As the other poster pointed out, that's not what you get. TurnItIn does a plain text match, it's completely unaware of context. If you use a sentence from someone else's paper and claim it's your own, you get exactly the same penalty as if you quote and cite that sentence. It also gives you a penalty if you use a sentence that happens to appear somewhere else in a completely different context.
I had to use TurnItIn for a course I taught last academic year (I also had to use Blackboard, which is the worst piece of software I've ever used - if one of my students had submitted code that bad, they'd have failed). To test it, I tried getting one of my students to upload a copy of the course notes. He uploaded a copy of the PDF that was on my web site. TurnItIn found the copy on my web site, and said that the uploaded version was 70% similar to it. Now, if it thinks that two bit-for-bit identical documents are only 70% similar, I don't have much faith in it finding real cheating...
Oh, and it comes back with a lot of false positives because it doesn't know about quotes. If someone says:
Poster hort_wort (in Slashdot post http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2422338&cid=37365024) posed the question "Did you use Turnitin to determine that?"
Then it would flag that quote as plagiarised and add it to the plagiarism total. This meant that the essays I got that cited a lot of sources were all flagged.
Why is an aircraft unable to perform it's mission because GPS has been knocked out
Because it has to stay on the south side of the border. If it strays over the DMZ then it becomes a legitimate target. If it's then shot down, then it's a diplomatic and political nightmare for the USA - they can't do nothing without looking weak, and they can't retaliate without escalating the conflict.
In a combat scenario, this is irrelevant. It would just fly over the border and take pictures. The inertial guidance system is more than accurate enough for this kind of activity.
Depends. Writing a plugin that lets you play back streamed video and is relatively secure is a lot easier than writing a secure plugin that is basically a complete VM, graphics toolkit, video player, and so on. It's a question of attack surface.
Part of the problem with HTML5 is that it now has most of the capabilities of Flash (people focus on the video, but it also has - via canvas and SVG - both immediate and retained mode 2D PDF-like drawing capabilities, sound playback, image and video compositing, location APIs, and so on). This means that the attack surface is huge.
Ten years ago, the web was evolving in the direction of web services. Every side would provide information in some machine-parseable XML format. For example, if you wanted to pick a flight, you'd run an app that would grab flight data from all of the relevant airlines, filter, and sort it for you. Now, largely as a result of Google's manipulation, this has been subverted so each airline tries to provide a web application for browsing flights, rather than providing you with the data. Because this is so useless, you instead visit a comparison site (which takes a cut of the booking price and gives Google ad money and shows Google ads) that, again, has its own web app that lets you do the comparison.
This is inherently less secure, because now you're getting code from untrusted locations, rather than just data. As the web apps become more capable, the browser is exposing a larger and larger subset of the operating systems' capabilities and your exploit potential becomes larger.
No, it's a problem with any collector. A tracing collector still needs a mechanism for breaking cycles. It can collect garbage cycles, where two objects reference each other but neither is referenced anywhere else, but that's a less common case. For example, consider a notification delivery object. This is a pretty common pattern - objects register to receive notifications of a particular type, then other objects send notifications and the notification centre routes them to any interested objects. The notification centre needs to keep a reference to the objects that are interested in notifications, but this should be a weak reference because the object should be collected if that's the only reference to it.
It's not all crap. There is value in liquidity. A company that wants to expand needs to be able to finance this expansion. This typically involves either issuing more shares or getting a loan. The former is preferable to the company (no interest to pay), but needs investors. Having some speculators in the market makes it possible for the company to issue the stock and sell it immediately to speculators, who later sell it on to long-term investors once they've had more time to judge the risks.
The problem is that we now have a lot more speculators and they dominate the system, so the ability of a company to raise capital no longer depends on whether it's a good long-term investment, but on the opinions of the speculators.
Completely insane constructor semantics trying to look a bit like Java in a prototype-based language (new foo() calls foo() with this set to a new copy of foo.prototype. WTF?)
Lack of weak references (makes it really hard to write nontrivial code that doesn't leak)
Poor numerical support (everything is a double - no integer types)
Everything is an object... except that sometimes it isn't, although it pretends to be.
Arrays that look like dictionaries but aren't... except when they are (e.g. someArray[1] and someArray["foo"] do completely unrelated things)
There are probably other reasons to dislike JavaScript. Putting Self in a browser would have been a lot better than this crappy cut-down Self clone with Java syntax that we ended up with.
Straw man. Patents are not meant to encourage innovation, they are meant to encourage disclosure. R&D costs money. It's always cheaper to make copies than make something innovative. Companies that innovate without patents have to obfuscate their products so that they're harder to copy. Other companies had to independently recreate the same things that they'd invented, or spend effort reverse engineering the obfuscated devices, rather than just licensing them.
The NSA was an example. If your encryption is secure, you are using a peer-reviewed algorithm and you can publish that algorithm without compromising security. As I said, the only 'obvious reasons' for not discussing the security involved are that you're talking bullshit, or that your encryption is insecure. I'm inclined to believe the first option.
The building isn't across state lines. The building is on one side. The window is on the state lines. The customers stand on the other side of the state line.
Thought experiment: If I open a drive-through restaurant on one side of a state line, but with the window on the other side, so people pass me money and get their food handed back across the state line, which state's sales tax do I need to collect?
Good CS graduates shouldn't care what language they've been taught in
And there's the problem. There aren't that many good graduates. Universities league tables have been counting drop-out rates as a bad thing, so there's a lot of pressure on departments to let people graduate, or they drop in the ranking and find it difficult to attract good students. Funding is linked to the number of students and so there's a lot of pressure to take lots of students. Once they're there, the curriculum has to be dumbed down so the drop out rate isn't too high.
A few Computer Science departments in the UK are adopting the Informatics brand. Bangor and Edinburgh are the two that I've visited, but there are probably others (not sure if you count Welsh and Scots as native English speakers).
WOW stands for Windows-On-Windows. It's the layer for running Windows apps on a newer version of Windows. So, the name does make sense, it's the system directory for WOW64, which is an application for running Windows on Windows64.
For obvious reasons, I'm not going to discuss the encryption technology involved - save to say that it is very secure.
Bullshit. The NSA publishes encryption algorithms and opens them up for review. If it is secure, then publishing the algorithm does nothing. The only 'obvious reasons' are that you're talking out of your arse.
You hit - obliquely - on the big failing of communism. It's not a problem of communism vs capitalism, it's a problem of top-down vs bottom-up. I would contend that no top-down economic system is stable in the long term. They always degrade into some form of oligarchy. For a communist state to work, the central component needs to make it easy for individuals to cooperate, not try to enforce this cooperation. Currently, our tax structure is set up to strongly favour large corporate entities, so the emergent property is large centralised economic entities.
And, in these cases, you aren't removing the greed motive. Quite the reverse, in fact. If a worker's income is directly related to the performance of his company, then a greedy worker will work hard to ensure that the company is a success. If anything, traditional capitalism removes the greed motive: in most companies, people get paid the same irrespective of how well they do their jobs. Why should they work harder to make random shareholders richer?
Actually, by law, in the UK, the service provider does now have an obligation to unlock the device for you.
Yes, because a law was specifically passed in this area. Before this law was passed, they did not have to.
however her daughter contested this in court saying she deserved some
Again, in the UK there are specific laws covering how little you can leave to your surviving relatives. If a will violates these, it can be overturned in it entirety and it acts as if you died intestate. It's completely irrelevant in this case, because you're talking about an area with very specific laws.
In this case, as I said in another post, the Sale of Goods Act would apply, but that defines the relationship between buyer and seller, not between buyer and third party. You would be able to return the game to the shop where you bought it and they would be required to give you a refund. Valve is providing you with a service that you agree to when you install the game. They can withdraw this at any time. The product that you bought requires the provision of the service to be suitable for the purpose for which sold, so without the service you can return it. The shop may or may not be able to get the money back, depending on their agreement with their wholesaler.
It's like buying a mobile phone or mapping GPS locked to a specific provider. If the provider decides to stop offering you the service, then the device is worthless. You may be able to return it to the shop for a refund, but that's between you and the seller, not between you and the service provider.
The Sale of Goods Act applies to sales of goods, not rental of services. Before you buy anything from Steam, it makes it clear in the terms and conditions that you are not actually buying anything. With regards to sale of a boxed game, the Act only applies between the seller and the purchaser. Valve is not one of these entities. They can revoke your copy of the game, and the Sale of Goods Act means that you can sue the shop that sold you the box if they refuse to give you a full refund. You will, however, need to have kept the receipt for the game to be able to prove that you purchased it from them...
If it appears to be an actual purchase, and behaves like all other actual purchases, then it is an actual purchase - regardless how Valve would prefer it to be treated.
That big license agreement that you agree to before signing up for Steam and before every Steam purchase would disagree. Any games 'purchased' over Steam come with text that you agree to before the purchase stating that it is not a purchase. If you don't read this... caveat emptor.
If I didn't purchase the game from Steam or Valve, then they have no say over whether I can play it or not.
That's a more tricky situation, however the text is presented when you first install the game makes it clear that you have not, in fact, purchased the game, and instructs you to return it to the shop if you are not happy with this. The shop is required to give you a full refund.
This case is pretty simple with regard to Valve. The only agreement that they have with regard to the game is the one that you agreed to when you installed it. They can withdraw this service at any time. You are then left with the shiny disk that you purchased. You can return this to the shop as not suitable for the purpose for which sold if Valve withdraws the service from you, but your (legal) disagreement is with the shop that sold it to you, not with Valve.
I'd be amazed if it's legal for them to block access to content you've legitimately paid for.
It's perfectly legal. You are not buying anything from Steam. You do not own anything that you pay for on Steam. You are paying for a revokable license, at the sole discretion of Valve. If you confuse this with an actual purchase, then that's your problem.
Slashdot Mirror
As the other poster pointed out, that's not what you get. TurnItIn does a plain text match, it's completely unaware of context. If you use a sentence from someone else's paper and claim it's your own, you get exactly the same penalty as if you quote and cite that sentence. It also gives you a penalty if you use a sentence that happens to appear somewhere else in a completely different context.
I had to use TurnItIn for a course I taught last academic year (I also had to use Blackboard, which is the worst piece of software I've ever used - if one of my students had submitted code that bad, they'd have failed). To test it, I tried getting one of my students to upload a copy of the course notes. He uploaded a copy of the PDF that was on my web site. TurnItIn found the copy on my web site, and said that the uploaded version was 70% similar to it. Now, if it thinks that two bit-for-bit identical documents are only 70% similar, I don't have much faith in it finding real cheating...
Oh, and it comes back with a lot of false positives because it doesn't know about quotes. If someone says: Poster hort_wort (in Slashdot post http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2422338&cid=37365024) posed the question "Did you use Turnitin to determine that?"
Then it would flag that quote as plagiarised and add it to the plagiarism total. This meant that the essays I got that cited a lot of sources were all flagged.
Why is an aircraft unable to perform it's mission because GPS has been knocked out
Because it has to stay on the south side of the border. If it strays over the DMZ then it becomes a legitimate target. If it's then shot down, then it's a diplomatic and political nightmare for the USA - they can't do nothing without looking weak, and they can't retaliate without escalating the conflict.
In a combat scenario, this is irrelevant. It would just fly over the border and take pictures. The inertial guidance system is more than accurate enough for this kind of activity.
Nonsense. We all know that time is a cube.
Depends. Writing a plugin that lets you play back streamed video and is relatively secure is a lot easier than writing a secure plugin that is basically a complete VM, graphics toolkit, video player, and so on. It's a question of attack surface.
Part of the problem with HTML5 is that it now has most of the capabilities of Flash (people focus on the video, but it also has - via canvas and SVG - both immediate and retained mode 2D PDF-like drawing capabilities, sound playback, image and video compositing, location APIs, and so on). This means that the attack surface is huge.
Ten years ago, the web was evolving in the direction of web services. Every side would provide information in some machine-parseable XML format. For example, if you wanted to pick a flight, you'd run an app that would grab flight data from all of the relevant airlines, filter, and sort it for you. Now, largely as a result of Google's manipulation, this has been subverted so each airline tries to provide a web application for browsing flights, rather than providing you with the data. Because this is so useless, you instead visit a comparison site (which takes a cut of the booking price and gives Google ad money and shows Google ads) that, again, has its own web app that lets you do the comparison.
This is inherently less secure, because now you're getting code from untrusted locations, rather than just data. As the web apps become more capable, the browser is exposing a larger and larger subset of the operating systems' capabilities and your exploit potential becomes larger.
No, it's a problem with any collector. A tracing collector still needs a mechanism for breaking cycles. It can collect garbage cycles, where two objects reference each other but neither is referenced anywhere else, but that's a less common case. For example, consider a notification delivery object. This is a pretty common pattern - objects register to receive notifications of a particular type, then other objects send notifications and the notification centre routes them to any interested objects. The notification centre needs to keep a reference to the objects that are interested in notifications, but this should be a weak reference because the object should be collected if that's the only reference to it.
don't give me "market liquidity" crap.
It's not all crap. There is value in liquidity. A company that wants to expand needs to be able to finance this expansion. This typically involves either issuing more shares or getting a loan. The former is preferable to the company (no interest to pay), but needs investors. Having some speculators in the market makes it possible for the company to issue the stock and sell it immediately to speculators, who later sell it on to long-term investors once they've had more time to judge the risks.
The problem is that we now have a lot more speculators and they dominate the system, so the ability of a company to raise capital no longer depends on whether it's a good long-term investment, but on the opinions of the speculators.
A few things, off the top of my head:
There are probably other reasons to dislike JavaScript. Putting Self in a browser would have been a lot better than this crappy cut-down Self clone with Java syntax that we ended up with.
Not to mention the fact that Google has migrated a lot of their internal code away from Python over the last few years...
Straw man. Patents are not meant to encourage innovation, they are meant to encourage disclosure. R&D costs money. It's always cheaper to make copies than make something innovative. Companies that innovate without patents have to obfuscate their products so that they're harder to copy. Other companies had to independently recreate the same things that they'd invented, or spend effort reverse engineering the obfuscated devices, rather than just licensing them.
The NSA was an example. If your encryption is secure, you are using a peer-reviewed algorithm and you can publish that algorithm without compromising security. As I said, the only 'obvious reasons' for not discussing the security involved are that you're talking bullshit, or that your encryption is insecure. I'm inclined to believe the first option.
The building isn't across state lines. The building is on one side. The window is on the state lines. The customers stand on the other side of the state line.
Thought experiment: If I open a drive-through restaurant on one side of a state line, but with the window on the other side, so people pass me money and get their food handed back across the state line, which state's sales tax do I need to collect?
Good CS graduates shouldn't care what language they've been taught in
And there's the problem. There aren't that many good graduates. Universities league tables have been counting drop-out rates as a bad thing, so there's a lot of pressure on departments to let people graduate, or they drop in the ranking and find it difficult to attract good students. Funding is linked to the number of students and so there's a lot of pressure to take lots of students. Once they're there, the curriculum has to be dumbed down so the drop out rate isn't too high.
A few Computer Science departments in the UK are adopting the Informatics brand. Bangor and Edinburgh are the two that I've visited, but there are probably others (not sure if you count Welsh and Scots as native English speakers).
WOW stands for Windows-On-Windows. It's the layer for running Windows apps on a newer version of Windows. So, the name does make sense, it's the system directory for WOW64, which is an application for running Windows on Windows64.
For obvious reasons, I'm not going to discuss the encryption technology involved - save to say that it is very secure.
Bullshit. The NSA publishes encryption algorithms and opens them up for review. If it is secure, then publishing the algorithm does nothing. The only 'obvious reasons' are that you're talking out of your arse.
Then he is in exactly the same situation as if you broke into his house and stole his 3TB disk, which is completely orthogonal to the MTBF.
You hit - obliquely - on the big failing of communism. It's not a problem of communism vs capitalism, it's a problem of top-down vs bottom-up. I would contend that no top-down economic system is stable in the long term. They always degrade into some form of oligarchy. For a communist state to work, the central component needs to make it easy for individuals to cooperate, not try to enforce this cooperation. Currently, our tax structure is set up to strongly favour large corporate entities, so the emergent property is large centralised economic entities.
And, in these cases, you aren't removing the greed motive. Quite the reverse, in fact. If a worker's income is directly related to the performance of his company, then a greedy worker will work hard to ensure that the company is a success. If anything, traditional capitalism removes the greed motive: in most companies, people get paid the same irrespective of how well they do their jobs. Why should they work harder to make random shareholders richer?
Actually, by law, in the UK, the service provider does now have an obligation to unlock the device for you.
Yes, because a law was specifically passed in this area. Before this law was passed, they did not have to.
however her daughter contested this in court saying she deserved some
Again, in the UK there are specific laws covering how little you can leave to your surviving relatives. If a will violates these, it can be overturned in it entirety and it acts as if you died intestate. It's completely irrelevant in this case, because you're talking about an area with very specific laws.
In this case, as I said in another post, the Sale of Goods Act would apply, but that defines the relationship between buyer and seller, not between buyer and third party. You would be able to return the game to the shop where you bought it and they would be required to give you a refund. Valve is providing you with a service that you agree to when you install the game. They can withdraw this at any time. The product that you bought requires the provision of the service to be suitable for the purpose for which sold, so without the service you can return it. The shop may or may not be able to get the money back, depending on their agreement with their wholesaler.
It's like buying a mobile phone or mapping GPS locked to a specific provider. If the provider decides to stop offering you the service, then the device is worthless. You may be able to return it to the shop for a refund, but that's between you and the seller, not between you and the service provider.
The Sale of Goods Act applies to sales of goods, not rental of services. Before you buy anything from Steam, it makes it clear in the terms and conditions that you are not actually buying anything. With regards to sale of a boxed game, the Act only applies between the seller and the purchaser. Valve is not one of these entities. They can revoke your copy of the game, and the Sale of Goods Act means that you can sue the shop that sold you the box if they refuse to give you a full refund. You will, however, need to have kept the receipt for the game to be able to prove that you purchased it from them...
If it appears to be an actual purchase, and behaves like all other actual purchases, then it is an actual purchase - regardless how Valve would prefer it to be treated.
That big license agreement that you agree to before signing up for Steam and before every Steam purchase would disagree. Any games 'purchased' over Steam come with text that you agree to before the purchase stating that it is not a purchase. If you don't read this... caveat emptor.
If I didn't purchase the game from Steam or Valve, then they have no say over whether I can play it or not.
That's a more tricky situation, however the text is presented when you first install the game makes it clear that you have not, in fact, purchased the game, and instructs you to return it to the shop if you are not happy with this. The shop is required to give you a full refund.
This case is pretty simple with regard to Valve. The only agreement that they have with regard to the game is the one that you agreed to when you installed it. They can withdraw this service at any time. You are then left with the shiny disk that you purchased. You can return this to the shop as not suitable for the purpose for which sold if Valve withdraws the service from you, but your (legal) disagreement is with the shop that sold it to you, not with Valve.
I'd be amazed if it's legal for them to block access to content you've legitimately paid for.
It's perfectly legal. You are not buying anything from Steam. You do not own anything that you pay for on Steam. You are paying for a revokable license, at the sole discretion of Valve. If you confuse this with an actual purchase, then that's your problem.