The most disturbing part of these interviews was that the jurors said they would've reached the same conclusion regardless of whether a transfer had to take place to be infringement, especially since none of the case coverage mentioned the RIAA lawyers showing evidence that any transfers took place at all. They mainly focused on how file sharing is terrible for their cartel, estimates for its effect on their cartel as a whole, etc... They never said anything like, "As a result of her making files available, N people downloaded the song for free, which translates to $D in lost sales". Absent any evidence that transfers took place, there was no way the jury could have found her guilty of infringement if the instruction was "Infringement only occurs when a transfer takes place".
The jury definitely had their minds made up well before their deliberations. They came to the right legal conclusion for the wrong reasons: they felt insulted.
This guy's main beef appears to be with medical studies and other sciences which rely heavily on statistics (sociology, psychology and the other wannabe-sciences). This is not surprising, to be honest. Statistical analysis isn't difficult, but I've known many social science students. They consider statistics to be extremely advanced and have no other mathematical background. As a result, they don't have a very deep understanding of how to mathematically model a system. Naturally, this will lead to bogus conclusions and incompetent analysis work. Medicine has a similar problem, albeit on a smaller scale. Most of the time, statistical analysis will yield correlations, but they won't tell you anything about the mechanism behind what you're seeing, which is what's important in science.
I'd expect the rate of error for physics experiments to be much lower than that of, say, sociology.
Edward James Olmos would be just about perfect for Gloval, I think. I'm hoping that they take the same direction with this movie as the new Battlestar Galactica. Darker, grittier, with all the campiness trimmed out.
The amount of radiation you endure by talking on a mobile phone exceeds the radiation leaked into the environment by the Three Mile Island reactor. Hell, coal plants pump more uranium into the environment than Three Mile Island did, and that's part of their normal operation. The Three Mile Island "disaster" is actually a demonstration of how safe modern nuclear powerplants are. Not a single person has died as a result of that meltdown, and the radiation leakage was utterly trivial.
I didn't know Windows had a Pascal legacy. Though I guess this isn't the first time that Microsoft's inability to say "no" to backward compatibility has bitten them in the ass. Hell, there are still some dark caves in Mac OS X that have Pascal roots and holdovers.
Do you mean that you can actually create a key whose name has a NUL byte embedded in the middle of it? As in "MyRegistry[0x0]Key"? Why the hell would anyone need to do that? Why aren't the keys just standard C strings?
The more important point here is the question of why Microsoft's Registry APIs make it possible to add a key that cannot be removed by the user. I don't really use Windows, but the Registry has always struck me as an example of utter stupidity in software design. For some reason, certain pieces of spyware can't be removed from your computer without tinkering around in the Registry. Why? Does the Registry store executable code that re-downloads it? Does the Registry contain hard links to those files? What the hell is this thing doing except making Windows users' lives more and more difficult, exactly? I thought it was supposed to store preferences and settings. What operating system besides Windows has had its settings store exploited in this manner?
Agreed. Warp-like effect has been studied in theoretical physics, and has even been considered by the US military.
The US military also blew money on researching psychic teleportation and remote viewing. That the military turns over a rock doesn't mean there isn't just a bunch of dog shit underneath.
That's not how writing sci-fi works. Sci-fi writers map out a plot and literally send a technical consultant a script that is basically a mad-lib. The consultant inserts technical-sounding terms that he thinks are close to what the writers are looking for. If the consultant says something like "This would never work; the engineer would have to do this, this and this instead", he gets ignored. If he says, "This character is a physicist, not a biologist. He wouldn't know anything about the microbes", he gets ignored. Star Trek is just like any other sci-fi franchise in this regard. It just gets special treatment by sci-fi fans because it's been around the longest, and they can make some far-fetched claims about how Star Trek predicted the coming of the cell phone. (As if no one has ever needed to make a phone call when there aren't any pay phones around.)
And actually, if memory serves, Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach complained that their suggestions for scientific and technical accuracy were routinely ignored by the writing staff of TNG. And those two were arts majors.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
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The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The other side of that coin is that if copy protection prevents just one customer from legitimately using the content he paid for, it's become an irritant that devalues your content. You can lose money either way. If a customer gives his copy of your software to one of his buddies, you've potentially lost a sale. If a customer tells one of his friends that your software is a pain in the ass because of the copy protection, you've almost certainly lost a sale.
But the Windows world isn't like that. It's a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken. Especially the Windows browser market.
If that was how the Windows world worked, Microsoft would be out of business by now. If the Windows browser market was at cut-throat as this clown seems to think, why the hell is Internet Explorer still the dominant browser? Windows users don't forgive "even the smallest error"? What alternate universe is this idiot living in?
Yes. The data are stored in different parts of the file. You can change and manipulate the ID3 tags of an MP3 or MP4 file without ever touching the audio data.
No, Clinton didn't lie. He said he didn't have "sexual relations" with Lewinsky, which he interpreted as "had sex with". And that part is true. Technicality? Yes. But this is the law we're talking about. Perjury is especially difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and Clinton's words were very carefully crafted to leave in that reasonable doubt.
No thanks Apple, unlike portable music players, people actually are happy with their cellphones.
People were happy with their portable CD players, too. And before that, they were happy with their Walkmans (Walkmen?). Hell, I'm sure everyone was happy with their horses-and-buggies, too.
Technology isn't about sitting on your ass and stopping innovation because everyone's "happy". That might be the game for the cell phone companies, who have spent years cramming more and more functionality into an interface designed solely for dialing telephone numbers. Sorry, but that's just stupid. Cell phones have been overloading the touch-tone phone interface for years, and no real innovation has gone on in the cell phone UI. It's about time someone came up with an interface that wasn't just "Let's put more buttons on it! On both sides!"
Multi-threaded programming is very difficult. But some things just shouldn't be done on multiple threads either. Multi-threading is a trade-off to get (generally) better efficiency and performance in exchange for vastly more complex control logic in many cases. This greater complexity means that the program is much more difficult to debug and maintain. Sometimes multi-threading a program is just a matter of replacing a function call with a call to pthread_create(...). But sometimes a program just can't be multi-threaded without introducing unacceptable complexity. A lot of the complaints of difficulty in multi-threading comes from people trying to multi-thread programs that can't be easily changed.
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The most disturbing part of these interviews was that the jurors said they would've reached the same conclusion regardless of whether a transfer had to take place to be infringement, especially since none of the case coverage mentioned the RIAA lawyers showing evidence that any transfers took place at all. They mainly focused on how file sharing is terrible for their cartel, estimates for its effect on their cartel as a whole, etc ... They never said anything like, "As a result of her making files available, N people downloaded the song for free, which translates to $D in lost sales". Absent any evidence that transfers took place, there was no way the jury could have found her guilty of infringement if the instruction was "Infringement only occurs when a transfer takes place".
The jury definitely had their minds made up well before their deliberations. They came to the right legal conclusion for the wrong reasons: they felt insulted.
Apache wasnt invented at Apple. Neither was Samba. Neither was SSH. Neither was gcc. All of these things are very important in Mac OS X.
This guy's main beef appears to be with medical studies and other sciences which rely heavily on statistics (sociology, psychology and the other wannabe-sciences). This is not surprising, to be honest. Statistical analysis isn't difficult, but I've known many social science students. They consider statistics to be extremely advanced and have no other mathematical background. As a result, they don't have a very deep understanding of how to mathematically model a system. Naturally, this will lead to bogus conclusions and incompetent analysis work. Medicine has a similar problem, albeit on a smaller scale. Most of the time, statistical analysis will yield correlations, but they won't tell you anything about the mechanism behind what you're seeing, which is what's important in science.
I'd expect the rate of error for physics experiments to be much lower than that of, say, sociology.
Edward James Olmos would be just about perfect for Gloval, I think. I'm hoping that they take the same direction with this movie as the new Battlestar Galactica. Darker, grittier, with all the campiness trimmed out.
The amount of radiation you endure by talking on a mobile phone exceeds the radiation leaked into the environment by the Three Mile Island reactor. Hell, coal plants pump more uranium into the environment than Three Mile Island did, and that's part of their normal operation. The Three Mile Island "disaster" is actually a demonstration of how safe modern nuclear powerplants are. Not a single person has died as a result of that meltdown, and the radiation leakage was utterly trivial.
I didn't know Windows had a Pascal legacy. Though I guess this isn't the first time that Microsoft's inability to say "no" to backward compatibility has bitten them in the ass. Hell, there are still some dark caves in Mac OS X that have Pascal roots and holdovers.
Do you mean that you can actually create a key whose name has a NUL byte embedded in the middle of it? As in "MyRegistry[0x0]Key"? Why the hell would anyone need to do that? Why aren't the keys just standard C strings?
The more important point here is the question of why Microsoft's Registry APIs make it possible to add a key that cannot be removed by the user. I don't really use Windows, but the Registry has always struck me as an example of utter stupidity in software design. For some reason, certain pieces of spyware can't be removed from your computer without tinkering around in the Registry. Why? Does the Registry store executable code that re-downloads it? Does the Registry contain hard links to those files? What the hell is this thing doing except making Windows users' lives more and more difficult, exactly? I thought it was supposed to store preferences and settings. What operating system besides Windows has had its settings store exploited in this manner?
As long as it's retroactive for graduates in the past 5 years who now work in the field, fine by me. :)
But seriously, forgiving the debt of recent graduates who are now working in engineering fields will pump a shit-load of money into the economy.
That's not how writing sci-fi works. Sci-fi writers map out a plot and literally send a technical consultant a script that is basically a mad-lib. The consultant inserts technical-sounding terms that he thinks are close to what the writers are looking for. If the consultant says something like "This would never work; the engineer would have to do this, this and this instead", he gets ignored. If he says, "This character is a physicist, not a biologist. He wouldn't know anything about the microbes", he gets ignored. Star Trek is just like any other sci-fi franchise in this regard. It just gets special treatment by sci-fi fans because it's been around the longest, and they can make some far-fetched claims about how Star Trek predicted the coming of the cell phone. (As if no one has ever needed to make a phone call when there aren't any pay phones around.)
And actually, if memory serves, Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach complained that their suggestions for scientific and technical accuracy were routinely ignored by the writing staff of TNG. And those two were arts majors.
The other side of that coin is that if copy protection prevents just one customer from legitimately using the content he paid for, it's become an irritant that devalues your content. You can lose money either way. If a customer gives his copy of your software to one of his buddies, you've potentially lost a sale. If a customer tells one of his friends that your software is a pain in the ass because of the copy protection, you've almost certainly lost a sale.
Or "compartmentalization". Or "containment".
I'm guessing that the service contracts are renewed from year to year. So they can change the terms at their leisure.
Indeed. When I read that David Maynor was involved, my bullshit-o-meter started ringing.
A little late guys. The majority of PC's being sold now are laptops. And that proportion is growing.
He can convene both houses all he wants. Congressmen can still call in sick.
Yes. The data are stored in different parts of the file. You can change and manipulate the ID3 tags of an MP3 or MP4 file without ever touching the audio data.
No, Clinton didn't lie. He said he didn't have "sexual relations" with Lewinsky, which he interpreted as "had sex with". And that part is true. Technicality? Yes. But this is the law we're talking about. Perjury is especially difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and Clinton's words were very carefully crafted to leave in that reasonable doubt.
Technology isn't about sitting on your ass and stopping innovation because everyone's "happy". That might be the game for the cell phone companies, who have spent years cramming more and more functionality into an interface designed solely for dialing telephone numbers. Sorry, but that's just stupid. Cell phones have been overloading the touch-tone phone interface for years, and no real innovation has gone on in the cell phone UI. It's about time someone came up with an interface that wasn't just "Let's put more buttons on it! On both sides!"
Indeed. Amit Singh has no geek credentials at all.
Multi-threaded programming is very difficult. But some things just shouldn't be done on multiple threads either. Multi-threading is a trade-off to get (generally) better efficiency and performance in exchange for vastly more complex control logic in many cases. This greater complexity means that the program is much more difficult to debug and maintain. Sometimes multi-threading a program is just a matter of replacing a function call with a call to pthread_create(...). But sometimes a program just can't be multi-threaded without introducing unacceptable complexity. A lot of the complaints of difficulty in multi-threading comes from people trying to multi-thread programs that can't be easily changed.