par with their non-CC-licensed books, e.g. O'Reilly's Open Books series meets the regular O'Reilly standards.
British parties are looking at Obama's operation very closely to see if they can improve their own using similar techniques. But they don't have nearly the same budgets for this kind of bespoke IT work and corporation-sized infrastructure, so are having trouble figuring out how to adapt any lessons from it.
That works, but really only if you know something is going to happen ahead of time. If there's a scheduled protest and you suspect something will go down, you could set up with a telephoto in a nearby hotel or apartment (that's how Western photographers got their Tiananmen Square footage). But a lot of these police-filming incidents are just some regular person who happens to walk by, see something, and pull out their cell-phone camera. The odds of someone just happening to spot an incident from two blocks away while they're carrying a telephoto aren't quite as good.
I have some similar mixed thoughts, but honestly I don't really believe their explanation in this case. If someone mentally ill were being filmed in public and the police were not present, would any prosecutor later press HIPAA charges for the public filming? My guess is no, and that he's being prosecuted because he filmed the police, with filming the mentally ill person serving as the excuse.
This guy made less than $100k selling pirated software, so we're not really talking about some kind of big-shot international criminal syndicate. I don't think I would want the U.S. busting small-time drug dealers in random third countries either.
I don't disagree entirely, and lean Democratic myself, but I don't think you can blame the Republicans entirely for this one. A bunch of the plutocrats on the board are Republican appointees, but a bunch are Democratic appointees also. Perhaps the most egregious one is Richard C. Blum, an investment banker who owns significant stakes in for-profit universities, so directly benefits from the weakening of their public competition. Oh, and he just happens to be married to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree we should talk about something bigger than specific people, but Swartz was extremely interested in injustice in addition to information freedom, so I don't see it as an either-or. We can talk about how to open data, and we can also talk about how to reform the American criminal-justice system. After all, the latter led more directly to his death.
The fact that the fruits of scientific research are available only to people who "paid heavily" is precisely the objection.
NASA images are generally public domain; that's why there's a huge pile of them on Wikipedia, among other places. There are a few exceptions for stuff created by third-party contractors, though; depending on the terms of the contract, the copyrights might be owned by the contractor. The NASA logo itself is also not in the public domain, so you can't sell knockoff NASA tshirts.
Sure, EADS's shares are up, and since their major competitor Boeing had bad news today, perhaps we can speculate that "EADS shares up on bad news for rival Boeing", as finance journalists like to speculate. But you know who else's shares went up today? Boeing's. The stock market is weird, and a lot of factors go into price movements.
The article just says that the contribution of soot to global warming is higher than previously thought. It doesn't say that soot is now the sole or even the main cause of global warming (the linked article ranks it #2, behind CO2).
Even high-level players do tend to use a bit of that kind of thing. Kasparov mentioned that was one of the odd things about playing Deep Blue, that unlike playing another grandmaster, there wasn't this human meta-game element: he couldn't intimidate the machine into screwing up.
My guess is that this is some kind of clumsy way of trying to get in on the LinkedIn gravy train. LinkedIn has a setup where you have to pay for a premium account to be able to message people you aren't directly connected to, and they actually pull in quite a bit of cash through that, because recruiters and various other kinds of businesspeople will pony up to send those messages.
The official reason is that they're trade secrets they don't want their competitors to copy.
A more plausible charitable interpretation is that the companies have actually vetted the chemicals internally and are sure they're safe (at least as used), but the companies are worried about the expenses of lawsuits, i.e. they'd prevail in the end, but only after a bunch of regulatory hassle and legal fees.
The uncharitable interpretation is that either the chemicals aren't safe, or nobody really knows because the companies haven't really done any rigorous research to find out.
And for #1, it doesn't help that the mixture of chemicals is kept secret, and its safety hasn't been rigorously studied. I would be willing to consider fracking in principle, if there were some actual vetting of what is being pumped down there and what its effects are.
I cannot say it was pleasant, but it was not even close to being a scenario in which I could have been the victim of homosexual rape or any of the other awful things idiots on Slashdot speculate about when they imagine prison.
I'm glad you got lucky, but it's hardly mere "speculation": the prevalence of rape in U.S. prisons, by both guards and other inmates, is well documented.
A lot of people do, though. It's not at all uncommon for people facing long prison sentences to kill themselves before reporting to prison. Courts sometimes order special observation around the time of sentencing for that reason.
It's not even necessarily irrational. I think I would probably rather off myself than spend 30 years in prison. Life is in general worth living, but not in every possible set of circumstances.
And even if you don't, software incompatibilities may lead to the same result. It's starting to appear in digital cameras now. For example, the Sony NEX-5R and NEX-6 cameras add an ability to be remote-controlled by a smartphone: you can get a remote view through the viewfinder and trigger the shutter remotely. Kind of cool idea in principle. But the Android app doesn't work on the newest version of Android, and Sony hasn't given an indication of when they plan to release an update.
A lot of companies are, too. Hell, a university I used to be affiliated with had someone in the communications department editing its professors' Wikipedia articles. This kind of stuff is everywhere!
Unfortunately, a lot of European banks use Java applets as part of their login process. Many EU countries were a bit ahead of the curve in requiring better logins than just user/pass in the early 2000s (e.g. two-factor authentication), which at the time was a good idea, but the downside is that a lot of those systems were built in Java, since that was the obvious choice circa 2001 (doing serious client-side stuff in JavaScript wasn't really done at the time), and now there's a bunch of legacy cruft still stuck using it.
There was an earlier discussion about that. Afaict, the answer is "not really", but some of the Japanese and Korean brands may have a bigger proportion of their production done in, respectively, Japan and Korea.
I'm not all the way into drinking the Agile koolaid, but to be fair the original idea of Scrum meetings was explicitly designed to avoid that problem. Scrum meetings are supposed to be led by a "Scrum-master", who is not supposed to be the manager or boss of the meeting participants. In fact the manager is not even supposed to be there. Scrum is supposed to be a way to facilitate communication within a team, so everyone knows what everyone else is working on. The scrummaster is just supposed to be another engineer on the team who facilitates the meeting so it moves along, and is not supposed to be someone who has any particular authority over the project or the participants.
Most companies have ignored that part, and the Scrum meetings are, as you say, run by the manager, as these daily "report your progress" checkins.
Filing for patents has been a routine part of being an IBM employee for decades, so employees know how to do it, the internal bureaucracy is in place to make it happen, employees are used to identifying what might count as patentable and submitting it, and there are some minor incentives to do it (bonuses). The fact that IBM usually doesn't make embarrassing headlines with stupid lawsuits (they use them mostly defensively) helps grease that also, because employees don't feel like huge jerks filing them.
The linked article is just a paraphrase of this press release, which has more details.
But by default you won't be paid if you stay home, so there's still an incentive to try to come in and hide it if you feel you're at all on the borderline, and to come back as soon as you no longer look visibly sick (even if you're still contagious).
Some employers do give their employees a certain number of sick days to reduce that incentive, but labor law in most states doesn't require it, and many employers don't. For example, neither Starbucks nor McDonald's offer sick days to their retail workers. Oddly, they do offer sick days to their non-retail workers (office employees, e.g. accountants, managers, etc.), despite those employees not being customer-facing. Perhaps they care about whether corporate HQ is sick more than whether customers get sick. :P
I agree with your characterization of what good publishers do, but I think it's more about the publisher than the license. Good publishers do: 1) vetting, so crap doesn't go out under their name; and 2) editing, both for style/substance and copyediting. Books that don't go through that process are more hit-or-miss, because literally anyone can publish them. Some of 'em are good, and some not.
But I don't really see a license-related difference between "all rights reserved" books and "creative commons" books. Most books published on Lulu are all-rights-reserved, and the average quality isn't particularly stellar. And in the other direction, CC-licensed books published by major publishers are typically on a quality par with their non-CC-licensed books, e.g. O'Reilly's Open Books series meets the regular O'Reilly standards.
British parties are looking at Obama's operation very closely to see if they can improve their own using similar techniques. But they don't have nearly the same budgets for this kind of bespoke IT work and corporation-sized infrastructure, so are having trouble figuring out how to adapt any lessons from it.
That works, but really only if you know something is going to happen ahead of time. If there's a scheduled protest and you suspect something will go down, you could set up with a telephoto in a nearby hotel or apartment (that's how Western photographers got their Tiananmen Square footage). But a lot of these police-filming incidents are just some regular person who happens to walk by, see something, and pull out their cell-phone camera. The odds of someone just happening to spot an incident from two blocks away while they're carrying a telephoto aren't quite as good.
I have some similar mixed thoughts, but honestly I don't really believe their explanation in this case. If someone mentally ill were being filmed in public and the police were not present, would any prosecutor later press HIPAA charges for the public filming? My guess is no, and that he's being prosecuted because he filmed the police, with filming the mentally ill person serving as the excuse.
This guy made less than $100k selling pirated software, so we're not really talking about some kind of big-shot international criminal syndicate. I don't think I would want the U.S. busting small-time drug dealers in random third countries either.
I don't disagree entirely, and lean Democratic myself, but I don't think you can blame the Republicans entirely for this one. A bunch of the plutocrats on the board are Republican appointees, but a bunch are Democratic appointees also. Perhaps the most egregious one is Richard C. Blum, an investment banker who owns significant stakes in for-profit universities, so directly benefits from the weakening of their public competition. Oh, and he just happens to be married to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.