Google Trends accurately measures what it purports to: people using Google to search for something.
TED doesn't detect earthquakes. It detects people twittering about earthquakes, and assumes either that correlation equals causation, or that false tweets won't rise above the level of background noise.
The real question is... twenty minutes for other reports? We can't put a seismograph online in real time, or are we afraid to do so?
How about a free, open source, crowdsourced Kickstarted network of online jury-rigged seismographs, then?
You don't even need that. This isn't an app, it's a KML layer for Google Earth, which is already in the store. Put the info into a KML file, put it online, and then enter the URL of the KML file in the Google Earth search field.
Of course, this only gets the information out there in a useable form. It doesn't let you draw attention to yourself by claiming you've been censored by Apple. Which was really the entire point of this.
and he isn't declared innocent either if he isn't charged.
Actually, he is. That's what "innocent until proven guilty" means, and that is the legal status of any person in the US who has not been tried and convicted.
Actually, he's not. You focused on the word "innocent" and ignored the word "declared". If he is not charged, he cannot be declared innocent. He is presumed innocent. They are not the same. The former is a positive statement to establish the proposition that the individual did not commit the alleged crime, and that there was never any evidence to the contrary. The latter is a presumption that applies to all people, whether charged or not, that they are innocent of any allegation until evidence is brought forth. The two statements are categorically different.
That eventuality is presumed within the question of "whether the US military would be able to perform operations in North Korea". The question being asked is whether or not, should the need arise, the US military would be able to function in or near North Korea given the situation described above. The "need arising" means war. So, yes, presumably in peactime North Korea is able to disrupt the navigation systems of US recon planes in the area, and removing that capability would be an act of war.
Should hostilities start, presumably those capabilities would be disabled (or at least such disabling would be attempted) and whether or not that would be an act of war would be a moot question-- else why is there a need for the US to "conduct operations" in North Korea?
waste of real estate and too little energy. The Blythe plant output sounds impressive, until you realize it can't take sunlight 24x7. So divide its 960 MW by four or more. That's a tenth of the power of modern two reactor nuclear facility that would take up less than a square mile compared to the 12 square miles it occupies. Then realize its $6 billion price tag. Compared to nuclear power, it's a farce.
Factor in the cost of the environmental damage of a worst-case failure scenario for each plant, and the chance of such a failure in each year of the plant's operating lifetime. Nuclear's worst case scenario is so much worse, for just about any design currently in use, that even if the chance of such failure in each year, for each plant, is vanishingly small, it may be justifiable to invest more cash and real estate in a system that has no such catastrophic potential consequences.
If and when such failures occur, which is more of a farce-- spending more money on power that's safer, or risking some extremely expensive accident consequences for saving a few bucks now?
The USPS doesn't want to change, or can't. They are an supertanker with 2 steering wheels- the USPS leadership on one and congress on the other. They already do USPS money orders, why not make them electronic? They feed letters into automatic sorting machines at various points along the delivery route, why can't they have a scannable barcode with tracking information on each piece of first class mail?
How would that help the current situation? Nearly every kind of improvement you can make here either increases the quality of the service (which does not address the problem, as nice as it would be) or only realizes cost reductions by reducing head count-- which they cannot do because of labor agreements. The kind of automation that usually makes operations better and more efficient here can't make things cheaper because they can't lay off the extra workers; in fact, it only makes things worse, because you have to invest capital into the automation but can't realize the savings-- and you can't gain more revenue.
The ability to either reduce costs or increase revenue would solve this problem, but both are legally prohibited in this case. Increased automation probably isn't necessary to see cost reductions if layoffs were allowed; decreased volume per capita in the system, as email has taken over, would probably achieve that all by itself. That's why the only proposals on the table are things like curtailing Saturday delivery-- keep people on the payroll, but have them work fewer days or fewer hours. Fewer days of delivery means lower fixed costs for utilities and fuel for vehicles.
Neither the article linked nor the BBC article cited near the top of the thread even included the word "favour". One included the phrase "level playing field" suggesting that, rather than favoring one thing or another, all were to compete fairly. The other mentions open standards, not open source, which is not the same thing at all.
The summary is a bit of agenda-driven bile with no almost relation to the article it links to.
The summary appears to be deliberately misleading, saying the government "promised to favour open source" whereas the BBC article you cite merely says that open source should be considered "on a level playing field".
That's not favouring. That's the opposite of favouring; it's a goal to stop favouring non-open source projects just because they're open source.
We know he lied about not being able to enjoy movies, though, because many completely blind people do.
What kind of fucking twisted un-logic is that? Because many completely blind people enjoy movies, therefore this person also must enjoy movies? I just happen to do charity work with visually impaired and blind people, and know that the majority of them do not enjoy movies, specifically because they can't see them.
It's perfectly good logic. This individual's defense boils down to 1) All blind people cannot enjoy movies. 2) I am a blind person. 3) Therefore, I cannot enjoy movies, had no motive for downloading this movie, and could not have done so.
The existence of any significant minority of people who legally blind, or at least as blind if not more blind than the individual in question, who are capable of enjoying movies, invalidates his first assumption. That the "majority" of blind people do not enjoy them does not establish his premise, which was that ALL blind people not only do not enjoy movies, but are essentially incapable of doing so.
For each example you could throw at me of those people, I could counter it with an example of people that consider them to be overpriced gimmicks. And the very fact that they are not selling well outside of iPad suggest that only the fanbois want them.
I've always wondered about this. How is it that there were only enough fanbois to garner Apple 3-5% of the PC market, but enough to get 70%+ of the MP3 player market, enough to move Apple past companies with much more experience in handsets in the smartphone market segment, and now to sell millions of tablets?
In the last (calendar) quarter of 2009, Apple sold 3.3 million computers-- their best quarter ever at the time. In that same quarter they sold 8.7M iPhones.
Where did Apple, a company with such a vanishingly small share of the personal computer market, get all of these "fanbois" from? Is every person who owns an Apple computer buying 2-3 iPads and iPhones each? If someone buys an iPhone or an iPad without previously having owned a Mac, or any other Apple product, are they a "fanboi"?
The problem with your argument is that you're trying to prove a negative, and you can't. Even a handful of people who bought the device because they have a legitimate use for it establishes firmly that there is, at least theoretically, a legitimate use for the device. If it were not selling well one could say that those who have a need for such a product don't constitute an addressable market, but that appears not to be the case.
Conversely, any number of people who don't consider the device to have a legitimate use does not establish that to be a fact, since the assertion is of a negative-- that the device lacks any legitimate use. I'm not sure why you'd choose to frame your argument this way, since it precludes you from actually winning.
"One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad"
If as many or more Honeycomb-running tablets were being sold, then yes, one might have expected that. Aside from that, there seem to be the issues cited in other comments, to the effect that it's hard to find apps in the marketplace, the emulator runs slowly, and not every Honeycomb tablet has the same technical specifications. So it seems like making this explosion of Android tablet apps may be harder than making them for the iPad, while serving a smaller audience.
Who expected this explosion and why? What reason does anyone have to think these issues are being rectified?
So they claim that early versions (which kicked everyones ass) were based on Crafty, and later versions (which kicked even more ass) were based on Fruit. Amazing how the author can pick up someone elses open source chess engine and make them so much better, yet nobody else in the world has demonstrated the same capability to do so.
Because the license of Crafty and Fruit expressly prohibit that activity. In other words, it's not that nobody else has demonstrated that capability-- it's that everyone else has complied with the license. Not to mention the fact that he'd have to expose the fact that he borrowed or derived code from those projects when he submitted his entry, and he did not, claiming instead that it was completely original, while filing complaints against other groups that were already doing the same to him (Ippolit).
It was cheating because the entry form for the competition says you need to disclose the source of any code you've borrowed or derived from other projects. As well, the projects that it is claimed he did borrow from are distributed under a custom open source license that prohibits the use of the code in competitions.
Also, he sells his code as a commercial product, distributed as a binary, without source.
Putting 2 engines together is original code from where I stand. So point (b) is moot. (see all the posts under the total is bigger than the sum-total of the parts)
For the love of pete... read the report. The author did not do this. Early versions of the program were cribbed from one source. Later versions were cribbed from another, resulting in a dramatic change in performance in a short space of time, while the "author" denied discarding large portions of his codebase, even though decompilation indicates this is exactly what happened.
Reordering statements does not prove that a program is more than the sum of its statements; it means that the definition of a statement can only be comprehended within the context of a whole.
Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own. He didn't do that. Putting together something out of components made by others and saying that the end product was made by you does not amount to plagiarism. Oh, and don't attribute disagreement to ignorance unless you know you are talking to someone with less than grade-school education. You'll pump your rage, but you won't convince anyone of anything by doing it.
Saying that the end product was made by you and ONLY by you certainly does amount to plagiarism. That's why code distributed under open source licenses usually obligates you to include that license when you distribute, as well as to credit the original source. The individual in question here did neither. He claimed the work was only his own, and was original. When the entry form asks him to list what other projects he has taken or derived code from, he listed none, so he entered the contests under false pretenses.
Then, he takes his work closed source and commercial, selling it in violation of the license of Fruit without attribution or compensation.
Are people here really trying to defend this guy, or has everyone just not bothered to read the article or the report?
How would you explain a high degree of correspondence between the target program and large portions of unused and obselete code in another open source program?
If he was just ripping off two other engines, why did his win?
Sounds like he at least made improvements to them, and isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about? In fact, the article even acknowledges "ICGA isn’t even disqualifying Rybka because it copies Fruit — rather, it’s simply upset that Rajlich claims his engine is original, and refuses to give credit where it’s due." Okay, so maybe he should have given the other coders credit, but why should that disqualify him from winning? He still won. He didn't cheat. He didn't steal the code from the other engines (it was open source). His biggest offense is denying the other coders credit.
Under the rules of the tournaments he entered, that is cheating. The entry form must list the sources of any non-original code. The author claimed none, violating the license under which that code was distributed, as well as violating the terms of entry into the contest. When faced with previous questions about the origin of his program's code, as well as an unprecedented strength increase in a single year (800 ELO points) the author responded that his work was wholly original-- not that it was strong because it combined code from two other programs.
(At any rate it appears he did not do so; he was using functions from one program, crafty, and then changed to fruit later. Decompilation showed similarities to large portions of non-functional and obseleted code in crafty, which is fairly convincing even without access to source. When asked about the dramatic change in score, the "author" claimed not to have thrown out his codebase, but to have made incremental changes, but decompilation shows that also to be false.)
This is not China taking IP seriously as a matter of principle.
This is China taking the needs of Foxconn seriously, and in this case, Foxconn's need is to demonstrate to its clients that it can be trusted with their sensitive commercial materials, such as the specifications of as-yet-unreleased products.
Agreed. Story seems to not only be demonstrably false, but unsubstantiated-- there's no external source that verifies the author's claim, just a link to the separate (but related) furor about Skype 5's terrible interface (which is terrible).
So one guy has his Skype glitch on him, and it makes the frontpage of Slashdot? What gives?
The second this happens to my copy of Skype 2.8 I'll be screaming bloody blue murder, but I'd expect someone to verify the same is happening to others before calling it news, or something that matters.
Another vote for the Watchmen. It's what you describe.
No, it wasn't.
Some of the Watchmen have super powers, and some don't-- but no one is alone in that respect, which was a key element of his suggestion. The world isn't forced to cope with the death of that individual, which is the second element. As for moral codes-- Watchmen doesn't so much examine the idea of a superhero exploring his own moral code as it deals with superheroes who become immoral (the Comedian) or amoral (Dr. Manhattan) or fall back on personal loyalties instead of a comprehensive moral code (Night Owl) or on paranoia and conservative dogma (Rorshach). That's also very much the opposite of the suggestion.
Okay, so apparently you liked The Watchmen. That doesn't mean it's the answer for every viewer who'd like to see something different from superhero films than what is being presented.
The Watchmen did fit into this suggestion in one way: it took itself very, very seriously-- probably far more so than the actual content warranted.
What's the rationale here? That Amazon and Apple are going to buy and shutdown all the public libraries, including the Library of Congress? There's a fine line between being forward-thinking and being, well, nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Trends accurately measures what it purports to: people using Google to search for something.
TED doesn't detect earthquakes. It detects people twittering about earthquakes, and assumes either that correlation equals causation, or that false tweets won't rise above the level of background noise.
The real question is... twenty minutes for other reports? We can't put a seismograph online in real time, or are we afraid to do so?
How about a free, open source, crowdsourced Kickstarted network of online jury-rigged seismographs, then?
You don't even need that. This isn't an app, it's a KML layer for Google Earth, which is already in the store. Put the info into a KML file, put it online, and then enter the URL of the KML file in the Google Earth search field.
Of course, this only gets the information out there in a useable form. It doesn't let you draw attention to yourself by claiming you've been censored by Apple. Which was really the entire point of this.
and he isn't declared innocent either if he isn't charged.
Actually, he is. That's what "innocent until proven guilty" means, and that is the legal status of any person in the US who has not been tried and convicted.
Actually, he's not. You focused on the word "innocent" and ignored the word "declared". If he is not charged, he cannot be declared innocent. He is presumed innocent. They are not the same. The former is a positive statement to establish the proposition that the individual did not commit the alleged crime, and that there was never any evidence to the contrary. The latter is a presumption that applies to all people, whether charged or not, that they are innocent of any allegation until evidence is brought forth. The two statements are categorically different.
This story doesn't need a correction, it needs a retraction. The only item of significance was the misattributed quote.
That eventuality is presumed within the question of "whether the US military would be able to perform operations in North Korea". The question being asked is whether or not, should the need arise, the US military would be able to function in or near North Korea given the situation described above. The "need arising" means war. So, yes, presumably in peactime North Korea is able to disrupt the navigation systems of US recon planes in the area, and removing that capability would be an act of war.
Should hostilities start, presumably those capabilities would be disabled (or at least such disabling would be attempted) and whether or not that would be an act of war would be a moot question-- else why is there a need for the US to "conduct operations" in North Korea?
waste of real estate and too little energy. The Blythe plant output sounds impressive, until you realize it can't take sunlight 24x7. So divide its 960 MW by four or more. That's a tenth of the power of modern two reactor nuclear facility that would take up less than a square mile compared to the 12 square miles it occupies. Then realize its $6 billion price tag. Compared to nuclear power, it's a farce.
Factor in the cost of the environmental damage of a worst-case failure scenario for each plant, and the chance of such a failure in each year of the plant's operating lifetime. Nuclear's worst case scenario is so much worse, for just about any design currently in use, that even if the chance of such failure in each year, for each plant, is vanishingly small, it may be justifiable to invest more cash and real estate in a system that has no such catastrophic potential consequences.
If and when such failures occur, which is more of a farce-- spending more money on power that's safer, or risking some extremely expensive accident consequences for saving a few bucks now?
It's a marvelous way to relax.
The USPS doesn't want to change, or can't. They are an supertanker with 2 steering wheels- the USPS leadership on one and congress on the other. They already do USPS money orders, why not make them electronic? They feed letters into automatic sorting machines at various points along the delivery route, why can't they have a scannable barcode with tracking information on each piece of first class mail?
How would that help the current situation? Nearly every kind of improvement you can make here either increases the quality of the service (which does not address the problem, as nice as it would be) or only realizes cost reductions by reducing head count-- which they cannot do because of labor agreements. The kind of automation that usually makes operations better and more efficient here can't make things cheaper because they can't lay off the extra workers; in fact, it only makes things worse, because you have to invest capital into the automation but can't realize the savings-- and you can't gain more revenue.
The ability to either reduce costs or increase revenue would solve this problem, but both are legally prohibited in this case. Increased automation probably isn't necessary to see cost reductions if layoffs were allowed; decreased volume per capita in the system, as email has taken over, would probably achieve that all by itself. That's why the only proposals on the table are things like curtailing Saturday delivery-- keep people on the payroll, but have them work fewer days or fewer hours. Fewer days of delivery means lower fixed costs for utilities and fuel for vehicles.
Neither the article linked nor the BBC article cited near the top of the thread even included the word "favour". One included the phrase "level playing field" suggesting that, rather than favoring one thing or another, all were to compete fairly. The other mentions open standards, not open source, which is not the same thing at all.
The summary is a bit of agenda-driven bile with no almost relation to the article it links to.
The summary appears to be deliberately misleading, saying the government "promised to favour open source" whereas the BBC article you cite merely says that open source should be considered "on a level playing field".
That's not favouring. That's the opposite of favouring; it's a goal to stop favouring non-open source projects just because they're open source.
Monopolies are prohibited, right?
Actually no, they're not. Abuse of the power that comes with having one is, but merely being one is not prohibited.
We know he lied about not being able to enjoy movies, though, because many completely blind people do.
What kind of fucking twisted un-logic is that? Because many completely blind people enjoy movies, therefore this person also must enjoy movies? I just happen to do charity work with visually impaired and blind people, and know that the majority of them do not enjoy movies, specifically because they can't see them.
It's perfectly good logic. This individual's defense boils down to 1) All blind people cannot enjoy movies. 2) I am a blind person. 3) Therefore, I cannot enjoy movies, had no motive for downloading this movie, and could not have done so.
The existence of any significant minority of people who legally blind, or at least as blind if not more blind than the individual in question, who are capable of enjoying movies, invalidates his first assumption. That the "majority" of blind people do not enjoy them does not establish his premise, which was that ALL blind people not only do not enjoy movies, but are essentially incapable of doing so.
For each example you could throw at me of those people, I could counter it with an example of people that consider them to be overpriced gimmicks. And the very fact that they are not selling well outside of iPad suggest that only the fanbois want them.
I've always wondered about this. How is it that there were only enough fanbois to garner Apple 3-5% of the PC market, but enough to get 70%+ of the MP3 player market, enough to move Apple past companies with much more experience in handsets in the smartphone market segment, and now to sell millions of tablets?
In the last (calendar) quarter of 2009, Apple sold 3.3 million computers-- their best quarter ever at the time. In that same quarter they sold 8.7M iPhones.
Where did Apple, a company with such a vanishingly small share of the personal computer market, get all of these "fanbois" from? Is every person who owns an Apple computer buying 2-3 iPads and iPhones each? If someone buys an iPhone or an iPad without previously having owned a Mac, or any other Apple product, are they a "fanboi"?
The problem with your argument is that you're trying to prove a negative, and you can't. Even a handful of people who bought the device because they have a legitimate use for it establishes firmly that there is, at least theoretically, a legitimate use for the device. If it were not selling well one could say that those who have a need for such a product don't constitute an addressable market, but that appears not to be the case.
Conversely, any number of people who don't consider the device to have a legitimate use does not establish that to be a fact, since the assertion is of a negative-- that the device lacks any legitimate use. I'm not sure why you'd choose to frame your argument this way, since it precludes you from actually winning.
"One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad"
If as many or more Honeycomb-running tablets were being sold, then yes, one might have expected that. Aside from that, there seem to be the issues cited in other comments, to the effect that it's hard to find apps in the marketplace, the emulator runs slowly, and not every Honeycomb tablet has the same technical specifications. So it seems like making this explosion of Android tablet apps may be harder than making them for the iPad, while serving a smaller audience.
Who expected this explosion and why? What reason does anyone have to think these issues are being rectified?
So they claim that early versions (which kicked everyones ass) were based on Crafty, and later versions (which kicked even more ass) were based on Fruit. Amazing how the author can pick up someone elses open source chess engine and make them so much better, yet nobody else in the world has demonstrated the same capability to do so.
Because the license of Crafty and Fruit expressly prohibit that activity. In other words, it's not that nobody else has demonstrated that capability-- it's that everyone else has complied with the license. Not to mention the fact that he'd have to expose the fact that he borrowed or derived code from those projects when he submitted his entry, and he did not, claiming instead that it was completely original, while filing complaints against other groups that were already doing the same to him (Ippolit).
It was cheating because the entry form for the competition says you need to disclose the source of any code you've borrowed or derived from other projects. As well, the projects that it is claimed he did borrow from are distributed under a custom open source license that prohibits the use of the code in competitions.
Also, he sells his code as a commercial product, distributed as a binary, without source.
Putting 2 engines together is original code from where I stand. So point (b) is moot. (see all the posts under the total is bigger than the sum-total of the parts)
For the love of pete... read the report. The author did not do this. Early versions of the program were cribbed from one source. Later versions were cribbed from another, resulting in a dramatic change in performance in a short space of time, while the "author" denied discarding large portions of his codebase, even though decompilation indicates this is exactly what happened.
Reordering statements does not prove that a program is more than the sum of its statements; it means that the definition of a statement can only be comprehended within the context of a whole.
Plagiarism is passing someone else's work as your own. He didn't do that. Putting together something out of components made by others and saying that the end product was made by you does not amount to plagiarism. Oh, and don't attribute disagreement to ignorance unless you know you are talking to someone with less than grade-school education. You'll pump your rage, but you won't convince anyone of anything by doing it.
Saying that the end product was made by you and ONLY by you certainly does amount to plagiarism. That's why code distributed under open source licenses usually obligates you to include that license when you distribute, as well as to credit the original source. The individual in question here did neither. He claimed the work was only his own, and was original. When the entry form asks him to list what other projects he has taken or derived code from, he listed none, so he entered the contests under false pretenses.
Then, he takes his work closed source and commercial, selling it in violation of the license of Fruit without attribution or compensation.
Are people here really trying to defend this guy, or has everyone just not bothered to read the article or the report?
How would you explain a high degree of correspondence between the target program and large portions of unused and obselete code in another open source program?
If he was just ripping off two other engines, why did his win?
Sounds like he at least made improvements to them, and isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about? In fact, the article even acknowledges "ICGA isn’t even disqualifying Rybka because it copies Fruit — rather, it’s simply upset that Rajlich claims his engine is original, and refuses to give credit where it’s due." Okay, so maybe he should have given the other coders credit, but why should that disqualify him from winning? He still won. He didn't cheat. He didn't steal the code from the other engines (it was open source). His biggest offense is denying the other coders credit.
Under the rules of the tournaments he entered, that is cheating. The entry form must list the sources of any non-original code. The author claimed none, violating the license under which that code was distributed, as well as violating the terms of entry into the contest. When faced with previous questions about the origin of his program's code, as well as an unprecedented strength increase in a single year (800 ELO points) the author responded that his work was wholly original-- not that it was strong because it combined code from two other programs.
(At any rate it appears he did not do so; he was using functions from one program, crafty, and then changed to fruit later. Decompilation showed similarities to large portions of non-functional and obseleted code in crafty, which is fairly convincing even without access to source. When asked about the dramatic change in score, the "author" claimed not to have thrown out his codebase, but to have made incremental changes, but decompilation shows that also to be false.)
Actually, I think he did read it.
He read it and then wrote what he wanted anyway, because the story he wanted told wasn't the one he linked to.
There is no way this should ever have been posted.
This is not China taking IP seriously as a matter of principle.
This is China taking the needs of Foxconn seriously, and in this case, Foxconn's need is to demonstrate to its clients that it can be trusted with their sensitive commercial materials, such as the specifications of as-yet-unreleased products.
Agreed. Story seems to not only be demonstrably false, but unsubstantiated-- there's no external source that verifies the author's claim, just a link to the separate (but related) furor about Skype 5's terrible interface (which is terrible).
So one guy has his Skype glitch on him, and it makes the frontpage of Slashdot? What gives?
The second this happens to my copy of Skype 2.8 I'll be screaming bloody blue murder, but I'd expect someone to verify the same is happening to others before calling it news, or something that matters.
Here's a thought for a Super Hero film
Another vote for the Watchmen. It's what you describe.
No, it wasn't.
Some of the Watchmen have super powers, and some don't-- but no one is alone in that respect, which was a key element of his suggestion. The world isn't forced to cope with the death of that individual, which is the second element. As for moral codes-- Watchmen doesn't so much examine the idea of a superhero exploring his own moral code as it deals with superheroes who become immoral (the Comedian) or amoral (Dr. Manhattan) or fall back on personal loyalties instead of a comprehensive moral code (Night Owl) or on paranoia and conservative dogma (Rorshach). That's also very much the opposite of the suggestion.
Okay, so apparently you liked The Watchmen. That doesn't mean it's the answer for every viewer who'd like to see something different from superhero films than what is being presented.
The Watchmen did fit into this suggestion in one way: it took itself very, very seriously-- probably far more so than the actual content warranted.
What's the rationale here? That Amazon and Apple are going to buy and shutdown all the public libraries, including the Library of Congress? There's a fine line between being forward-thinking and being, well, nuts.