True. However, in fact TigerDirect does not own the trademark to Tiger-- Apple does.
Now, TigerDirect is challenging that at the trademark office, but Apple is the current owner. So I do think TigerDirect is in the wrong here for assuming certain rights that are in fact pursuant to the outcome of a pending appeal (which I personally don't believe will be found valid).
So I'd stand by my assessment of this as a meritless money-grab.
I'd say you might be on to something, though TigerDirect seems to be making two arguments: 1. The media blitz involving the word "Tiger" is hurting our ability to reach out to customers, and 2. We should own the trademark to "Tiger"
Now, you're getting at the second argument. TigerDirect has already filed a case at the trademark office to overturn Apple's ownership of the word "Tiger" in this context.
Distinctly, however, this injunction is about the first argument. Nothing to do with trademark ownership, but, assuming ownership, that Apple is hurting their ability to reach customers. To lift from www.macrumors.com,
"The company says that Apple's use of Tiger has changed internet search results, directly impacting its ability to market product to its customers. The company alleges that Apple's use of the name has adversely affected its ranking among the internet's largest search engines, Google and Yahoo, bumping the company from its usual spot in the first three results."
Now, I fail to see how this adds up to a case personally. Search engine ranking is hardly property, or anything close to it. I call blackmail.
This is a grab for quick settlement money, no questions about it. Clever and slimey-- Apple can either take their chances fighting it (with a small chance to be hurt big) or pay TigerDirect cash. Blackmail, essentially, and the timing of this suit is proof.
I sincerely hope they'll fight it, not only because I believe the lawsuit is meritless and one should never give into blackmail, but also...
Apple has taken the "we defend our legal rights" stance when they've sued Tiger leakers. Fair enough. If they reverse their stance on that now when up against someone with lawyers, I think that'd be quite hypocritical.
I agree with you that there can be- and are- corporations who have have a sense of purpose beyond merely turning a profit. And that a sense of purpose other than profit, and turning a profit, are not mutually exclusive.
I also see where you're coming from that some folks often use the concept of "social responsibility" in a rather vague and self-serving way.
A couple followup points: I do think there is a culture of maximizing profits and downplaying social activities and social responsibilities in corporations (witness microsoft pulling out of sponsoring this bill essentially in order to become more consistent with corporate tradition). One person's "social responsibility" is another's "spending my money for something I don't believe in." Management often assumes that turning a profit is always a safe bet to keep your shareholders happy- thus, many corporations take it to an extreme.
So, though corporations may have noble purposes, the deck is often stacked against following through on them where it'd impact profits- or even take the focus away from profits.
Secondly, though the concept of "social responsibility" is indeed vague and is often used self-servingly, I don't think that means we should stop using it unless we've a good replacement concept. If we stop talking about corporate social responsibility because it's hard to define, there'll be no debate on corporate social responsibility.
And finally, I think it'd be dangerous for a number of reasons to not have an intense, ongoing debate about corporate social responsibility.
To be brief, I think your rebuttal doesn't take into account corporations' fiduciary obligation to their shareholders.
Yes, to be precise, corporations have a legal obligation to carry out their shareholders' wishes. Most people tend to invest to gain money and prioritize that above most anything else-- this has created somewhat of an unfortunate legal and cultural precedent that they shall prioritize shareholder returns above all else. Or, in other words, that corporations, discounting statistically irrelevant minorities, shall "have no [significant] interests except profits."
So that's the argument by precedent why the grandparent is right. There's also the argument by experience-- look around you. Are you living in a world where corporations on the whole tend to value social responsibility above profit-taking?
Paul Graham's right-on about this phenomenon of PR firms feeding stories to various press outlets. But...
Frankly, we're going to have to come up with a good name for this phenomenon (I could go into all the reasons why putting a name to something is a Good Thing, but life is short and I'll take it as a given).
"We wanted to talk directly to the consumer first."
Make that, "We wanted to talk directly at the consumer first."
Sadly, you can't "talk to" anyone via TV (especially MTV-style networks). Let's just call this an (admittedly clever) uni-directional advertisement and be done with it.
I hate to say it, but I think your quest to directly compare search engines "objectively" is pretty problematic.
Frankly, I think you're on the right track when you ask, "What am I missing out on by not giving Yahoo search a shot?"
Likewise, I think you're on the wrong track when you go on, "Or, more to the point, how would one go about trying to effectively and objectively compare competing search engines?"
Comparing the results of searches is necessarily subjective. Only that first question has a real answer. RD
I enjoyed the most recent 'what to do in college' essay on PG's site. But considerably less so than I did his 'what to do in high school' essay.
Insofar as Paul's advice is geared toward the general student and not just the "I want to be a God programmer-- full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes" student, I'd have to say it's a bit lacking and a bit limiting, even despite the great advice that it does give. He suggests majoring in something like math, skipping psychology, philosophy, the study of other languages, etc etc etc and concentrating on "hard problems". Implicit in this is 1. That the social sciences have no "hard problems"; 2. That the sum total of one's worth as a thinker is held in their ability to solve a branch of "hard problems"; 3. That college is fundamentally about learning how to solve "hard problems".
If you want to have a balanced, open-minded outlook on life, you have to reject 1 and 2. If you want to have a realistic chance at being happy in life, you have to reject 3.
My advice to the aspiring programming god in undergrad is to heed Paul's advice up to a point, but also to remember three things:
1. Just because 95% of people in social sciences aren't as smart as you are, that doesn't mean the social sciences themselves aren't worthwhile. Dig a little. Branch out. You'll be better for it.
2. Just as, or more important, than going to college to learn to program, job skills, how to solve "hard problems", or however you want to put it, is that college is the greatest, most well-timed, and most forgiving classroom where you learn how to life your life. Don't forget that or take it for granted. Get out and have some fun and meet some people.
3. Anyone who's really damn good at programming is abnormal. This isn't a valuative statement; you've got some genes in you that are simply not found in a similar configuration in the vast majority of the population. Now, this is going to involve some tradeoffs. Learn to accomodate them and/or live with them, because you're stuck with the bad along with the good. Be OK with that.
Since it's a decentralized standard, we'll need other clients to mark packets as 'bulk data' as well to get full benefits in routing from this. Since companies are starting to use BT commonly to distribute files in-game (or will, shortly), their code will need to be updated too. So, no magic bullet but a step in the direction of creating a heirarchy of data packets.
I'm interested to see where this'll go-- will ISPs absolutely choke 'bulk data' packets and drive folks into using older or fringe BT clients to get faster downloads? Will this help solve VoIP realtime bandwidth issues? Will the 'good net citizen' vibe surrounding writing the 'bulk data' flag into ones code overshadow potentially making ones users into second-class net citizens?
Can someone on the inside of OO.org give a quick rundown on what to expect from this beta RC in terms of stability/usability?
It sounds like "Release Notes, a list of know issues, system requirements are in preparation" but I assume that'll be written for the LCD and hard for folks to get the big picture from.
So... if anybody in the know is out there, what's this release like? How buggy is it? What's the worst-case scenario if I start using it?
As a caveat, we should be wary of saying the system "understands" a language.
I would say generally that humans able to translate between languages generally understand both languages, but whether a statistical, probabilistic model based on correlations understands a language might be a stretch.
Further reading: Searle's Chinese Room argument- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
This is akin to asking, Does your tax software understand the tax code? Does Photoshop understand the principles of image manipulation?
Are these silly questions to ask?
Further reading: Dennett on intentionality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennett but the entry is pretty sparse).
Agreed, there was some spin and some gloss but he's employed by an interested party. And his answers were rather thoughtful and meaningful, many times trying to "meet us halfway"- I was especially impressed to hear he read all 1000+ comments.
Thank you, Martin, for taking this interview on and treating it seriously. I'm sure the slashdot community would love to have this be a more regular thing.
Mike
Comments on his statistics
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is interesting, if not completely scientific.
First of all, the author asserts, "Based on [statistics extrapolated from the arbitrary] keywords being monitored, 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is "illegal"
Which is arbitrary but interesting. I bet he might get different statistics if he monitored keywords unrelated to popular software programs. Or if non "top 60 channels" were monitored. Or if some more specific traffic-based analysis was carried out (cut messages by bots, etc).
Secondly, and this is a place where he doesn't go, is IRC an encourager of illegal activity or just an outlet for it (i.e. if all IRC servers quit today, would all the illegal activity just shift to other parts of the 'net?)-- it's probably somewhere in the middle, but where, exactly? In other words, what does his study imply?
In my opinion the "we should not do this" argument splits into three branches: it's dehumanizing for humans, we're opening pandora's box, and it's bad for the chimeras.
I'll leave the first and second branch alone and focus on the third. These sorts of experiments probably put the chimeras through a great deal of hardship: we're creating organic systems which are not found in nature, and very probably have deep physiological problems.
My grandparents' ranch bought a critter that was 3/8 buffalo, 1/8 cow, and 1/2 yak. It was a very messed up animal and walked around in a constant state of confusion- I would guess due to conflicting instincts and brain chemistry.
I can only imagine what a mouse with human brain cells (mentioned in the article) would feel like- it'd almost certainly feel unwell, to say the least. Worse yet, how a non-human critter with human brain cells exposed to culture would feel like (and thus being smart enough to 1. know how messed up he is and 2. feel more dimensions of pain).
We may be creating hell on earth for some of these critters. That's not very cool.
Understood and agreed. I've found that bringing discussion of "paradigm shifts" into research is usually just used as a distraction to shift attention away from bad research.
I agree with you that it's a terrible, terrible waste of money and Bad Science.
However, the statement you lambasted,
"This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts"
is quite true, if a bit sensationalistic. I'm not certain, as you said, it shows "no understanding of science". It's a reasonable paraphrase of some of the assertions in Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is the backbone (along with Popper's ideas and some french folks' theories) of modern conceptions of science and how science changes.
Sometime somewhere someone really made a big mistake, and thus this research program was born. However crap it may be, though, it does show awareness of modern approaches to scientific change.
These songs are licensed under the Creative Commons license-- which means not only are you free to share these songs, but you're free to tinker with them. Extract samples, make new mixes, whatever. In stark contrast to the norm.
This isn't just about "good free music" (though it looks like it is that). It's about artists and labels "getting it" about what creates a culture of creativity and walking the walk.
There is quite a difference between a study showing that women coped much better in living in confined quarters for a prolonged period of time, and your assertion that "an all female submarine crew would probably have higher moral than an all male crew."
I don't have the foggiest whether women or men would work better in this, personally, but I'd like to make the point that better individual psychological reactions to confined quarters don't strongly imply better homogeneous group reactions to confined quarters.
Slashdot Mirror
True. However, in fact TigerDirect does not own the trademark to Tiger-- Apple does.
Now, TigerDirect is challenging that at the trademark office, but Apple is the current owner. So I do think TigerDirect is in the wrong here for assuming certain rights that are in fact pursuant to the outcome of a pending appeal (which I personally don't believe will be found valid).
So I'd stand by my assessment of this as a meritless money-grab.
I'd say you might be on to something, though TigerDirect seems to be making two arguments:
1. The media blitz involving the word "Tiger" is hurting our ability to reach out to customers, and
2. We should own the trademark to "Tiger"
Now, you're getting at the second argument. TigerDirect has already filed a case at the trademark office to overturn Apple's ownership of the word "Tiger" in this context.
Distinctly, however, this injunction is about the first argument. Nothing to do with trademark ownership, but, assuming ownership, that Apple is hurting their ability to reach customers. To lift from www.macrumors.com,
"The company says that Apple's use of Tiger has changed internet search results, directly impacting its ability to market product to its customers. The company alleges that Apple's use of the name has adversely affected its ranking among the internet's largest search engines, Google and Yahoo, bumping the company from its usual spot in the first three results."
Now, I fail to see how this adds up to a case personally. Search engine ranking is hardly property, or anything close to it. I call blackmail.
Lawyers, check my reasoning?
This is a grab for quick settlement money, no questions about it. Clever and slimey-- Apple can either take their chances fighting it (with a small chance to be hurt big) or pay TigerDirect cash. Blackmail, essentially, and the timing of this suit is proof.
I sincerely hope they'll fight it, not only because I believe the lawsuit is meritless and one should never give into blackmail, but also...
Apple has taken the "we defend our legal rights" stance when they've sued Tiger leakers. Fair enough. If they reverse their stance on that now when up against someone with lawyers, I think that'd be quite hypocritical.
So, sock it to them, Apple.
I agree with you that there can be- and are- corporations who have have a sense of purpose beyond merely turning a profit. And that a sense of purpose other than profit, and turning a profit, are not mutually exclusive.
I also see where you're coming from that some folks often use the concept of "social responsibility" in a rather vague and self-serving way.
A couple followup points:
I do think there is a culture of maximizing profits and downplaying social activities and social responsibilities in corporations (witness microsoft pulling out of sponsoring this bill essentially in order to become more consistent with corporate tradition). One person's "social responsibility" is another's "spending my money for something I don't believe in." Management often assumes that turning a profit is always a safe bet to keep your shareholders happy- thus, many corporations take it to an extreme.
So, though corporations may have noble purposes, the deck is often stacked against following through on them where it'd impact profits- or even take the focus away from profits.
Secondly, though the concept of "social responsibility" is indeed vague and is often used self-servingly, I don't think that means we should stop using it unless we've a good replacement concept. If we stop talking about corporate social responsibility because it's hard to define, there'll be no debate on corporate social responsibility.
And finally, I think it'd be dangerous for a number of reasons to not have an intense, ongoing debate about corporate social responsibility.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
To be brief, I think your rebuttal doesn't take into account corporations' fiduciary obligation to their shareholders.
Yes, to be precise, corporations have a legal obligation to carry out their shareholders' wishes. Most people tend to invest to gain money and prioritize that above most anything else-- this has created somewhat of an unfortunate legal and cultural precedent that they shall prioritize shareholder returns above all else. Or, in other words, that corporations, discounting statistically irrelevant minorities, shall "have no [significant] interests except profits."
So that's the argument by precedent why the grandparent is right. There's also the argument by experience-- look around you. Are you living in a world where corporations on the whole tend to value social responsibility above profit-taking?
No? I didn't think so.
Paul Graham's right-on about this phenomenon of PR firms feeding stories to various press outlets. But...
Frankly, we're going to have to come up with a good name for this phenomenon (I could go into all the reasons why putting a name to something is a Good Thing, but life is short and I'll take it as a given).
"The Submarine" doesn't cut it.
Thoughts?
Yes, technically, my last line should have read,
The term "superfluid" has more to do with whether various properties obtain than being an actual liquid.
Right. To clarify,
Matter can be in a "superfluid" state when in solid, liquid, gas, and plasma form (this is a fairly new discovery).
The term "superfluid" has more to do with whether various properties obtain than being an actual fluid.
"We wanted to talk directly to the consumer first."
Make that, "We wanted to talk directly at the consumer first."
Sadly, you can't "talk to" anyone via TV (especially MTV-style networks). Let's just call this an (admittedly clever) uni-directional advertisement and be done with it.
I hate to say it, but I think your quest to directly compare search engines "objectively" is pretty problematic.
Frankly, I think you're on the right track when you ask, "What am I missing out on by not giving Yahoo search a shot?"
Likewise, I think you're on the wrong track when you go on, "Or, more to the point, how would one go about trying to effectively and objectively compare competing search engines?"
Comparing the results of searches is necessarily subjective. Only that first question has a real answer.
RD
I enjoyed the most recent 'what to do in college' essay on PG's site. But considerably less so than I did his 'what to do in high school' essay.
Insofar as Paul's advice is geared toward the general student and not just the "I want to be a God programmer-- full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes" student, I'd have to say it's a bit lacking and a bit limiting, even despite the great advice that it does give. He suggests majoring in something like math, skipping psychology, philosophy, the study of other languages, etc etc etc and concentrating on "hard problems". Implicit in this is
1. That the social sciences have no "hard problems";
2. That the sum total of one's worth as a thinker is held in their ability to solve a branch of "hard problems";
3. That college is fundamentally about learning how to solve "hard problems".
If you want to have a balanced, open-minded outlook on life, you have to reject 1 and 2. If you want to have a realistic chance at being happy in life, you have to reject 3.
My advice to the aspiring programming god in undergrad is to heed Paul's advice up to a point, but also to remember three things:
1. Just because 95% of people in social sciences aren't as smart as you are, that doesn't mean the social sciences themselves aren't worthwhile. Dig a little. Branch out. You'll be better for it.
2. Just as, or more important, than going to college to learn to program, job skills, how to solve "hard problems", or however you want to put it, is that college is the greatest, most well-timed, and most forgiving classroom where you learn how to life your life. Don't forget that or take it for granted. Get out and have some fun and meet some people.
3. Anyone who's really damn good at programming is abnormal. This isn't a valuative statement; you've got some genes in you that are simply not found in a similar configuration in the vast majority of the population. Now, this is going to involve some tradeoffs. Learn to accomodate them and/or live with them, because you're stuck with the bad along with the good. Be OK with that.
And good luck.
Mike
Also of note is that BT 4.0 is using a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License.
It's complient with the Open Source Definition. Not huge shaking news it seems like.
Since it's a decentralized standard, we'll need other clients to mark packets as 'bulk data' as well to get full benefits in routing from this. Since companies are starting to use BT commonly to distribute files in-game (or will, shortly), their code will need to be updated too. So, no magic bullet but a step in the direction of creating a heirarchy of data packets.
I'm interested to see where this'll go-- will ISPs absolutely choke 'bulk data' packets and drive folks into using older or fringe BT clients to get faster downloads? Will this help solve VoIP realtime bandwidth issues? Will the 'good net citizen' vibe surrounding writing the 'bulk data' flag into ones code overshadow potentially making ones users into second-class net citizens?
Or will this not be a big deal at all?
Probably some of everything, I suppose.
Can someone on the inside of OO.org give a quick rundown on what to expect from this beta RC in terms of stability/usability?
It sounds like "Release Notes, a list of know issues, system requirements are in preparation" but I assume that'll be written for the LCD and hard for folks to get the big picture from.
So... if anybody in the know is out there, what's this release like? How buggy is it? What's the worst-case scenario if I start using it?
RD
As a caveat, we should be wary of saying the system "understands" a language.
I would say generally that humans able to translate between languages generally understand both languages, but whether a statistical, probabilistic model based on correlations understands a language might be a stretch.
Further reading: Searle's Chinese Room argument- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
This is akin to asking, Does your tax software understand the tax code? Does Photoshop understand the principles of image manipulation?
Are these silly questions to ask?
Further reading: Dennett on intentionality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennett but the entry is pretty sparse).
RD
Agreed, there was some spin and some gloss but he's employed by an interested party. And his answers were rather thoughtful and meaningful, many times trying to "meet us halfway"- I was especially impressed to hear he read all 1000+ comments.
Thank you, Martin, for taking this interview on and treating it seriously. I'm sure the slashdot community would love to have this be a more regular thing.
Mike
This is interesting, if not completely scientific.
First of all, the author asserts, "Based on [statistics extrapolated from the arbitrary] keywords being monitored, 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is "illegal"
Which is arbitrary but interesting. I bet he might get different statistics if he monitored keywords unrelated to popular software programs. Or if non "top 60 channels" were monitored. Or if some more specific traffic-based analysis was carried out (cut messages by bots, etc).
Secondly, and this is a place where he doesn't go, is IRC an encourager of illegal activity or just an outlet for it (i.e. if all IRC servers quit today, would all the illegal activity just shift to other parts of the 'net?)-- it's probably somewhere in the middle, but where, exactly? In other words, what does his study imply?
I'd love to see more analysis on this.
To be fair, "infected files" is a rather ambiguous notation (perhaps "malicious packages" would be a better way to count things).
I would also feel better if the submitter hadn't been anonymous. Though it's probably not astroturfing.
RD
In my opinion the "we should not do this" argument splits into three branches: it's dehumanizing for humans, we're opening pandora's box, and it's bad for the chimeras.
I'll leave the first and second branch alone and focus on the third. These sorts of experiments probably put the chimeras through a great deal of hardship: we're creating organic systems which are not found in nature, and very probably have deep physiological problems.
My grandparents' ranch bought a critter that was 3/8 buffalo, 1/8 cow, and 1/2 yak. It was a very messed up animal and walked around in a constant state of confusion- I would guess due to conflicting instincts and brain chemistry.
I can only imagine what a mouse with human brain cells (mentioned in the article) would feel like- it'd almost certainly feel unwell, to say the least. Worse yet, how a non-human critter with human brain cells exposed to culture would feel like (and thus being smart enough to 1. know how messed up he is and 2. feel more dimensions of pain).
We may be creating hell on earth for some of these critters. That's not very cool.
RD
Understood and agreed. I've found that bringing discussion of "paradigm shifts" into research is usually just used as a distraction to shift attention away from bad research.
RD
I agree with you that it's a terrible, terrible waste of money and Bad Science.
However, the statement you lambasted,
"This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts"
is quite true, if a bit sensationalistic. I'm not certain, as you said, it shows "no understanding of science". It's a reasonable paraphrase of some of the assertions in Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is the backbone (along with Popper's ideas and some french folks' theories) of modern conceptions of science and how science changes.
Sometime somewhere someone really made a big mistake, and thus this research program was born. However crap it may be, though, it does show awareness of modern approaches to scientific change.
RD
These songs are licensed under the Creative Commons license-- which means not only are you free to share these songs, but you're free to tinker with them. Extract samples, make new mixes, whatever. In stark contrast to the norm.
This isn't just about "good free music" (though it looks like it is that). It's about artists and labels "getting it" about what creates a culture of creativity and walking the walk.
Seeing this makes me happy.
RD
There is quite a difference between a study showing that women coped much better in living in confined quarters for a prolonged period of time, and your assertion that "an all female submarine crew would probably have higher moral than an all male crew."
I don't have the foggiest whether women or men would work better in this, personally, but I'd like to make the point that better individual psychological reactions to confined quarters don't strongly imply better homogeneous group reactions to confined quarters.
RD
... or should I say Karl Rove? ;)
RD
I can agree with that.
Mike