Why do they keep this guy around? I mean, is he anything but a washed up philosopher? I don't mind a philosopher. But this is a techno site. Shouldn't he have some modicum of technical understanding? If cell phones act as routers, that means that have to constantly (or at least often) maintain a certain level of transmission. Which means they would have talk-time level of power consumption. For most phones that's too short. The passive mode on phones is so low on power consumption because they are mostly just receiving. Anyone with even a tiny bit of technical knowledge would understand this. How's is this guy kdawson a slashdot editor? C'mon.
You don't need to spoof a mac address, but you could have a peer-negotiated unique mac address that changes every time you reconnect. If the handshaking is done via signed pub/priv crypto system, you would have assurance that the device which was assigned the address was the one that is using it.
The day was the day when "these are the stakes" mushroom cloud commercial played on TV. It scared the people of reason into thinking that rational discourse is important in the wake of rhetoric evoking visceral response. It was the day the Republican party resigned from being the part of rational people. Republicans decided that to protect the reasonable society they must enlist visceral response of their own. And so they married the religious right. What we see today is the golem attacking its creators. They decided to take the low road for immediate convenience of winning elections with the usual brush off that the long term damage that they were doing to the cause would be someone else's problem. Well, it's our problem now. There is no more a political party that appeals to the left brain. Both parties appeal to right brain, just on different issues.
That commercial showed that visceral response can completely preempt any arguments. It only played once. And after it did, the downfall started. That was the day I was talking about.
I am sure everyone with their favorite cause that is buzzing on their mind thinks they need to make an argument against me based on how I am ignoring why one party or the other is not addressing the cause that is "the most important cause right now". Blah, blah, blah. All debate today is trying to stir emotional reaction. So all schooling is done to force people to know enough facts to understand the vocabulary of these emotional MEMEs. Logical thinking is not taught anymore. It's not even valued. The idea of discovery is really shunned. "Open-minded" now means conforming to the person making the statement. Everything is subjective. Objectivity is deemed impossible. This is all right-brain values. It's where we are because there is nothing in culture or public debate that appeals to the left-brain values.
Polya's "How To Solve It" gives a pretty good philosophy on how to structure a math lesson. Not my favorite though. I personally most enjoyed a more "historical" teaching of math. Where new methods introduce new problems and further methods are introduced to solve these new problems. It gives this natural feeling where one feels actual angst at the problem not being solved. So that when a method for solving it is shown, it becomes a favorite new toy.
But more importantly, the idea that "no matter how far you, you still have more to go" is sometimes a turn off as too abstract. This story makes it more concrete. AND it manages to demonstrate that an infinity can be contained in some set. It's quite a good example, once you parse it.
My best math teachers were in 2nd and 7th grades. Both were women. I can honestly say that my life-long exploration (maybe I should call it maniacal obsession instead?) had I not gone through the 7th grade with the teacher that I had. The first encounter with male math instructors was in high school. I had one male math teacher in high school. Now that I better understand what arguments are, I have to say that he structured math proofs and arguments too ad hominem.
And, of course, most math professors in college were males. They were intolerable pricks. It took years after college to shake off the bitter taste they left to get back into math again. My PhD thesis adviser was a woman who still amazes me with the level of utmost expertise which is not moderated by rather naturally instilled with utter humbleness. The best I saw from her male colleagues was professionalism. The worst was, of course, narcissism. I've seen male professors fall apart during instruction to the point where they were doing nothing but giving behavior advise on how to study math... talking about people and not talking about math (all the while talking to graduate math students who clearly were there because they already loved math).
The problem with males is that they rarely invite open hostility. And math instruction requires just that. Women seem to be able to better invite this "but, wait minute..." attitude. And this is how the discipline of proves is trained. The process of verifying a proof is mostly checking that all the assumptions have been justified. And questioning an assumption is too easily taken as a personal assault. So males get defensive. Women not as much.
It's not necessarily wrong. The first girls assertion was about set A being infinite. The second girl's assertion was that set B contained all objects satisfying a certain property. B can contain A. For example, B could be equal to A.
Brown v Scopes was actually still a process of deliberation. It was still a time when debate was seen as a truth-seeking exercise (as opposed to today's attempt at proving the other side irrelevant by proving that their position has a flaw).
Well, the original reference was about to the rise of influence of religion on public debate in this country. So my question was essentially "what triggered that"?
No, it was much later. As a matter of fact, if you look at old navy textbooks (I had a chance to browse one that my neighbor kept around), you'll see that they read like good HS math books that you wish you had. WWII did not end good education. Try again.
Why did you slip the word "women" in there? My best math teachers/professors were women. They tended to be less self-absorbed and when they showed the love for the subject it was love of the subject rather than plain narcissism that's so common to men teaching math (I am guilty of it too, btw).
It may seem very rote, but if you are frustrated by the people you have to deal with (as your stress indicates), then you may benefit from rethinking of your approach to the whole situation. People who succeed in technology are usually perfectionists. Adapt the attitude that you'll be great at whatever you are doing right now. People you work with probably are not dumb. Their area of expertise, however, is very different from yours. In a word, look for ways to make yourself useful. If you find a conversation frustrating, don't think "I gotta get out of here" after the conversation is over. Try to figure out what the other person needed that you didn't communicate to them. Communication is one of the most valuable skills in creation of technology because most technology is created through large-scale cooperative effort. Think of your current arrangement as a training ground in communication. Once you learn how to communicate with people who are intelligent even though they are not tech-savvy, you'll become much more valuable to a technology company in which you really do want to work.
you have me confused with someone arguing for perpetual copyrights. i am simply arguing for short-period copyrights. the gp to which i responded was clearly against all copyrights.
Being on company premises during off hours is hardly trespassing. And "abuse of company assets"? That's not a crime. It's a contract violation. And certainly cause for dismissal. But it's not a crime. So I insist that the original copier would not be breaking any laws. But even if he was, anyone copying his copy wouldn't be. They'd be associating with a criminal and touching property acquired during a crime. But since they wouldn't have to actually buy that property (but only touch it in order to copy on their own premises with their own equipment), they wouldn't be guilty of any wrong doing. The copy is not "fraudulent". Actually, that's patently absurd to call it that. And doing business with a criminal is not a crime in itself (otherwise every grocer who sold food to a bank robber would be party to the bank robbery). You know you are in deep trouble in your argument. You just don't want to admit it. Fine. Split hairs. We both know. That without copyright this would happen right and left because it happens (on rare occasion) even with copyright.
It's theirs to withhold. Just as food withheld from the hungry will cause deaths. But anyone who'd suggest that we must take it from those who have it by force has already joined the Communist Party. Look up the story of Pavlik Morozov if you think I am trolling. Wikipedia doesn't do it justice because the emphasis that the Communists always put on in that story is that Pavlik exposed his parents for hiding grain from the government (which, of course, claimed to be feeding the starving).
This meshing together of "research" of all kind is woefully misleading. Grant-sponsored research tends to concentrate more on basic science. Ie, it attempts to describe the underlying system. Whereas, industry-led research tends to be more of, let's call it engineering, endeavor. It attempts to use what's known to create procedures and devices for changing it and shaping into what can sell. So putting too much money into grants is actually harmful. It siphons the brains of interested researchers from industry to academia. Ie, it makes the academic job too cushy for researches to try to raise funding to start research into actual new treatments. After basic science has been established, the road to a treatment is anything but clear. For example, it's been understood for a very long time what is diabetes. But a hope of a diabetes pill is just emerging. Why? Because to create a treatment it is necessary to put together minds from different disciplines who don't care for each others' research and get to work together to produce something that will work. This is simply not what happens in an academic setting. It is, however, what happens in a corporate setting.
The second part of that premise that is so misleading is that it is the initial funding that is put into research that drives the research. It doesn't drive it. It sustains it. But most researches in an academic setting who are actually hoping to produce something useful, are also hoping to do so in order to strike it rich. They hope that if they get to some useful results that are commercially viable, they'll leave academia and establish companies that would letter on be bought out by some pharmaceutical corporation.
Calling corporations that produce the best of what humanity has to offer -- the cures that defy nature -- by a name invented by a second grade filmmaker who is very liberal about his fact checking (and Michael Moore is just that) is vile. It dehumanizes humanity. It trivializes the best of human effort and attempts to erase the distinction between the enablers of the modern society and the savages who ran feudal societies and lived off of death and sweat of those who did the actual work.
To use an extreme to demonstrate a point, all research in the Soviet Union was conducted in government-sponsored labs. All legal activity was, as a matter of fact, government sponsored. Soviet Union was decades behind US in the development of medical treatments. As a matter of fact, what remains of the SU is still behind US in the kinds of treatments that are available there. And this is nearly 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was happening despite the fact that SU had some of the brightest minds on the planet. And now swarm of shills is trying to drag into the same type of arrangement as the one that existed in the Soviet Union. And they are using vagueries to attempt to "prove" their positions. Well, money spent does not have the same effect if it's spent in one place or in another. The structure that is fed by that money matters a great deal. And the structure of research set up in academia simply is not conducive to creating cures. The structure set up in pharmaceutical companies is.
So the idea that more research is sponsored by the government is of no consequence. What is of consequence is what portion of the treatments were paid for by the private industry and what portion by the government. Because sponsoring research that doesn't end up contributing to the solution of the problem (while it inevitable) is not conducive to solving the problem.
The idea that they are "making" people die by blocking treatment is just as vile. Are farmers responsible for starvation because they don't personally deliver food to the hungry? Anyone who'd claim so should not also claim to be a member of a civilized society.
Do you not know that most drugs are researched at universities, with the public's money? Also, many drugs are extracted straight from native folk medicine, and patented.
That's an courageous lie. Universities work on basic research. Specific drug-related research is done commercially. And you, sir, are an ignominious fool for repeating it. And don't think for a second that repeating the words of some other fool is "educating" anyone. It's you repeating a rumor you heard in order to make yourself feel a little better about the fact that you are too scared to look in the mirror.
The very reason why ownership of ideas must be limited to a short period of time is that they are exchanged for tangible property and tangible property (such as land) is finite. So the longer it persists the more tangible property must be exchanged for it. No one insists, by the way, that one must enforce the one's own copyright. It's a right to prevent others to use it. If you don't have any vested interest in preventing others from using it, you don't have to prevent them. It is a right to prevent others from using your property (intellectual or tangible). It's not an obligation.
Why would I see EULA? Courts don't uphold them. DRM is... well, I think there should be a warning label if there is DRM on any sold media. But if you buy something and you know it has DRM, that's your choice -- so it's something you agreed to.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do they keep this guy around? I mean, is he anything but a washed up philosopher? I don't mind a philosopher. But this is a techno site. Shouldn't he have some modicum of technical understanding? If cell phones act as routers, that means that have to constantly (or at least often) maintain a certain level of transmission. Which means they would have talk-time level of power consumption. For most phones that's too short. The passive mode on phones is so low on power consumption because they are mostly just receiving. Anyone with even a tiny bit of technical knowledge would understand this. How's is this guy kdawson a slashdot editor? C'mon.
You don't need to spoof a mac address, but you could have a peer-negotiated unique mac address that changes every time you reconnect. If the handshaking is done via signed pub/priv crypto system, you would have assurance that the device which was assigned the address was the one that is using it.
Steganography is nothing new. And you can be sure that all intelligence services conduct extensive research into it.
The day was the day when "these are the stakes" mushroom cloud commercial played on TV. It scared the people of reason into thinking that rational discourse is important in the wake of rhetoric evoking visceral response. It was the day the Republican party resigned from being the part of rational people. Republicans decided that to protect the reasonable society they must enlist visceral response of their own. And so they married the religious right. What we see today is the golem attacking its creators. They decided to take the low road for immediate convenience of winning elections with the usual brush off that the long term damage that they were doing to the cause would be someone else's problem. Well, it's our problem now. There is no more a political party that appeals to the left brain. Both parties appeal to right brain, just on different issues.
That commercial showed that visceral response can completely preempt any arguments. It only played once. And after it did, the downfall started. That was the day I was talking about.
I am sure everyone with their favorite cause that is buzzing on their mind thinks they need to make an argument against me based on how I am ignoring why one party or the other is not addressing the cause that is "the most important cause right now". Blah, blah, blah. All debate today is trying to stir emotional reaction. So all schooling is done to force people to know enough facts to understand the vocabulary of these emotional MEMEs. Logical thinking is not taught anymore. It's not even valued. The idea of discovery is really shunned. "Open-minded" now means conforming to the person making the statement. Everything is subjective. Objectivity is deemed impossible. This is all right-brain values. It's where we are because there is nothing in culture or public debate that appeals to the left-brain values.
These are the stakes
Polya's "How To Solve It" gives a pretty good philosophy on how to structure a math lesson. Not my favorite though. I personally most enjoyed a more "historical" teaching of math. Where new methods introduce new problems and further methods are introduced to solve these new problems. It gives this natural feeling where one feels actual angst at the problem not being solved. So that when a method for solving it is shown, it becomes a favorite new toy.
But more importantly, the idea that "no matter how far you, you still have more to go" is sometimes a turn off as too abstract. This story makes it more concrete. AND it manages to demonstrate that an infinity can be contained in some set. It's quite a good example, once you parse it.
My best math teachers were in 2nd and 7th grades. Both were women. I can honestly say that my life-long exploration (maybe I should call it maniacal obsession instead?) had I not gone through the 7th grade with the teacher that I had. The first encounter with male math instructors was in high school. I had one male math teacher in high school. Now that I better understand what arguments are, I have to say that he structured math proofs and arguments too ad hominem.
And, of course, most math professors in college were males. They were intolerable pricks. It took years after college to shake off the bitter taste they left to get back into math again. My PhD thesis adviser was a woman who still amazes me with the level of utmost expertise which is not moderated by rather naturally instilled with utter humbleness. The best I saw from her male colleagues was professionalism. The worst was, of course, narcissism. I've seen male professors fall apart during instruction to the point where they were doing nothing but giving behavior advise on how to study math... talking about people and not talking about math (all the while talking to graduate math students who clearly were there because they already loved math).
The problem with males is that they rarely invite open hostility. And math instruction requires just that. Women seem to be able to better invite this "but, wait minute..." attitude. And this is how the discipline of proves is trained. The process of verifying a proof is mostly checking that all the assumptions have been justified. And questioning an assumption is too easily taken as a personal assault. So males get defensive. Women not as much.
It's not necessarily wrong. The first girls assertion was about set A being infinite. The second girl's assertion was that set B contained all objects satisfying a certain property. B can contain A. For example, B could be equal to A.
Brown v Scopes was actually still a process of deliberation. It was still a time when debate was seen as a truth-seeking exercise (as opposed to today's attempt at proving the other side irrelevant by proving that their position has a flaw).
Well, the original reference was about to the rise of influence of religion on public debate in this country. So my question was essentially "what triggered that"?
No, it was much later. As a matter of fact, if you look at old navy textbooks (I had a chance to browse one that my neighbor kept around), you'll see that they read like good HS math books that you wish you had. WWII did not end good education. Try again.
That's a amazingly good way to demonstrate what's infinity to new students. I like it so much I think I am going to steal it.
Why did you slip the word "women" in there? My best math teachers/professors were women. They tended to be less self-absorbed and when they showed the love for the subject it was love of the subject rather than plain narcissism that's so common to men teaching math (I am guilty of it too, btw).
Can you name one day in history that started that war? (I am fairly certain that I can)
It may seem very rote, but if you are frustrated by the people you have to deal with (as your stress indicates), then you may benefit from rethinking of your approach to the whole situation. People who succeed in technology are usually perfectionists. Adapt the attitude that you'll be great at whatever you are doing right now. People you work with probably are not dumb. Their area of expertise, however, is very different from yours. In a word, look for ways to make yourself useful. If you find a conversation frustrating, don't think "I gotta get out of here" after the conversation is over. Try to figure out what the other person needed that you didn't communicate to them. Communication is one of the most valuable skills in creation of technology because most technology is created through large-scale cooperative effort. Think of your current arrangement as a training ground in communication. Once you learn how to communicate with people who are intelligent even though they are not tech-savvy, you'll become much more valuable to a technology company in which you really do want to work.
It's already been done off of Scotland and off of Portugal by a Scottish company.
you have me confused with someone arguing for perpetual copyrights. i am simply arguing for short-period copyrights. the gp to which i responded was clearly against all copyrights.
Being on company premises during off hours is hardly trespassing. And "abuse of company assets"? That's not a crime. It's a contract violation. And certainly cause for dismissal. But it's not a crime. So I insist that the original copier would not be breaking any laws. But even if he was, anyone copying his copy wouldn't be. They'd be associating with a criminal and touching property acquired during a crime. But since they wouldn't have to actually buy that property (but only touch it in order to copy on their own premises with their own equipment), they wouldn't be guilty of any wrong doing. The copy is not "fraudulent". Actually, that's patently absurd to call it that. And doing business with a criminal is not a crime in itself (otherwise every grocer who sold food to a bank robber would be party to the bank robbery). You know you are in deep trouble in your argument. You just don't want to admit it. Fine. Split hairs. We both know. That without copyright this would happen right and left because it happens (on rare occasion) even with copyright.
So if you buy a Toyta what did you buy? The car or the right to build its replicas? Yeah... I am the one who should get a life... sure.
It's theirs to withhold. Just as food withheld from the hungry will cause deaths. But anyone who'd suggest that we must take it from those who have it by force has already joined the Communist Party. Look up the story of Pavlik Morozov if you think I am trolling. Wikipedia doesn't do it justice because the emphasis that the Communists always put on in that story is that Pavlik exposed his parents for hiding grain from the government (which, of course, claimed to be feeding the starving).
This meshing together of "research" of all kind is woefully misleading. Grant-sponsored research tends to concentrate more on basic science. Ie, it attempts to describe the underlying system. Whereas, industry-led research tends to be more of, let's call it engineering, endeavor. It attempts to use what's known to create procedures and devices for changing it and shaping into what can sell. So putting too much money into grants is actually harmful. It siphons the brains of interested researchers from industry to academia. Ie, it makes the academic job too cushy for researches to try to raise funding to start research into actual new treatments. After basic science has been established, the road to a treatment is anything but clear. For example, it's been understood for a very long time what is diabetes. But a hope of a diabetes pill is just emerging. Why? Because to create a treatment it is necessary to put together minds from different disciplines who don't care for each others' research and get to work together to produce something that will work. This is simply not what happens in an academic setting. It is, however, what happens in a corporate setting.
The second part of that premise that is so misleading is that it is the initial funding that is put into research that drives the research. It doesn't drive it. It sustains it. But most researches in an academic setting who are actually hoping to produce something useful, are also hoping to do so in order to strike it rich. They hope that if they get to some useful results that are commercially viable, they'll leave academia and establish companies that would letter on be bought out by some pharmaceutical corporation.
Calling corporations that produce the best of what humanity has to offer -- the cures that defy nature -- by a name invented by a second grade filmmaker who is very liberal about his fact checking (and Michael Moore is just that) is vile. It dehumanizes humanity. It trivializes the best of human effort and attempts to erase the distinction between the enablers of the modern society and the savages who ran feudal societies and lived off of death and sweat of those who did the actual work.
To use an extreme to demonstrate a point, all research in the Soviet Union was conducted in government-sponsored labs. All legal activity was, as a matter of fact, government sponsored. Soviet Union was decades behind US in the development of medical treatments. As a matter of fact, what remains of the SU is still behind US in the kinds of treatments that are available there. And this is nearly 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was happening despite the fact that SU had some of the brightest minds on the planet. And now swarm of shills is trying to drag into the same type of arrangement as the one that existed in the Soviet Union. And they are using vagueries to attempt to "prove" their positions. Well, money spent does not have the same effect if it's spent in one place or in another. The structure that is fed by that money matters a great deal. And the structure of research set up in academia simply is not conducive to creating cures. The structure set up in pharmaceutical companies is.
So the idea that more research is sponsored by the government is of no consequence. What is of consequence is what portion of the treatments were paid for by the private industry and what portion by the government. Because sponsoring research that doesn't end up contributing to the solution of the problem (while it inevitable) is not conducive to solving the problem.
The idea that they are "making" people die by blocking treatment is just as vile. Are farmers responsible for starvation because they don't personally deliver food to the hungry? Anyone who'd claim so should not also claim to be a member of a civilized society.
Do you not know that most drugs are researched at universities, with the public's money? Also, many drugs are extracted straight from native folk medicine, and patented.
That's an courageous lie. Universities work on basic research. Specific drug-related research is done commercially. And you, sir, are an ignominious fool for repeating it. And don't think for a second that repeating the words of some other fool is "educating" anyone. It's you repeating a rumor you heard in order to make yourself feel a little better about the fact that you are too scared to look in the mirror.
The very reason why ownership of ideas must be limited to a short period of time is that they are exchanged for tangible property and tangible property (such as land) is finite. So the longer it persists the more tangible property must be exchanged for it. No one insists, by the way, that one must enforce the one's own copyright. It's a right to prevent others to use it. If you don't have any vested interest in preventing others from using it, you don't have to prevent them. It is a right to prevent others from using your property (intellectual or tangible). It's not an obligation.
Why would I see EULA? Courts don't uphold them. DRM is... well, I think there should be a warning label if there is DRM on any sold media. But if you buy something and you know it has DRM, that's your choice -- so it's something you agreed to.
No one is preventing you from sharing what's yours. Sharing that which doesn't belong to you is not sharing. It's stealing.