All bank notes have a unique identifying number, so receiving banknotes without them being linked to you means you can be more sure that you're free to do whatever you like with that money (join a gay dating site, pay for health tests, donate to activist groups, etc.) without someone having a record linking you to your purchases.
It also cuts out the banks, who can be controlled by corrupt governments (i.e. all of them, to varying degrees) who can get your accounts frozen, even when doing so is illegal. Just ask Julian Assange. Sometimes private businesses (e.g. PayPal) can do this too.
> you are frustrated by the negative tone, the airing of "dirty laundry," etc.
On the contrary. I'm disappointed that the blogger ignored the dirtier laundry and instead focussed on the attention grabbing stuff like monkey selfies.
He indeed proposes solutions, but he doesn't mention that similar things have been in discussion for years and there are known problems with these proposals.
That's what I call disingenuous. The author seems informed about Wikipedia, so he should know that his missing the target and spreading out of date ideas.
(Thanks for the friendly reply, quite disarming, sorry I was a bit abrasive.)
The monkey-selfie story is a red flag for me because it's a honeypot for zero-effort journalists. The headlines come already half-written. It does have to get solved, but there are loads of other issues that are at least as important but are getting no attention from journalists because they'd take more work.
The proposed (and rejected) use of patented video formats is a much bigger story but it has no buzzwords and what picture are they going to show under the headline? Or, I'd be delighted to see an article ridiculing the quality of the articles about football/soccer players, which are written event-by-event by fans of that player and rarely given a top-down coherency review or any critical review at all. But that would also take time to research.
The blog entry's coverage of transparency/anonymity is also poor. Only one side is presented, and it's presented like it were an issue that WF has not yet tried to address. The truth is that it's been discussed to death and the blog entry's suggestions are mostly impossible. Some people need to be anonymous, and WF couldn't check everyone's identity even if there was consensus for it.
It's clear the author of that blog entry knows Wikipedia, so it's hard to imagine that he's unaware of the state of he anonymity debate, or that there are strong arguments for anonymity. So that's another red flag for disingenuous writing.
The suggestions regarding biographies of living persons too. The debate is much more advanced than what is presented in the blog entry, and it seems strange that the blog author doesn't know this.
(I haven't read reviews of Wikimania2014. I didn't even know it took place. The Wikimania conferences are a non-event for 99% of Wikipedia editors. That might explain lack of coverage in non-UK press.)
I'm interested in those problems. I'm just not interested in being informed by a ranter who's selective coverage indicates that he has an agenda other than simply providing an overview of the issues in question. That sort of person might disingenuously provide out of date info, or leave out key facts.
He makes out like Wikipedia is screwing the world, and that contradicts my observations that Wikipedia is massively making the world a better place to live in. If someone tells me the sky is usually green, that person better impress me quickly before I stop listening.
> you've failed to admit that you're a hardcore Wikipedian yourself
Oh no! You've uncovered my secret which I mention on my homepage, which I often mention on slashdot, and which was surely obvious from the context. I've added it to my Slashdot bio too now. (I have 14,000+ edits spanning ten+ years)
> the author also talks about very positive aspects of the event
Don't be distracted. He threw in a few kind words about the "sense of enjoyment" and he finishes by saying he didn't hate the conference. Surely that's not enough to make you think the author is objective?
On everything of substance the blog entry was moan, moan, moan.
I'm very interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems.* But I've no time for disingenuous rants like this one.
(* such as declining numbers of active editors, and the increasing rate at which edits are reverted by small groups of editors who think they "own" the consensus of the article, and the declining use of Talk pages, and the lack of control over bots.)
I wrote a comment about how the media experts were focussing on the wrong problems and how they clearly -surprisingly- knew very little about Wikipedia and its problems - BUT then I read the source article and found it's just an attack piece, cherry picking the least interesting parts of the conference and painting every controversy as being the fault of an iron-fist dictat from the Wikimedia Foundation.
What I learned: wikipediocracy is a nonsense website.
FWIW, I'm also learning German. It's the fifth language I'm learning as an adult and it's definitely the toughest. I've never found any good software or edu-websites, I just use the old methods. I watch a lot of German telly:
Series are the easiest because you can get to know the characters and then they're kinda predictable so you can't get completely lost. The News is easy enough because there's lots of pictures and you'll know the context of most stories, but it doesn't teach you conversational German. Comedy can be the toughest. On Das Erste, there's a crime drama most Friday and Sunday nights called Tatort which is good because there's also a version for blind people ("hÃrfassung" - o-umlaut between h and r, if that doesn't display right), which has everything of the normal version plus one extra voice describing the visuals, so you hear a lot more words.
I also read German translations of books I've already read. And when I'm cooking I leave on WDR5 talk radio in the background, all to help develop a feel for how the language sounds when used correctly:
Oh, and of course I'm working my way through a book with grammar and exercises.
Yeh, German's a tough nut to crack alright. Unlike Spanish, you have to do a lot of grammar before you can really start building sentences (the declensions are what frustrate me most) but I think it's a language where your effort won't show at first, but then there's the breakthrough later.
With regard to this, one helpful thing in the ruling is that the Court says that old and ubiquitous technologies don't count when judging if an abstract concept has been transformed into a patentable application of said abstract concept.
(Patent lawyers are up in arms about this, complaining that the Court has "mixed up article 101 (subject matter) with articles 102 (prior art) and 103 (obviousness)". To get more patents, they want to reduce the "abstract ideas" exception to a theoretical concept that only happens inside people's brains any patent application can pass.)
So Timothy's right (as usual), but still, at least we have the Justices acknowledging that algorithms shouldn't be patentable, and that "on a computer" doesn't make a non-patentable concept patentable. All we have to do is bridge that last gap and show them that all software is math:
I know the headline is correct because Gene Quinn is hopping mad. Quinn makes a living by obtaining software patents and always says he can draft around any limits imposed by the courts, but here's what he's saying today:
"an intellectually bankrupt opinion... will render many hundreds of thousands of software patents completely useless... On first read I donâ(TM)t see how any software patent claims written as method or systems claims can survive challenge."
I mention my Wikipedia activities in the "Other interests" section of my CV but I'm always worried that employers will misinterpret it as an offer to polish their image. With this rule change, if an employer does ask me to "Hey, since you know how this wiki thing works, can you correct some stuff?" I can say that I could but I'd have to declare it as being paid work.
That'll make them less interested, so I'm less likely to get put in that situation to begin with.
(Some other comments rubbished the idea because it won't get 100% compliance but they're missing the point. Improvement is improvement.)
Today's mass-scale manufacturing will collapse, and needs will change, so my bet is that it will be very useful to be the guy who can design models to be fed to 3D printers.
This is going to become a useful skill anyway in the next few decades, so it's not a bad investment for a hobby today.
Will lawyers be useful? (I know many slashdotters will laugh and say we'll be better off without them, but the new forms of society will need new rules and a new justice system - and programmers would do this as badly as lawyers would program.)
Last I checked (a few years ago), the pretty much universally accepted theory of muscle growth is that muscle fibres suffer micro-tears during exercise, and these heal back slightly stronger than before. Bodybuilders inflict more micro-tears on their muscle fibres than other exercisers and then try to maximise nutrition, rest, and hormones afterwards to maximise the healing.
The observations might be valid in some sense (e.g. not incorrect) but it looks to me like an insignificant finding that's been dressed up to get press attention. I mean, I don't think anyone was under the impression that all-nighters were somehow good for you, or even neutral. A good question would be how much damage they do, and more importantly, what nutrition or what should be done before or after an all-nighter to reduce the negative effects.
This researcher's next shocking discovery will be that crossing the road carries a risk of death.
I said muscles. You're talking about tendons. And your example is a corner case - most people who exercise never get tennis elbow. Even among those whose sport of choice is tennis!
> anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable > in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
I think that's overly vague. Us animals have very resilient bodies. Our muscles get damaged during exercise but years of hard exercise doesn't wear our muscles away.
The article itself (or at least the blurb) is sensationalist in its use of "brain damage".
If I never did any all nighters, ok, maybe I would have avoided some "measurable" but insignificantly small amount of damage, but I would have failed some important exams and missed some project deadlines.
Similarly, I won't be giving up drink just because some study says it's not good for the brain.
> Narrowing what the Federal Circuit thinks is patentable, yes. Narrowing what the Supreme Court thinks is patentable, no.
The Supreme Court rarely narrows what it thinks. They look for ways to judge each case in a way that (they can claim) is consistent with prior rulings.
The Supreme Court had never ruled on the subject matter of Mayo or Myriad before. Until they rule on something, the patents are "valid" if the PTO grants them and if the courts uphold them. In those two cases, the Supreme Court's ruling means the PTO has to stop granting a certain category of patents, and the lower courts have to stop upholding them against product developers. That means patentable subject matter got narrowed.
> we can see pretty well which way they're leaning, based on Bilski and other cases.
If you check, you'll find that the last three subject matter cases taken by the Supreme Court have resulted in *narrowing* what is patentable.
The Mayo and Myriad cases narrowed subject matter very explicitly, and while I originally read Bilski was neutral, it did actually cause the CAFC to start rejecting certain types of previously-accepted patents, and Bilski is also the reason we're seeing this case today.
> You can patent a new method for ranking relevant web pages in search results.
Well, no. That's only the patent office's point of view. We don't know what the Supreme Court thinks about this, and that's what this case is going to decide.
> I'd say that's pretty much the definition of generally accepted
Wearing Google Glass isn't common. I've never seen anyone wearing it. If I saw someone wearing it in a bar, I think I'd ask the barman to ask them to put it away or leave.
P.S. In that last sentence I meant "person" in the general sense, not specifically the person mentioned in this particular article. What I'm criticising is that the article portrays the behaviour of filming people without their consent as being perfectly fine, and that people who object just "don't understand". (Don't understand what??)
I wouldn't be aggressive, but I also think it's unacceptable that people film me constantly when I'm trying to relax. Especially in bars and similar places where I have high expectations of being away from the scrutiny of everyone but the people I've chosen to socialise with.
Pointing cameras at people (and optionally saying "I swear it's not recording"), in the form of phones or Glass or whatever, is simply a really anti-social thing to do.
So is aggression and theft, but one wrong doesn't mean we should turn the other person into a white knight as this article tries to do.
There was an initial surge of pro-mpeg votes by people connected to the WikiMedia Foundation and the technical team which would have been implementing it, then there were many days of mostly anti-mpeg voting when normal Wikipedia contributors heard about this idea.
As someone who has been campaigning for many years against software patents, it was very encouraging to see that the general Wikipedia populous (i.e. after the initial pro-mpeg surge from employees and pre-briefed technicians) was two-thirds against the use of patented formats.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't address the desire to send text messages during protests without being eavesdropped .
Or the issue of documenting the event and not having your phone taken off you, thus losing all those pics/vids/etc.
All bank notes have a unique identifying number, so receiving banknotes without them being linked to you means you can be more sure that you're free to do whatever you like with that money (join a gay dating site, pay for health tests, donate to activist groups, etc.) without someone having a record linking you to your purchases.
It also cuts out the banks, who can be controlled by corrupt governments (i.e. all of them, to varying degrees) who can get your accounts frozen, even when doing so is illegal. Just ask Julian Assange. Sometimes private businesses (e.g. PayPal) can do this too.
> you are frustrated by the negative tone, the airing of "dirty laundry," etc.
On the contrary. I'm disappointed that the blogger ignored the dirtier laundry and instead focussed on the attention grabbing stuff like monkey selfies.
He indeed proposes solutions, but he doesn't mention that similar things have been in discussion for years and there are known problems with these proposals.
That's what I call disingenuous. The author seems informed about Wikipedia, so he should know that his missing the target and spreading out of date ideas.
(Thanks for the friendly reply, quite disarming, sorry I was a bit abrasive.)
The monkey-selfie story is a red flag for me because it's a honeypot for zero-effort journalists. The headlines come already half-written. It does have to get solved, but there are loads of other issues that are at least as important but are getting no attention from journalists because they'd take more work.
The proposed (and rejected) use of patented video formats is a much bigger story but it has no buzzwords and what picture are they going to show under the headline? Or, I'd be delighted to see an article ridiculing the quality of the articles about football/soccer players, which are written event-by-event by fans of that player and rarely given a top-down coherency review or any critical review at all. But that would also take time to research.
The blog entry's coverage of transparency/anonymity is also poor. Only one side is presented, and it's presented like it were an issue that WF has not yet tried to address. The truth is that it's been discussed to death and the blog entry's suggestions are mostly impossible. Some people need to be anonymous, and WF couldn't check everyone's identity even if there was consensus for it.
It's clear the author of that blog entry knows Wikipedia, so it's hard to imagine that he's unaware of the state of he anonymity debate, or that there are strong arguments for anonymity. So that's another red flag for disingenuous writing.
The suggestions regarding biographies of living persons too. The debate is much more advanced than what is presented in the blog entry, and it seems strange that the blog author doesn't know this.
(I haven't read reviews of Wikimania2014. I didn't even know it took place. The Wikimania conferences are a non-event for 99% of Wikipedia editors. That might explain lack of coverage in non-UK press.)
I'm interested in those problems. I'm just not interested in being informed by a ranter who's selective coverage indicates that he has an agenda other than simply providing an overview of the issues in question. That sort of person might disingenuously provide out of date info, or leave out key facts.
He makes out like Wikipedia is screwing the world, and that contradicts my observations that Wikipedia is massively making the world a better place to live in. If someone tells me the sky is usually green, that person better impress me quickly before I stop listening.
> you've failed to admit that you're a hardcore Wikipedian yourself
Oh no! You've uncovered my secret which I mention on my homepage, which I often mention on slashdot, and which was surely obvious from the context. I've added it to my Slashdot bio too now. (I have 14,000+ edits spanning ten+ years)
> the author also talks about very positive aspects of the event
Don't be distracted. He threw in a few kind words about the "sense of enjoyment" and he finishes by saying he didn't hate the conference. Surely that's not enough to make you think the author is objective?
On everything of substance the blog entry was moan, moan, moan.
I'm very interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems.* But I've no time for disingenuous rants like this one.
(* such as declining numbers of active editors, and the increasing rate at which edits are reverted by small groups of editors who think they "own" the consensus of the article, and the declining use of Talk pages, and the lack of control over bots.)
> Andreas Kolbe) is legit.
Well, this article he wrote is nonsense. I know nothing else about the guy.
He just takes every controversy and paints it as an unsolvable failure of the iron-fisted Wikimedia Foundation.
I hope he edits Wikipedia better than he writes blog entries.
The linked article is just tabloid journalism.
I wrote a comment about how the media experts were focussing on the wrong problems and how they clearly -surprisingly- knew very little about Wikipedia and its problems - BUT then I read the source article and found it's just an attack piece, cherry picking the least interesting parts of the conference and painting every controversy as being the fault of an iron-fist dictat from the Wikimedia Foundation.
What I learned: wikipediocracy is a nonsense website.
That helps me sometimes.
Oh, and no coffee late in the evening.
FWIW, I'm also learning German. It's the fifth language I'm learning as an adult and it's definitely the toughest. I've never found any good software or edu-websites, I just use the old methods. I watch a lot of German telly:
* http://mediathek.daserste.de/s...
* http://www.zdf.de/Sendungen-vo...
Series are the easiest because you can get to know the characters and then they're kinda predictable so you can't get completely lost. The News is easy enough because there's lots of pictures and you'll know the context of most stories, but it doesn't teach you conversational German. Comedy can be the toughest. On Das Erste, there's a crime drama most Friday and Sunday nights called Tatort which is good because there's also a version for blind people ("hÃrfassung" - o-umlaut between h and r, if that doesn't display right), which has everything of the normal version plus one extra voice describing the visuals, so you hear a lot more words.
I also read German translations of books I've already read. And when I'm cooking I leave on WDR5 talk radio in the background, all to help develop a feel for how the language sounds when used correctly:
* http://www.listenlive.eu/germa...
And I do tandems with a native German:
* http://conversationexchange.co...
Oh, and of course I'm working my way through a book with grammar and exercises.
Yeh, German's a tough nut to crack alright. Unlike Spanish, you have to do a lot of grammar before you can really start building sentences (the declensions are what frustrate me most) but I think it's a language where your effort won't show at first, but then there's the breakthrough later.
With regard to this, one helpful thing in the ruling is that the Court says that old and ubiquitous technologies don't count when judging if an abstract concept has been transformed into a patentable application of said abstract concept.
(Patent lawyers are up in arms about this, complaining that the Court has "mixed up article 101 (subject matter) with articles 102 (prior art) and 103 (obviousness)". To get more patents, they want to reduce the "abstract ideas" exception to a theoretical concept that only happens inside people's brains any patent application can pass.)
So Timothy's right (as usual), but still, at least we have the Justices acknowledging that algorithms shouldn't be patentable, and that "on a computer" doesn't make a non-patentable concept patentable. All we have to do is bridge that last gap and show them that all software is math:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Softw...
For Alice v. CLS, more analyses listed at the end of this page:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Alice...
I know the headline is correct because Gene Quinn is hopping mad. Quinn makes a living by obtaining software patents and always says he can draft around any limits imposed by the courts, but here's what he's saying today:
"an intellectually bankrupt opinion ... will render many hundreds of thousands of software patents completely useless ... On first read I donâ(TM)t see how any software patent claims written as method or systems claims can survive challenge."
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2014...
I didn't want to trust my own reading, but I knew it was a big victory when I read Quinn's reaction.
Sorry, all you've got is me.
If anyone can help, I've been building this wiki for five years now without a break:
http://en.swpat.org/
(And I'm working on campaigns against software patents since 2003.)
Fantastic news.
I mention my Wikipedia activities in the "Other interests" section of my CV but I'm always worried that employers will misinterpret it as an offer to polish their image. With this rule change, if an employer does ask me to "Hey, since you know how this wiki thing works, can you correct some stuff?" I can say that I could but I'd have to declare it as being paid work.
That'll make them less interested, so I'm less likely to get put in that situation to begin with.
(Some other comments rubbished the idea because it won't get 100% compliance but they're missing the point. Improvement is improvement.)
Today's mass-scale manufacturing will collapse, and needs will change, so my bet is that it will be very useful to be the guy who can design models to be fed to 3D printers.
This is going to become a useful skill anyway in the next few decades, so it's not a bad investment for a hobby today.
Will lawyers be useful? (I know many slashdotters will laugh and say we'll be better off without them, but the new forms of society will need new rules and a new justice system - and programmers would do this as badly as lawyers would program.)
Last I checked (a few years ago), the pretty much universally accepted theory of muscle growth is that muscle fibres suffer micro-tears during exercise, and these heal back slightly stronger than before. Bodybuilders inflict more micro-tears on their muscle fibres than other exercisers and then try to maximise nutrition, rest, and hormones afterwards to maximise the healing.
The observations might be valid in some sense (e.g. not incorrect) but it looks to me like an insignificant finding that's been dressed up to get press attention. I mean, I don't think anyone was under the impression that all-nighters were somehow good for you, or even neutral. A good question would be how much damage they do, and more importantly, what nutrition or what should be done before or after an all-nighter to reduce the negative effects.
This researcher's next shocking discovery will be that crossing the road carries a risk of death.
I said muscles. You're talking about tendons. And your example is a corner case - most people who exercise never get tennis elbow. Even among those whose sport of choice is tennis!
> anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable
> in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
I think that's overly vague. Us animals have very resilient bodies. Our muscles get damaged during exercise but years of hard exercise doesn't wear our muscles away.
The article itself (or at least the blurb) is sensationalist in its use of "brain damage".
If I never did any all nighters, ok, maybe I would have avoided some "measurable" but insignificantly small amount of damage, but I would have failed some important exams and missed some project deadlines.
Similarly, I won't be giving up drink just because some study says it's not good for the brain.
> Narrowing what the Federal Circuit thinks is patentable, yes. Narrowing what the Supreme Court thinks is patentable, no.
The Supreme Court rarely narrows what it thinks. They look for ways to judge each case in a way that (they can claim) is consistent with prior rulings.
The Supreme Court had never ruled on the subject matter of Mayo or Myriad before. Until they rule on something, the patents are "valid" if the PTO grants them and if the courts uphold them. In those two cases, the Supreme Court's ruling means the PTO has to stop granting a certain category of patents, and the lower courts have to stop upholding them against product developers. That means patentable subject matter got narrowed.
> we can see pretty well which way they're leaning, based on Bilski and other cases.
If you check, you'll find that the last three subject matter cases taken by the Supreme Court have resulted in *narrowing* what is patentable.
The Mayo and Myriad cases narrowed subject matter very explicitly, and while I originally read Bilski was neutral, it did actually cause the CAFC to start rejecting certain types of previously-accepted patents, and Bilski is also the reason we're seeing this case today.
> You can patent a new method for ranking relevant web pages in search results.
Well, no. That's only the patent office's point of view. We don't know what the Supreme Court thinks about this, and that's what this case is going to decide.
> I'd say that's pretty much the definition of generally accepted
Wearing Google Glass isn't common. I've never seen anyone wearing it. If I saw someone wearing it in a bar, I think I'd ask the barman to ask them to put it away or leave.
P.S. In that last sentence I meant "person" in the general sense, not specifically the person mentioned in this particular article. What I'm criticising is that the article portrays the behaviour of filming people without their consent as being perfectly fine, and that people who object just "don't understand". (Don't understand what??)
I wouldn't be aggressive, but I also think it's unacceptable that people film me constantly when I'm trying to relax. Especially in bars and similar places where I have high expectations of being away from the scrutiny of everyone but the people I've chosen to socialise with.
Pointing cameras at people (and optionally saying "I swear it's not recording"), in the form of phones or Glass or whatever, is simply a really anti-social thing to do.
So is aggression and theft, but one wrong doesn't mean we should turn the other person into a white knight as this article tries to do.
There was an initial surge of pro-mpeg votes by people connected to the WikiMedia Foundation and the technical team which would have been implementing it, then there were many days of mostly anti-mpeg voting when normal Wikipedia contributors heard about this idea.
As someone who has been campaigning for many years against software patents, it was very encouraging to see that the general Wikipedia populous (i.e. after the initial pro-mpeg surge from employees and pre-briefed technicians) was two-thirds against the use of patented formats.