All that does is ensure information regulated by a tyranny of the majority. If there is nothing like objective reality, then this is perfectly acceptable. If there is an objective reality, you'd better hope it's a popular one, or you'll never hear about it in wikipedia.
That's a very good point - and it's one that is addressed by services like Netflix, where the consumer isn't asked to pay late fees and yet can still enjoy the movies as long as they want.
The problem isn't that people don't return movies on time, and disposable DVD's aren't the solution to it.
I'm sorry, but even saying "just a little more than the price to rent... " they were still destined to fail.
Consumers know when they rent something that it has to go back - they don't own it. They're accustomed to this paradigm.
When they buy something, they own it. They get to use it however they like, and they're not looking to get something that breaks after 2 days.
They're also accustomed to this paradigm.
So when you suggest that they could pay for something that self-destructs in 2 days (or 10, fer petes sake)... well of course it's not going to be popular.
And when the asking price is actually more than a rental, well d'uh.
Many other skeptical scientific people have suggested that there is nothing outside the scope of the physical sciences and therefore your personal taste is irrelevant (except insofar as it is an expression of your brains preponderance to search for patterns and explanations in the physical world)
So it's scientific to believe that there's no afterlife despite having no evidence of it being so and ridicule those that believe there is ?
No. It's scientific to hypothesize the existence of an afterlife and then attempt to come up with some sort of experiment to verify or disprove ones claim. Since no one has come up with a good hypothesis, nor a good design for such an experiment, it is reasonable to suggest that such a thing is not proven, perhaps unprovable. It then comes down to the irrational belief system of your choice as to whether there is an afterlife and what it looks like.
She won't forget it. But what will she learn from this lesson ?
She won't learn that she should respect others.
She'll learn that it's ok for authority figures to perform acts of minor violence in a place of worship when they're embarrassed by the actions of their charges.
But lets say some evil company wont share. If the data is really important somebody else generates it independantly and publishes it in a format that is freely available.
there's the rub, chum. How do I *prove* I generated the data independantly, and didn't just copy the stuff out of your db ? If you can show that the data is substantially the same, you might be able to shift the onus of proof on to me to prove otherwise... I don't like that idea.
In fact they seem to be extending protection that would be similar to what would exist for your physics text book. If you write it - a large portion of it would be information that you gathered from other sources. So why can't I xerox it and put my name on it? Because your work is protected- though I doubt little of it would be in any way original.
there's a kicker right there. If I, as a physics textbook writer, were to write something that covers the same topics as a previous writers textbook, that's ok. if I use substantially different wording as that previous authors to communicate the same ideas, I'm ok, even though the ideas and the topics are the same. However, if the text is very similar to the previous authors actual text, then I am infringing his copyright. The copyright is in the text itself, not the ideas. It qualifies as "original" not because the ideas are new, but because their treatment of it is sufficiently different. Interestingly enough, if I choose to pick and choose from a dozen different books, and it takes me lots of time and effort to come up with this work, I am still infringing on their copyright.
Copyright doesn't protect my efforts in compilation (except insofar as I've created a derivative work - so if I get permission from the other authors, I'm ok). It doesn't protect my ideas, whether it be new twists on physics, or a new twist on a classic plotline. It only protects the expression of those ideas - the copyrighted work itself.
Because it's not a work of literary merit. There are already laws governing direct theft (of information or anything else).
Shoehorning this law into copyright blurs the whole purpose of copyright even more than it currently is.
Copyright is about making copies of works that (judging by whatever standard) have some artistic merit. Protecting the author of an original work against people who would copy his work (or make a derivative thereof) and not give due credit.
The idea that databases of readily available, pure facts are of artistic merit is insulting to the real artists whose works will eventually (we hope) enter the public domain and enrich our society as a whole.
If they want a law to protect databases from theft, they already have "trade secrets" and so on.
But that's not the issue. These databases are publicly available. The companies involved aren't protecting an artistic work, or a trade secret. They want to be able to enforce rigid restrictions on otherwise public knowledge, simply because they aggregated it and published it first.
Thing is - I saw the intro to Firefly and went "nahh"... western in space is really just a western. But a friend of mine had taped all of the episodes, and then we sat and watched them all in the correct order. I was much more impressed than my initial exposure led me to believe I would be.
I agree with my sibling poster - I think Firefly would have done better if they'd given it a chance.
On the other hand, they could have downplayed the "western" style a bit without losing anything, make it more subtle etc, and I think it would have seemed more mature.
My 1.35 cents worth (adjusted for inflation and exchange rates)
Have you been hit by a car ? At what speed ? I can tell you that 15mph is too fast to be hit by a car. Hell, 10mph still hurts if you weren't already going that way. What speed limit would you like ? Perhaps we should all go no faster than 5 mph on any road where bicyclists might be. That would solve your problem.
Speed decides how bad, but almost any speed is going to cause you injury - 35 mph is _slow_, on the roads in California (for example), but it's fast enough to turn you into a jumble of bones and spokes under the wheels of an SUV. But "I didn't break the speed limit, officer".
It takes two to tango - cyclists and pedestrians should realize they cannot win any altercation with two tons of metal, and act accordingly. I've lost track of the number of morons who've stepped off the curb without even looking. This is especially prevalent in parking lots, but I've seen it on regular roads as well.
You miss the parent posters point. It's a privacy issue. No matter what the *objective* of the law is meant to be, the result allows the government to assemble information about you without your explicit consent, or any specific reason.
Glass does not flow _incredibly_ slowly. The ripple effect in old windows is due to the inadequate process of making the glass in the first place. Those ripples were always there.
For a counter example, there are telescope lenses 150 years old that still provide a crisp image. There are roman glass artifacts of incredible delicacy that survive to this day with no discernible perturbations due to "flow".
So if you lock your car in the parking lot and then someone comes along, breaks into it, and then uses it to commit a crime, then it was *your* responsibility ? I think not.
Now I'm not saying definitively that someone stole this guys screener and copied it, but we don't have any evidence to go on here. All we know is that the screener was leaked. It was his responsibility to take reasonable precautions to protect the screener (as you point out), and yet we cannot say (because we have no evidence) that he did not. The fact of the leak does not, prima facie, prove a lack of responsibility on his part.
Your "flaw" in the study isn't really all that much of a problem.
Think of this as a network of nodes. The point of the 6 degrees concept is that the network isn't sparse. It's a dense network : most of the nodes are well connected, and this is a classic shortest path problem. In the few cases that you have a low number of connections for a given node, all that generally happens is that this node doesn't figure in many paths (because there is often a shorter path that excludes the low connected node). If you must start your path with a low connected node (Hermit on the mountain), you might have to add a "degree of separation", but generally even the sparsely connected nodes connect to a highly connected node within one or two degrees at most.
Say you know 10 people. And each of them knows 10 other people you don't know. Six degrees of separation in this case is about a billion people. Since you probably know more than 10 people (although overlap probably means you might not know 10 people that none of your other friends know...) then you might have a case for saying *any* two people are six degrees away from each other. You might think that this sort of set of relationships tend to be restricted by national or cultural boundaries, but in practice, it only takes one person in your list who has a wide array of experiences and/or wide group of acquaintances to jump such limitations.
No one will ever need more than 15 frames per second or 640KB of RAM.
- Bill Gates
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
·
· Score: 1
Slap me if I'm old fashioned - but I found that the scenes that focus on the one protagonist in the midst of a battle and the 12 to 20 people around him/her to be more filled with drama and tension than the eagle-eye view of the thousands upon thousands gathering for the assault.
That's not to say that the Massive engine wasn't impressive, the vistas amazing; merely that over-use of such things can lead to a dis-association with what is (IMHO) more important: the characters and their story.
One other factor in the US... A prosecutors chances of advancement (apart from the elected positions such as DA) are based directly on performance. The definition of performance is not "cases tackled" but "cases won". The practice of plea-bargaining is directly related to this.
For the low-profile cases, most prosecutors will not drop a case if they think there's even a chance of winning it. Why ? because if they win, that's a feather in their cap, but if they drop a case (even if that would be the obviously just thing to do) then that's a strike against their careers - more than if they'd lost it. So it makes sense for them to put at least a minimal effort into each case. So long as they don't pursue completely frivolous cases into court (earning the ire of a judge who might censure them if this attitude persists), there isn't much incentive not to take it to trial.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the fact that, when you call Cable tech support they can interrogate your box's status and order it to reboot.
All that does is ensure information regulated by a tyranny of the majority.
If there is nothing like objective reality, then this is perfectly acceptable.
If there is an objective reality, you'd better hope it's a popular one, or you'll never hear about it in wikipedia.
That's a very good point - and it's one that is addressed by services like Netflix, where the consumer isn't asked to pay late fees and yet can still enjoy the movies as long as they want.
The problem isn't that people don't return movies on time, and disposable DVD's aren't the solution to it.
I'm sorry, but even saying "just a little more than the price to rent ... " they were still destined to fail.
Consumers know when they rent something that it has to go back - they don't own it. They're accustomed to this paradigm.
When they buy something, they own it. They get to use it however they like, and they're not looking to get something that breaks after 2 days.
They're also accustomed to this paradigm.
So when you suggest that they could pay for something that self-destructs in 2 days (or 10, fer petes sake)... well of course it's not going to be popular.
And when the asking price is actually more than a rental, well d'uh.
Many other skeptical scientific people have suggested that there is nothing outside the scope of the physical sciences and therefore your personal taste is irrelevant (except insofar as it is an expression of your brains preponderance to search for patterns and explanations in the physical world)
So it's scientific to believe that there's no afterlife despite having no evidence of it being so and ridicule those that believe there is ?
No. It's scientific to hypothesize the existence of an afterlife and then attempt to come up with some sort of experiment to verify or disprove ones claim.
Since no one has come up with a good hypothesis, nor a good design for such an experiment, it is reasonable to suggest that such a thing is not proven, perhaps unprovable.
It then comes down to the irrational belief system of your choice as to whether there is an afterlife and what it looks like.
She won't forget it.
But what will she learn from this lesson ?
She won't learn that she should respect others.
She'll learn that it's ok for authority figures to perform acts of minor violence in a place of worship when they're embarrassed by the actions of their charges.
But lets say some evil company wont share. If the data is really important somebody else generates it independantly and publishes it in a format that is freely available.
there's the rub, chum. How do I *prove* I generated the data independantly, and didn't just copy the stuff out of your db ? If you can show that the data is substantially the same, you might be able to shift the onus of proof on to me to prove otherwise... I don't like that idea.
In fact they seem to be extending protection that would be similar to what would exist for your physics text book. If you write it - a large portion of it would be information that you gathered from other sources. So why can't I xerox it and put my name on it? Because your work is protected- though I doubt little of it would be in any way original.
there's a kicker right there. If I, as a physics textbook writer, were to write something that covers the same topics as a previous writers textbook, that's ok. if I use substantially different wording as that previous authors to communicate the same ideas, I'm ok, even though the ideas and the topics are the same.
However, if the text is very similar to the previous authors actual text, then I am infringing his copyright. The copyright is in the text itself, not the ideas. It qualifies as "original" not because the ideas are new, but because their treatment of it is sufficiently different.
Interestingly enough, if I choose to pick and choose from a dozen different books, and it takes me lots of time and effort to come up with this work, I am still infringing on their copyright.
Copyright doesn't protect my efforts in compilation (except insofar as I've created a derivative work - so if I get permission from the other authors, I'm ok).
It doesn't protect my ideas, whether it be new twists on physics, or a new twist on a classic plotline.
It only protects the expression of those ideas - the copyrighted work itself.
Because it's not a work of literary merit.
There are already laws governing direct theft (of information or anything else).
Shoehorning this law into copyright blurs the whole purpose of copyright even more than it currently is.
Copyright is about making copies of works that (judging by whatever standard) have some artistic merit. Protecting the author of an original work against people who would copy his work (or make a derivative thereof) and not give due credit.
The idea that databases of readily available, pure facts are of artistic merit is insulting to the real artists whose works will eventually (we hope) enter the public domain and enrich our society as a whole.
If they want a law to protect databases from theft, they already have "trade secrets" and so on.
But that's not the issue. These databases are publicly available. The companies involved aren't protecting an artistic work, or a trade secret. They want to be able to enforce rigid restrictions on otherwise public knowledge, simply because they aggregated it and published it first.
shoeheels : Roman military.
gunpowder : China.
Hand Gonne : French military
Oh - were you thinking the world didn't exist before the US was founded ? Sorry. I forgot.
Thing is - I saw the intro to Firefly and went "nahh"... western in space is really just a western.
But a friend of mine had taped all of the episodes, and then we sat and watched them all in the correct order. I was much more impressed than my initial exposure led me to believe I would be.
I agree with my sibling poster - I think Firefly would have done better if they'd given it a chance.
On the other hand, they could have downplayed the "western" style a bit without losing anything, make it more subtle etc, and I think it would have seemed more mature.
My 1.35 cents worth (adjusted for inflation and exchange rates)
Natalie Portman was the only reason I saw the second one. I see no reason that will change.
Have you been hit by a car ?
At what speed ?
I can tell you that 15mph is too fast to be hit by a car. Hell, 10mph still hurts if you weren't already going that way. What speed limit would you like ? Perhaps we should all go no faster than 5 mph on any road where bicyclists might be. That would solve your problem.
Speed decides how bad, but almost any speed is going to cause you injury - 35 mph is _slow_, on the roads in California (for example), but it's fast enough to turn you into a jumble of bones and spokes under the wheels of an SUV. But "I didn't break the speed limit, officer".
It takes two to tango - cyclists and pedestrians should realize they cannot win any altercation with two tons of metal, and act accordingly. I've lost track of the number of morons who've stepped off the curb without even looking. This is especially prevalent in parking lots, but I've seen it on regular roads as well.
Cars don't kill people, people kill people.
You miss the parent posters point. It's a privacy issue. No matter what the *objective* of the law is meant to be, the result allows the government to assemble information about you without your explicit consent, or any specific reason.
A persistent Myth.
Glass does not flow _incredibly_ slowly. The ripple effect in old windows is due to the inadequate process of making the glass in the first place. Those ripples were always there.
For a counter example, there are telescope lenses 150 years old that still provide a crisp image. There are roman glass artifacts of incredible delicacy that survive to this day with no discernible perturbations due to "flow".
Glass is not a liquid.
90 day warranty ?
I bet you'd kill for a relationship that lasted so long.
So if you lock your car in the parking lot and then someone comes along, breaks into it, and then uses it to commit a crime, then it was *your* responsibility ? I think not.
Now I'm not saying definitively that someone stole this guys screener and copied it, but we don't have any evidence to go on here. All we know is that the screener was leaked. It was his responsibility to take reasonable precautions to protect the screener (as you point out), and yet we cannot say (because we have no evidence) that he did not.
The fact of the leak does not, prima facie, prove a lack of responsibility on his part.
Also, for some more recent studies ...
... see the
check out this
And if you'd like to see Six Degress of Kevin Bacon in action
oracle of bacon
Your "flaw" in the study isn't really all that much of a problem.
Think of this as a network of nodes. The point of the 6 degrees concept is that the network isn't sparse. It's a dense network : most of the nodes are well connected, and this is a classic shortest path problem. In the few cases that you have a low number of connections for a given node, all that generally happens is that this node doesn't figure in many paths (because there is often a shorter path that excludes the low connected node).
If you must start your path with a low connected node (Hermit on the mountain), you might have to add a "degree of separation", but generally even the sparsely connected nodes connect to a highly connected node within one or two degrees at most.
Say you know 10 people. And each of them knows 10 other people you don't know. Six degrees of separation in this case is about a billion people. Since you probably know more than 10 people (although overlap probably means you might not know 10 people that none of your other friends know...) then you might have a case for saying *any* two people are six degrees away from each other. You might think that this sort of set of relationships tend to be restricted by national or cultural boundaries, but in practice, it only takes one person in your list who has a wide array of experiences and/or wide group of acquaintances to jump such limitations.
Especially when you consider that there are companies that bottle their water straight from the tap.
Like this one
No one will ever need more than 15 frames per second or 640KB of RAM.
- Bill Gates
Slap me if I'm old fashioned - but I found that the scenes that focus on the one protagonist in the midst of a battle and the 12 to 20 people around him/her to be more filled with drama and tension than the eagle-eye view of the thousands upon thousands gathering for the assault.
That's not to say that the Massive engine wasn't impressive, the vistas amazing; merely that over-use of such things can lead to a dis-association with what is (IMHO) more important: the characters and their story.
One other factor in the US...
A prosecutors chances of advancement (apart from the elected positions such as DA) are based directly on performance. The definition of performance is not "cases tackled" but "cases won". The practice of plea-bargaining is directly related to this.
For the low-profile cases, most prosecutors will not drop a case if they think there's even a chance of winning it. Why ? because if they win, that's a feather in their cap, but if they drop a case (even if that would be the obviously just thing to do) then that's a strike against their careers - more than if they'd lost it. So it makes sense for them to put at least a minimal effort into each case. So long as they don't pursue completely frivolous cases into court (earning the ire of a judge who might censure them if this attitude persists), there isn't much incentive not to take it to trial.
Have you been swallowing the tripe from the MS developers journal again ?
Have you even worked with Java ? I don't mean puttering around at home in between failed job interviews. I mean in a production environment.
Javascript != Java.